KLAUS ROHDE: SCIENCE, POLITICS AND ART

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Marine Parasitology, latest book review

Here is an extract of the latest review of Marine Parasitology (CSIRO Publishing Melbourne and CABI Oxford), edited by me, as posted on the website of CSIRO Publishing. I shall add the complete review when available.

“This work should be considered the standard in its field.” “Individuals interested in parasites in any natural system would be rewarded by referring to this work.” “The rigor of the material presented is appropriate for scientifically sophisticated readers. Highly recommended.”
S.R. Fegley, Maine Maritime Academy, Choice Reviews Online

For earlier reviews see my post Marine Parasitology.

The Theory of Games: Evolutionarily Stable Strategies

I have discussed applications of games theory and in particular Nash equilibria in two previous posts. There is fairly general agreement that it is most useful in evolutionary biology and economics. Various people have drawn attention to the danger of applying it to politics and international relations. But even in evolutionary biology, Nash equilibria are not as common as believed by some. See Nonequilibrium Ecology, support material, Appendix 3, for a detailed discussion.

The Center for Media and Democracy

In a previous post I drew attention to dangers of the increasing media concentration (e.g., Murdoch), much if not most of it strengthening the more extreme corners of the political spectrum (e.g., FoxNews). The website of the Center for Media and Democracy provides very useful information about the spin produced by well financed and therefore influential institutions. This is how the Center describes itself :

“The nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy strengthens participatory democracy by investigating and exposing public relations spin and propaganda, and by promoting media literacy and citizen journalism, media “of, by and for the people.” Our programs include PR Watch, a quarterly investigative journal; six books by CMD staff; Spin of the Day; the Weekly Spin listserv; and, Congresspedia and SourceWatch, part of our wiki-based investigative journalism collaborative to which anyone, including you, can contribute.”

You will find interesting information for example about the American Enterprise Institute, closely linked to neo-conservatives, which has offered money to discredit reports on the social costs of tobacco smoking and on global warming, and which has been at the forefront in promoting wars in Iraq and now in Iran. Have a guess where the money comes from. Interesting also information on Halliburton and its associates.

How to solve our problems with medical doctors

Australia has an acute shortage of medical doctors, as have some other Western countries. So, they “import” doctors from third world countries for which the loss of people in whose education they have invested much, is a disaster. Even for Western countries the acquisitions are sometimes of doubtful use, see the recent unsuccessful bomb attacks in Britain and the imprisonment in Australia, so far without any convincing justification, of a cousin of one of the British bombers.

I suggest to approach Cuba for advice and help. After all, Australia followed Cuba’s example in handing out free environment-friendly light bulbs to its populace.

See the following extract from BBC News:
Friday, 18 August 2006.
Cuba doctors popular in quake-stricken Java
By Tom Fawthrop
In Java (for complete report see BBC)

Many of the international aid teams that descended on Indonesia after the 27 May earthquake in Java, have packed up and gone home. But a medical team from Cuba has proved so popular that locals have asked it to stay on for another six months.

About half of the Cuban doctors in Indonesia are women
More than two months after the quake, the 135-strong Cuban team sees up to 1,000 patients a day at two field hospitals set up in the earthquake zone, 30km (18 miles) from Yogyakarta.

But it is not only here in Java that they are playing an important role – Cuban medical teams have quietly assumed a major role in global humanitarian relief operations usually seen as the domain of wealthy nations.

Last October, Havana sent more than 2,000 medical staff to Pakistan and set up 30 field hospitals after the earthquake there, treating more than 1.5 million people.

The two Cuban hospitals in Java are fully-equipped with X-ray machines, laboratories, operating rooms and specialists to handle the broken bones and other injuries common to earthquake victims.

About half of the 65 Cuban doctors are women, a great advantage in Muslim countries, where women may be reluctant to be examined by a male doctor.

“They treat patients like people, not just cases. Everyone I spoke to from the affected areas was so grateful. They felt they could always go to the Cuban doctors to ask a question, despite language difficulties.”

“I appreciate the Cuban medical team. Their style is very friendly. Their medical standard is very high. The Cuban hospitals are fully complete and it’s free, with no financial support from our government.

Cuba currently has about 20,000 doctors working in 68 countries across three continents, without much being said about it.

Havana rejects any suggestion of strings attached to its aid.

“We are here purely out of humanitarian motives – we hope that governments around the world will see that health is most important,” says Dr Putol.

From the early days of the 1959 revolution, President Fidel Castro prioritised education and health as pillars of the new society, and the Caribbean island now has the highest ratio of doctors per person in the world, according to the World Health Organization (which, by the way, recognizes Cuban medical degrees: my addition)

Many things could change in a post-Castro era, but most Cubans would fiercely resist any attempt to undermine the extraordinary success of their health system.

The “Paradox of the plankton”

According to the “Paradox of the plankton”, more plankton species exist than allowed under the competitive exclusion principle of Gause. This principle states that the number of species cannot be greater than the number of niches utilized by these species, unless certain conditions are met. The Paradox of the plankton has played a crucial role in ecological theory. Hutchinson, who formulated the paradox, explained this discrepancy by nonequilibrium conditions, due to repeated weather – and climate – induced changes in environmental conditions. Recent work on marine and freshwater plankton has shown this to be correct, but it has also shown that the number of niches available for exploitation is far greater than earlier assumed (components of the white light spectrum, additional essential resources), and that chaotic fluctuations can increase diversity even when environmental conditions are constant.

You will find a detailed discussion of these studies on the Cambridge University Press website of my book Nonequilibrium Ecology (Resources and solutions. Appendix 2).

The Chowdhury Ecosystem Model: A Test of the Latitude-Niche Breadth Hypothesis

Our latest paper has now been accepted for publication by the French ecological journal View et Milieu. It is the latest in a series of three that uses the Chowdhury Ecosystem Model (see Appendix 1) to examine an important problem in evolutionary ecology, i.e., the niche breadth-latitude hypothesis, according to which greater species numbers in the tropics are correlated with narrower niches. The Chowdhury Ecosystem Model permits simulations over evolutionary (millions of years) and much shorter ecological time scales. It is agent based, i.e., each individual is treated separately with its own random birth and death, instead of by a differential equation describing how the total number of individuals changes with time. Sometimes, differential equations can give qualitatively wrong results compared to the more realistic individual treatment. In physics, such agent-based simulations have been used for half a century as “Molecular Dynamics” or “Monte Carlo”. Monte Carlo simulations are also important tools in biology.

The Abstract of the paper follows.

Habitat width along a latitudinal gradient
D. Stauffer, C. Schulze, K. Rohde

Abstract
We use the Chowdhury ecosystem model, one of the most complex agentbased ecological models, to test the latitude-niche breadth hypothesis, with regard to habitat width, i.e., whether tropical species generally have narrower habitats than high latitude ones. In two previous studies using the Chowdhury Model, we have shown that simulations result in faster speciation in the tropics and in latitudinal diversity gradients, that the complexity of foodwebs increases with time and at higher rates in the tropics (Rohde & Stauffer 2005), and that latitudinal ranges of species are greater in the tropics, contradicting Rapoport’s rule (Stauffer & Rohde 2006). In this paper we show that the Chowdhury Model does not support the latitude-niche breadth hypothesis for the niche dimension habitat width: habitats, measured by comparing species numbers in small and large areas at a particular locality, are generally wider and not narrower in the tropics. This hypothesis cannot, therefore, give a causal explanation of latitudinal gradients in species diversity

Sex and Islam

One reads quite frequently in the press that Muslim women who committed adultery are stoned to death etc. etc. I always thought that such instances in some backward countries were more a tribal than a religious tradition.

The following two reports, one referring to Sunni, the other to Shiite customs, are of interest in this context.

1) Sunni Islam. According to the German news magazine Der Spiegel, 26.2.07, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Ali Gumaa, the highest religious authority in Egypt, issued a fatwa on one of the most important TV shows, according to which a woman who had lost her hymen before marriage, can be restored to virginity surgically. However, the woman should keep quiet about it to her future husband: “ If God had wished that we know everything about each other, he would have made as all clairvoyants”. And if a woman commits adultery, but regrets her deed and asks God for forgiveness, she shall keep quiet it about it to her husband, in order to preserve peace in the family. This led to a heated controversy in the conservative Egyptian society, but the Mufti’s position was supported by Mohammed Schama, Professor for Islamic sciences at the Azhar University (the most important Sunni University): “These rules are not new, it is all written in the books”; and the Mufti had supported his fatwa with sayings of the Prophet. The Mufti stressed that “bawdy” (unzüchtige) girls had a right to a second chance.

2) Shiite Islam. According to a BBC News report (2.6.07, extracts):

“Iran’s Interior Minister, Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi (a cleric), has started promoting temporary marriage as a solution to the country’s social problems. Shia Islam allows a man and woman to marry for a fixed period of time, ranging from an hour to a century. A man can also have any number of temporary marriages – or sigheh, as they are known.

However, Iranian society still looks down on temporary marriage as a cover for prostitution. He said there needed to be a cultural change to allow this.

Iran first started promoting temporary marriage as an alternative to living in sin 15 years ago. The then President, Hashemi Rafsanjani, said it was a way for men and women to satisfy their sexual needs.

He even said there was no need for a cleric: the couple could read out an oath in private in order to marry. These days, some girls who want to travel with their boyfriends and be allowed to stay in the same hotel room or avoid arrest by the moral police might have a temporary marriage.”

Nonequilibrium Ecology: Latest Book Review

Three earlier reviews of my recent book Marine Parasitology and one review of my book Nonequilibrium Ecology are mentioned in the relevant posts (NE, MP). They were the only ones available until a few days ago. A second one for Nonequilibrium Ecology has now been published in Ecology 88, No.5, 1338-1339.

The reviewer concludes that

“………………. Nonequilibrium ecology is a useful book providing much food for thought—even for ecologists considering selection and competition as factors of prime importance (like myself), it is healthy to be confronted with arguments and evidence to the contrary.”

However, he draws attention to a number of “deficiencies”, on which I comment in the following. Some of the reviewer’s statements are plainly wrong or misleading. I address these points in the order in which they are discussed in the review.

1) The reviewer writes that I view the terms equilibrium thinking and competition thinking as almost synonymous. There has been much debate on the meaning and definition of equilibrium and nonequilibrium, and I have given not an exhaustive, but a fairly comprehensive historical review of the concepts in the book, which makes it clear that there are very wide differences of opinion on this. It is obvious from the discussion in Chapter 1 of the book and from the various examples given, that I do not view equilibrium and competition thinking as being almost synonymous, even though many authors consider density dependence (usually thought to be due to competition) as a major characteristic of equilibrium.

In this context, according to the reviewer,”Viewed this way, empirical studies showing that populations are kept at equilibrium by predation pressure are viewed as evidence against equilibrium ecology. Conversely, limit-cycle oscillations and other complex behavior are subsumed under the heading “equilibrium dynamics”… This also is incorrect. On pages 13-15 and elsewhere I discuss examples in detail, which show that predation and parasitism may regulate host populations, leading to apparent equilibrium.

2) The reviewer further accuses me of placing too much emphasis on marine parasites, a “bias” which I supposedly “justify” by my own expertise and by the fact that parasites represent probably the largest component of the Earth’s fauna and should therefore not be ignored when determining the mainstream of ecological thought. He writes that even hard-core competition biologists will readily agree that parasites are often more strongly limited by their hosts than by their conspecifics, and that host-parasite interactions have an inherent tendency for exhibiting nonequilibrium behavior. He further claims that “Although they are of obvious ecological relevance, host-parasite systems just do not form the arena for the discussion on the relative importance of competition.”

I believe that these comments by the reviewer are misleading. Chapters 7-9 deal with detailed examples, of these, four sections with 19 pages are on marine parasites, one with 3 1/2 pages is on ectoparasitic insects (plant herbivores), seven sections with 47 pages deal with other groups. The two large chapters on interspecific competition make only some reference to parasites, and other chapters even less. Further, the comment that I justify my “bias” towards marine parasites by my expertise in the field, applies only to the autoecological example in Chapter 10, where I use Aspidogastrea, and one of them a freshwater species, and give as ONE reason the fact that I have done much work on them. The ratio parasites/free-living species discussed corresponds roughly to what one finds in nature. Importantly, contrary to the reviewer’s statement, in almost all cases I do not analyse host parasite interactions, but interactions between species in parasite communities. Furthermore, why should hard-core competition ecologists a priori agree that parasites tend towards nonequilibrium? Should one not analyse the data first, as done in my book? Moreover, the section on “Larval trematodes in snails” (pp.131-134) clearly shows that parasite communities, like free- living ones, may be strongly structured by interspecific competition. Indeed, many parasite ecologists believe in the great importance of competition in structuring communities. But importantly, as stated in the Introduction to my book, a majority of authors are prejudiced towards equilibrium assumptions because they select systems in which equilibrium is expected. The whole idea of the book is to remedy this situation by using examples from groups where equilibrium may be expected, and others from groups where it is not expected. As it turns out, there really are significant differences in equilibrium/nonequilibrium between groups, and this is explained in chapter 11 (Fig. 11.1).

3). The reviewer objects to some of my theoretical statements, foremost to my statement in the legend to Fig.1.3 that “x never reaches carrying capacity” in the bifurcation diagram of the discrete-time logistic growth model. Different interpretations are possible and I do not wish to comment on this further, except to state that two reviewers and the journal editor, all of whom have considerable experience in chaos theory, accepted my interpretation in a paper on chaos (Rohde and Rohde 2001 : Fuzzy chaos: reduced chaos in the combined dynamics of several independently chaotic populations. American Naturalist, 158, 553-55). Whichever interpretation one uses, it does not affect the validity of the conclusions (at which I have arrived in several earlier papers not using the bifurcation diagram in Fig. 1.2), i.e., that large oscillations in population density can occur even when conditions are constant, and that equilibrium may be established well below the saturation level.

The reviewer further criticizes me for applying the packing rules of Ritchie and Olff to fish parasites. He believes “that there is no reason to assume that the parasite fauna satisfies the assumptions of the model which was built for competing herbivores in a fractal landscape”. Within the context of the packing rules, I do not write that “that competition for limiting resources has not been important in evolution” (as stated by the reviewer), but much more cautiously that “these negative results support the view” (also shown by various other tests) “that parasites of marine fish do not live in saturated structured communities, but rather in assemblages not significantly structured by interspecific competition”. Ritchie and Olff did apply their packing rules not only to herbivores in a fractal landscape, as implied by the reviewer, but to plants as well. There is no a priori reason that they should not apply to parasites, whose “landscape”, because of their small size, may not appear patchy and fractal to us, but may in fact be so for many of them. It is important here to realize that parasites living in the same microhabitat may differ vastly in size! The packing rules provide an excellent model to test for competition in a fractal landscape for any group of plants and animals. One should not make any a priori assumptions. What is the point in testing if the answer has to be known in advance? Furthermore, Ritchie and Olff clearly were after something universally applicable. They write: “Spatial scaling laws provide potentially unifying first principles that may explain many important patterns of species diversity” and ” Packing rules yield a theory of species diversity”. Even if variability of the resource density and R(w) as an independent biological property are included in the model, there is no reason to assume that it is not applicable to parasites.- Most importantly, I am convinced the reviewer agrees with me that one should never base conclusions on a single model. Concerning the data analysed using the packing rules of Ritchie and Orff, they were also analysed using a variety of other methods, and they all led to the same conclusion: fish parasites live in communities largely unstructured by interspecific competition.

Finally, the reviewer criticises me for stating that the metabolic theory of ecology does not rely on equilibrium assumptions. In fact, the theory (as developed by the time when the book was submitted, and I do not believe now) “does not rely on equilibrium assumptions”, a belief which is shared by the one of the chief architects of the theory whom I contacted (see also Allen, A.P. and Gillooly, J.F. 2007. The mechanistic basis of the metabolic theory of ecology, Oikos in press). This does not mean that the theory does not make certain predictions on when equilibrium and nonequilibrium conditions may arise, but this is something quite different from “relying” on equilibrium assumptions.

Some appendices and Errata of the book are available at:
http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521674553&ss=res

Games Theory (Nash Equilibria) in International Conflicts

I have written a detailed discussion of applications of game theory in evolutionary biology (evolutionarily stable strategies or ESS’s) for the second edition of my Nonequilibrium Ecology. Here, I wish to draw attention to the risks in using game theory (Nash equilibria) for analysing international conflicts.

A Nash Equilibrium (John Nash 1950, Equilibrium points in n-person games. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 36: 48-49), is one in which none of a number of players in a game can gain by changing her/his strategy unilaterally.

A Nash Equilibrium strategy set will be adopted if the following conditions are met (I take these conditions from Wikipedia: Nash equilibrium): 1) players try indeed to maximise their potential payoff; 2) players are flawless in execution; 3) the players are intelligent enough to deduce the solution; 4) everybody knows that all players meet these conditions, including condition 4.

However, often these conditions are not met. 1) The first condition is not met if the quantities a player wishes to maximize are not properly defined; 2) the second condition is not met if players bungle execution of a plan; 3) the third condition is not met if players cannot deduce the correct solution because of its complexity, or if only some players can deduce it; 4) The fourth criterion is not met when players distrust each other and act as if their adversaries behaved “irrationally”.

Because of these limitations, establishment of Nash equilibria are difficult to foresee in international conflicts. It therefore seems risky to base decisions on peace or war, economic sanctions or not, etc., on “games” using game theory and specifically Nash equilibria.

As in previous posts, let’s use the example of Iran. Condition 1: the “West” always assumes that Iran does indeed wish to “maximize” its payoff by developing nuclear weapons. This may well be the case, but what is the evidence? The Grand Ayatollah has issued a fatwa forbidding development of such weapons (of course, he might issue a contradictory one tomorrow). Condition 2: execution of war plans has been bungled more often than not in the Middle East (Iraq, Lebanon), and probabilities are high that one against Iran will be bungled also. Condition 3: I think that the assumption of all players being able to deduce the correct outcome of a war against Iran is preposterous. Iran is unlikely to foresee how it would be “punished”, and the US, judging from its performance in Iraq, is unlikely to foresee all the consequences of a war. Condition 4: it is more than obvious that Iran distrusts the US. and vice versa.

My conclusion, then, is that attempts to analyse the present situation in the Middle East and specifically with regard to Iran using Nash equilibria, are not only without hope of success but highly dangerous, in particular also because human players are almost by definition “irrational”: they are consistently biased as discussed in my post “On Aggression“.

The conditions above, however, are not the only ones. In a more general way, Nash equilibria, as their name implies, are equilibria, and nonequilibria are more common than equilibria in nature, and this includes mankind. I have pointed out in my account of evolutionarily stable strategies, that ESS’s are not likely when disturbances are frequent and large, that is, under nonequilibrium conditions. I cite:

“it is to be expected that frequent and drastic abiotic and biotic changes in the environment which affect the fitness (reproductive success) of potential contestants in evolutionary “games”, will make it more difficult to establish evolutionary stable strategies, because the establishment of an ESS cannot keep up with the changes. If the development of an ESS takes a long time, even a single strong environmental disruption with long lasting effects may make it impossible for an ESS to develop. An established ESS may be affected by environmental instability for example by reducing population size so much that encounters with possible contestants are radically reduced, facilitating the invasion by mutants which are less fit, on a more or less random basis. Alternatively, a strategy stable under certain conditions may become less stable, permitting establishment of a different ESS. For example, it may well be that in the “war of attrition” mentioned above, the strategy of posturing in an unpredictable way and for a duration depending on the value of the resource, is replaced by one which demands greater aggressiveness, because resources are severely depleted.”

Hence, a Nash equilibrium today may not be one tomorrow. Who can foresee such changes? Climate change, for example, may have unforeseen consequences for how nations behave: a war of attrition may become more aggressive.

The Pillars of Democracy: a Free Press

During the Cold War, the western democracies trumpeted their freedoms to the Soviet Block. Foremost among them were free elections, a free press, free trade unions, the separation of the executive and legislative branches of government, and an independent judiciary.

In this post, I wish to draw attention to a few disquieting developments concerning the second item on the list, a free press.

There appears to be an (accelerating?) concentration of media ownership, which severely biases information provided to the public. Take Rupert Murdoch, who openly boasted of his political power because of the influence he has on public opinion. He “advised” the US government in the lead up to the Iraq war, not to take notice of dissenting international voices and go ahead with invading Iraq anyway. His rightwing Fox News played a leading role in brainwashing the American public. At this very moment, the British Labour government is wary of “taking on” Rupert Murdoch, since he owns The Times and The Sun. In Australia, which has the greatest or one of the greatest concentrations of media ownership in the Western world, it would be almost political suicide not to have the support of the media barons including Murdoch. Therefore, Kevin Rudd, on his pilgrimage to the US, made sure to meet Rupert Murdoch. In the United States, Rupert Murdoch has just made an offer of 6 billion US $ to take over ownership of the company (Dow Jones) which owns the Wall Street Journal plus various other items.

Media companies are treated like any other commercial company, and – from an economic point of view, or better from the point of view of shareholders – it may often make sense to form larger entities. This may be one reason why cross ownership laws in the media “industry” are continuously being watered down in a number of countries. Another reason: various parties want to keep the press on their side. This seems to me a serious danger to Western democracy.

What can one do about it?

(Just a reminder: a diverse and free press has been an important cornerstone of “classical” Western liberalism)

The Future of Humanity according to Stephen Hawking

As reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, the famous physicist (Black Holes) Stephen Hawking recently took off in a Boeing 727 that “roared over the Ocean and curved large parabolic arcs in the sky”, producing the effect of floating in zero-gravity, like being in space.

Before taking off he said life on Earth was “at the ever increasing risk” of being overcome by disaster, “such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers. The human race has no future if it doesn’t go into space.”

Note the sudden global warming, which may be due to chaotic fluctuations, something to my knowledge often neglected in modelling. Chaotic fluctuations are determined by very small initial conditions and are largely unpredictable (though strictly deterministic). Let’s hope Stephen Hawking is wrong, and – if not – let’s hope we have sufficient time to get ready for space travel on a large scale.

On Aggression (The Instinct for Wars)

An article by Ross Gittins in the Sydney Morning Herald (April 25, 2007) “Why ‘never again’ will never work” suggested this post to me. Ross Gittins asks whether there could be a deeper, purely psychological explanation for wars and specifically for the war against Iraq (and not the supposed weapons of mass destruction etc. used as an excuse). He asks “Could it be humans are so warlike because of the way their minds work? That’s the novel thesis advanced by Professor Daniel Kahneman, of Princeton University, and Jonathan Renshon, of Harvard University….” The psychologist Kahneman is the founder of behavioural economics and a Nobel Prize winner.

In fact, the thesis is not new at all. Another Nobel Prize winner, Konrad Lorenz, one of the founders of ethology, the modern study of animal behaviour, advanced it over 40 years ago. I strongly recommend to read his popular and inspiringly written books on the subject, because they are even more relevant today than they were 40 years ago:

On Aggression (translated from the German Das Sogenannte Böse, 1963), and The Waning of Humaneness (Engl translation 1988, German 1983). In these two books, Lorenz describes how intraspecific aggression (an instinct for aggression) in various animal species can have effects that threaten the survival of a species. The same applies to humans. Humans, in their evolutionary history, have acquired aggressive instincts that may have had a survival value at the time, but are dangerous today. Nevertheless, Lorenz is (or pretends to be?) optimistic. He refers to “safety valves” that prevent negative effects due to aggression in various animal species, from which we can learn. A precondition for optimism is that mankind must be modest and realize that we are only part of nature and subject to its laws. (A note for evolutionary biologists: Lorenz bases many of the arguments on group selection, which may not be scientifically sound, but many of his conclusions concerning the survival of species are nevertheless correct).

Kahneman’s Nobel Prize winning insight was that humans do not possess the mental powers necessary for the rational calculations required by conventional economics.
Humans tend to make mental shortcuts that may lead to erroneous predictions, i.e., they are biased. When Kahneman and Renshon listed these biases, they found that all of them were on the hawkish side (one did not listen to advice given by doves, but by hawks).

These hawkish biases are of several kinds:

1) optimism bias: most people believe they are smarter than others (for politicians this means for example that they tend to take the advice of hawks who predict a favourable outcome of a war);

2) illusion of control: the amount of control people think they have over outcomes is generally exaggerated (does this ring a bell with the present war in Iraq?);

3) fundamental attribution error: other people’s motives are often misinterpreted; and it is completely ignored that other people may have the same bias towards us (does this ring a bell? Iran?);

4) reactive devaluation: something is considered worth less for the only reason that it is offered by the other side (i.e., a concession by some supposedly hostile person is devalued).

I suggest to consider these points when looking at one of the supposed rogue states, Iran. People should realize that Iran has a long history of suppression by neighbours and non-neighbours (Britain, Russia, in particular). In the seventies(?) an Iranian airliner was shot down by an American warship killing about 200 people. There was no war between the US and Iran, and (if I am correctly informed, I am open to correction) Iran did not even receive an apology from the US. Iraq’s invasion of Iran under Saddam Hussein (allegedly supported by the US) led to 2 million Iranian dead.  Iran cooperated with the US in getting rid of the Taliban, but never received a “reward”. President Bush declared Iran a state on the Axis of Evil, and there has been repeated talk of “regime change” in Iran. Earlier, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mossadeq, was overthrown with the involvement of the CIA, for the simple reason that he wanted to nationalize the oil industry. This led to the rise of the Shah and finally the present political system (by the West usually depreciatively referred to as the ayatollah “regime”). The Iranian government has declared that it has never attacked a neighbour over the last centuries, and this is correct. It has also declared that it has no intention of attacking anybody, including Israel. Iran is entitled by international law to use uranium for peaceful purposes (whether it is wise to pursue this idea under the present circumstances, is a different matter).

I believe that we should try to understand the motives of “the other side”, considering its history, and make political judgements accordingly.

The Dangers of Gaia

The Gaia (Greek Earth Goddess) hypothesis was proposed by James Lovelock and states that the Earth’s biotic and abiotic components form a single, interacting whole that can be thought of as a single organism. Living organisms have a regulatory effect on the environment, promoting the persistence of life. There are several variants of the hypothesis, some close to being straight forward absurd, others so vague and close to accepted scientific ideas that some people (e.g., Richard Dawkins in his Unweaving the Rainbow) have expressed the view that the hypothesis is superfluous. Dawkins, among others, believes that natural selection (in his view the only mechanism driving evolution, beside neutral drift) has no “foresight” necessary for a Gaia effect to occur, but is restricted to selecting genes on the basis of how they perform in the present environment. Lynn Margulis, on the other hand, well known for her studies demonstrating the symbiotic origin of several cell organelles (such as mitochondria) is a strong supporter of the Gaia hypothesis (although not its extreme version).

I do not wish to discuss the scientific merits of the hypothesis, but want to draw attention to its potential misuse.

An organism consists of many parts (cells, tissues, organs) that do not only interact but interact in such a way that the survival of the organism is guaranteed, by “self-correcting” (homeostatic) mechanisms (e.g., if the temperature in a homeothermic animal becomes too high, or if it is in danger of becoming too high, it is lowered by behavioural or physiological processes). Adherents of the Gaia hypothesis believe that the same must occur on Earth. The danger here of course is the false conclusion that – if Earth heats up, as presently apparently happening – :don’t worry, don’t do anything, Gaia will look after it.

Richard Dawkins, in his Unweaving the Rainbow, tells the story of an “ecologist”, who, at a conference sponsored by the British Open University, in which the possibility of extinction of the Dinosaurs by an asteroid impact was raised, said

This could not have happened, ‘Gaia would not have permitted it’.

Gaia may very well permit the extinction of life on Earth by any mechanism that gets out of hand, and this includes global warming. After all, even an organism can die if its homeostatic mechanisms fail: patients are known to have died of high fever. And that such mechanisms operate at the level of a superorganism comprising the entire Earth, postulated by the Gaia hypothesis, is at least doubtful. I certainly would not bet on it.

On the other hand, the Gaia concept may play a positive role. Let us look at the Earth and its ecosystems in their entirety as a sick patient that needs treatment: Do not only treat the parts that are obviously sick (such as rivers and forests), but get to the bottom of it and treat a sick economic and political system that has lead to the deterioration of the environment. But more on this perhaps in a future post.

Private Wars and the Christian Right

The Sydney Morning Herald (April 21-22, 2007) reports on the huge contribution private subcontractors make to the war in Iraq. It is no secret that private contractors are involved, but little publicity is given to the scale of their involvement. It casts further doubts on the legality of the war and how it has been conducted. It also illustrates the influence of the Christian Right in the US.

I quote from the Sydney Morning Herald:

“When Rumsfeld resigned last December, there were an estimated 100,000 private contractors in Iraq”.

Jeremy Scahill , in his book “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army” writes “Contractors have provided the Bush Administration with political cover, allowing the Government to deploy private forces in a war zone free of public scrutiny, with the deaths, injuries and crimes of those forces shrouded in secrecy. The Administration in turn have shielded contractors from accountability, oversight and legal constraints. ‘We have over 200,000 troops in Iraq, and half of them aren’t being counted,’ says the Democrats’ Dennis Kucinich, a leading congressional critic of war contracting.”

Blackwater USA is such a mercenary company. “It was founded in 1996 by conservative Christian multimillionaire and ex-Navy SEAL, Erik Prince, the scion of a wealthy Michigan family whose generous political donations helped fuel the rise of the religious right and the Republican revolution in 1994…….. Prince, his family and his political allies poured money into the Republican campaign coffers….”

“Prince has expanded his headquarters …..in North Carolina, to 7000 acres (2800 hectares), making it the largest private military base, with 2300 personnel in nine countries and 20,000 other contractors at the ready”.

According to the Washington Post:

“On the afternoon of July 8, 2006, four private security guards rolled out of Baghdad’s green zone in an armoured security vehicle. The team leader,……., rode in the front passenger seat. He seemed in good mood. His vacation was to start the next day.

“I want to kill somebody today”, ….. said, according to the other three men in the vehicle. Before the day was over, the guards had been involved in three shooting incidents. In one, … allegedly fired into the windshield of a taxi for amusement.

The full story may never be known…”

Is this how future wars will be fought? Are private contractors being drilled for taking on the Iranians? Do the Geneva convention and other international treaties apply to such private armies? Apparently not, how otherwise could the “Administration in turn have shielded contractors from accountability, oversight and legal constraints”? Who pays for this billion Dollar business? Salaries of the contractors certainly are very high.

Advice to Travellers II (Life before Adam and Eve)

My advice to travellers series draws attention to localities and happenings around the world which you should avoid (see no. I) or visit (this one). In this post, you will see what we and all creatures on earth were like before Adam and Eve:

(Based on BBC News, 14.4.2007)

A new creationism museum is being built in Kentucky, in the middle of North America, within a day’s drive of two-thirds of the US population, and just 10 minutes from Cincinnati International Airport. That is why it was picked as the site for a new museum, due to open in a couple of months.

“It is the dream of Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, a Christian ministry that promotes the idea that the Biblical book of Genesis should be taken literally in describing the creation of the world, life and humans as carried out by God over a six-day period a few thousand years ago. He lectures or broadcasts almost daily and clearly has the charisma to raise $27m (£14m) for this ambitious museum.”

Apparently, “Tyrannosaurus rex and humans co-habited Earth
In one exhibit, on a rocky ledge, there is a pair of small theropods – young T. rex individuals, we’re told. And near to them (”hold onto your hat”, says Ken, anticipating our disbelief) there are two human children playing by a stream.”

“Most geologists would say humans and dinosaurs were separated by more than 60 million years. And those dinosaurs have very sharp teeth!

“So do bears”, says Ken, “but they eat nuts and berries! Remember, before the sin of Adam, the world was perfect. All creatures were vegetarian.” (bold by me). One of the dinosaurs lets out a rather contradictory roar.

Though the Bible does not mention them directly, Ken Ham thinks there is no reason to suppose that dinosaurs were not still around at the time of the flood.”

I believe the museum will be a roaring success and it is a must for everybody! You might meet a few illustrious people there!

Introducing Academic Reader

This is an extract from a post by Peter Rohde (my son), who is involved in developing this website:

The Academic Reader is a new web site that makes it easier to keep track of your scientific reading. Rather than going to multiple websites every day to keep up, we pull all the sources together in a single location, so you can keep track easily. Sources include the preprint arXiv, the Physical Review, and Nature, and many new sources will be added in the months to come, including sources outside physics.

US braces for global warring

Still any doubts about global warming? If so, read the extracts from “US braces for global warring”, the Sydney Morning Herald, April 10, 2007, below. Perhaps the best “security” response would be not to invest billions of dollars in new aircaft carriers and starwar systems, but in upgrading economies and social conditions in poorer countries. After all, the poorer countries contribute little or nothing to global warming.

Here are some extracts:

THE United States fears climate change could trigger new humanitarian crises and force countries to go to war over diminishing water and energy resources.

American politicians are so concerned about the threats posed by the effects of global warming, they are legislating to elevate it to an official defence issue, with the CIA and the Pentagon required to assess the national security implications of climate change.

Australia has also signalled its intention to broaden its treatment of the issue from one that is just environmental to one that draws on expertise from all arms of government, including defence and intelligence.

The US proposal, which its sponsors expect to pass through Congress with wide support, calls for the director of national intelligence to conduct the first-ever “national intelligence estimate” on global warming.
……….

The measure would also order the Pentagon to undertake a series of war games to determine how global climate change could affect US security, including “direct physical threats to the US posed by extreme weather events such as hurricanes”.

Experts say the increasing focus on global warming as a security issue could open new avenues of support for tougher efforts to limit greenhouse gases.

Terry Eagleton: Lunging Flailing Mispunching. The God Delusion of Richard Dawkins.

I have commented on “Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion” in an earlier post. Considering the number of faithful in the various monotheistic religions, it is to be expected that his book will be violently opposed by many. We can only hope that it will not have the consequences which the Satanic Verses of Salmon Rushdie had. Here I present extracts from a review of Dawkins’ book by Terry Eagleton, John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at Manchester University. According to the Wikipedia Encyclopedia, “He began his career studying the literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. Then he switched to Marxist literary theory in the vein of Williams. More recently Eagleton has integrated cultural studies with more traditional literary theory. He was, during the 1960s, involved in the left-wing Catholic group Slant and authored a number of theological articles as well as a book Towards a New Left Theology. His most recent publications have suggested a renewed interest in theological themes. Another significant theoretical influence on Eagleton is psychoanalysis.” His latest book is How to Read a Poem. The review was published in the London Review of Books Vol. 28 No. 20, 19 October 2006, and is titled Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.

Here are some extracts of the review. I leave judgement to the readers, but include some comments by me in parantheses and bold.

“God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

This, not some super-manufacturing, is what is traditionally meant by the claim that God is Creator. He is what sustains all things in being by his love; and this would still be the case even if the universe had no beginning. To say that he brought it into being ex nihilo is not a measure of how very clever he is, but to suggest that he did it out of love rather than need.” (I certainly always thought that a personal God in monotheistic religions is one who created the world and maintains it. If not, what then is the difference between pantheism and monotheism? I certainly would be very sympathetic to pantheistic views. Is, what Eagerton says here, really the view of the Pope and Catholicism, or is it the view perhaps of a small group of “leftwing” catholics? And is it really acceptable in theology to claim that “God does not in fact exist”? That seems to me atheism or perhaps better theological homeopathy: God is so diluted that she does not exist anymore.)

“God is an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it, not a scientist at work on a magnificently rational design that will impress his research grant body no end.” (?????)

“Nor does he (Richard Dawkins) understand that because God is transcendent of us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to love us. Dawkins’s God, by contrast, is Satanic. Satan (‘accuser’ in Hebrew) is the misrecognition of God as Big Daddy and punitive judge, and Dawkins’s God is precisely such a repulsive superego.”

“Dawkins thinks it odd that Christians don’t look eagerly forward to death, given that they will thereby be ushered into paradise. He does not see that Christianity, like most religious faiths, values human life deeply, which is why the martyr differs from the suicide.”

“The Christian faith holds that those who are able to look on the crucifixion and live, to accept that the traumatic truth of human history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life – but only by virtue of an unimaginable transformation in our currently dire condition. This is known as the resurrection. Those who don’t see this dreadful image of a mutilated innocent as the truth of history are likely to be devotees of that bright-eyed superstition known as infinite human progress, for which Dawkins is a full-blooded apologist. Or they might be well-intentioned reformers or social democrats, which from a Christian standpoint simply isn’t radical enough.

The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you. Here, then, is your pie in the sky and opium of the people. It was, of course, Marx who coined that last phrase; but Marx, who in the same passage describes religion as the ‘heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions’, was rather more judicious and dialectical in his judgment on it than the lunging, flailing, mispunching Dawkins.”

“The mainstream theology I have just outlined may well not be true; but anyone who holds it is in my view to be respected, whereas Dawkins considers that no religious belief, anytime or anywhere, is worthy of any respect whatsoever.”

“On the horrors that science and technology have wreaked on humanity, he is predictably silent. Yet the Apocalypse is far more likely to be the product of them than the work of religion. Swap you the Inquisition for chemical warfare.” (Are these horrors really due to science and technology, or are they the result of economic conditions, colonisation, perhaps religious misconceptions, etc.? Certainly one cannot blame the invention of fire for the burning of witches and the inquisition).

“He is like a man who equates socialism with the Gulag. Like the puritan and sex, Dawkins sees God everywhere, even where he is self-evidently absent. He thinks, for example, that the ethno-political conflict in Northern Ireland would evaporate if religion did, which to someone like me, who lives there part of the time, betrays just how little he knows about it.” (Yes, I agree with this and pointed this out in my earlier post. Overemphasis on religion, ignoring economic, social and other aspects may not be helpful and sometimes even dangerous).

“These are not just the views of an enraged atheist. They are the opinions of a readily identifiable kind of English middle-class liberal rationalist. Reading Dawkins, who occasionally writes as though ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness’ is a mighty funny way to describe a Grecian urn, one can be reasonably certain that he would not be Europe’s greatest enthusiast for Foucault, psychoanalysis, agitprop, Dadaism, anarchism or separatist feminism. All of these phenomena, one imagines, would be as distasteful to his brisk, bloodless rationality as the virgin birth. Yet one can of course be an atheist and a fervent fan of them all. His God-hating, then, is by no means simply the view of a scientist admirably cleansed of prejudice. It belongs to a specific cultural context. One would not expect to muster many votes for either anarchism or the virgin birth in North Oxford.” (I cannot comment on this, having no firsthand experience of the cultural context).

“There is a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in what it can touch, weigh and taste, and The God Delusion springs from, among other places, that particular stable. At its most philistine and provincial, it makes Dick Cheney sound like Thomas Mann. The secular Ten Commandments that Dawkins commends to us, one of which advises us to enjoy our sex lives so long as they don’t damage others, are for the most part liberal platitudes. Dawkins quite rightly detests fundamentalists; but as far as I know his anti-religious diatribes have never been matched in his work by a critique of the global capitalism that generates the hatred, anxiety, insecurity and sense of humiliation that breed fundamentalism. Instead, as the obtuse media chatter has it, it’s all down to religion. (Yes, I agree in part: Dawkins has ignored the economic and social causes of much of the problems, which may often be more important than religion: see my earlier post).

“Dawkins tends to see religion and fundamentalist religion as one and the same. This is not only grotesquely false; it is also a device to outflank any more reflective kind of faith by implying that it belongs to the coterie and not to the mass. The huge numbers of believers who hold something like the theology I outlined above can thus be conveniently lumped with rednecks who murder abortionists and malign homosexuals. As far as such outrages go, however, The God Delusion does a very fine job indeed. The two most deadly texts on the planet, apart perhaps from Donald Rumsfeld’s emails, are the Bible and the Koran; and Dawkins, as one the best of liberals as well as one of the worst, has done a magnificent job over the years of speaking out against that particular strain of psychopathology known as fundamentalism, whether Texan or Taliban. He is right to repudiate the brand of mealy-mouthed liberalism which believes that one has to respect other people’s silly or obnoxious ideas just because they are other people’s.”

(In summary, I think that some of the criticism of Eagleton are quite justified, but some of the main points, such as, what or who is God, seem to me fairly obscure. As a scientist, I am more impressed by the logical and clear exposition of Richard Dawkins. And what about the many horrible events in history and now that were really entirely or largely due to religion? No word on these by Eagleton. – One main point made by Eagleton is that Dawkins is ignorant of much of Christian theology and nuances within it, and should therefore keep quiet about it. Does one really have to be a theologian to comment on the principles of a religion? If we accept Eagleton’s requirement, we would have to abolish all critical comments on anything except our own narrow field of expertise, i.e., leave everything to the experts. I believe this would be a disaster, because it would open the door to suppressing all opinions that are not considered to conform to what a self appointed “elite” thinks is true. We would probably still be in the dark ages, if a few dissidents had not established new versions of the “truth” against the “experts” of the time).

Iraq War Casualties and Iran

In view of the misinformation about Iraqi war casualties frequently read in the press (“several 10,000 civilians dead”), and in view of the ominous developments concerning Iran, it seems appropriate to draw attention to the survey published last October in the leading British medical journal “Lancet”, conducted by the John Hopkins School of Public Health using cutting edge survey techniques. According to a report published by the BBC on 26 March 2007:

“The British government was advised against publicly criticising a report estimating that 655,000 Iraqis had died due to the war, the BBC has learnt.”

“Iraqi Health Ministry figures put the toll at less than 10% of the total in the survey, published in the Lancet. But the Ministry of Defence’s chief scientific adviser said the” Lancet “survey’s methods were “close to best practice” and the study design was “robust”. Another expert agreed the method was “tried and tested”.”

For the Iraqi Health Ministry survey, “the Iraq government asks the country’s hospitals to report the number of victims of terrorism or military action. Critics say the system was not started until well after the invasion and requires over-pressed hospital staff not only to report daily, but also to distinguish between victims of terrorism and of crime.”

For the Lancet survey ”the researchers spoke to nearly 1,850 families, comprising more than 12,800 people. In nearly 92% of cases family members produced death certificates to support their answers. The survey estimated that 601,000 deaths were the result of violence, mostly gunfire.”

“President Bush said: “I don’t consider it a credible report.” But a memo by the MoD’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Roy Anderson, on 13 October, states: “The study design is robust and employs methods that are regarded as close to “best practice” in this area, given the difficulties of data collection and verification in the present circumstances in Iraq.””

“However “Speaking six days after Sir Roy praised the study’s methods, British foreign office minister Lord Triesman said: “The way in which data are extrapolated from samples to a general outcome is a matter of deep concern….””

“Dr Michael Spagat of Royal Holloway London University says that most of those questioned lived on streets more likely than average to witness attacks: “It would appear they were only able to sample a small sliver of the country,” he said. Dr Spagat has previously conducted research with Iraq Body Count, an NGO that counts deaths on the basis of media reports and which has produced estimates far lower than those published in the Lancet.

If the Lancet survey is right, then 2.5% of the Iraqi population – an average of more than 500 people a day – have been killed since the start of the war.”

Even if casualties are overestimated in the Lancet report, they appear to be certainly much greater than the “several 10,000” often mentioned. On top of this, we have the more than 4 million displaced people (about 2 million in neighbouring countries, particularly Syria and Jordan), and the catastrophic collapse of most of the infrastructure including medical services (which must have led to a very large loss of life not directly attributable to violence and therefore not included in above reports).

And all this in the name of Western civilisation and democracy.

An attack on Iran would very likely have even more serious consequences.

The Origin of Life

An argument frequently used by adherents of “Intelligent Design” is the improbability of life having arisen spontaneously. Citing Stuart Kauffman 1993 (The Origins of Order. Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution. Oxford University Press, New York Oxford), page 287: “Improbable features of current organisms imply improbable origins. If the probability that a protein catalyzes a given reaction is 10 to the power of minus 20, and if a minimal contemporary organism such as a pleuromona-like organism has on the order of 1000 or 2000 enzymes, then the probability of their joint occurrence by chance is, say 10 to the power of minus 40 000. More likely that, as Hoyle says, the whirlwind assemble a 747 from scraps in a junkyard.”

However, the detailed investigations of Stuart Kauffman suggest that life is not improbable, it is “an expected, emergent, collective property of complex systems of polymer catalysts.” “ It “crystallizes” in a phase transition leading to connected sequences of biochemical transformations by which polymers and simpler building blocks mutually catalyze their collective reproduction”. And such a “collectively reproducing polymer system is relatively probable”.

A blog is not a suitable place to discuss the theory in detail, the reader is referred to: Kauffman (pages 287-341) where a detailed account of the mathematical theory and evidence for the hypothesis is given, and where experiments are described to test for the in vitro creation of self-reproducing biochemical systems.

Even if not all aspects of the hypothesis should turn out to be correct, it is important that a problem such as the origin of life can be theoretically and experimentally examined and should not be left unexplained by referring it to “Intelligent Design”, ultimately a meaningless phrase which does not explain anything.

Genetic Engineering and dramatic collapse of bee populations

This is an extract from the international edition of the German news magazine Der Spiegel (22.3.07). It reports on dramatic declines in population sizes of bees in Europe and North America.

“Walter Haefeker is a man who is used to painting grim scenarios. He sits on the board of directors of the German Beekeepers Association (DBIB) and is vice president of the European Professional Beekeepers Association. And because griping is part of a lobbyist’s trade, it is practically his professional duty to warn that “the very existence of beekeeping is at stake.”

The problem, says Haefeker, has a number of causes, one being the varroa mite, introduced from Asia, and another is the widespread practice in agriculture of spraying wildflowers with herbicides and practicing monoculture. Another possible cause, according to Haefeker, is the controversial and growing use of genetic engineering in agriculture.

As far back as 2005, Haefeker ended an article he contributed to the journal Der Kritischer Agrarbericht (Critical Agricultural Report) with an Albert Einstein quote: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”

Mysterious events in recent months have suddenly made Einstein’s apocalyptic vision seem all the more topical. For unknown reasons, bee populations throughout Germany are disappearing — something that is so far only harming beekeepers. But the situation is different in the United States, where bees are dying in such dramatic numbers that the economic consequences could soon be dire. No one knows what is causing the bees to perish, but some experts believe that the large-scale use of genetically modified plants in the US could be a factor.”

Review of Satire, Politik und Kunst

Here is the first review of my book “Satire, Politik und Kunst”, Lulu 2006.

http://www.lulu.com/content/378808

frontcover.jpg

The book is in German, and so is the review. It is by a distinguished German polyglot, Josef Alvermann. He has wide interests, among others in Chinese and Japanese language and culture, and is a brilliant photographer and writer.

Die Grundvoraussetzungen der satirischen Tätigkeit wie der Wissenschaft sind Beobachtung, Analyse und Kritik. Beobachtung setzt Beachtung, ja Achtung voraus, und erst in die Be- und Verwertung gehen aufgrund der Polaritäten von richtig und falsch, wichtig und unwichtig usw. Elemente der Geringschätzung ein. Wissenschaft vermerkt dann das Positive; Satire gibt die Unzulänglichkeiten an. Die Wissenschaft wie die Tiefenpsychologie deckt auf, ‚entdeckt’; der Satiriker aber weist nur hin. Er legt (und stellt) nicht bloß, sondern macht nur aufmerksam auf Öffentliches und Offensichtliches. Er schüttelt oft den Kopf, schmunzelt, lacht und klagt und fühlt sich nur zu ‚Aufdeckungen’ genötigt, wo Unzulänglichkeiten, und es langt ja in der Welt hinten und vorne nicht, ihre Unschuld verloren haben und mit Feigenblättern und Feigheiten kaschiert werden. Doch wo Achtung endet, beginnt Verachtung, und die heitere Satire wird ernst. Der Satiriker selbst muss jedoch auch dann heiter bleiben. Ist es dem Autor des Buchs ‚Satire, Politik und Kunst’ gelungen? Den schnellsten und besten Indikator dafür stellen wohl die aussagestarken grafischen Arbeiten dar, die mehr als die Hälfte des Bandes einnehmen und durch ihren Humor und ihre Kunst viel Freude bereiten. Die unzimperlichen Texte, die in fröhlicher Umkehrung der Regel Illustrationen der vielen Abbildungen sind, enthalten – dem Stichwort `Politik´ im Titel gemäß – auch Verärgerungen und Verletzungen aktueller Art, die in den vielen Grafiken zeitlos verarbeitet wurden. Schön, dass sie nun auch einem breiteren Publikum zugänglich sind! Ich wünsche dem mutigen Werk viel Erfolg! Josef Alvermann, Baden-Baden.

18 Mar 2007
by Josef Alvermann

Some sections of the book can be read at

http://satire-politik-kunst.blogspot.com/

read more…

Definite evidence for Intelligent Design

Having given the matter considerable thought over the weekend, I have now convinced myself that only intelligent design can explain what we see around us. I hope you will be able to follow me in this. (The size of the figures indicates their value for the argument).

1.) Can this high intelligence have arisen by chance?

unsin.jpg

Glotz nicht so blöd!

2.) Can this apotheosis of beauty, here assembled for a beauty contest, be the result of chance?

schonhe.jpg

Dumme Weiber!

3.) If this cannot convince you, can you explain this divine beauty by chance or natural selection?

perspektive-a.jpg

Unbeschreiblich schön!

Natural selection, that silly idea, cannot possibly have led to this goddess from behind, because the beauty seen here is not natural but supernatural (divine). And this gives me another idea. The fools who reject the idea of intelligent design, often argue that not everything is perfect in this world. But they forgot to consider that not a God but a Goddess may be behind it all. After all, we all know that female entities are not perfect, they sometimes make mistakes although they will never admit it. So, we have killed three flies with one stroke: neither chance nor natural selection, nor an infallible God are responsible for the mess, a Goddess is. Sic demonstrandum est!

Illustrations form my book Satire, Politik und Kunst http://www.lulu.com/content/378808

Faster Evolution in the Tropics: Convincing molecular evidence

This is a follow-up to questions about a paper discussed in a seminar which I gave two weeks ago at the School of Environmental Sciences and Natural Resources Management.

I have given a causal explanation of the much greater species richness in tropical than in cold-temperate environments in my post “Faster Evolution in the Tropics ? Effective Evolutionary Time”. A recent paper by Wright, S., Keeling, J. and Gillman, L. in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science) 103, 7718, 2006) specifically tests this hypothesis using molecular evidence from tropical and cold-temperate tree species and finds convincing evidence. The authors used the ITS (internal transcribed spacer) –region of ribosomal RNA-encoding DNA of 45 pairs of phylogenetically independent congeneric or conspecific rainforest trees. One representative of each pair was from the lowland or low mountainous region in the tropics, the other from the highest possible latitude and altitude. The pairs did not overlap in their geographical distribution, and trees belonged to genera that were as species-rich or richer at high latitudes than in the tropics (which excludes the possibility that higher molecular substitution rates in the tropics were a consequence of faster speciation). In order to reduce the effect of genetic drift, population sizes of all species examined were large. – The speed of molecular evolution was found to be twice as great in the tropics than at high latitudes.

A brief note on this paper appeared in Science NOW Daily News, 1 May 2006, based on interviews with Jim Brown of the University of New Mexico, and me. Here is the interview with me, which clarifies some points and implications of the paper.

1) Have other scientists put forward empirical evidence that species evolve faster in the tropics before this study, or is this the first? And if there have been other kinds of studies, how is this one different or more enlightening?

There are several studies which provide strong evidence in support of various partial aspects of the hypothesis of faster evolutionary rates in the tropics, such as accelerated mutation rates, shorter generation times, and availability of many vacant niches which can absorb newly evolved species. There also are some studies which suggest faster rates of molecular evolution. However, the latter have never solved the problem of whether faster molecular evolution is the result of underlying metabolic rates (mutation rates especially) as suggested by the hypothesis, or whether faster molecular evolution is the result of higher speciation rates (in other words, which way round should the story be read). Allen et al. 2002 provide very strong evidence that metabolic rates are correlated with generation times and mutation rates, and they conclude that these finding support Rohde’s hypothesis, but only by inference. The present study, to my knowledge, is the first that provides direct and convincing empirical evidence that the hypothesis in toto is indeed valid.

2) What factor do you believe this study suggests might be responsible for the difference in molecular evolution rate between temperate and tropical regions?

As just said, the factor responsible was shown, in this study, to be increased mutation rates at higher temperatures, (as well as shorter generation times).

3) Are there weaknesses in the method that this group used?

I cannot see any. The authors have been very cautious: they state that further studies are necessary to definitively rule out the alternative explanation that genetic drift in small populations may be responsible. But this alternative really is only a remote possibility, considering that temporary reductions in population size in the evolutionary past are not more likely for tropical than cold-latitude species (as pointed out by the authors themselves).

4) What are the implications of species evolving faster in the tropics, either on how biodiversity is distributed around the world

The hypothesis predicts that evolution is faster not only in the tropics but in habitats which have higher temperatures and energy inputs generally, for example in deepsea sites which are fed by volcanic hot water upwellings. Scientists should therefore put special emphasis on studying such spots, if they want to get a true understanding of marine diversity. – Also, global warming will affect different areas of the globe differently. A re-distribution of diversity patterns must therefore be expected, although changes due to different evolutionary rates will take some time.

– or on how scientists conduct studies of evolution?

Looking at the vast number of evolutionary and ecological studies, some using very sophisticated statistical analyses, one is struck by the fact that potential DIRECT temperature effects on diversity until recently have been largely neglected. Such effects may be far greater than any effects due, for example, to area, heterogeneity of the habitat etc. etc. Many of the older studies are therefore quite useless. I don’t want to mention specific authors or books, but even some of the most widely cited monographs on general ecological and evolutionary patterns lead the reader astray because of the neglect of such direct temperature effects, concentrating instead on factors that are at best of secondary significance, such as area.- (It may be of interest that one of the truly great contemporary ecologists, when I presented my ideas at a symposium in the U.S., at first thought me “mad” (he told me and others), but he is now fully “converted”).

5) Does this speedier pace have any impact on species conservation in tropical locales?

It is obvious, of course, that devastation of tropical habitats has far greater implications for reducing global plant and animal diversity than devastation of cold-latitude habitats, because of the vastly greater species diversity in the tropics. Important here is to realize that species numbers in such tropical (and other) habitats are vastly underestimated, because parasites, the huge number of small invertebrates and microorganisms, most of which have not even been described yet, are usually ignored. Such species are not only of aesthetic and theoretical interest, but may play very significant roles in ecosystems. The role they play is even less well known than the species themselves. – To understand the cause of increased diversity in the tropics is of great significance: it may lead to more realistic estimates of diversity of these smaller organisms, because evolutionary rates will vary depending on the metabolism of these organisms. However, metabolic rates of these organisms are largely unknown. The present study may induce others to follow this up and look at mutation rates and their temperature dependence in various groups of organisms lower down the “hierarchy”.

Altogether, I believe that this paper is of extreme importance and will stimulate a lot of further research.

Here is the reference by Allen et al.:

Allen, A.P., Brown, J.H. and Gillooly, J.F. (2002). Global biodiversity, biochemical kinetics, and the energetic-equivalence rule. Science, 297, 1545-1548.

Advice to Travellers (Don’t eat raw snails in Beijing)

In the Sydney Morning Herald 12.3.07, a brief notice appeared that drew attention to meningitis (a serious brain disease) acquired by 40 customers in a Beijing restaurant who had eaten insufficiently cooked snails. No details were given, but it is very likely that the infection was caused by a nematode (roundworm) larva (Angiostrongylus) leading to eosinophilic meningitis. The infection may be fatal. The natural definitive host of this parasite is the rat, but other vertebrates including humans can become infected as well. Infection is acquired by eating infected invertebrates. So, be careful when you eat raw snails, mussels etc. in any country around the Pacific. Details of the symptoms, life cycle etc. can be found in
Marine Parasitology: http://www.publish.csiro.au/pid/5045.htm

Scientific integrity and money

I am posting this in response to Chris Fellows’ comment about university interference in expressing one’s opinion (see post “Comments on Richard Dawkins: the God Delusion”). I am shocked that this has happened here. Universities are supposed to be institutions of free learning and research, and the guarantee of free expression of opinions should be the foundation of any university deserving that name. But, of course, universities these days are also money-spinning enterprises, forced to contribute significantly to financing themselves by attracting funds on the “free market”. This has the very unfortunate consequence that there often will be a conflict of interest between objective research and results expected by the money givers. It should be prohibited to receive funds from a source that has some interest in the outcome of the research. Take the tobacco industry. Why has it taken so long until anti-smoking laws were introduced? Important factors certainly were the “research” reports financed by the tobacco industry claiming that tobacco was not so bad. Or take the environmental impact studies financed by the uranium mining companies or land developers. I do not claim that all the people doing research financed in this way were corrupt, and I do not claim that all reports were doctored, and I do not claim that the companies tried to influence the outcome of the research in any way, but one is perhaps more careful in arriving at conclusions adversely affecting the activities of the financiers than if the money had come from independent sources. After all, one wants continuing research support. Therefore, as a matter of principle, such financing of research should be forbidden by law.

Does the case of UNE and its arrangement with the Australian College of Natural Therapies mentioned by Chris Fellows fall into this category? I don’t know what kind of arrangement the university had. Did it profit financially by it, directly or indirectly (by increasing student numbers)? Whatever the case: a university actively interfering with publishing an opinion is similar to a government doctoring research reports (see my post “Scientific Integrity and Global Warming”). It corrupts the whole process of free research and learning.

Intelligent Design

An extract from my book Satire, Politik und Kunst (Lulu 2006).
http://www.lulu.com/content/378808
The figures are intelligent designs from this world (a self portrait) and from others.

I

Intelligent Design

Hier nehmen wir einmal ein englisches Wort, nämlich “Intelligent design”. Die offizielle Begründung: die Deutschen sind nicht dumm genug um an so etwas zu glauben, die inoffizielle: mir fällt das deutsche Äquivalent gerade nicht ein.

Der Begriff ist in der Deutschen Allgemeinen Enzyklopädie für Alles und Jedermann, Verlag Neuschwanstein, Köpenick, 25. Auflage 2006 so definiert:

“Intelligent Design
Denglisch für gottverdammte Dummheit. — Bedeutung: Der Gottvater sitzt in seiner Werkstatt und holt sich von Zeit zu Zeit Geschöpfe aus der Natur, die er vor etwa 6000 Jahren geschaffen hat, um nachzusehen, ob alles noch funktioniert und um sie gegebenfalls aufzupolieren. Bei Pferden kontrolliert er die Schwänze, ob sie auch noch zum Fliegen-Verscheuchen gebraucht werden können; bei den Eseln, ob ihre Ohren noch lang genug zum Wackeln sind; beim Menschen, ob die Arschlöcher noch gross genug zum Reinkriechen sind. Beweise: Der grosse Philosoph Leibniz hat schon vor 300 Jahren bewiesen, dass wir in der besten aller Welten leben, was natürlich nur möglich ist, wenn jemand nach dem besten sieht. Zwar hat Voltaire das bespöttelt, doch er zählt ja als Philosoph bekanntermassen überhaupt nicht. Somit kann die Sache also als erwiesen angesehen werden. Literatur: Die Heilige Schrift, die Théodicée von Leibniz, Candide oder die Beste der Welten von Voltaire.”

Man kann das natürlich auch anders beweisen. Vergleichende Untersuchungen haben gezeigt, dass alle anderen denkbaren Welten tatsächlich viel schlechter sind als unsere, wie im folgenden illustriert ist.

Ein tolles Exemplar aus dieser Welt (Ich) (siehe auch “Ein deutsches Wörterbuch “V”),

intdesign2.jpg

Es hätte aber auch so sein können.

intdesign.jpg

Oder so: denkt Euch, als Maschine und dann auch noch als Frau. Ich frage Euch, in welcher Welt wolltet Ihr lieber leben?

intdesign3.jpg

Comments on Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

Richard Dawkins, the well known evolutionary biologist and popularizer of evolutionary science (The Selfish Gene) has recently published a book that has been on various bestseller lists for months. It argues against the necessity of assuming the existence of a personal God, and draws attention to much harm done by religions in history and now. In the following I comment on some points made in the book. (See also post “Intelligent Design”)

Dawkins’ war against religion may seem somewhat quixotic to those who do not believe in a personal god and live or lived in countries where religion is unimportant. However, this is of course quite wrong, considering the dangerously evil influence fundamentalist religion has in the United States (Dawkins’ aptly named American Taliban and the rulers influenced by them), and the Middle East, to mention only the two most obvious cases. One can only hope that these people listen to what Dawkins has to say, although this may be wishful thinking. After all, criticism of religion has a long history (just remember Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstauffen), but religions still flourish, and in many parts of the world, it seems, more than ever.

Turning now to Dawkins’ arguments. He bases his arguments largely on the role of natural selection, which has led to the evolution of complex systems. Hence, he concludes, a God hypothesis supposedly needed to explain such complexity is superfluous. It seems to me that a God hypothesis is not needed whether natural selection is the predominant factor shaping evolution or not. The theoretical investigations of Stuart Kauffman (The Origins of Order. Self-organization and Selection in Evolution. Oxford University Press 1993) suggest that the overriding importance of natural selection in evolution is doubtful. He concludes that many traits of organisms have evolved not because of natural selection but in spite of it. Stephen Wolfram’s (A New Kind of Science, Wolfram Media 2002) extensive computer simulations of many systems have shown that simple “rules” in programs lead to complex characters. It is likely that genetic programs behave similarly. Therefore, natural selection acting on a very large number of mutations gradually leading to complex characters may be only one component in the process leading to complexity, and not necessarily the most important one. Many mutations will lead to complexity anyway. Further evidence against the overriding significance of selection is the prevalence of nonequilibrium conditions in nature (Klaus Rohde. Nonequilibrium Ecology. Cambridge University Press, 2005). The role of interspecific competition and natural selection, in such systems, is not as great as in equilibrium systems; historical events are important, and competition may go this way or that (diminishing the evolutionary impact of competition and therefore of natural selection). All of this does of course not rule out that natural selection plays some role as well, but it does mean that this role needs much further investigation.

Concerning the historical and social impact of religions, there can be little doubt that it has often been disastrous, to mention only the crusades, inquisition, forced conversion of natives in many continents leading to many millions of deaths. But I cannot quite agree with Bertrand Russell who said that the only good produced by religion (I assume he meant the Christian one) is the Gregorian calendar and one other minor achievement, which has dropped from my memory. After all, much charitable work, Bach’s cantatas and passions, much religious art (the Isenheim altar), architecture (the mosques of Cordoba and Isfahan, the blue mosque in Istanbul, the medieval cathedrals) and writings were inspired by religion. Richard Dawkins is of course right when he says that historical conditions made other inspirations at the time difficult. Mozart might well have been inspired by the Big Bang (after all he was a Freemason). But the same can also be said about the evil influence of religion. Is religion perhaps only a most effective way of establishing group coherence (as indeed suggested by Dawkins), and has it been the only available choice over much though not all of history? Groups tend to stick together much more closely when they feel threatened. Islam over centuries was almost a model of tolerance (at least towards other monotheistic religions); fundamental Islam has arisen at a time when Moslem countries felt overpowered and exploited by Western countries (much of this due to aggression driven by fundamental Christianity). The large Buddha statues in Afghanistan survived for centuries in a Moslem country; they were destroyed only now. Why? – So, assuming that Richard Dawkins’ crusade against religion succeeds, is it possible that some other mechanism of group coherence will take over? Could it be a virulent racism (some of which we have had already) or a national/cultural chauvinism that preaches conversion of others to one’s own supposedly superior language, culture and values in general (much of which has been abundant in history as well)? In this context, Dawkins’ emphasis on religion might even be dangerous, if (and I repeat if) it deflects attention from other important issues. Would it be perhaps more useful to concentrate on social and economic inequalities and try to suggest recipes for their amelioration? One can foresee the displacement of large populations due to global warming and virulent upheavals as a consequence. Keeping an eye on religions may be less fruitful, under such circumstances, than on social and economic inequalities.

In toto: this is an inspiringly and wittily written book, one must hope that the Taliban of any hue will not only read it but change their beliefs when reading it! As to the moral of the future, suggested by Dawkins to be universal love including not only humans but animals as well, this is the moral philosophy based on compassion, of the atheist Arthur Schopenhauer and atheistic Buddhism.

  • EcoRes Forum Launches Climate Change E-Conference Series

    I wish to draw your attention to a series of e-conferences on climate change.

    18 January 2007 – The EcoRes Forum, a new initiative undertaken by Mary Leyser, Coordinator of the Eco-Ethics International Union (EEIU), and Acad. Prof. Gennady Polikarpov, EEIU Vice-President and Chief Scientist at the
    Institute of Biology of Southern Seas in Sevastopol, Ukraine, announces the launch of a series of online e-conferences focusing on the ethical, political and sociocultural aspects of climate change.

    The series, which will be offered free of charge, starts off in April 2007 with a two-week dialogue on a topic of increasing urgency: expanding and accelerating an ecocentric philosophy among societies around the world. The need for such a shift has long been recognized. Based on the UN’s Rio Declaration of Environment and Development, in 1992 Al Gore observed, “Our challenge is to accelerate the needed change in thinking about our relationship to the environment in order to shift the pattern of our civilization to a new equilibrium – before the world’s ecological system loses its current one.” (Earth in the Balance)

    Titled “From Anthropocentrism to Ecocentrism: Making the Shift”, the e-conference will bring together academics and activists, scientists and social critics, researchers and journalists, community leaders and citizens, all focused on looking for answers and actions to make this paradigm shift a reality. After reflecting on past movement successes to identify transferable practices, the semi-structured discussion will evaluate the current status – looking at what is working (and what isn’t) around the globe. Armed with this knowledge, participants will shift focus to the
    future, considering multi-prong approaches for moving forward on this trans-disciplinary issue.

    As EcoRes materials outline, the forum’s mission is ambitious, yet,organizers are convinced, fully achievable:

    In keeping with our foundational philosophy of ecocentric environmental ethics and commitment to the principles of social equity and environmental justice;

    • by leveraging the potential of new media by providing an easily accessible global platform for discussion and access to subject experts;
    • by involving global stakeholders in global issue discussions by circumventing the logistical and financial barriers of traditional dialogue interactions;
    • by building ongoing connections and networks between these actors;
    • by crossing borders, whether disciplinary, philosophical, or geopolitical; and
    • by maintaining a results-oriented focus;

    the goals of the EcoRes Forum are:

    • to level the field of discourse by moving it to a space whose boundaries are set only by our own creativity;
    • to promote awareness, public dialogue and the free exchange and exploration of ideas, knowledge and issues related to climate change;
    • to leave all participants with something of value, whether knowledge, best practices, or a new perspective, which can be put to use immediately to improve efforts in their individual fields; and
    • by so doing, to contribute to taking the environmental movement to the next level and thereby, in some small way, to assist in preventing further extreme human-induced climate change.

    For more information or to register for the April event, visit the EcoRes Forum website at http://www.eco-res.org or write forum@eco-res.org.

    Why are there so many species in the tropics? Effective evolutionary time

    Tropical habitats, generally, have many more species than temperate and cold habitats. Such gradients are referred to as latitudinal gradients in species diversity. No agreement has been reached on the causes of the gradients. The hypothesis of effective evolutionary time (K. Rohde: Latitudinal gradients in species diversity: the search for the primary cause, Oikos, 65, 514-527,1992) attempts to explain diversity gradients, and in particular latitudinal gradients. It was originally named “time hypothesis” (K. Rohde: Latitudinal gradients in species diversity and their causes. I. A review of the hypotheses explaining the gradients. Biologisches Zentralblatt 97, 393-403, 1978, K. Rohde: Latitudinal gradients in species diversity and their causes. II. Marine parasitological evidence for a time hypothesis. Biologisches Zentralblatt 97, 405-418, 1978).

    Background

    Low (warm) latitudes contain significantly more species than high (cold) latitudes. This has been shown for many animal and plant groups, although exceptions exist. An example of an exception is helminths (parasitic worms) of marine mammals, which have the greatest diversity in northern temperate seas, possibly because of small population densities of hosts in tropical seas that prevented the evolution of a rich helminth fauna, or because they originated in temperate seas and had more time for speciation there. It has become more and more apparent that species diversity is best correlated with environmental temperature and more generally environmental energy. These findings are the basis of the hypothesis of effective evolutionary time. Species have accumulated fastest in areas where temperatures are highest. Mutation rates and speed of selection due to faster physiological rates are highest, and generation times which also determine speed of selection, are smallest at high temperatures. This leads to a faster accumulation of species, which are absorbed into the abundantly available vacant niches, in the tropics. Vacant niches are available at all latitudes, and differences in the number of such niches can therefore not be the limiting factor for species richness.

    The hypothesis of effective evolutionary time offers a causal explanation of diversity gradients, although it is recognized that many other factors can also contribute to and modulate them.

    Historical aspects

    Some aspects of the hypothesis are based on earlier studies. (B. Rensch: Neuere Probleme der Abstammungslehre. Die transspezifische Evolution. Encke, Stuttgart, 1954), for example, stated that evolutionary rates also depend on temperature: numbers of generation in poikilotherms, but sometimes also in homoiotherms, are greater at higher temperatures and the effectiveness of selection is therefore greater. Ricklefs refers to this hypothesis as “hypothesis of evolutionary speed“ oder “higher speciation rates“ (E. Ricklefs: Ecology. Nelson and Sons, London, 1973). Genera of Foraminifera in the Cretacious and families of Brachiopoda in the Permian have greater evolutionary rates at low than at high latitudes (F.G. Stehli, E.G. Douglas and N.D. Newell: Generation and maintenance of gradients in taxonomic diversity. Science 164, 947-949, 1969). That mutation rates are greater at high temperatures has been known since the classical investigations of N.W. Timofeeff-Ressovsky, K.G. Zimmer und M. Delbrück: Über die Natur der Genmutation und der Genstruktur. Nachrichten aus der Biologie der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften Göttingen I, 189-245, 1935), although few later studies have been conducted. Also, these findings were not applied to evolutionary problems.

    The hypothesis of effective evolutionary time differs from these earlier approaches as follows. It proposes that species diversity is a direct consequence of temperature-dependent processes and the time ecosystems have existed under more or less equal conditions. Since vacant niches into which new species can be absorbed are available at all latitudes, the consequence is accumulation of more species at low latitudes. All earlier approaches remained without basis without the assumption of vacant niches, as there is no evidence that niches are generally narrower in the tropics, i.e., an accumulation of species cannot be explained by subdivision of previously utilized niches. The hypothesis, in contrast to most other hypotheses attempting to explain latitudinal or other gradients in diversity, does not rely on the assumption that different latitudes or habitats generally have different “ceilings” for species numbers, which are higher in the tropics than in cold environments. Such different ceilings are thought to be, for example, determined by heterogeneity or area of the habitat. But such factors, although not setting ceilings, may well modulate the gradients.

    A considerable number of recent studies, discussed in K. Rohde: Nonequilibrium Ecology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005b, 223 pp., http://www.cambridge.org/9780521674553 support the hypothesis. Thus, diversity of marine benthos, interrupted by some collapses and plateaus, has risen from the Cambrian to the Recent, and there is no evidence that saturation has been reached (D.Jablonski: The future of the fossil record, Science 284, 2114-2116, 1999). Rates of diversification per time unit for birds and butterflies increase towards the tropics (M. Cardillo: Latitude and rates of diversification in birds and butterflies. Proceedings of the Royal Society London 266, 1221-1225,1999). Allen et al. found a general correlation between environmental temperature and species richness for North and Central American trees, for amphibians, fish, Prosobranchia and fish parasites. They showed that species richness can be predicted from the biochemical kinetics of metabolism, and concluded that evolutionary rates are determined by generation times and mutation rates both correlated with metabolic rates which have the same Boltzmann relation with temperature. They further concluded that these findings support the mechanisms for latitudinal gradients proposed by Rohde (A.P. Allen, J.H. Brown, and J.F. Gillooly: Global biodiversity, biochemical kinetics, and the energetic-equivalence rule. Science, 297, 1545-1548, 2002). Gillooly et al. (2002) described a general model also based on first principles of allometry and biochemical kinetics which makes predictions about generation times as a function of body size and temperature (J.F. Gillooly, E.L. Charnov, G.B. West, M.Van Savage, and J.H. Brown: Effects of size and temperature on developmental time. Nature 417, 70–73, 2002). Empirical findings support the predictions: in all cases that were investigated (birds, fish, amphibians, aquatic insects, zooplankton) generation times are negatively correlated with temperature. Brown et al.(2004) further developed these findings to a general metabolic theory of ecology (J.H. Brown, J.F. Gillooly, A.P. Allen, M. Van Savage, and G.. West,. (2004). Toward a metabolic theory of ecology. Ecology 85, 1771-1789). Indirect evidence points to increased mutation rates at higher temperatures (C. Bazin, P. Capy, D. Higuet, and T. Langin, T.: Séquences d’AND mobiles et évolution du génome. Pour Sci., Hors. Sér. Janvier 97, 106-109., 1997), and the energy-speciation hypothesis is the best predictor for species richness of ants (M. Kaspari, P.S. Ward and M.Yuan: Energy gradients and the geographical distribution of local ant diversity. Oecologia 140, 407-413, 2004). Finally, computer simulations using the Chowdhury eosystem model have shown that results correspond most closely to empirical data when the number of vacant niches is kept large (K. Rohde and D. Stauffer: “Simulation of geographical trends in Chowdhury ecosystem model”, Advances in Complex Systems 8, 451-464, 2005). For a detailed discussion of these and other examples see K. Rohde: Nonequilibrium Ecology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005b, 223 pp., http://www.cambridge.org/9780521674553 and K. Rohde: Eine neue Ökologie. Aktuelle Probleme der evolutionären Ökologie”. Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau, 58, 420-426, 2005.

    Depth gradients

    Species diversity in the deepsea has been largely underestimated until recently (e.g., Briggs 1994: total marine diversity less than 200,000 species) (J. C.Briggs. Species diversity: land and sea compared. Systematic Biology 43, 130-135, 1994). Although our knowledge is still very fragmentary, some recent studies appear to suggest much greater species numbers (e.g., Grassle and Maciolek 1992: 10 million macroinvertebrates in soft bottom sediments of the deepsea) (J. F. Grassle and N. J. Maciolek: Deepsea species richness: regional and local diversity estimates from, quantitative bottom samples. American Naturalist 139, 313-341, 1992). Further studies must show whether this can be verified (K. Rohde: Ecology and biogeography of marine parasites. Advances in marine biology 43,1-86, 2002). A rich diversity in the deepsea can be explained by the hypothesis of effective evolutionary time: although temperatures are low, conditions have been more or less equal over large time spans, certainly much larger than in most or all surface waters.

    This post is based on an earlier article of mine in Wikipedia. See also post on vacant niches.

    Review of Nonequilibrium Ecology

    Here are extracts from the first review, by a distinguished ecologist, of my book Nonequilibrium Ecology (http://www.cambridge.org/9780521674553). The reviewer is well known for his studies of coral fish communities.

    Book Reviews
    Parasites and Passerines Tell Different Tales
    Nonequilibrium Ecology. Rohde,
    K. 2006. Cambridge University Press,
    New York, NY. 234 (xi + 223) pp.
    $120.00 (hardcover). ISBN 0-521-
    85434-2. $60.00 (paperback). ISBN 0-
    521-67455-7.
    Passerine birds have had a surprisingly substantial impact on the development of ecological theory. Studies of birds, most often passerines, have been central to such topics as niche theory, resource partitioning, energy allocation, and optimality, and to the broad range of behavioral ecology topics such as parental investment, parent-offspring conflicts, and sexy sons. They have been important despite being a relatively species poor and ecologically atypical taxon. Passerines have strongly determinate growth; thus, juveniles are essentially full size at fledging, and individuals of a species are remarkably uniform in size. Consequently, each bird in a population has a very uniform set of ecological requirements and set of impacts on its environment, and these features remain largely constant throughout life. Passerines are among the less fecund organisms and provide much larger parental investments per offspring than is the case for any animals other than mammals. Passerines are homeotherms with high metabolic rates, and, perhaps because the requirements of flight limit their ability to store energy, they require a continuous supply of food and can quickly die in its absence. Finally, with the forelimbs specialized for flying and the hind limbs for perching, they are forced to use a quite inflexible jaw structure as the sole tool for food acquisition, manipulation, and consumption. In each of these aspects they are bizarre compared with the majority of organisms. In fact, as someone who does not work with birds, I marvel that they have been able to persist and diversify to the extent that they have. Intelligent design would never have produced such creatures—they are so tightly constrained by their morphology, ontogeny, and physiology that they must live continuously at the very edge of survival. It has always seemed strange to me that ecological ideas have been so heavily influenced by such atypical organisms. But then, some of the ideas central to ecological thinking have also seemed very strange to me, and maybe these two things are linked. Perhaps what is termed conventional ecology, or equilibrium ecology to use Rohde’s terminology, got that way because of the strange organisms that fueled its development. In his book Nonequilibrium Ecology, Klaus Rohde sets out to redress both issues. The author provides abundant examples from the ecology of parasites and other organisms to demonstrate that what may possibly be true for some birds is not necessarily the norm for other kinds of creatures. As its title states, the book is also an attempt to draw attention to the very considerable evidence for the idea that ecological systems—populations, communities, ecosystems—are normally (usually) not at or moving toward equilibrial conditions. In my opinion, a book like this has been needed for some time, and I am pleased that Rohde has written it.

    ……for those students and scientists who value hypotheses and the rigorous testing of them, it is clear that the equilibrium ecology that Rohde argues against is now but a tattered remnant of its earlier sparkling comprehensiveness. …Rohde’s book provides them with substantial ammunition to use in building a new, more realistic ecological paradigm.

    ……this is a useful book that should be read by any ecologist and particularly by any graduate student interested in a refreshingly different perspective on our science than the one dished up too frequently in survey courses and the conservation press.

    Peter F. Sale
    Biological Sciences, University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, and United Nations University—International Network on Water, Environment and Health, Hamilton, Ontario P0B 1J0.

    Conservation Biology 21, 282, February 2007

    Free market economy

    The hobby horses of neoliberalism: free markets and economic equilibrium. Here they are: the larger swallows the smaller, until everything, rather fast, has reached an equilibrium. In a nutshell, the largest survives, until he is in equilibrium with himself.

    marktok.jpg

    But it may not always go smoothly. The digestion may not work as expected:

    gier.jpg gier3.jpg

    But take it cum grano salis: I am not an economist.

    From my book “Satire, Politik und Kunst”, Lulu 2006 http://www.lulu.com/content/378808

    Global warming and scientific integrity

    Global warming, much or all of it man induced, is a certainty, and its likely consequences are disastrous. Pressure of governments on scientists to withhold the facts from the public are therefore particularly dangerous. Below some recent information on this point.

    BY J. SCOTT ORR
    STAR-LEDGER WASHINGTON BUREAU

    WASHINGTON — A leading scientist told a House committee yesterday that “political interference is harming federal science and threatening the health and safety of Americans,” and the committee chairman said the Bush White House has been misleading the public on the dangers of global warming.

    “Political interference with the work of federal scientists threatens the quality and integrity of (federal) policies,” said Francesca Grifo, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Scientific Integrity Program.

    According to a UCS survey whose findings were presented to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, more than 40 percent of the 279 scientists who responded said their work had been edited to more closely reflect the administration’s position on climate change.

    “No scientist should ever encounter any of the various types of political interference described in our survey questions,” Grifo told the committee, which is looking at the government’s response to climate change.

    The panel chairman, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), said he has seen evidence the administration has been trying to mislead the public on global warming.

    “We know that the White House possesses documents that contain evidence of an attempt by senior administration officials to mislead the public by injecting doubt into the science of global warming and minimizing the potential dangers,” he said.

    Waxman demanded that the documents be turned over to his committee. He said he has been rebuffed in his efforts so far.

    “The committee isn’t trying to obtain state secrets or documents that could affect our immediate national security. We are simply seeking answers to whether the White House’s political staff is inappropriately censoring impartial government scientists,” he said.

    Most scientists believe global warming is caused by greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide from vehicles and industrial sources, that keep heat from the sun trapped in the atmosphere.

    President Bush acknowledged the existence of climate change in his Jan. 23 State of the Union address, though he did not use the term “global warming.”

    (downloaded January 31, 2007)

    According to the Sydney Morning Herald, February 3, 2007, the American Enterprise Institute, financed by large American oil companies, has offered bribes to scientists to discredit the reliability of the recent UN climate change report, compiled by a large number of scientists from around the world.

    Klaus Rohde: Nonequilibrium Ecology

    A central problem in ecology is the relative importance of equilibrium and nonequilibrium conditions in populations, communities and ecosystems. The prevailing view was for a long time that systems are generally at or near equilibrium, although deviations from equilibrium due to environmental disturbances are possible and even common. In such near-equilibrial systems, consisting of densely packed populations, competition between individuals of the same or different species is believed to be of paramount importance. However, much evidence contradicts this prevailing paradigm. A recent book examines the evidence for equilibrium and nonequilibrium in ecological systems (Klaus Rohde 2005. Nonequilibrium Ecology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). The book contains a brief discussion of the theoretical background and history (in greater detail discussed in G.C.Cooper, The Science of the Struggle for Existence, Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Biology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2003), detailed discussions of competition (and the often faulty evidence given for it), a discussion of non-competitive mechanisms responsible for niche restriction and segregation, and detailed examples of equilibrium and nonequilibrium over evolutionary time, in populations and metapopulations, in communties, and in ecosystems. An attempt is made to explain why different communities and ecosystems differ in the degree of equilibrium/nonequilibrium. Finally, “prospects for an ecology of the future” are discussed. Particular attention is paid to latitudinal gradients in species diversity, and to nonequilibrium caused by climate change. Details of the book are available at:

    http://www.cambridge.org/9780521674553

    From the only review available to date:

    …..this is a useful book that should be read by any ecologist and particularly by any graduate student interested in a refreshingly different perspective of our science than the one dished up too frequently in survey courses and the conservation press.

    Peter F. Sale, Conservation Biology 21, 282, 2007.

    Klaus Rohde editor: Marine Parasitology

    Marine parasites are among the most common and most diverse animals on earth, and most species have not yet been described. Many species are important as agents of disease in the oceans and in aquaculture. The study of marine parasites should be an essential component of any course in marine biology. This post draws your attention to a new book on marine parasites, the standard work on the subject. It was published by CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne and CABI Wallingford, Oxford, in November 2005. 75 experts in their fields contributed. There are sections on the various parasite groups (from protistans to vertebrates), on behavioural, ecological, evolutionary and zoogeographical aspects, and on aspects of economic, environmental and medical importance. Details of the book are available on the website of CSIRO Publishing:

    http://www.publish.csiro.au/pid/5045.htm

    In the following I show extracts from the three reviews available to date.

    1.) “……..It offers a very thorough review of the present knowledge of virtually all marine parasites and most of what concerns their biology and ecology…….The scope of the book reaches from tree of life based on molecular analysis, fossil parasites or mites parasitic on walruses to medical importance of marine parasites. … We can suppose that the book will become a standard text, stimulating work not only by students recently attracted to marine parasite research but also of established scientists. At present, when most scientists studying marine parasites are specialised in their field of research and cannot be equally proficient in other directions, even for them the book will be an invaluable source of information. However, the book will find its place on the shelf of every biologist who likes the intricacies and charms of organisms adapted to symbiotic existence in the immense and rich realm of marine life.” Jiri Lom, Folia Parasitologica 53, 77-78 (2006).
    2.) “One of the world’s foremost experts on the ecology of host–parasite relationships in marine systems is Klaus Rohde. In 1993, the second edition of his Ecology of Marine Parasites was printed (CABI International).
    Twelve years later, he expanded the approach from the ecology of marine parasites to just about everything that has anything to do with marine parasitology. ……. he is the editor of an 11-chapter volume, collectively written by some 75 authors. Each of the chapters is divided into a various number of sections, with each section written by an authority.

    I think this is a very important piece of work. I would strongly urge anyone with an interest in marine parasites, and marine biologists in general, to purchase it for your own bookshelf. If you are interested in marine biology, or if you have any kind of marine program in your institution, then I also would strongly recommend that your library have a copy. It is well worth the money.”
    Gerald W. Esch, Department of Biology, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27109. American Journal of Parasitology 92(2), 2006, p. 312.

    3.)”This is a beautiful book, and I recommend it for everybody with an interest in marine ecology.”
    Peter Heuch, National Veterinary Institute Oslo, Norway. Published in “Monoculus”, the newsletter of the World Association of Copepodologists.

    Vacant niches

    This post is based on my earlier entry in Wikipedia. This seems necessary because Wikipedia permits changes made by anybody, whether with the necessary knowledge or not.

    The concept of a vacant or empty niche has been controversial in ecology. It is at the basis of any discussion of whether equilibrium or nonequilibrium conditions prevail in ecological systems. A vacant niche can be defined as the possibility that in ecosystems or habitats more species can exist than are present at a particular point in time, because many possibilities are not used by potentially existing species (K. Rohde 2005 Nonequilibrium Ecology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, http://www.cambridge.org/9780521674553).

    1. History of the concept

    Hutchinson, G. E. (1957) Concluding remarks. Cold Spring Harbour Symposium on Quantitative Biology 22, 415-427 was apparently the first who considered the possibility of vacant niches. He writes: (p.424): “The question raised by cases like this is whether the three Nilghiri Corixinae fill all the available niches……….. or whether there are really empty niches.”…….“The rapid spread of introduced species often gives evidence of empty niches, but such rapid spread in many instances has taken place in disturbed areas.”

    Since then, the concept “vacant niche” or “empty niche” has been used regularly in the scientific literature. Some of the many examples are Elton, C. (1958) The ecology of invasions by animals and plants. Chapman and Hall, London, UK. 181 pp.; Rohde, K. (1977). A non-competitive mechanism responsible for restricting niches. Zoologischer Anzeiger 199, 164-172; Rohde, K. (1979). A critical evaluation of intrinsic and extrinsic factord responsible for restricting niches. American Naturalist 114, 648-671; Rohde, K. (1980 ). Warum sind ökologische Nischen begrenzt? Zwischenartlicher Antagonismus oder innerartlicher Zusammenhalt?. Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau, 33, 98-102;
    Lawton, J.H. (1984). Non-competitive populations, non-convergent communities, and vacant niches: the herbivores of bracken. In: Strong, D.R. Jr., Simberloff, D., Abele, L.G. and Thistle, A.B. eds. Ecological communities: conceptual issues and the evidence. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., pp. 67-101; Price, P.W. (1984). Alternative paradigms in community ecology. In: Price, P.W., Slobodchikoff, C.N. and Gaud, W.S. eds. (1984). A new ecology. Novel approaches to interactive systems. John Wiley & Sons, New York, Chichester, Brisbane, Toronto, Singapore, pp.353-383; Compton, S.G., Lawton, J.H. and Rashbrook, V.K. (1989). Regional diversity, local community structure and vacant niches: the herbivorous arthropods of bracken in South Africa. Ecological Entomology 14, 365-373; Begon, M.J., Harper, L. and Townsend, C.R. (1990). Ecology. Individuals, populations and communities, second edition. Blackwell Scientific, Boston; and Cornell, H.V. (1999). Unsaturation and regional influences on species richness in ecological communities: a review of the evidence. Ecoscience 6, 303-315.
    Further examples, some of them in great detail, are discussed in K. Rohde (2005) Nonequilibrium Ecology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

    2. Causes of vacant niches

    Vacant niches can have several causes.

    One cause is radical disturbances in a habitat (biotop). For example, draughts or forest fires can destroy a flora and fauna partially or completely. However, in such cases species suitable for the habitat usually survive in the neighbourhood and colonize the vacated niches, leading to a relatively fast reestablishment of the original conditions.

    Further causes of vacant niches are radical and long-lasting changes in the environment, such as ice ages.

    Vacant niches can also be due to evolutionary contingencies: suitable species did not evolve for usually unknown reasons.

    3. Demonstration of vacant niches

    Vacant niches can best be demonstrated by comparing the spatial component of niches in simple habitats. For example, Lawton and collaborators compared the insect fauna of the bracken , Pteridium aquilinum, a widely distributed species, in different habitats and geographical regions and found vastly differing numbers of insect species. They concluded that many niches remain vacant (e.g., Lawton, J.H. (1984). Non-competitive populations, non-convergent communities, and vacant niches: the herbivores of bracken. In: Strong, D.R. Jr., Simberloff, D., Abele, L.G. and Thistle, A.B. eds. Ecological communities: conceptual issues and the evidence. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., pp. 67-101.

    Rohde and collaborators have shown that the number of ectoparasitic species on the gills of different species of marine fishes varies from 0 to about 30, even when fish of similar size and from similar habitats are compared. Assuming that the host species with the largest number of parasite species has the largest possible number of parasite species, only about 16% of all niches are occupied. However, the maximum may well be greater, since the possibility cannot be excluded that even on fish with a rich parasite fauna, more species could be accommodated (recent review in K. Rohde (2005) Nonequilibrium Ecology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

    Using a similar way of reasoning, Walker, T.D. und Valentine, J.W. (1984). Equilibrium models of evolutionary diversity and the number of empty niches. American Naturalist 124, 887-899. estimated that 12-54% of niches for marine invertebrates are empty.
    The ground breaking theoretical investigations of Kauffman, S.A. (1993). The origins of order. Self-organization and selection in evolution. Oxford University Press, New York Oxford and Wolfram, S. (2002). A new kind of science. Wolfram Media Inc. Champaign, Il. also suggest the existence of a vast number of vacant niches. Using different approaches, both have shown that species rarely if ever reach global adaptive optima. Rather, they get trapped in local optima from which they cannot escape, i.e., they are not perfectly adapted. As the number of potential local optima is almost infinite, the niche space is largely unsaturated and species have little opportunity for interspecific competition.

    The packing rules of Ritchie, M. und Olff, H. (1999). Spatial scaling laws yield a synthetic theory of biodiversity. Nature 400, 557-562 can be used as a measure of the filling of niche space. They apply to savanna plants and large herbivorous mammals, but not to any of the parasite species examined so far. It seems likely that they do not apply to most animal groups. In other words, most species are not densely packed: many niches remain empty (Rohde, K. (2001). Spatial scaling laws may not apply to most animal species. Oikos 93, 499-503).

    That niche space may be nonsaturated, is also shown by introduced pest species. Such species lose almost without exception all or many of their parasites (Torchin, M.E. and Kuris, A.M. (2005). Introduced parasites. In: Rohde, K. (Ed.) Marine Parasitology. CSIRO Publishing Melbourne und CABI Wallingford, Oxon., pp. 358-366). Species that could occupy the vacant niches either do not exist or, if they exist, have not had the chance to invade these niches.

    Diversity of marine benthos, interrupted by some collapses and plateaus, has increased from the Cambrian to the Recent, and there is no evidence that saturation has been reached (Jablonski, D. (1999) The future of the fossil record, Science 284, 2114-2116).

    Simulations of latitudinal gradients in species diversity using the Chowdhury ecosystem model, have shown that results are closest to reality when many niches are kept empty (Rohde, K. and Stauffer, D . 2005 Simulation of geographical trends in the Chowdhury ecosystem model. Advances in Complex Systems 8, 451-464).

    4. Consequences of the nonsaturation of niche space

    The view that niche space is largely or completely saturated with species is widespread. It is thought that new species are accommodated mainly by subdivision of niches occupied by previously existing species, although an increase in diversity by colonization of large empty living spaces (such as land in the geologic past) or by the formation of new bauplans also occurs. It is also recognized that many populations never completely reach a climax state (i.e., they may come close to an equilibrium but never quite reach it). However, altogether the view prevails that individuals and species are densely packed and that interspecific competition is of paramount significance. According to this view, nonequilibria are generally caused by environmental disturbances.

    Many recent studies (above and Rohde, K. (2005) Eine neue Ökologie. Aktuelle Probleme der evolutionären Ökologie. Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau, 58, 420-426; Rohde, K. 2005: Nonequilibrium Ecology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge support the view that niche space is largely unsaturated, i.e. that numerous vacant niches exist. As a consequence, competition between species is not as important as usually assumed. Nonequilibria are caused not only by environmental disturbances, but are widespread because of nonsaturation of niche space. Newly evolved species are absorbed into empty niche space, that is, niches occupied by existing species do not necessarily have to shrink.

    5. Relative frequency of vacant niches in various groups of animals and plants

    Available evidence suggests that vacant niches are more common in some groups than in others. Using SES values (standardized effect sizes) for various groups, which can be used as approximate predictors of the filling of niche space, Gotelli, N.J. and Rohde, K. (2002). Co-occurrence of ectoparasites of marine fishes: null-model analysis. Ecology Letters 5, 86-94 have shown that SES values are high for animal populations which occur in large population densities and/or are of large body size and are vagile, they are low for animal groups which occur in small population densities and/or are of small body size and have little vagility. In other words, more vacant niches can be expected for the latter.

    6. Criticisms of the concept

    The concept of vacant niche is not accepted by all. The reason given is that a niche is a property of a species and does therefore not exist if no species is present. In other words, the term is thought to be “illogical”. However, some authors who have contributed most to the formulation of the modern niche concept (Hutchinson, Elton) apparently saw no difficulties in using the term. If a niche is defined as the interrelationship of a species with all the biotic and abiotic factors affecting it, there is no reason not to admit the possibility of additional potential interrelationships. So, it seems logical to refer to vacant niches.

    Furthermore, it seems that authors most critical of the concept vacant niche really are critical of the view that niche space is largely empty and can easily absorb additional species. They instead adhere to the view that everything is much of the time in equilibrium (or at least close to it), resulting in a continual strong competition for resources. This view, indeed, is the basis of Darwinian natural selection. Many recent studies, some empirical , some theoretical, have provided support for the alternate view that nonequilibrium conditions are widespread (see above and the recent review in Rohde K. Rohde 2005) Nonequilibrium Ecology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

    In the German literature, an alternate term for vacant niches has found some acceptance. It is that of “freie ökologische Lizens” (free ecological license) (Sudhaus,W. und Rehfeld, K. 1992. Einführung in die Phylogenetik und Systematik. Gustav Fischer Verlag Jena. It has the disadvantage that it does not convey immediately and easily what is meant, and it indeed does not correspond exactly to the term vacant niche. The usefulness of a term should be measured on the basis of its pregnancy and easy understandability, and on how fertile it is in promoting future research. The term vacant niche appears to fulfill these requirements.

    Fuzzy chaos modelling in ecology and economics

    The aim of this post is to draw the attention of economists to some results obtained for ecological systems, because they may provide insights into how economic systems work. In a paper published a few years ago (Klaus Rohde and Peter P. Rohde 2001. Fuzzy chaos: reduced chaos in the combined dynamics of several independently chaotic populations. American Naturalist 158, 553-556) we have shown that chaos in populations is reduced in metapopulations consisting of several largely independent subpopulations with different reproductive rates. Examples are given in figures 1 and 2. Population sizes x are plotted as fractions of carrying capacities (0-1) at different reproductive rates r of the population. Figure 1 shows a bifurcation diagram for a single population; the insets show population sizes plotted against time for a few selected reproductive rates. Note that chaotic fluctuations in population size begin at r=3.57. Figure 2 shows a bifurcation diagram for a metapopulation consisting of 5000 subpopulations, illustrated only for reproductive rates of r=3.50 and larger. Note that there still are chaotic fluctuations, but the width of the fluctuations is significantly reduced.

    fig1.jpg

    Figure 1: Bifurcation diagram for a single population.
    Fig.2. Bifurcation diagram for 5000 subpopulations.

    Figure 2: Bifurcation diagram for a metapopulation consisting of 5000 subpopulations.

    This may suggest that chaotic fluctuations are much stronger in single large economies, for example due to globalisation, than in the world economy consisting of national economies that are largely separated.

    I invite comments to point out any errors in the argument.

    recent papers

    This is a test run, i.e., my first blog. I am using it to draw your attention to some recent papers on ecological/evolutionary modelling done jointly with Dietrich Stauffer of the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Universität Köln, Germany. Dietrich Stauffer is one of the leading computational physicists in the world. His “Introduction to Percolation Theory” has been cited around 4000 times. His many papers include applications of models to physics, chemistry, genetics, immunology, language evolution, geology and biology. His most recent book, published jointly with some colleagues, is on “Biology, Sociology, Geology by Computational physicists” (Elsevier 2006).

    Our papers are:

    Rohde, K. and Stauffer, D. 2005. Simulation of geographical trends in the Chowdhury ecosystem model. Advances in Complex Systems 8, 451-464. http://arxiv.org/q-bio/0505016

    Stauffer, D and. Rohde, K. 2006. Simulation of Rapoport’s rule for latitudinal species spread. Theory in Biosciences 125, 55-65. http://arxiv.org/q-bio/0507033

    Stauffer, D., Schulze C., Rohde K. submitted. Habitat width along a latitudinal gradient. View et Milieu http://arxiv.org/q-bio/0612012

    In the first of these papers, we use the Chowdhury ecosystem model to analyse latitudinal gradients in species diversity. We found that complexity of foodwebs increases with time and at a higher rate at low latitudes. Keeping many niches empty makes the results correspond more closely to natural gradients.

    In the second paper, we use the Chowdhury ecosystem model to test Rapoport’s rule, according to which latitudinal ranges of species are greater at high latitudes. We did not find support for the rule, in agreement with empirical studies.

    In the third paper, we use the Chowdhury ecosystem model to test the latitude-niche breadth hypothesis, which explains the higher species diversity in the tropics by narrower niches there. We did not find support for the hypothesis, in agreement with some empirical studies.

    I have examined the same ecological/evolutionary problems in a number of earlier papers using empirical data. References can be found at http://www-personal.une.edu.au/~krohde/