Environment

In 2006, then-British environment minister Ben Bradshaw told Britons that they might someday have to pay for the amount of waste they produce -- arguing that the practice would push people to waste less, promote recycling and reduce pressure on landfills. His successor David Miliband moved to lift a ban which prevented local officials for offering financial incentives for recycling -- further clearing the way for the use of garbage-monitoring microchips.

The nature of the chips and their exact purpose vary across the country: Some of the chips are intended to sense the weight of the garbage piled into a bin. Others are meant to track the whereabouts of the bin itself, or check whether it has been emptied.

None of the chips are used to charge residents in so-called "pay-as-you-throw" plans -- at least so far.

Even though the practice exists elsewhere in Europe, proposals to charge householders for their trash have almost invariably aroused howls of outrage from Britain's tabloid press.

Britons are already subjects to one of the most intrusive speed and security camera regimes in the Western world, and security officials have lobbied for the power to monitor every e-mail, text, and phone call made in the U.K. Many are loath to let the state intrude on yet another aspect of their day-to-day life.

But Big Brother Watch said the growth in the number of chips meant that local officials "are quietly installing the infrastructure with which to monitor our waste habits, ready to go further when they judge the political and public climate ... to be more amenable."

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On the Net:

Big Brother Watch report: http://bit.ly/aNIv2d

The officer, Luke Pearce, told The Associated Press he had been walking along a stream trying to catch a southern pygmy perch when he spotted the frog next to the water.

Pearce returned in the same season in 2009 with experts who confirmed it was a colony of around 100 yellow-spotted bell frogs.

Dave Hunter, threatened species officer with the Department of Climate Change and Water, said the find is very important.

"To have found this species that hasn't been seen for 30 years and that professional researchers thought was extinct is great," he said. "It gives us a lot of hope that a lot of other species that we thought were extinct aren't actually extinct -- we just haven't found them."

The find wasn't made public until now to allow enough time to establish conservation measures to protect the frogs from many dangers, including poaching, Hunter said.

The discovery is "as significant in the amphibian world as it would be to discover the Tasmanian tiger, said Sartor, the environment minister.

The last known tiger -- a cousin of the Tasmanian devil -- died in a zoo in 1933, although unconfirmed sightings have been reported since then.

Seven of 216 known Australian frog species have disappeared in the last 30 years.

Mike Tyler, a frog expert at the University of Adelaide, said around a dozen species of Australian frogs are regarded as critically endangered.

"Most of them are on the east coast, mainly in Queensland and New South Wales," he said, but added there are probably other species that never have been identified.

Tyler said the cataloguing of fauna in Australia is still far from complete.

"In the last decade, three new species of frog have been discovered in the Kimberley," he said, referring to a northern region of Western Australia state. "I know of two more in the Northern Territory which haven't even yet been described ... one of the specimens is sitting here on my desk looking at me."

Milk bags are far more unremarkable than most Americans think. They're common in India and many European countries, and constitute a frequent choice for 60 percent of Canadian, Polish, South African and Chinese milk buyers. Yesterday, the enormous British Sainsbury's grocery chain announced that it too was converting from milk bottles to milk bags. As the Telegraph reported, the chain had been testing the bags for the last two years, and are now convinced that "the bags are very robust" and that "no customers have complained about the bags splitting." The chain claimed that 3 percent of its 24 million weekly customers have already made the transition (approximately 720,000 shoppers).

Why bags? They use 75 percent less packaging than bottles, which saves the chain valuable manufacturing costs (the company claims it will save 1,400 tons in packaging per year). They're also recyclable, and cheaper for consumers. On the (very slight) downside, they require customers to purchase reusable plastic jug in which to store their bags -- the chain will be giving away 500,000 of them -- that can be slightly more cumbersome for fridge storage.

Where did the milk bag come from? As the Toronto Star explained, Canadians began using milk bags in the late '60s, when Canadian milk workers became annoyed with the breakage of glass bottles. The practice didn't catch on in a big way until the country transitioned from the imperial system to metric measurements in the 1970s. It was easier to convert milk bag packaging machines from gallons into liters than machines that worked with jugs -- and as milk bags become more common, alternatives became more expensive, fueling the change.

These days, however, milk bags' popularity in most countries can be tied to environmental concerns, the economic advantages of limited packaging, and strong top-down regulation (in China, even beer is sold in bags). Milk bags have made sporadic local appearances across the country, but America is still a country of cartons and plastic bottles. Why? Clearly we're behind most European countries as far as eco-awareness and packaging regulation go, the U.S. hasn't had to transition from imperial to metric like Canada, and if YouTube comments are any indication, Americans are also far more prone to having their minds blown by the concept of storing liquids in bags.

But as Sainbury's move demonstrates this week, it's a concept that isn't going away any time soon, and as Americans continue to become more  conscious of their environmental impact, people better start getting used to it; it's likely only a matter of time before milk bags are jiggling at a grocery store near you.

But unlike most of these attacks, "What Darwin Got Wrong," a new book by Jerry Fodor, a professor of philosophy and cognitive sciences at Rutgers University, and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a professor of cognitive science at the University of Arizona, comes not from the religious right, but from two atheist academics with -- surprise -- a nuanced argument about the shortcomings of Darwin’s theories. Their book details (in very technical language) how recent discoveries in genetics have thrown into question many of our perceived truths about natural selection, and why these have the potential to undermine much of what we know about evolution and biology.

Salon spoke to Fodor over the phone from his home, about the problems with Darwin’s ideas, bloggers’ "obscene" comments on his work, and why Darwinism might be as unreliable as creationism.

In 2007, you wrote an article attacking Darwinism in the London Review of Books, and experienced a lot of backlash from both inside and outside of the scientific community. Why do you think people get so worked up about Darwinism?

It’s a theory that’s played all sort of roles in the foundations of biology. There’s a lot of people who think wrongly that if you didn’t have Darwinism the whole foundations of modern biology would collapse. I doubt that’s true. I’m sure it’s not. But if you tell people, "There’s this fundamental theoretical commitment you’ve made and there’s holes in it," they’ll want very much to defend that theory.

Most of the backlash to the book so far has been on blogs, which have been pretty obscene and debased. What’s upsetting is that they tell you that they think you’re an idiot, but they don’t tell you why -- people who aren’t part of the field or who may not, in many cases, know much about Darwin. I’m not sure that all people who have been blogging about it are very sophisticated. It’s frustrating because you don’t know who you’re talking to.

At some point you just have to stop worrying about the reaction and worry if the argument is any good. I don’t take the arguments that say, "This that can’t be true because of what I learned in Biology 101" very seriously.

 What is your beef with natural selection?

The main thing Darwin had in mind with natural selection was to come up with a theory that answers the question, "Why are certain traits there?" Why do people have hair on their heads? Why do both eyes have the same color? Why does dark hair go with dark eyes? You can make up a story that explains why it was good to have those properties in the original environment of selection. Do we have any reason to think that story is true? No.

According to Darwin, traits of creatures are selected for their contribution to fitness [likelihood to survive]. But how do you distinguish a trait that is selected for from one that comes along with it? There are a lot of interesting structures in creatures that have nothing to do with fitness.

Some variants in selection are clearly environmental. If you can’t store water you’ll do worse in a dry environment than if you can. But suppose that having a high ability to carry a lot of water is correlated for genetic reasons with skin color. How do you decide which trait is selected for by environmental factors and which one is just attached to it? There isn’t anything in the Darwinist picture that allows you to answer that question.

So we have no way of knowing whether a trait serves an evolutionary purpose?

Some traits are presumably selected for by the environment, and some of them are not. If somebody says Trait A affects fitness and Trait B does not, but Trait B comes with Trait A so you’ve got both traits in the organism, it’s very natural for somebody in the Darwinian tradition to think that Trait B has been selected for by the environment. But the answer is, it’s not there for anything.

Look, everybody has toenails, so you might ask yourself, why is it such a good thing we have toenails? It may be a case that in the environment there was some factor that favored toenails but there also may not.

As you explain in the book, it turns out many genes are far more tied together -- and gene expression is much more complicated -- than many people originally thought.

What the genetics has come to show is that traits are not independent, but complexly interconnected, and a lot of the effect that the environment has on an organism’s evolution depends on what organism it is.

There’s a famous fox-into-dog experiment, in which many generations of foxes were selected for being domestically trainable. As you would expect, when you select for domesticability, you get animals that behave less and less like their feral counterparts -- but you also get curly ears and kinked tails and changes in their reproductive system. Nobody had that in mind, but the structure of the organism groups all of these traits together. Why do these animals have kinky tails? They just happen to be structural correlates. Now the question is, how much of the evolutionary variance is determined by factors of the environment and how much is controlled by the organization of the organism, and the answer is nobody knows.

Most children learn about natural selection by learning the example of the giraffe’s long neck, which supposedly evolved because it allowed animals to graze higher branches. Does this mean that we’re giving schoolchildren the wrong information?

The inference runs that there’s this creature that has a long neck, so this creature was selected for having a long neck. That inference is clearly invalid. A creature that has a long neck may have that neck because a different trait was selected, and the long neck came along with it.

And in a sense, there are no such things as traits. The environment selects creatures. Animals can have long necks and toenails, but if you try to break such creatures apart into traits and you say, OK, "What selected this trait?" and, "What selected that trait?" you've made a mistake right from the beginning. The disintegration of the organism into traits is itself a spurious undertaking. Biologists have said for a long time that organisms aren’t like Swiss apples, you can’t tap them on a table and have them fall apart into distinct wedges. Selection is operating on whole organisms.

There's been increasing evidence in recent years that homosexuality has a genetic cause, which doesn’t exactly mesh with natural selection, given that gay people aren’t likely to have lots of children. Does your theory help explain the gay gene?

It’s not obvious what, when the environment was selecting for fecundity, would have selected for people who are gay. You could have gotten them innately as a result of something that has nothing to do with sexual performance.

Do you think people are defending Darwinism because they think any attack on Darwinism gives power to creationists, and they don't want creationists to get the upper hand?

I think there’s the sense that if you think that there’s something wrong with the theory you’re giving aid and comfort to intelligent design people. And people do feel very strongly about whether you want to do that.

When you do science, you try to find the truth. The problem with creationism, even if you’re not a hardcore atheist, as I am, is that anything is compatible with creationism. If God created the world, he could have created it any way he liked. So creationists, when faced with evidence of evolution, are happy to say that that’s the way God created the world. If it turns out that there is no process of evolution, they’d say OK, that’s fine too. Whatever turns out to be the case it’s compatible with God having created the world, so you can’t argue with their position or you throw your shoulders out.

As you explain in the book, one of the problems with Darwinism is that Darwin is inventing explanations for something that happened long ago, over a long period of time. Isn’t that similar to creationism?

Creationism isn't the only doctrine that’s heavily into post-hoc explanation. Darwinism is too. If a creature develops the capacity to spin a web, you could tell a story of why spinning a web was good in the context of evolution. That is why you should be as suspicious of Darwinism as of creationism. They have spurious consequence in common. And that should be enough to make you worry about either account.

If you're right, what do you think your argument means for the study of evolution?

If this is true, then we need to rethink the implications of Darwinism. Maybe the right question to ask is not what environmental variables are doing selection, but what kinds of complexes are they selecting on. One sees, even without God, how this Darwinian story could turn out to be radically wrong. You could see a massive failure of the evolutionary project, because wrong assumptions were made. 

Colin Miner reports:

The company that protects the copyrights on the works of Theodor Geisel, better known as the children's book author Dr. Seuss, has sent a cease-and-desist letter to a Massachusetts company looking to get into the coal business under the name Lorax -- the title character of a story published in 1971.

"There's no reason for them to use the term," said Karl ZoBell, the longtime lawyer for Dr. Seuss Enterprises, "except to purloin the good will attached to the book and use it for a company that appears to be the opposite of everything the book is about."

Miner does a good job of summarizing the story, but leaves out one key point. The first publication to report on LoraxAg's existence was Massachusetts High Tech, back last November. But according to Wonk Room's Brad Johnson, who who posted about the sacrilege last week, Dr. Seuss Enterprises did not have any idea LoraxAg even existed until Johnson called them up. Thus the cease-and-desist letter.

Give a hard-working blogger some credit, Mr. Paper-Of-Record!

(Thanks to reader Katherine Harrison for bringing the Green Inc. item to my attention.)

Salon spoke to the energetic Parola over the phone about America’s conservative eating habits, his name-change marketing campaign, and why it’s so hard to get people to eat a giant rat.

How did you get involved in this effort to turn Asian carp into a menu item?

I was riding on my boat, going fishing, when these two fish literally jumped into my boat and landed on my feet. I’m a chef and I love exploring new avenues for new food, so when I saw them I decided to bleed them, bring them to my restaurant and fillet them. I found it was a delicious white meat. Then I called the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and let them know that this fish needs to have a marketing campaign.

Why haven’t people been eating this fish the whole time?

It was classified as a trash fish -- destroying nets, killing people [by knocking them out of boats], wiping out the native fish species by eating their food source. But there were two reasons we weren’t eating them: If you don’t bleed the fish, the meat is grayish-looking without much flavor, and there’s a lot of bones in this fish. Those were two things that nobody could overcome. I overcame them by bleeding the fish and steaming the meat so I could remove the bone.

Why are you so passionate about getting people to eat Asian carp?

I believe that if you kill, you eat it. The No. 1 goal is to resolve this ecological problem. The second goal is to create jobs. The third thing is for consumers, who have the most to gain. This fish is extremely healthy. It’s rich in omega 3 and there is no mercury because the silverfin is a filter feeder.

The silverfin? Is this your new name for the Asian carp?

Some clown from the USDA classified it as a carp. Carps are a bottom feeders and this is a filter feeder. The shape of the fish, the way it grows, the color: Literally there is no similarity to the carp. There’s no other species named the silverfin, so what’s the problem?

Well, off the top of my head, shouldn’t it be up to scientists to name the fish?

But what I’m saying to you -- very loudly -- is that this fish doesn’t have any similarity with the carp. I want somebody out there to redo that research and help us out.

You were part of an initiative to get people to start eating nutria, which is a rodent commonly found in Louisiana. It didn’t get a lot of national traction. What happened?

It was successful until the government went in and stopped it. The FDA wouldn’t allow us to use the FDA stamp because the nutria needed to be killed in a slaughterhouse. The idea was to hunt them in the wild, but nobody would buy something without the FDA approval. I’m very proud I was involved with that. To quote one of our presidents, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

To be fair, it was also pretty hard to imagine people eating an animal that looks like a giant rat.

Yes. That was the biggest difficulty to overcome. I did a promotion with alligator meat, and that went fine, but with nutria, the fact that it’s classified as a rodent, and that cops were shooting nutria in the gutters kind of killed it. At least this fish doesn’t have a rat tail.

Why do you think Americans are so reluctant to eat unconventional animals?

America has been spoiled in many ways. People can get boneless fillet of fish, and consumers got used to that. Any other country in the world you will eat a fish with a head and bone and tail on -- which tastes better.

Are there any other maligned animals that you’re going to try to turn into food?

You can tell people that if they send one to me, I guarantee that I’ll find a way to sell it. If it flies, crawls or swims we can eat it. I recently got a call from Australia about a carp there that nobody’s eating. I said, hey, send it to me. I’ll give it a try.

The key is to be smart about it. When I was doing nutria promotion, there was guy on a radio station who asked me, Why should I eat nutria when I can have chicken every day? I wanted to tell him, listen dumbass, this animal is invading your city, that’s why you want to eat it.