EVIDENCE ON THE EVOLUTION OF SNAKES

     Snakes belong to the suborder Serpentes in the order Squamata (the scaled reptiles). There has been a considerable controversy over their evolutionary origin. The two basic theories are 1)they evolved from terrestrial burrowing reptiles and 2)that they evolved from aquatic reptiles and are closely related to the extinct mosasaurs. In both cases the loss of the legs would aid rather than inhibit mobility. The paleontological evidence is equivocal. In 1997 Michael Caldwell of the University of Edmonton reported a 100-million-year-old fossil of an aquatic snake that retained its hind legs. In contrast others reported a 90-million-year-old fossil of a terrestrial snake that also retained vestigial legs. Molecular studies find little similarity between snakes and living mosasaur relatives such as the Komodo Dragon.

     In a recent brief report in Science Magazine (Science 8 November 2013: Vol. 242 no 6159 p683a- available behind a paywall at Science ) a novel way to approach the question was described. At the 73rd annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology researcher Hong-yu Yi told of how she looked at previously ignored evidence - the anatomy of the inner ear. She CT-scanned the area in question in 10 modern snakes, both aquatic and terrestrial. She also look at 9 modern lizards for comparison.

     In aquatic species the semicircular canal of the ear protruded relatively far from another local structure, the vestibule. The canal protruded far less in land dwelling snakes and lizards. The difference is because of the relative freedom of head movement of the aquatic species.

     She then scanned the preserved skull of a 85-million-year-old fossil snake called Dinilsia. It fell within the terrestrial range. While the evidence isn't definite (criticisms were voiced at the meeting) it adds weight to the hypothesis that the ancestors of snakes were land-dwellers.

OTHERNESS: WHEN KILLING IS EASY:
The above is the title of a recent review in Science magazine (Science 315, pp601-602, February 2, 2007) by reviewer Caroline Ash. This a review of two books. One of them 'The Altruism Equation:Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness', was the subject of the review that Molly discussed back on Feb. 11th under the heading 'A Review of a Review'. The other is the book 'Conflict', edited by Martin Jones and A.C. Fabien. Both of these books are collections of previous writings, but the approach couldn't be any more different. The first book features writers puzzling over the evolution of altruism while the second discusses the equally strong biological tendencies that lead to intraspecific conflict. The two together make an interesting study in contrast.





Caroline Ash is much more enthusiastic about 'The Altruism Equation' than the reviewer for Nature was. She finds it "exhilarating", and her "irritation" is reserved for the author Dugatkin's "unfairly bemoaning the lack of insight into economic modelling by all of Hamilton's predecessors, including Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley and Walter Clyde Allee."





The lack of mathematical base or simple mistakes are also bemoaned in the likes of Ronald Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane and Sewell Wright. The reviewer could easily have included Kropotkin amongst this number as he is discussed extensively in 'The Altruism Equation'. Kropotkin was no mathematical illiterate; he trained in the artillery after all, and his criticisms of Marx's theories of value show that he understood at least a complex situation to be so...quite unlike Marx did. I will, however, defer to the reviewer's irritation here. I've read about where Haldane expressed the "bare bones" of the theory of kin selection, but I am not well read enough to tell anybody where he went wrong. From a simple historical perspective, however, the theories of altruism could simply not be expressed at the time of Kropotkin, Huxley and the others because the mathematical tools of game theory were as yet unknown.





Molly has yet to acquire a copy of 'The Altruism Equation', but this review definitely whets my appetite more. Ash brings up the question of George Price, one of the most fascinating characters in the development of evolutionary psychology. Price turned Hamilton's theories of the evolution of kin selection on their head and laid out a theoretical explanation for "the evolution of spite" whereby a spiteful act could still be selected for if the cost to the actor was less than the damage done to a rival.





Price is one of the more interesting characters I have ever heard of. Born in 1922, he was originally a physical chemist, later a science journalist and a computer consultant. He came to population genetics and evolutionary biology late in life when he devised the Price Equation after having read Hamilton's 1964 paper on kin selection. This is a covariance equation (1)that explained the frequency of allele variation in a population where the frequency of one allele depends on the frequency of another. This had previously been derived by C.C. Li, but price's formulation allowed it to be applied to all levels of selection, including inclusive fitness and group selection.





On June 6th, 1970 Price underwent a "conversion experience" and turned from atheism to a devote Christianity. He devoted the rest of his life to helping the homeless, taking to sleeping in his office at the Galton Laboratory so that homeless people could sleep in his rented house. This house was eventually demolished as part of a construction project. Having given away all his possessions Price went on to live at various squats in north London until he eventually committed suicide at Christmas, 1974 with a pair of "nail scissors".





This character definitely deserves a further look, and Molly will do same in the future.





Caroline Ash uses Price's work on the evolution of "spite" to lead into the second part of her review on the book 'Conflict'. This is part of the Darwin College lectures, Cambridge, a series held each year. This is apparently from the 1995 series on conflict that covers a wide spectrum of topics, from Labour and Conflict, to sex differences in intergroup conflict, to the Middle East and the evolution of state sponsored war...along with much more. The reviewer obviously can't do justice to such a wide range of topics in a few paragraphs and so she concentrates on two essays in the volume, one on parallels between aggression in humans, the regular chimpanzee (Pan trogodytes), and the bonobos (Pan paniscus), and the possible ecological pressures that led to different rates of inter-group aggression in these different species, the second on sex differences in intergroup aggression in humans. This hardly does justice to the volume on the lectures, but little more can be expected from a two page review devoted to two books.





Molly is not surprised at how two different reviewers can have such different views of a book like 'The Altruism Equation'. Each focuses on things that the other ignores because each brings their previous tastes to the reading. This doesn't mean, ala a pseudo intellectual post modernist "explanation", that they "create the meaning by manipulating the text". It merely means that they notice and emphasize different things that actually exist in the books reviewed.
Molly

THE PUZZLE OF HUMAN SOCIALITY:
The December 8th edition of Science Magazine (Vol. 314, Issue 5805), the journal of the AAAS, has three very interesting articles on the evolution of cooperation. Two are specifically related to human sociability and one is a general theoretical piece on the evolution of cooperation. This blog explores the first article of the eponymous title in the 'Perspectives' section of the magazine (pp1555-1556). Further entries will explore the other articles.
Robert Boyd has written an overview of an article by S. Bowles in this issue of Science. The subject is the "evolutionary puzzle" of the wide range of human cooperation as compared to other animal species. As the author says,
"Division of labour, trade and large-scale conflict are common. The sick, hungry and disabled are cared for, and social life is regulated by commonly held moral systems that are enforced, albeit imperfectly, by third party sanctions. In contrast, in other primate species, cooperation is limited to relatives and small groups of reciprocaters. There is little division of labour or trade, and no large scale conflict. No one cares for the sick or feeds the hungry or disabled. The strong take from the weak without fear of sanctions by third parties".
(Molly note: This introduction overstates the case greatly !!!. Of all the presumably human-only attributes cited above only "trade" is absent in other social species. This is not just confined to the primates. Other social species exhibit ALL the behaviors cited, though with specific items in each species. Third party sanctions, as the author calls them, are actually a fertile field of research in primatology and other fields. There they are called "altruistic punishment" , and anyone familiar with the behavior of domestic animals sees these agonistic actions on a routine basis. Ah, well it's a review, and the author is allowed to overstate his case.)
The author goes on to explain the disproportionate levels of cooperation between humans and other primates by proposing that the small size of primate societies means that kin selection provides a reasonable explanation of the behavior. The reviewer then goes on to point out that Bowles proposes that competition between genetically differentiated groups of proto-humans led to evolutionary selective pressure that favoured prosociality genes. He says,
"Limited migration between groups can lead to the buildup of genetic relatedness...among group members. This means that group membership can also be a clue that allows assortative interaction-genes that cause you to help members of your group can be favoured because other group members are disproportionately likely to carry the same genes, even though you do not share a recent common ancestor."
The author does point out that this idea, originally found in Darwin's 'The Descent of Man' has never been very popular. It's called "group selection". It was a theory held by Kropotkin amongst others (and Kropotkin took it to the extreme of species level selection). The reviewer points out that Bowles meets the standard objections to group selection with both data and theoretical considerations. First of all, data are presented about the level of genetic differentiation between hunter gatherer groups that present a different picture from the standard view. Hunter gatherer groups are much more different genetically than has usually been assumed and, therefore, intragroup cooperation has a basis of genetic similarity greater than what is usually assumed.
(Molly Note: watch out, there's a "weasel word" contained in Boyd's summary. He states that the level of differentiation between groups is the same as "the level of relatedness within such groups". That is not necessarily true. The two are NOT synonyms. It is easily conceivable that another human group can be widely different in a genetic sense while a competitive group can have all sorts of different levels of similarity)
The level of costs and benefits according to these articles is that cooperation will be favoured if the benefits are about 10 times the cost. The ability of cooperative groups to colonize the territories of competitors means that competition amongst relatives does not attenuate the benefit of cooperation. It is finally pointed out that intergroup competition is common in hunter gatherer societies (Molly Note: unlike the fantasies entertained by primitivists) so that benefits from cooperation are substantial.
Finally and perhaps most importantly, according to Boyd, Bowles notes that foraging groups have culturally transmitted norms such as food sharing and imposed monogamy that "reduce fitness differences within groups. he makes the original and interesting argument that such 'levelling mechanisms' act like redistributive taxes to reduce the disadvantage of engaging in costly prosocial behavior".
(Molly Note: These behaviors are themselves genetically influenced in humans and are not pure examples of cultural transmission. They also vary between groups, but, in general, they hover about a norm that is a clue to our evolutionary sociobiology)
The reviewer goes on to argue that the article by Bowles is not a group selection hypothesis because it merely presents an alternative mathematical framework that works out to the same sums as viewing the matter within kin selection lenses. This may or may not be true. Boyd then poses the questions of whether the levels of genetic variability observed in today's foragers are the same as those in Pleistocene hominids, whether the benefits were the same then as now (Molly Note: a questionable assumption given a much ! lower population density) and whether the "leveling mechanisms" were the same in ancestral populations.
The reviewer opines that "there is little dominance among human foragers" in contrast to other social species, an opinion that is not a settled matter. He goes on to suggest that, "It is certainly fair to invoke reproductive levelling to explain the stability of extended altruism among humans, but whether it is sufficient to explain its origin is not yet clear."(Molly Note: I am of the opinion that they are NOT for many reasons, not the least because research on altruistic punishment suggests that this mechanism which appears in other social species has a broader effect than 'reproductive levelling'. This is the old "proximate cause" and "ultimate cause" argument. Altruistic punishment can evolve via mechanisms in a social species that are very much removed from "reproductive levelling" and still be perpetuated in the species because they happen to serve the "ultimate cause" of reproductive levelling. Concentrating on one cause may lead to an ignoring of more fruitful areas of research.)
The author concludes with speculations on what he sees as the "competing explanations" for human sociality ie "the theory of mind, spoken language and other cognitive mechanisms" As he notes all these explanations are not mutually exclusive. Molly feels that the explanation of human cooperation will be a multi-faceted "complex" one rather than a "chaotic" one of one evolutionary pressure reaching some sort of "tipping point". Genes will interact with each other in a full "genetic environment" that is, in turn, influenced by the "memetic environment"-itself complex- of a learning animal. At its best this is what anarchism posits as an explanation for social evolution in contrast to the unidimensional theories of traditional Marxism and present day primitivism.
The other two articles in this issue of Science will be reviewed later.
Til then,
Molly

Stop Building Igloos in France.
The latest edition of Science, the journal of the AAAS (Nov 17th, 2006) to arrive at my door has an interesting news-bite on the matter of one possible consequence of global warming. It's entitled 'False-Alarm:Atlantic Conveyor Belt Hasn't Slowed Down After All'. The basic point of the news-bite on page 1064 is that more thorough research has shown that previously alarmist reports of the "demise of the Gulf Stream" are "greatly exaggerated" because natural variation from year to year is far greater than the decades long "snapshot" that an original article in Science (Dec. 2nd, 2005, p 1403) suggested. So take heart. You won't be skating on the Thames in September, and you won't have to import Musk-Ox from Canada for livestock in Provence.
This doesn't mean that climate change won't have serious consequences, merely that one doomsday scenario has been proven wrong. Alberta will still likely go to complete desert conditions, as will the Western USA, hurricanes will still likely increase in ferocity in the Atlantic, etc.etc.,etc.. Just that one item is in serious doubt.
Molly

Two Interesting Reviews:
A recent edition of Science Magazine (Nov. 10th, 2006), the journal of the AAAS, contains a couple of book reviews that I find interesting.


One review by Joseph T. Devlin is of 'Toward and Evolutionary Biology of Language' by Philip Lieberman. The review points out that the three critical differences between human language and other communication systems in other animals are, "...a large vocabulary, a rapid (and robust) transmission system and the ability to combine a finite set of words into a potentially infinite set of sentences." It also points out that, "...each of these is based on existing on linguistic abilities present in other species."


The reviewer goes on to present evidence given in the book that none of these abilities are unique to humans and all have their "prototypes" in other species. He goes on to discuss the vocabulary of vervet monkeys and, of course, the famous chimpanzee experiments in terms of "vocabulary". He states that the most successful chimps have learned about 150 to 200 words which they can combine in novel ways as a sort of "proto-grammar".
Molly aside: A little veterinary note here. Many people have made equal or even greater claims for the vocabulary of dogs. Little of this has been scientifically tested, though on an anecdotal basis I have met dogs who understood at least 6 verbs and up to 15 nouns (excluding "proper nouns" which might take the number much higher). What I have failed to see evidence for is that dogs have any concept of grammar. The whole idea of "a ball" versus "the ball" is beyond them, though I must admit that this distinction present in Germanic languages, Romance languages, Arabic, and Greek isn't present in most Slavic languages. It's minor actually.
What I usually struggle to communicate to people who were never taught grammar is that dogs are even more lacking than they are. Dogs do not understand such things as "tense" or "mood". My best example is the following. If you say to your dog,
"If you shit on the floor again, I will kick your ass"
The dog, being ignorant of both conditional and future tenses...and mood as well hears what you have said as,
"Shit...floor...kick ass."
Knowing the nouns "shit" and "floor" and being a bright dog who has picked up your use of the term "kikas" as one word signifying aggression the dog, being very eager to please, promptly shits on the floor and attacks somebody. The dog is very well acquainted with the imperative mood and takes what you have said as such. Actually, most dog's just cock their head in confusion and beg you to make a little more sense. This is, of course, the "eternal present" that mystic philosophers have always assumed is the best way for people to live.
Something to both think and woof about.


Back to the review. The reviewer goes on to compare the human ability to recognize "communication phonemes" at a much more rapid rate than they recognize other sounds. Phonemes are understood at a rate of 20 to 30 sounds per second while other sounds of 10 to 15 per second are hear as a "buzzing noise".
Molly Aside: I wonder if this is true of musical notes as well as random sounds ?


The reviewer notes that other animal species can produce every phoneme found in humans, even if all are not found in any given species in the variety found in humans. He goes on to state that "changes in the position and shape of our tongue, however, have enhanced our vocal communication by enabling us to generate more distinct vowel sounds that reduce ambiguity in the acoustic signal. Because these changes also increase the risk of choking on our food, the communicative advantages must outweigh the potential costs.
Molly aside: There have also been changes in the anatomy of the human larynx during the course of the evolution of hominids. This is a simplified statement.


The reviewer goes on to point out the differences between the model proposed by Lieberman and that proposed by people such as Chomsky and Pinker in terms of the production of grammar. the basic difference is that Lieberman proposes a "reiterative" system dependant on the basal ganglia structure of the brain that says that language is structured by a more or less simple process of repetition to produce a coherent whole ala a sort of "natural selection" in the brain reminiscent of "dance". The reviewer points out that the author wrongly attributes a greater specificity of cerebral cortex involvement to people such as Chomsky, Pinker and others than such people actually hold in their view of language-including the naming of specific cortical regions that such people simply don't name- as an "hierarchically structured" process that requires the "overwhelming" participation of the cortex. Very much a straw man argument on the part of the author.


The reviewer, however, points out that the author's enumeration of the prelinguistic abilities of other species is very valuable in laying out the evolutionary biology of the evolution of language and that the author's focus on the basal ganglia is a needed correction to something of an over concentration on the cortex in the neurobiology of language.
Molly's final aside. I think that I have pointed out one problem previously, that "music" may also be organized in an "hierarchical" manner similar to language in that rules of context may determine meaning. This is certainly true of the artform known as "comics", something that I have more familiarity with than "fine art", though I am pretty sure that it is true of other visual arts as well. I am very much the amateur in terms of the visual arts outside of comics, though I am familiar with at least a few of the rules, especially as they apply to art history. All that being said the point is that I personally "provisionally" favour the idea that many other modes of human communication are structured in an hierarchical rather than a reiterative manner. This points to an evolutionary conserved ability to understand many different modes of communication that is basically the same at its simple base. If this is right I am sure that both neurology and evolutionary biology will eventually converge towards a parsimonious explanation of why bower birds can understand both the communication of nests and of songs. Let's leave the humans for later.


For those interested in a "layperson's explanation" of the neurobiology involved in such debates I suggest the following site, formulated for teachers (which is about as "lay" as you can get in my arrogant opinion), 'The Evolution of Language' by Brian Peterson at 'Brain Connection' at http://www.brainconnection.com/topics/?main=fa/evolution=language


Anyways, on to the second book reviewed in said issue. This is a review of 'The Evolution of Animal Communication' by William A. Searcy and Stephan Nowicki, reviewed by Katherine E. Levan and Noah Wilson-Rich. This is actually a review of a subtitle in the Princeton series of 'Monographs in Behavior and Ecology', so it's hard to say if it deserves the title of "book". it's 286 pages long so maybe it does. The subtitle of the book, 'Reliability and Deception in Signalling Systems' really says much more about the "book" than the main title, as it hardly presumes to give an overview of "the evolution of animal communication" at all but merely deals with a few restricted issues in the sociobiology of same.


The main point to take away from this review is that there are three basic situations in which signalling takes place. There is, of course, a continuum between the various situations. They are a "yardstick" rather than "three colours", but research can be oriented by looking at the evolutionary interests of the "communicators" in these three different situations. One is where "the interests overlap" in terms of communication between "related" individuals. This shades because of degrees of relationship towards "where interests diverge" as in communication between the sexes and this, in turn, shades towards "when interests oppose" as between competitors. The monograph, as the reviewers point out, concentrates on the communication "within species" even though many of the most interesting questions revolve around interspecific communication. The reviewers also criticize the concentration on avian species, though this is excused by both the research interests of the original authors and the weight of the data accumulated for birds versus other species. The practical exclusion of the social insects, however, is deplored.


The point to take away from this review is that the evolve communication systems such as "language" have both cooperative and competitive aspects that have to be carefully diced apart by extended research. The whole idea of 'deception" is something central to both animal and human sociobiology and I can certainly see it at work in many (most ?) political statements including that of many people who share the anarchist "adjective" with myself. Some of this stuff is so cynical that I have a hard time imaging that the authors believe their own bullshit. It must be nice to have a totally sponge-like view of the world where you can assert anything, even things that totally contradict each other, at the same time. Liberalism as a malignant brain tumour masquerading as anarchism. The traditional commies at least took as few days to totally switch their views at the orders of Moscow. The great right wing example of this present use of communication as deception may be perhaps the right wing exponents of the "right to life" who want to even expand the death penalty. Left wing nonsense is too numerous to enumerate beyond what I have mentioned above.


Anyways, to get off my hobby horse, if you'd like a debate in left wing terms of the whole concept of "deception in communication" which brilliantly avoids left wing examples but is very penetrating in terms of right wing examples see the "debate" (more like a love-in) between sociobiologist Robert Trivers and Noam Chomsky at http://www.seedmagazine.com/noam_chomsky_robert_trivers.php
Molly

"Dem Links, Dem Links, Dem Dry Links"'''
Four new links and a correction. I have added four new inks under the 'Scientific Links' section They are as follows:
a)Mineral Atlas from a professor of geology in Queensland Australia. This site contains not just its own description of various minerals but also numerous links to mineralogy and gemology both scientific and amateur. Http://www.mineralatlas.com
b) I Love Physics. Great numbers of tutorials and other resources for students from high school to undergraduate. A Forum and a blog are included on topics that involve physics. Http://www.ilovephysics.com .
c)World Ocean Observatory. A source for all things oceanographic. Sponsored by the NYC nonprofit organization of the same name. Http://www.thew2o.net/oceanForum.html .
d)Darwin Online. The complete online works of Charles Darwin, including many manuscripts and most of the correspondence. Over 50,000 accessible pages online. Since Oct 19th, 2006 this site has received 337,621 hits. Eat your heart out. Speaking of "eat" one of the new species that Darwin discovered during his 1830s South American voyage was the flightless bird Rhea darwinii . His description was incomplete as he and the crew of the Beagle had eaten most of the first specimen before it dawned on Darwin what it was. All six editions of 'The Origin of Species' are posted, so you can see how Darwin's thought "evolved". Http://darwin-online.org.uk

Finally, the correction . I mistakenly gave a wrong email address for the initiator of the 'Darwinian Anarchist Project' in a previous post. This has been corrected in the original post, but for the record the correct email is dbaake@sbcglobal.net .

As a final note I have seen that Science Magazine, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science plans to cancel their 'Netwatch' column. Over the years I've always found this column interesting and useful. The journal plans to incorporate the Netwatch matters into their 'Random Samples' column. I intend to send Science a letter asking them to reconsider this decision. If you are also a member of the AAAS consider sending one also to science_letters@aaas.org .

A Few Items From the Sept 15th Edition of Science Magazine
1)'Claim of Oldest New World Writing Excites Archaeologists'
A recently discovered stone block from a quarry at Cascajal, outside San Lorenzo, Mexico may have pushed the known date for writing in the New World back to as early as 900 BCE according to this report. This artifact apparently belongs to the Olmec culture who predated the Mayas and Aztecs in Mesoamerica. The artifact has been provisionally assigned to the San Lorenzo period of the Olmec culture (from 1200 BCE to 900BCE). The Toltecs had disappeared by 400 BCE.
2)'Grounding the Planes During a Flu Pandemic ? Studies Disagree'
This is a report about the recent article by John Brownstein and Kenneth Mandi in the Sept 11th edition of PLoS Medicine about how the post 9/11 drop in air traffic seemed to delay the onset of the flu season by 13 weeks. This article puts forward the various counter-arguments and the response that they are "computer models" while "this is empirical evidence".
3)In the 'Books et al' section there is a review of 'Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy'. The author of this review, Romain Wacziarg, states that the model presented in this book appears such that "In some ways, this basic model is a formalization of Marx's dialectical materialism." Well yes and no. The reviewer goes on to note that the authors of the book, who are economists, lay out an hypothesis of when a ruling class will respond to demands from other classes by either a)repression, b)concessions or c)democratization. They argue that the ruling class will follow the later path when the other classes feel that they must have guarantees of the good will of the rulers. The theoretical framework is that of game theory economics.
Yes, it terms that Marx emphasized the role of economic class struggle in the development of political institutions - as, of course, did many others who didn't have to borrow from the superstitions of the Hegelian academy and style it "dialectics". No because the authors of the book, even if they are as innocent of actual facts as Marx ever was lay out a program whereby their hypotheses can be falsified by actual research. this, of course, is "science" in contrast to the "science" of Marx's "scientific socialism" which grew out of the antique conviction that Hegelian philosophy was a "science" and that deductions using its methods of over abstraction deserved the name "scientific".

More On Avian Influenza:
Lest some might think that the article mentioned before on 'Bird Flu' from 'The Conservator' might be a case of an organization, Ducks Unlimited, making a special case for its own interests I went back in Science magazine to look up the topic a bit more thoroughly. The April 21 edition (312, issue 5772, pp 379- 399) has a special topic section on this virus.
The various articles in this section cover a number of different topics from a general overview, through vaccine development, manufacture of anti viral drugs, development of viral resistance to same, preparedness in the event of an outbreak and host species barriers to cross infection. The article that is relevant to what was previously mentioned is titled 'Global Patters of Influenza A Virus in Wild Birds' by B. Olsen et al. The article discusses the epidemiology of influenza A viruses in various wild bird species and their potential as a source for human epidemics.
The basic question of the source of H5N1 outbreaks to date, whether it is connected to wild bird migration or to the international poultry trade can best be summed up by the following paragraph,
"With our current limited knowledge on HPAI (Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza- Molly) in wild birds, there is no solid basis for including wild birds in control strategies beyond the physical separation of poultry from wild birds. Even in areas with significant outbreaks in poultry virus prevalence in wild birds is low, and the role of wild birds in spreading the disease is unclear. It is clear that the H5N1 problem originated from outbreaks in poultry and that the outbreaks and their geographical spread probably cannot be stopped without implementation of proper control measures in the global poultry industry. However, there is at present no scientific basis for culling wild birds to control the outbreaks and their spread, and this further highly undesirable from a conservationist perspective."

Water,Water, Water:
The August 25th edition of Science Magazine, the journal of the AAAS (see links on the left). focuses on 'Freshwater Resources'. There is a special section containing articles on the question of freshwater availability and safety in an increasingly thirsty world. The titles in this section are:
a)A Thirsty World
b)Global Hydrological Cycles and World Water Resources
c)The Challenge of Micropollutants in Aquatic Systems
d)Waterborne Infectious Diseases-Could They Be Consigned to History ?
e)Seeking sustainability:Israel's Evolving Water Management Strategy
f)Running Out of Water- and Time
g)Desalination freshens Up.
In addition other sections of the magazine contain articles on hydrological megaprojects in China and India. There is also an article on the freshwater cycle in arctic regions and a book review of 'When The Rivers Run Dry:Water- The Defining Crisis Of The Twenty-First Century, by F. Pearce; reviewed by S.L. Postel. The later contains not just the usual doom and gloom but also success stories such as, "In India, a vibrant grassroots movement to capture rainwater is replenishing aquifers. Water tables have risen so much in Rajasthan, Pearce writes, That five ancient rivers have returned to the map"
If this movement is indeed as grassroots as the reviewer says it bears looking into as a decentralized alternative to the governmental megaprojects that either upset water balance or attempt to improve it.
The editors of Science devote their editorial statement in this issue to the water question. More later-Molly