Steve Pacala and colleagues have a 2-page paper in Science that is well worth reading: False alarms over environmental false alarms. The article responds to recent criticisms by Bjørn Lomborg and others who claim that environmentalists issue too many false alarms. I won't summarize the arguments here, but I encourage you to read the article. We will return to some of these ideas in the last few lectures of the course.
A little later in the same issue you'll find a paper describing the hybrid origin of three different species of sunflowers. What make this particularly interesting for purposes of this course is that the Pecos sunflower (Helianthus paradoxus) is one of the hybrid species. It's the example I mentioned of a case in which the Fish and Wildlife Service decided that a species of hybrid origin is a "true" species. From the perspective of an evolutionary biologist it's also interesting because the three hybrid species all share the same two diploid ancestors, and all of them are stabilized diploid derivatives (not polyploids).
Posted by Kent at September 11, 2003 12:20 PM | TrackBack