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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday February 28 2017, @02:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the monarch-or-tiger dept.

A few years ago, Christopher Hamm was reading up on monarch butterflies when he noticed something peculiar. All of the scientific articles that mentioned the number of the insect's chromosomes—30, it seemed—referenced a 2004 paper, which in turn cited a 1975 paper. But when Hamm, then a postdoc at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, did a genetic analysis of his own, he found that his monarchs only had 28 chromosomes, suggesting that an error has pervaded the literature for more than 40 years. Another twist, however, was just around the corner.

Hamm suspected a mistake when he read the original 1975 paper. The authors, biologists N. Nageswara Rao and A. S. Murty at Andhra University in Visakhapatnam, India, had studied what they claimed was an Indian monarch butterfly in their work. But there's a problem: Monarchs are nearly exclusively a North American species. "It's implied they just went outside their building and collected some butterflies," Hamm says. "I immediately thought, 'Monarch butterflies in India? Really?'"

[...] Case closed, right? Not quite. A paper published a few days later on bioRxiv by some of Hamm's former colleagues at the University of Kansas claims to have found, like Rao and Murty, 30 chromosomes in monarchs. "Previously, an observation of N=30 chromosomes was reported only for males (Nageswara-Rao and Murty 1975)," the authors write. "Our current analysis confirms the same chromosome number not only in males but also in females." The authors of that paper declined to comment on Hamm's findings.


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  • (Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:51PM (1 child)

    by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:51PM (#473093)

    You think robbing a bank does not stimulate the economy?

    The criminals will want to spend it sooner or later.

    The banks are fractional reserve anyway. They only need so much cash on hand.

    The point of the original analogy is that by burning fossil fuels, we are burning millions of years of accumulated solar energy. It would be better to use "renewable" solar energy if we can. Perhaps reserve kerosene for reaching escape velocity (where power to weight is everything).

    If you don't think incident solar radiation is enough, nuclear power is an obvious option. Though the green movement seems to oppose it on general principle.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 28 2017, @11:15PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 28 2017, @11:15PM (#473108) Journal

    You think robbing a bank does not stimulate the economy?

    The criminals will want to spend it sooner or later.

    Indeed, I do believe that robbing a bank doesn't stimulate the economy. Nor do I believe that stimulating an economy is a desirable activity. Notice in my past comments how I have emphasized the value gained from mining or drilling fossil fuels (such as improving our lot in life or transporting things around), not the stimulation.

    The point of the original analogy is that by burning fossil fuels, we are burning millions of years of accumulated solar energy. It would be better to use "renewable" solar energy if we can. Perhaps reserve kerosene for reaching escape velocity (where power to weight is everything).

    By all means, hop into that time machine to harvest those millions of years of solar energy in a more sustainable way. But that's energy that we can and have used to make our lives better. Why is it better to not make our lives better? Why is it better to put billions of people into increased (and for a variety of reasons very unsustainable) poverty?

    My view on this is that it's easier for wealthy, petroleum-dependent societies to switch to renewables when it makes economic sense to do so than it is poor, renewables-dependent societies to stay on renewables when there are cheap fossil fuels to mine.