On Monday, August 12, 2019 at 2:03:05 AM UTC+1, James wrote:
On 12/8/19 3:03 am, Tom Kunich wrote:
I gave you the numbers - mutations would have to occur thousands per second. And yet since the time of Darwin not a single new species has arisen.
As we are still finding "new species" at an alarming rate, I'm not sure
anyone can proclaim what you just did.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scien...pecies-748819/
--
JS
Pft! I've seen kipunji when I walked up some bloody mountain in East Africa with the college mountain club because I wanted to get into the pants of a keen lady mountaineer. (Waste of effort. She turned out to be a closeted lesbian.) That was like 2000m from college, in relative civilisation, so if I saw them, so did plenty of other people. The local tour guides must earn a living, so good for them for telling these taxonomists or environmentalists or whatever they are about this "new" monkey. It's not the monkey that is new -- that's only the self-referential arrogance of these people; it is the formal classification that is new.
I've never believed this nonsense about a species a minute or whatever dying. It's a lie by the control freaks who want to limit your life, in favour of animals -- and of course their own aggrandisement as morally superior to everyone else. Even if it is true, it has always happened; that's the unstoppable force of evolution. There are millions of species of insects not yet classified, and nobody actually knows how many species of deep ocean fish and other bottom-feeders, or for that matter land animals. Down the road here from me is a colony of 50 or so breeding redleg finches, whereas we were told that if a golf club on their previous breeding ground went ahead, the last couple of pairs of breeding redlags would go extinct. When some of my hillwalking chums were campaigning against development of a swamp behind the police station, I cynically pointed them to "near-extinct newts and shrews who would be made homeless". The shopping centre was built (and contains some excellent chain stores) and the newts and shrews moved next door, further away from the swans and ducks on the river who were driving their numbers down, and are thriving. Among my pets I have a fox family, a hedgehog family, both supposedly extinct in these parts, and I personally brought a female heron that I caught in the estuary back up river, held her wings and head while I looked deep into her eyes (what my family calls "the Rexie stare" after a spaniel who used to dig up my lawn until I caught him and communicated with him, and his owner sued me for "reducing a prize dog's breeding potential to nil") and said, "Below these salmon stairs is a rich, rich, rich feeding ground. You'll thank me for bringing you here," the last a reference to the fact that she hadn't liked being transported in the rack bag on my bike. She has bred so much that now we have at least one heron on every little tributary of the river that I cycle past.* When recently the river was dredged and a new weir built, I fed her great-great^x-daughter (sic) daily on my living room patio. Bottom photo, taken about twenty years ago, is of the founding matriarch herself, every evening at dusk landing on a tree outside my study window on the way to her overnight nest, to thank me for bringing her:
http://www.audio-talk.co.uk/fiultra/...DVENTURES.html
Andre Jute
Countryman. Conservationist.
* One day I waited on my bike on the footbridge over the river for a photographer with his back to me to finish photographing five young herons flying loop de loop inches in front of the monstrously thick and long lens he was pointing freehand at them. I said helpfully to his back, "Sir, you need to put a tripod under that heavy lens or at such close range you'll shoot nothing but a blur." He took another sequence of shots, then turned to me. It was Richard Mills, a distinguished, multi-awarded photographer who, obviously, doesn't have shaking hands. He said, "Ah, I thought it would be you, Andre." Here's a book by a sometime editor of mine with Richard's photographs:
http://www.obrien.ie/west-cork-a-place-apart