From this article about an endangered mouse, it would appear that it wasn’t endangered after all, because it wasn’t a unique species, it was another type of much more plentiful mouse. :smack:
Quality scientific research = good.
I’ll take a non-existent mouse over several years of strip malls and subdivisions seven days a week and twice on Sundays.
You’ll take it? Delightful. Will that be cash or card?
I wonder if this mouse is related to the one in my bathroom?
Robin
So what you’re telling us is that you wouldn’t mind purchasing a parcel of land, paying taxes on it, and being told you could not effect improvements for your own use, or developing it for a profit, because of something which did not exist.
If so, don’t be surprised if realtors start popping out of your laundry basket and breadbox with offers for sale.
Personally, I feel the frustration of the property owners-I’m also pissed that my tax dollars were wasted on junk science.
No, what I’m saying is that there are already enough ugly strip malls and pre-fab housing subdivisions in Colorado and if this phantom mouse kept the landscape from being blighted with them for several years then good on the phantom mouse. If you want to debate the Endangered Species Act I’ll be happy to ignore a GD thread…
Be careful with your scorn here. It’s most likely that the “misdiagnosis” of the mouse’s species was not a product of bad science. Rather, it’s merely a symptom of the science of taxonomy undergoing a massive change. Historically, taxonomy has been based on phenotypic elements…that is, characteristics of physical appearance.
All things considered, the taxonomists have done a pretty good job.
Fortunately, they have a new, definitive tool at their disposal. Genetic analysis. Every year, new genera are added, modified, and eliminated as the genetic codes of species are compared and contrasted. Sometimes, as in the grass genus Panicum, species that have always been associated with that genus have to be split into their own genus (*Panicum, which used to be a pretty large genus, now has something like two species left. The rest, because their genetic structure was significantly different, were moved into Dicanthelium.)
In other cases, oops, it turns out populations which were previously thought to be different species, well, ain’t. That’s what I’m guessing happened here.
That’s just the way it goes. So sorry about the land developers, but science isn’t all-knowing. It’s self-correcting. The policy was made based on the best information available at the time. It just turned out that everybody thought it was definitive.
It wasn’t. Them’s the breaks sometimes.
Actually, reading the article, I find it offensive the way they present Krutzsche’s work. They label it “inaccurate” and “inadequate.” They all but accuse him of doing shoddy work. I’d guess that almost any biologist, working with 1954 methods, would come to the same conclusion Krutzsche did.
People, technology changes. It gets better and has finer resolution. That doesn’t mean that the work that was done in the past was worthless. What a pile of shit.
The problem is that phenotype is not always definitive. Most of the time, it is, but keep in mind that Krutzsche’s analysis was done only one year after Watson and Crick even described the structure of DNA. A definitive, genotypic analysis was decades in the future.
Forgive me for harping, but I was thinking about this article this morning and it occurred to me that if I were teaching a class on critical thinking, I’d save this article as a perfect example of why critical thinking is necessary. I mean, they include all the relevant information. There are no bald-faced lies there. They mentioned that the new analysis was done with genetics. They mentioned that the old analysis was done phenotypically (skull measurements.)
But they spun it so it seemed like the science done previous to the newest study was bad. They made it sound, without ever really saying so, as if Dr. Krutzsche is incompetent. They drummed up an emotional reaction…sympathy for the land developers…based on clever use of language and “hints, allegations, and things left unsaid.”
What they didn’t tell you is that this phenomenon is utterly, completely, unavoidably, par for the course. As new technology emerges, old methods are left by the wayside.
There is no blame to be placed.