6 ms·

The Ornithologist the Internet Called a Murderer

96 points by danso 8y ago

smackay 8y ago
There is definitely a "museum mentality" where is something is worth collecting it gets collected. That does not sit well with, shall we say, an over-sensitivity to the plight of individual animals while blithely ignoring the fate of millions or billions - as the article suggests. Museums have come a long way, since the golden age of collecting of Victorian times. A lot of museums run tissue banks, mainly blood, which are an invaluable resource. More of less anyone in the world has access to the material. The animals or birds that are unfortunate enough to enter a museum are put to good use and ultimately mean that a lot less are killed in the name research. Disclaimer: I knew Chris when I lived in Seattle. He's a stand-up guy.
- trhway 8y ago
  >an over-sensitivity to the plight of individual animals while blithely ignoring the fate of millions or billions the fate of the billions isn't ignored. It just can't be changed immediately as if by a magic wand. The process has to start somewhere, and the plight of individual animals who one way or another got some connection to people mind is a natural place to start as people pay attention to those animals, and with time the people would understand and would be able to extend that empathy from those individual to the rest of the billions. I for one happy to see that cold killing in the name of science doesn't sit ok anymore with a lot of people. 120 years ago scientists were cutting dogs alive without anesthesia. Back then one could also argue about "an over-sensitivity to the plight of individual animals while blithely ignoring the fate of millions or billions". Fortunately the plight of those individual animals back then had ultimately got its attention, and animal torture is a crime today.
  - jhbadger 8y ago
    You are missing the point that in order to save species, often individual animals need to be killed. Even in the modern era of DNA sequencing, museum collections tell us much about animals and even work as a sort of time machine for sequencing. I recently went to a seminar about a project that was studying the microbiomes from the gut contents of 19th century preserved animals in order to see if they were different from modern ones. This will help us know to what degree the greater human impact in the 21st century is affecting the health of wildlife. If people hadn't collected animals in the 19th century how could we do this? How will people in the future do the same if we don't collect animals now?
    - trhway 8y ago
      take any nightmarish atrocity and torture committed by people against other people or animals, and you'll always find a logical and reasonable rationale for it - at least held at the time by the people committing it.
      - jhbadger 8y ago
        Why exactly do you think people do wildlife research? Because they care about animals in a deep way. If endangered species get saved it will be through the result of their research. The true "atrocity" is the great extinction period we are going through.
classicsnoot 8y ago
I know this is silly but i firmly believe everyone should see it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Voyqy_dvRQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Voyqy_dvRQ Edit:it is a clip from Mitch & Webb
emiliobumachar 8y ago
Why are police and prosecutors not paying more attention to online lynch mobs? I assume at least a few of the death threats were made carelessly and left a trail. It's not like this stuff is protected speech. A handful of well publicized jail terms would go a long way towards protecting the next potential victim.
- aetherson 8y ago
  It's protected speech (in the US) unless you can demonstrate that it's a "true threat," and not something that a reasonable reader would interpret as hyperbole. You'd probably have an uphill battle convincing a court that an online death threat is a "true threat." What percentage of them are acted on? How many decimal places do you have to go to before it doesn't round to 0? I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, please don't threaten people with death, even if you don't mean it, it's gross.
  - kolpa 8y ago
    It doesn't matter what percentage of threats are acted upon, it matters what percentage of threatened people are harmed. I think conspiracy laws should apply here, where an "online lynch mob" ends up with one person committing a physical act in line with the mob's speech. If 100 people perpetrate a crime together -- even if loosely coupled mob, it's not less of a crime than if 1 person perpetrates it alone.
    - aetherson 8y ago
      I can't tell what exactly you're calling for, but I can't think of any interpretation that doesn't seem like an incredibly bad idea. Making a person face criminal liability for making a negative comment because a third party, that your defendant has never met, committed an actual crime is farcically orwellian.
      - kolpa 8y ago
        In the USA it is historically and modernly generally considered a good idea. The legal term is "Fighting words" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_words
russellbeattie 8y ago
There is a natural bell curve to intelligence and behavior. Those that created the internet, web and mobile phones were well on the right side of that curve. Then they sold it all to the rest of the curve and seem stunned that there are so many morons out there. Statistically there's way more ignorant people than not, that's just how it works. (After being stunned, the right-of-center folk then went on to create In App Purchases to take advantage of that mass of idiocy with Smurf-bucks and digital baseball caps, and laughed all the way to the bank. Until the last presidential election that is... Then they looked around and thought "What have we done??" It's a modern era tale from Mary Shelley, really.)
sgnelson 8y ago
Yet another use of the Internet that I never expected 20+ years ago when I thought it would be the magic bullet to help make people more educated, more empathetic, and just overall better humans. Oh Humanity, how you disappoint.
- CodeCube 8y ago
  I remember being so optimistic, exactly as you're describing ... ~20 years ago. Search engines, the nascent days of the blog community (rss!); open standards for chat (jabber/xmpp!), microformats for distributed social networks (foaf!). It was all so great, so empowering, so exciting. It was all a lie ... all those wonderful things were like chewing Coca leaves, holding great promise and benefits. But everything that came after: centralized social media, one dominant search engine, closed chat networks, centralized media ... it was akin to turning the coca leaves into cocaine. It felt amazing to see such growth, like fire. But ultimately, the sickness and addiction set in, and we see actors exploiting people using these tools. "We" are sick now, and need to figure out a way to regain our agency.
  - lotu 8y ago
    While I sometimes feel a lot of these things, I don't think you are diagnosing the cause correctly. I don't see how the fact that we have a single dominate social networks, and search engine are the cause. I can't imagine how having a distributed social network or more competition in the search market would make people be more civil. First off, people have always been uncivil both on-line and off-line. If you look at the adoption of the internet it started among "tech" people then it was societal elites, like professors, doctors, scientists, and lawyers, then moved down the chain to office workers, collage students and so on. It should not be a surprise that as the "common" people came on the internet that the sophistication and civility of discourse decreased. The same thing would be observed if you had in-person events with these groups of people. I argue that this is the cause of decline in civility: https://www.statista.com/statistics/865523/us-offline-population-share/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/865523/us-offline-popula... not consolidation. Yes their are problems but, if you look at where hate groups and online mobs appear to be most prevalent it is in the small distributed uncontrolled forums that don't have the manpower or compulsion from corporate overlords to police this type of thing. Secondly it is incorrect to think the internet hasn't done more enormous good, if you look at marginalized communities and the ability for people to find, connect and mobilize it has been because of the internet. I don't think it is a coincidence that the acceptance of LGBT people corresponded with a massive increase in the ability to communicate with other people. Just as the printing press did not make all of humanity scholars; the internet has not made humanity civil to each other.
imh 8y ago
>I couldn’t find him on Facebook or Twitter. The man seemed to have vanished. What a time we live in. The social internet is weird. It's the source of stuff like this article's outrage, and if you aren't on it, you're weird and "seem to have vanished."
Myrmornis 8y ago
I did field studies of birds in northern Brazil as a grad student and collected (killed) several birds that I caught. It is a controversial subject, with the viewpoints tending to be spread over a couple of different dimensions. In South America, teaching of biology at universities seems to me to have a heavier focus on evolutionary biology, taxonomy, biogeography and systematics, and from what I've seen in Colombia, Brazil and Peru, collecting museum specimens is uncontroversial among biologists. At the other end of the spectrum, in the UK, those areas of evolutionary biology are undervalued, with a much stronger focus on, for example, conservation biology and "hypothesis-driven" science. That, coupled with the greater squeamishness of the pet-loving garden-bird-feeding vegetarian-heavy gun-eschewing Brits (I'm one), means that collecting museum specimens tends to meet with disapproval from British biologists, in my limited experience (did grad school in the US). But it must be said, the UK does very little primary field research of that type. And in the USA, collecting specimens is an issue which mostly does not affect universities, since most of that sort of field work is done by the natural history museums (AMNH, FMNH, SMNH, etc) with their research wings, staff field biologists, and PhD students doing field work. From what I understand, at the Field Museum in Chicago, there was a more-or-less furious disagreement between the conservation biologists (against) and evolutionary biologists (pro). In any case, I killed a few birds with a shotgun, but mostly via thoracic compression (take a beautiful small bird you've just caught in its natural habitat and squeeze its chest hard; it will writhe and then have a heart attack and die in a few seconds). These were all small birds. It's not a nice thing to remember. Natural organisms in their natural habitat are one of the most important things in the world to me. But the scientific arguments for preserving examples of an entire body in a research collection are extremely strong and it doesn't endanger the population, obviously you don't kill a bird if there are only tens of them in the wild. So it's up to you and the battle between your personal beliefs about the sanctity of life and the possibility of some sort of consciousness in small birds on the one hand, and the objective arguments that museum specimens help science and help understand the evolutionary lineages that we are trying to conserve, on the other. Edit: (1) You would typically collect one specimen per species (or perhaps one male and one female) per locality, only if there were not already existing specimens of that species from that locality. "already existing specimens" = in any museum in the world; you don't collect specimens to add to one museum's research collection. Biologists get on planes and visit museums to examine the specimens there. (2) This all has nothing to do with the taxidermy of specimens for display to the public. The birds aren't stuffed and displayed artistically perched on branches or whatever. This is collection for the research collection part of the museum: draws and draws of birds stuffed in a standardized non-artistic way allowing the body and plumage to be examined.
staz 8y ago
> Many research expeditions are no longer being publicized; in some cases, there is a total blackout on media. As a result, the public will grow even less informed about the importance of this research. Thanks Internet crowd... Seriously, however you feel about this topic it should be discussed rationally, not via deaths threats
cataphract 8y ago
I really can't comprehend how the fate of single animals (ecologically irrelevant) frequently cause such an uproar online — more frequently cats and dogs, and never unattractive animals. I remember the a couple of years ago the completely disproportionate violent reactions in Spain to the order for the killing of a dog belonging to a nurse that had been infected with Ebola. It seems not even children elicit these kinds of reactions nowadays.
olefoo 8y ago
It is a commonplace of societies collapsing into ethnic cleansing and violence that a wave of violent rhetoric will precede the actual war crimes.

96 points by danso 8y ago

There is definitely a "museum mentality" where is something is worth collecting it gets collected. That does not sit well with, shall we say, an over-sensitivity to the plight of individual animals while blithely ignoring the fate of millions or billions - as the article suggests. Museums have come a long way, since the golden age of collecting of Victorian times. A lot of museums run tissue banks, mainly blood, which are an invaluable resource. More of less anyone in the world has access to the material. The animals or birds that are unfortunate enough to enter a museum are put to good use and ultimately mean that a lot less are killed in the name research. Disclaimer: I knew Chris when I lived in Seattle. He's a stand-up guy.

trhway 8y ago
>an over-sensitivity to the plight of individual animals while blithely ignoring the fate of millions or billions the fate of the billions isn't ignored. It just can't be changed immediately as if by a magic wand. The process has to start somewhere, and the plight of individual animals who one way or another got some connection to people mind is a natural place to start as people pay attention to those animals, and with time the people would understand and would be able to extend that empathy from those individual to the rest of the billions. I for one happy to see that cold killing in the name of science doesn't sit ok anymore with a lot of people. 120 years ago scientists were cutting dogs alive without anesthesia. Back then one could also argue about "an over-sensitivity to the plight of individual animals while blithely ignoring the fate of millions or billions". Fortunately the plight of those individual animals back then had ultimately got its attention, and animal torture is a crime today.
- jhbadger 8y ago
  You are missing the point that in order to save species, often individual animals need to be killed. Even in the modern era of DNA sequencing, museum collections tell us much about animals and even work as a sort of time machine for sequencing. I recently went to a seminar about a project that was studying the microbiomes from the gut contents of 19th century preserved animals in order to see if they were different from modern ones. This will help us know to what degree the greater human impact in the 21st century is affecting the health of wildlife. If people hadn't collected animals in the 19th century how could we do this? How will people in the future do the same if we don't collect animals now?
  - trhway 8y ago
    take any nightmarish atrocity and torture committed by people against other people or animals, and you'll always find a logical and reasonable rationale for it - at least held at the time by the people committing it.
    - jhbadger 8y ago
      Why exactly do you think people do wildlife research? Because they care about animals in a deep way. If endangered species get saved it will be through the result of their research. The true "atrocity" is the great extinction period we are going through.

classicsnoot 8y ago

I know this is silly but i firmly believe everyone should see it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Voyqy_dvRQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Voyqy_dvRQ Edit:it is a clip from Mitch & Webb

emiliobumachar 8y ago

Why are police and prosecutors not paying more attention to online lynch mobs? I assume at least a few of the death threats were made carelessly and left a trail. It's not like this stuff is protected speech. A handful of well publicized jail terms would go a long way towards protecting the next potential victim.

aetherson 8y ago
It's protected speech (in the US) unless you can demonstrate that it's a "true threat," and not something that a reasonable reader would interpret as hyperbole. You'd probably have an uphill battle convincing a court that an online death threat is a "true threat." What percentage of them are acted on? How many decimal places do you have to go to before it doesn't round to 0? I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, please don't threaten people with death, even if you don't mean it, it's gross.
- kolpa 8y ago
  It doesn't matter what percentage of threats are acted upon, it matters what percentage of threatened people are harmed. I think conspiracy laws should apply here, where an "online lynch mob" ends up with one person committing a physical act in line with the mob's speech. If 100 people perpetrate a crime together -- even if loosely coupled mob, it's not less of a crime than if 1 person perpetrates it alone.
  - aetherson 8y ago
    I can't tell what exactly you're calling for, but I can't think of any interpretation that doesn't seem like an incredibly bad idea. Making a person face criminal liability for making a negative comment because a third party, that your defendant has never met, committed an actual crime is farcically orwellian.
    - kolpa 8y ago
      In the USA it is historically and modernly generally considered a good idea. The legal term is "Fighting words" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_words

russellbeattie 8y ago

There is a natural bell curve to intelligence and behavior. Those that created the internet, web and mobile phones were well on the right side of that curve. Then they sold it all to the rest of the curve and seem stunned that there are so many morons out there. Statistically there's way more ignorant people than not, that's just how it works. (After being stunned, the right-of-center folk then went on to create In App Purchases to take advantage of that mass of idiocy with Smurf-bucks and digital baseball caps, and laughed all the way to the bank. Until the last presidential election that is... Then they looked around and thought "What have we done??" It's a modern era tale from Mary Shelley, really.)

sgnelson 8y ago

Yet another use of the Internet that I never expected 20+ years ago when I thought it would be the magic bullet to help make people more educated, more empathetic, and just overall better humans. Oh Humanity, how you disappoint.

CodeCube 8y ago
I remember being so optimistic, exactly as you're describing ... ~20 years ago. Search engines, the nascent days of the blog community (rss!); open standards for chat (jabber/xmpp!), microformats for distributed social networks (foaf!). It was all so great, so empowering, so exciting. It was all a lie ... all those wonderful things were like chewing Coca leaves, holding great promise and benefits. But everything that came after: centralized social media, one dominant search engine, closed chat networks, centralized media ... it was akin to turning the coca leaves into cocaine. It felt amazing to see such growth, like fire. But ultimately, the sickness and addiction set in, and we see actors exploiting people using these tools. "We" are sick now, and need to figure out a way to regain our agency.
- lotu 8y ago
  While I sometimes feel a lot of these things, I don't think you are diagnosing the cause correctly. I don't see how the fact that we have a single dominate social networks, and search engine are the cause. I can't imagine how having a distributed social network or more competition in the search market would make people be more civil. First off, people have always been uncivil both on-line and off-line. If you look at the adoption of the internet it started among "tech" people then it was societal elites, like professors, doctors, scientists, and lawyers, then moved down the chain to office workers, collage students and so on. It should not be a surprise that as the "common" people came on the internet that the sophistication and civility of discourse decreased. The same thing would be observed if you had in-person events with these groups of people. I argue that this is the cause of decline in civility: https://www.statista.com/statistics/865523/us-offline-population-share/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/865523/us-offline-popula... not consolidation. Yes their are problems but, if you look at where hate groups and online mobs appear to be most prevalent it is in the small distributed uncontrolled forums that don't have the manpower or compulsion from corporate overlords to police this type of thing. Secondly it is incorrect to think the internet hasn't done more enormous good, if you look at marginalized communities and the ability for people to find, connect and mobilize it has been because of the internet. I don't think it is a coincidence that the acceptance of LGBT people corresponded with a massive increase in the ability to communicate with other people. Just as the printing press did not make all of humanity scholars; the internet has not made humanity civil to each other.

imh 8y ago

>I couldn’t find him on Facebook or Twitter. The man seemed to have vanished. What a time we live in. The social internet is weird. It's the source of stuff like this article's outrage, and if you aren't on it, you're weird and "seem to have vanished."

Myrmornis 8y ago

I did field studies of birds in northern Brazil as a grad student and collected (killed) several birds that I caught. It is a controversial subject, with the viewpoints tending to be spread over a couple of different dimensions. In South America, teaching of biology at universities seems to me to have a heavier focus on evolutionary biology, taxonomy, biogeography and systematics, and from what I've seen in Colombia, Brazil and Peru, collecting museum specimens is uncontroversial among biologists. At the other end of the spectrum, in the UK, those areas of evolutionary biology are undervalued, with a much stronger focus on, for example, conservation biology and "hypothesis-driven" science. That, coupled with the greater squeamishness of the pet-loving garden-bird-feeding vegetarian-heavy gun-eschewing Brits (I'm one), means that collecting museum specimens tends to meet with disapproval from British biologists, in my limited experience (did grad school in the US). But it must be said, the UK does very little primary field research of that type. And in the USA, collecting specimens is an issue which mostly does not affect universities, since most of that sort of field work is done by the natural history museums (AMNH, FMNH, SMNH, etc) with their research wings, staff field biologists, and PhD students doing field work. From what I understand, at the Field Museum in Chicago, there was a more-or-less furious disagreement between the conservation biologists (against) and evolutionary biologists (pro). In any case, I killed a few birds with a shotgun, but mostly via thoracic compression (take a beautiful small bird you've just caught in its natural habitat and squeeze its chest hard; it will writhe and then have a heart attack and die in a few seconds). These were all small birds. It's not a nice thing to remember. Natural organisms in their natural habitat are one of the most important things in the world to me. But the scientific arguments for preserving examples of an entire body in a research collection are extremely strong and it doesn't endanger the population, obviously you don't kill a bird if there are only tens of them in the wild. So it's up to you and the battle between your personal beliefs about the sanctity of life and the possibility of some sort of consciousness in small birds on the one hand, and the objective arguments that museum specimens help science and help understand the evolutionary lineages that we are trying to conserve, on the other. Edit: (1) You would typically collect one specimen per species (or perhaps one male and one female) per locality, only if there were not already existing specimens of that species from that locality. "already existing specimens" = in any museum in the world; you don't collect specimens to add to one museum's research collection. Biologists get on planes and visit museums to examine the specimens there. (2) This all has nothing to do with the taxidermy of specimens for display to the public. The birds aren't stuffed and displayed artistically perched on branches or whatever. This is collection for the research collection part of the museum: draws and draws of birds stuffed in a standardized non-artistic way allowing the body and plumage to be examined.

staz 8y ago

> Many research expeditions are no longer being publicized; in some cases, there is a total blackout on media. As a result, the public will grow even less informed about the importance of this research. Thanks Internet crowd... Seriously, however you feel about this topic it should be discussed rationally, not via deaths threats

cataphract 8y ago

I really can't comprehend how the fate of single animals (ecologically irrelevant) frequently cause such an uproar online — more frequently cats and dogs, and never unattractive animals. I remember the a couple of years ago the completely disproportionate violent reactions in Spain to the order for the killing of a dog belonging to a nurse that had been infected with Ebola. It seems not even children elicit these kinds of reactions nowadays.

olefoo 8y ago

It is a commonplace of societies collapsing into ethnic cleansing and violence that a wave of violent rhetoric will precede the actual war crimes.