Fishing - Bull Trout

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JR wrote in message ...

This article by Ernst Mayr is very useful reading (and may be where
Steve found his references to "armchair taxonomists" and Darwin's
correspondence with Hooker):

http://members.aol.com/darwinpage/mayrspecies.htm

Sounds to me like an elder high priest trying to get certain
radical acolytes to toe the line. (Don't worry, once they get
enough "peer-reviewed" journal articles rejected, they'll come
around.) In any case, it didn't seem very "scientific" to me.

"Yet, because the species concept is an important concept in the p
hilosophy of science,
....
I would here attempt to present, from the perspective of a practicing
systematist, a concise overview of the philosophically important aspects
of the problem of the 'species'.
....
The species is the principal unit of evolution and it is impossible to
write about evolution, and indeed about almost any aspect of the
philosophy of biology,..."

Indeed I guess we are talking philosophy here. At least now we
don't have to worry about showing quantifiable justification for
our conclusions...

"Species are groups of interbreeding natural populations that are
reproductively isolated from other such groups."

Oh, ok. Well, actually, we can't use that because it's too strict
when we look at what we want to call species. So we'll soften it
a little bit.

"The biological meaning of species is thus quite apparent: 'The
segregation of the total genetic variability of nature into
discrete packages, so called species, which are separated from
each other by reproductive barriers, prevents the production of
too great a number of disharmonious incompatible gene combinations.'"

See, now we get to play with "too great", so it's whatever we need
at the time.

"The validity of this argument is substantiated by the fact that
hybrids between species, particularly in animals, are almost always
of inferior viability and more extreme hybrids are usually even
sterile."

Yes, see, we know what we're talking about. Except those plant guys
keep finding counter-examples:

"They discovered case alter case of occasional (sometimes even rather
frequent) hybridization"

Well darn, let's try again:

"However, if the two species continue their essential integrity, they
will be treated as species, in spite of the slight inefficiency of
their isolating mechanisms."

Oh so it's not REALLY about reproductive isolation is it? And we get
to play with "slight" now, too. How convenient. And don't worry,
we'll always keep it open enough so that Darwin wasn't wrong about
his finches...

I could go on but what's the point. Science is practiced by humans,
and as such it is a human process, not an objective discipline,
even though scientists might try to convince you otherwise. Human
beliefs, prejudices, feelings, etc. all come into play and the
more I learn about science the more I'm convinced we don't know
half as much as we think we know.

I wouldn't call myself a scientist (I've only done one rigorous
empirical study in my career), but I fully participate in the
same "scientific process" -- funding search, "investigative research",
peer-review publication of "results", and I've seen enough that
non-scientists ought to have a healthy skepticism of the results
that come out of the process.

Yes, this scientific process has had some great successes. But as
a teacher I believe it's my duty to expose some of the cracks in
the ivory towers. Scientists are humans and subject to all of the
problems the rest of us have, and their "results" are thus colored
by such. One thing I am sure, they should not be treated as high
priests.

Jon.

"troutbum_mt" wrote

Prove that you aren't a lawyer! I want to see real evidence. bseg

that's easy. he hasn't had a heart attack, and he doesn't have a room
over his local bar.

yfitons
wayno

Chas Wade wrote:

JR wrote:

No, seriously, I mean real evidence. You seem to draw all sorts of
conclusions from talks with "a biologist" or "the guy at the hatchery."

Listen asshole, I'm not a lawyer, and I don't have any legal evidence.

"Asshole." g Now, that's constructive. Let's take a step back...

Your original post was:

The Deschutes in Oregon is the home of the Redsides rainbow. It's
actually a rainbow/cutthroat cross that developed long ago when there
was a landslide that blocked upstream migration on the Columbia. I
can't remember how long ago it was, but at least thousands of years if
not tens of thousands.

The Deschutes is also famous for their steelhead. The populations are
distinct, despite spawning in the same parts of the river. If there
are hybreds, they are few enough in number to not disturb the gene
pools. I'm sure they can interbreed and produce viable offspring. The
redside is the same species as rainbows and steelhead. I think these
breeds are no more different from each other than Italians, Greeks, and
Spaniards.

Now, I'm a resident of Central Oregon with a keen interest in the fish
and rivers there, and have studied them a lot over the past several
years. When I asked what evidence there was that the redsides was
"actually a rainbow/cutthroat cross that developed long ago when there
was a landslide that blocked upstream migration on the Columbia", it
was because what seemed a fairly categorical and authoritatively stated
proposition didn't jibe with anything I'd read about the origins of
redsides (or the various interaction of cutthroats and different rainbow
subspecies in the Colombia basin), and asked. You responded:

I had a talk with the guy at the Redsides hatchery not too far from
Maupin last year. I was asking him about the cutthroat I'd caught at
Surf City (a run on the Deschutes), and he explained that it was
actually a Redside, but that some still show the cut on the throat. He
also explained that on the Deschutes the steelhead hatchery uses fresh
wild stock each year.

(I just know this is gonna provoke one of those "Listen, asshole"
thingies, but, well.......)

.....let's leave aside the repeated references to "hybreds" in several of
your recent posts, and the errant nonsense of equating two life
histories of a single anadromous fish population to various Southern
European nationalities, and consider just the more concrete hints that
maybe this source of an entirely new view on the evolution of the
Deschutes redsides should maybe be first questioned and then doubted
(lacking any more substantive evidence):

- The "populations" of Resides (resident redband rainbows) and steelhead
in the lower Deschutes are *not* distinct. (See Bob Weinberger's post
higher in this thread). They can certainly interbreed (but they don't
produce anything called a hybrid) because they are genetically
indistinguishable.

- There is no "Redsides hatchery" near Maupin. All the redsides in the
lower Deschutes are wild fish. The rainbows produced in the Oak Springs
Hatchery near Maupin are from brood stock originating in California
(probably the McCloud strain) and are planted in the high Cascades lakes
and elsewhere, but not in the Deschutes.

I simply wanted to know if there was some other evidence for this notion
of a cutt/redband rainbow "cross" somewhere in the large triangular
evidentiary space between 1) legal evidence (not normally of interest in
questions of evolutionary biology, but hey, who knows?), 2) shootin' the
**** with some hatchery technician, and 3) the altogether possible but
only marginally germane observation that I'm an asshole.

BTW, if you're interested, this is an excellent source of background
information:

http://tinyurl.com/2jlmk, especially (for this "discussion" g) Chapter
3 and the three subspecies overviews.

The sort of "evidence" I was looking for concerning cutthroat
introgression into redside genetics, would have been something specific
contradicting (or maybe as an exception to, refinement of) what is
regarded as coastal cutthroats' particularly marked tendency--even
presumably historically--toward "resource partitioning", especially
"habitat-partitioning" to prevent much hybridization in the presence
of other salmonids. (See: http://tinyurl.com/25vdy, the section
"Interactions of Coastal Cutthroat Trout with Other Salmonids").

JR

Things that you know:
1. For a different strain to develope you must isolate them for a
long time.
2. When you put them together again they will be able to
interbreed.
3. The thing that keeps them from interbreeding is different
spawning times.
ie: Rainbow, Cutthroat, Redside, Golden, Redband etc.
Ernie

Danl wrote:

Danl
who doesn't need a high priest to act as an intermediary in my behalf,
thanks anyway.

howza 'bout a very high priestess? we gotta few of dem 'round here in
the hills.

wally

ezflyfisher wrote:

Danl
who doesn't need a high priest to act as an intermediary in my behalf,
thanks anyway.

howza 'bout a very high priestess? we gotta few of dem 'round here in
the hills.

Why Waldo, you old lech, you been gettin' the ASU sorority girls
drunk on 'shine again ? Shame on you. ;-)

--
Ken Fortenberry

"JR" wrote in message ...
Jonathan Cook wrote:

Sounds to me like an elder high priest trying to get certain
radical acolytes to toe the line. (Don't worry, once they get
enough "peer-reviewed" journal articles rejected, they'll come
around.) In any case, it didn't seem very "scientific" to me.

Yeah, Mayr's a character, and not just because of his habit of referring
to himself in the third person. But just because he writes about the
philosophy of science (in the journal "Philosophy of Science"), and the
history of science (reading his book The Growth of Biological Thought
was one of the best two months I ever spent), doesn't make him any less
a great scientist in his "real" life.

Where you get this high priest stuff, though, is a mystery.
Qualifications of generalities, disagreements over fine points,
exceptions to "rules", *this* is the very stuff of biological science;
some sanitized idealization of supposed "objective" purity is not.

Mayr is indeed an interesting character as well as being widely and highly
regarded as a biologist. However, I don't think that Jon is out of line in
labeling him as an "elder high priest". He certainly does enjoy something
like such stature even among people who should (and do) know better.
Otherwise sober, equally qualified, and considerably better known scientists
frequently wax effusive if not downright rhapsodic in signing his praises.
Gould, for example.....and since you brought him up.....has said of Mayr
that he is "The world's greatest living biologist and a writer of
extraordinary insight and clarity". To borrow a rhetorical trick from Mayr
himself, one could go on at some length, but this is hardly the proper place
for it. :)

Personally, I'm not much bothered by Mayr's habit of referring to himself in
the third person. What DOES make me a little uneasy is that his references
and bibliographies lean very heavily on a single author......Ernst Mayr. In
the article you referenced, 13 of 41 references cited were by.....Erst Mayr,
and one was by P. Ashlock and......Ernst Mayr. Looking at "What Evolution
Is", a book by.....Ernst Mayer, in which he recapitulated a lot of what he
said in the above mentioned article, one notes that there are 195
bibliographical references, 15 authored by.....Ernst Mayr, and two coautored
by.....Ernst Mayr. We breath a sigh of relief on noting that the book is
without footnotes. :)

Having read both the article and the book (as well as a couple of others
by.....Ernst Mayr), I am a bit surprised at Mr. Gould's assessment
of.....Ernst Mayr's writing....especially since Mr. Gould was himself justly
famous for the clarity of his writing. Mayr's prose is....one would like to
say abstruse, but obfuscatory in the extreme seems more appropriate.....but
maybe that's just me.

As to his definition of "species", it is notewrothy that in "What Is a
Species and What Is Not" he specifially and quite casually dismisses
organisms that reproduce asexually, which is to say all but an infinitesimal
fraction of all the individual organisms that have lived on Earth over the
course of the last few billion years. Huxley, at least as indicated by the
quoted material below (I haven't clicked on that URL yet), doesn't even
bother to dismiss these uncounted trillions, but simply ignores them.

...quibbles snipped...

I could go on but what's the point.

Exactly, when there is this to do it for you:

http://sorrel.humboldt.edu/~kll1/speciesdef.html

Huxley's definition (though dated) has, I think, some key points that
well illustrate why the "can produce fertile offspring" test, alone, is
a gross oversimplification, without having to call into question
nine-tenths of modern biology and the role of scientists in modern
society g. (Emphases with asterisks mine):

"In general, it is becoming clear that we must use *a combination of
several criteria* in defining species. Some of these are of limiting
nature. For instance, infertility between groups of obviously distinct
mean type is a proof that they are distinct species, although once more
*the converse is not true*. Thus, in most cases, a group can be
distinguished as a species on the basis of the following points jointly:

1. a geographical area consonant with a single origin;
2. a certain degree of constant morphological and presumedly genetic
difference from related groups:
3. absence of intergradation with related groups."

"In most cases a species can thus be regarded as a geographically
definable group, whose members actually interbreed or are potentially
capable of interbreeding *in nature*, which *normally in nature* does
not interbreed freely or with full fertility with related groups, and is
*distinguished from them by constant morphological differences*."

"Thus we must not expect too much of the term species. In the first
place, we must not expect a hard-and-fast definition, for since most
evolution is a gradual process, borderline cases must occur. And in the
second place, we must not expect a single or a simple basis for
definition, since species arise in many different ways."

As noted above, Huxley's definition, like Mayr's, is pretty much caca as
both ignore not only the vast majority of species living on the planet
today, but also of all those that have ever lived on the planet. "Species"
is a fiction. A useful fiction, to be sure, but reification is still what
it is, and the existence of sophism is hardly going to be diproved by one of
its leading practioners.

Science is practiced by humans,
and as such it is a human process, not an objective discipline,
even though scientists might try to convince you otherwise. Human
beliefs, prejudices, feelings, etc. all come into play

Probably the most useful of the "take home points" in many of Steven Jay
Gould's books, but I'd probably opt for "...not an entirely objective
discipline."

Blah, blah, blah.

Hell of a lot more objective than figuring out what fly
works and why. ;)

Sometimes. "Objectivity" comes in varying degrees, depending very heavily
on who is doing what for which reasons under what particular set of
circumstances, and when. Most of what is said about objectivity is highly
subjective.....which, if you think about it, comes in very handy since most
of it is just plain stupid.

and the
more I learn about science the more I'm convinced we don't know
half as much as we think we know.

Or even a tenth as much. Which is why qualifiers such as "in most
cases" doesn't make a statement about a biological process or character
any less "scientific".

Depends on who you ask. We know a hell of a lot more than many people are
capable of imagining, and a lot less than a tenth of what some others
suppose.

......

Scientists are humans and subject to all of the
problems the rest of us have, and their "results" are thus colored
by such. One thing I am sure, they should not be treated as high
priests.

Or as red herrings. When did "high priests" ever vociferously disagree
with one another in public, which scientists *always* do?

The nature of "high priests", "science", "debate", and "public" vary in time
and space. The ancient Greeks argued "philosophy" in the Agora.......you
couldn't get much more public than that. The Romans did it too (as did the
Chinese and many others), though "in public" would only have taken
"citizens" into account, not all those "others". Aquinas, et al., would
have been mystified and/or horrified by modern definitions of "public". If
ya'll think that "species" is an intractable term, try any of the others in
quotation marks above. :)

Wolfgang
and that's the truth.

"Wolfgang wrote
Depends on who you ask. We know a hell of a lot more than many people are
capable of imagining, and a lot less than a tenth of what some others
suppose.

Indian Joe conjures---Damm wolfgang--for those of us with a reflective mind
I wish i could enjoy all this
Who are we

"Joe McIntosh" wrote in message
...

"Wolfgang wrote
Depends on who you ask. We know a hell of a lot more than many people are
capable of imagining, and a lot less than a tenth of what some others
suppose.

Indian Joe conjures---Damm wolfgang--for those of us with a reflective
mind
I wish i could enjoy all this
Who are we

Who do you wanna be?

Wolfgang
who is not above preaching to the choir.