Re: Stop It!!


Mike Vandeman wrote:
> On 14 Nov 2005 20:12:47 -0800, pbowles@xxxxxxx wrote:
>
> .
> .Mike Vandeman wrote:
> .> On 14 Nov 2005 17:22:36 -0800, pbowles@xxxxxxx wrote:
> .>
> .> .
> .> .pbowles@xxxxxxx wrote:
> .> .> Mike Vandeman wrote:
> .> .> > On 13 Nov 2005 08:35:13 -0800, "Josh Campbell" <jcampbell.joshua@xxxxxxxxx>
> .> .> > wrote:
> .> .> >
> .> .> > .I joined this group thinking it was a professional list-serve.
> .> .> >
> .> .> > Very funny. How can that be true, for a newsgroup open to the entire world? Why
> .> .> > not offer something more constructive?
> .> .>
> .> .> The problem is that "sci.bio" is something of a misnomer - another
> .> .> group I frequent in this heirarchy is a talking shop for professionals
> .> .> in the field; yes, amateurs are welcome and questions are answered (I
> .> .> myself am an amateur in that field), and based on that experience when
> .> .> I first discovered this group I expected something equivalent for
> .> .> ecologists.
> .> .
> .> .To elaborate on this, there are other groups where the discussion of
> .> .such things as your proposed no-human gazetting policy are appropriate
> .> .topics for discussion, such as the animals.nature group I last
> .> .encountered you on. Never mind that it's a policy conservationists
> .> .rejected as out of date three decades ago, it is a *policy* rather than
> .> .a scientific issue, and your case isn't based on science. Therefore it
> .> .has no place in a sci.* group.
> .>
> .> Nonsense. It is a scientific issue that has never been tested, because
> .> scientists and other humans are too selfish to exclude themselves from anywhere.
> .> ANYWHERE. ESPECIALLY biologists.
> .
> ."A scientific issue that has never been tested". So, in other words,
> .you spend all your time raving here and elsewhere simply presenting a
> .hypothesis?
>
> A hypothesis as well as supporting evidence and arguments.

Where does this evidence come from if the hypothesis hasn't been
tested?

> Yet you seem adamant in your support for it, without having
> .tested it.
>
> That's not my job. I'm not a professional biologist.

So I gather.

But I do have a lot of
> evidence for it, which I included in my paper & references. E.g. _Wildlife and
> Recreationists_ is FULL of information about various ways that humans negatively
> impact wildlife.

I'm not here to read adverts - if you have scientific references for
the particular claims you make, then by all means make them. However, I
scanned your thread and it seems to be nothing but a series of
diatribes against cyclists, comparing them with drug users, and similar
inflammatory rhetoric. I only noticed one comment of yours, in a thread
of 70+ messahes in which you were the major contributor, referring to a
scientific study - and that was one you criticised for concluding that
there was no significant difference between the effects on soil
compaction of hiking and those of mountain biking. That, and your
"paper", which consists largely of unreferenced assertions (including
such key points as "Is mountain biking harmful? Of course it is),
arguments based on flawed logic and a noticeable dearth of scientific
information. What's more, all the scientific references you do cite
conclude that there is no impact - certainly it's fair enough to raise
questions about their methods, but that is no basis for asserting that
their conclusions are wrong. The one piece you cite that does support
your case is based on anecdotes and speculation. However, your worst
failing of all in a scientific sense is that throughout the entire
piece you argue from your conclusion - you don't look at the evidence
and draw a conclusion from it, you look at what other people have found
and formulate explanations for why they are wrong to suit your
preconceptions.

It isn't hard (except for someone personally threatened by the
> idea) to conclude that they would be better off without humans around. It's not
> rocket science! Another bit of evidence is that most animals run away when we
> get too close.

Animals run away when any animal gets too close - it's a survival
mechanism. Observe animals running from the path of a pet dog, for
instance. It's ludicrous to suggest that animals have some sort of
grudge against humanity in particular; we're just large, noisy beasts
and therefore something to avoid for fear we might eat them. This is
why animals with no natural exposure to predators of their own - such
as many on the Galapagos and those on the Falklands - tend to be
incautious around humans, since they perceive no threat from large,
noisy animals.

> . Calling that science rings somewhat hollow.
>
> Not if you look at the evidence.

You claim yourself that it has never been tested, so where is your
evidence?

> What are your
> .predictions, even? That, in the absence of humans, wildlife would ...
> .sit there being wild? Anything more specific? Anything *testable*?
>
> There is plenty of evidence that humans kill wildlife, drive them out of their
> habitat, drive them away from resources that they desire, injure them, use up
> precious stores of energy, etc. I presented that evidence. You act as if you
> didn't read it.

You haven't presented it on this group - I have looked at what you've
written here. Of course there is plenty of evidence that humans harm
wildlife. That is not evidence that all human impacts necessarily harm
wildlife, or that disturbance necessarily threatens wildlife
populations or communities. So far as I've seen from anything you've
posted, you're working to a simplistic assumption that any deviation
from the natural 'norm' is bad. If you want to make a specific case you
need specific evidence to support it, not "humans have been known to
harm wildlife therefore keeping humans out must be good".

> Scientifically you would of course have to compare areas with
> .differing levels of disturbance with equivalent natural habitats to
> .confirm that, indeed, all forms of disturbance are inevitably malign.
>
> I never said ALL disturbance is harmful, and don't need to. MOST of it is
> harmful, rather than beneficial.

How can you say this without statistics to quantify that? You may well
be right, but you can't make that sort of blanket statement. In any
case it seems irrelevant to your particular crusade, which appears
mostly to be a front to get rid of mountain bikers, and for which you
would need specific evidence of the effects of mountain biking on
wildlife.

> .Have the necessary community studies in pre- and post-mountain bike
> .areas been conducted?
>
> Very few studies have been done. Mountain biking is too specialized to be of
> general interest. See the above URL. Community-level studies probably won't find
> much, because it is too hard to control for every factor. It's much easier to
> study a single factor (e.g. erosion or movement away from the recreationist).

Studying erosion won't tell you more than that there's been a change to
the environment - whether wildlife is affected by that change will
require further study. What meaningful result can be obtained by noting
movement of animals away from the cause of disturbance? If particular
species permanently move elsewhere as a consequence, certainly that's
relevant, but noting whether a deer runs out of the way of something
that might run it over reveals nothing. On the other hand many
community studies have been done on various forms of disturbance,
either by studying adjacent disturbed and undisturbed areas in the same
habitat or, more rarely, by studying impacts in one location before and
after disturbance. There seems no reason why mountain biking would be a
more complex subject for these studies than selective logging. My
feeling is that mountain-biking is probably regarded as too minor a
disturbance by potential funding bodies for anyone to pay for research
into its effects.

> .> Now, if you want to discuss Culotta's
> .> .1995 finding that amphibian species richness doubled in habitat
> .> .remnants following habitat fragmentation,
> .>
> .> Irrelevant. You can double species richness in your home by adopting a pet. That
> .> in no way benefits native wildlife.
> .
> .*sigh* I had hoped throwing something like this in might bring the
> .thread somewhere approaching the subject of the group. I suppose it was
> .a vain hope that you might counter this with the suggestion that
> .fragmentation results in species-packing, for instance, or something
> .else with a grounding in science rather than blind ideology. It's true
> .that this might not be representative or beneficial to the ecosystem in
> .question, but supporting that hypothesis requires intelligent argument.
>
> And not unscientific language like "blind ideology". Have you heard of
> "Projection"?

I have indeed. It's the process of extrapolating into the future based
on current evidence. It is not the repeated assertion of a particular
unsubstantiated claim in the absence, indeed defiance, of the available
evidence, which qualifies as blind ideology.

It sounds like you are guilty of just what you are accusing me of.
> You still haven't given a single SCIENTIFIC reason why I am wrong, or even
> quoted a statement of mine that you claim to be wrong.

I'm not here to argue your case with you; as I've said repeatedly my
interest is in keeping discussions on this group on-topic. I don't know
whether or not you're wrong and I have no reason to take sides. Besides
which, you have yet to provide any evidence for me to refute. However,
if you want me to point to statements of yours which are wrong in their
conclusions I'll present you with the following:

"Whether or not hiking (or All Terrain Vehicles or urban sprawl or
anything else)
is harmful really has no bearing on whether mountain biking is harmful:
they are
independent questions. Such a comparison would only be relevant if one
were
committed to allowing only one activity or the other, and wanted to
know which
is more harmful."

If, indeed, these were fully independent questions, this would be a
logical argument. However, bikers and hikers use the same trails - the
damage to the underbrush and the land clearance has already taken
place. If you cycle up a path that has already been cleared, you're
doing no harm to the vegetation. Certainly there is likely to be a
cumulative effect on soil erosion - the heavier the use of an path the
more it will be eroded - but you've as much as admitted yourself that
the research hasn't been done to indicate whether erosion of
hiking/biking trails is a threat to wildlife.

But this was the one that leapt out at me:

""Although overall impacts weren't significantly different, "soil
exposure [was] greater on
biking 500 pass lanes than hiking 500 pass lanes" (p.404). In other
words, after
500 passes, mountain biking began to show significantly greater
impacts. Thus
their conclusion, "the impacts of biking and hiking measured here were
not
significantly different" (p.405) is unwarranted."

Greater does not equal "significantly greater". The finding that
mountain biking led to greater soil exposure is not equivalent to
saying that the impacts of mountain biking were significantly greater
than those of hiking. While trawling the literature on the effects of
disturbance on amphibians and reptiles, for instance, I found several
studies that indicated species richness increased following
disturbance, but in none of these cases was the difference
statistically significant. Either you're unaware of the nature of
significance in a scientific context, or this statement is deliberately
disingenuous.

> So surely what you need to ask is not whether
> .disturbance benefits wildlife, but whether it necessarily harms it,
> .which is a very different question.
>
> That's what I did.

No, you claimed it harms wildlife and then looked for arguments to
support this, seemingly in defiance of the majority of evidence. You
may well be right about many of the flaws in those arguments, but
proving someone else wrong is not the same as supporting your own case.

> Is possible species-packing
> .detrimental to amphibians in these Brazilian fragments? Possibly,
> .though the ten-year study failed to find any evidence that that was the
> .case.
>
> It is very hard to tease apart a single effect of a community-wide impact like
> that, as you should know. Living things are too complex (and communities are
> even MORE complex) to yield very many clear conclusions. You should know that by
> now. A failure to find an effect doesn't say much.

If this is the level of your scientific argumentation it's no wonder
your paper has failed to convince - "this result doesn't count because
it's too difficult to study". You concede that you aren't a biologist,
and so are presumably not familiar with the forms of investigation used
in community studies. It's true that communities are difficult to study
in detail, but surrogates such as species richness are simple measures
that are susceptible to investigation. Such studies focus on the
effects of a single variable on species richness, and conducting the
study over a long period minimises the effects of short-term climatic
variability. The fact that numerous habitat fragments of numerous sizes
were investigated and this trend was found in every one, not simply as
an aggregate, indicates that the effect here is real, and not an
artefact of undersampling in one or two sites during the early phases.

> .> or argue that Gillespie et
> .> .al. were wrong to conclude that moderate disturbance has no effect on
> .> .amphibian and reptile community structure in Sulawesi, that would be an
> .> .appropriate angle to take in an ecology group.
> .> .
> .> .I have to confess to having been disillusioned that this group more
> .> .often appears to be "alt.politics.environment" than "sci.bio.ecology" -
> .> .please move the politics elsewhere,
> .>
> .> Very funny. Science is FULL of politics. That's one of the main reasons that new
> .> ideas get rejected, such as by someone saying "it's not science".
> .
> .Your idea for one isn't new - quite the reverse, it's regarded as an
> .outdated irrelevance in modern conservation planning.
>
> How could that be, if it has never been tested?! That isn't science, that's
> politics. One minute you are telling me it has to be tested, the next minute you
> are dismissing it without being tested. Get your story straight....

I never claimed it wasn't political, simply that it wasn't a new idea -
indeed I said right at the start that it was a policy issue that has no
place here.

> .> and maybe practising scientists
> .> .would be encouraged to develop this group into an ecology discussion
> .> .forum.
> .>
> .> (Some) scientists' unwillingness to relate to real people is part of their
> .> problem. How to "get the word out" is a common topic at their conferences,
> .> especially conservation biologists.
> .
> .Here's an idea for getting the word out: follow the lead of the other
> .sci.bio groups, such as sci.bio.paleontology - turn this group into an
> .open discussion forum among ecologists that interested laypeople can
> .visit and observe, where they can ask questions of these professionals
> .and contribute themselves. As I mentioned in my other post, Usenet is
> .already chock-full of groups dedicated to natural history lovers and
> .amateur political agitators; having this group clone these adds nothing
> .and benefits no one.
>
> I have no control over anyone but myself. I can't make people like you give real
> information, and I can't keep out the ignorant loudmouths. I put my papers here
> expecting to get some real information, but I haven't gotten much yet.

Checking your thread, it appears to have come here halfway through as a
flamewar-in-progress from another group, presumably a mountain biking
group, and it's clear from your paper that your approach is not
scientific - your attitudes are too firmly set to be conducive to
scientific debate. So what would anyone have to gain by commenting on
it?

I think
> of it as mostly a one-way medium. Why don't you post some of your more readable
> work here????

I've yet to have anything published, and I wouldn't regard it as
scientifically responsible to put out pieces that haven't been
peer-reviewed, especially in a forum where laypeople might be exposed
to them. Nor am I presently engaged in research, so I have nothing to
put forward in that context either. When I have published results from
research projects to inform people about, I will probably make a note
of it here.

Philip Bowles

.

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