In support of clearly bad things

Michael P. Nelson and John A. Vucetich advocate political advocacy by scientists in Conservation Biology. They also take the opportunity to engage in some political advocacy themselves.

Quite apart from whether neutrality is an appropriate position, refraining from advocacy is unlikely to represent a neutral position. Rather, such a refrain is typically implicit, but powerful, support for the policy backed by those with the most political power. [...] For example, biodiversity loss, climate change, human population growth, and pollution on the whole are so favored by the dominant culture, institutions, and policies that abstaining from advocacy against such processes is a de facto support for these processes. Just as being neutral toward child abuse guarantees children will be abused, neutrality about environmental abuse guarantees environmental abuse. Arguably, many current policy issues are like this. They are clearly bad, and scientists are responsible for knowing that they are clearly bad, but they delude themselves into believing that they can remain neutral about them.

I don't advocate against human population growth because I see nothing wrong with it. I don't advocate against climate change for the same reason I don't advocate against the weather. I don't advocate against pollution or biodiversity loss (or anthropogenic climate change) for the same reason I don't advocate against work, chemotherapy or paying off your mortgage.

GM crops, African farmers and just a little tyranny

A dogmatic and unscientific stance on basic human rights — whether for or against — helps no one, least of all African slaves. We support a 'wait-and-see' stance.

I have made up this quote, but I thank Ian Scoones and Dominic Glover for inspiration:

A dogmatic and unscientific stance on GM crops — whether for or against — helps no one, least of all African farmers.

Scoones and Glover sum up their point of view with this deceptively middle-of-the-road sentence. But their point of view is no middle of the road. They argue that African farmers, unlike their more prosperous counterparts in the U.S., Brazil and Argentina, must not be allowed to choose what crops to grow because GM crops are no panacea - as if non-GM crops were the solution to all human problems from genocidal war to erectile dysfunction.

An informed 'wait-and-see' stance thus makes sense.

Predicting financial crises with agent-based models

Nature complains in an editorial that standard economic models failed to predict the recent financial crisis and endorses the idea that agent-based models, which detail the behavior of individual consumers, producers, investors and other agents, may be more useful. J. Doyne Farmer and Duncan Foley further explore the idea in the same issue (The economy needs agent-based modelling).

Such models do not rely on the assumption that the economy will move towards a predetermined equilibrium state, as other models do. Instead, at any given time, each agent acts according to its current situation, the state of the world around it and the rules governing its behaviour. An individual consumer, for example, might decide whether to save or spend based on the rate of inflation, his or her current optimism about the future, and behavioural rules deduced from psychology experiments. The computer keeps track of the many agent interactions, to see what happens over time.

I wonder how agent-based models would model the behavior of agents that use agent-based models to guide their decisions. Well, no need to wonder. Given that all agents can and do use at least as much information as models there is no way for models to outsmart the system. Financial crises are inherently unpredictable. And this is precisely what standard economic models say.

The collapse of Japan

If I was Japan’s worst enemy trying to figure out a strategy to drive it into a crisis in 10 years’ time, my strategy would be to get the Japanese to do exactly what they are doing, which is to over-harvest their main source of protein.

While lunching on salmon, orzo, avocado, grapefruit, pomegranate lychee green tea and lots of pomegranate juice in his Bel Air home, Jared Diamond reflects that the Japanese will rather starve than eat anything other than tuna.

Engineering ecosystems for services

From Nature:

[Peter] Kareiva is a great fan of the ecosystem-services argument for preserving nature. But he admits that the problem of what to do when novel ecosystems provide better services than the native ones is "a question we don't talk about that much".

And Kent H. Redford and William M. Adams write in Conservation Biology:

[E]cosystem services need not be provided by native species. Many introduced species will do the job as well, or perhaps better. Zebra mussels are highly effective in filtering particulates from water, although their impact on ecosystems is in other ways strongly negative. Ecosystems managed so as to deliver services may do their job perfectly well if existing species are replaced with exotics; they may even do it better. Environmental policy based on the optimization of ecosystem-service values will not necessarily lead to the conservation of biodiversity. [...]

A logical extension of the alteration of natural systems to increase flows of ecosystem services is to replace naturally occurring parts with novel, artificial alternatives.

Of course, this is the kind of thing humans have been doing for millennia in order to get food, clothing, refuge and entertainment.

A biologist offers investment advice

Here.

Evolution of the social discount rate

Peter D. Sozou argues in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (Individual and social discounting in a viscous population) that caring about the long-term welfare of one's local community may make evolutionary sense because it benefits one's kin. But,

What of a social discount rate for decisions that impact on the whole population, rather than a locality or specific group? This question arises, for example, in the problem of global climate change. In the absence of competition between planets, there is no basis for behaviours that benefit the planet as a whole to be directly adaptive, and therefore no evolutionary basis for directly determining a social discount rate for global welfare. This seems to lead to a puzzle: why do people care at all about the long-term welfare of humanity as a whole? People may have evolved preferences for positive valuation of long-term general social welfare in ancestral environments in which such preferences would have mainly or always influenced actions with only local effects, and that therefore would have helped kin. But in the modern, global environment, such preferences may cause people to care about global problems such as climate change.

A more plausible explanation is that, as expected by an evolutionary analysis and as shown by people's actual behaviors, people do not really care about the future of humanity but do try to appear as if they care. Appearing to care may be adaptive because it may help to attract partners and friends.