Name: ______________________________________________________________________________________________ Period: ____________________
Separating Fact and Fiction
Good Science
Bad Science
Define:
Fact:
Inference:
Bias:
Article One:
1. Read the article.
2. Using a blue colored pencil, highlight 2 facts that you find in the article. Explain how you verified these facts in the margin next to your highlighted statement.
3. Using a yellow colored pencil, highlight 2 inferences.
4. Using a red colored pencil, highlight 2 illogical conclusions either based on fact or fantasy.
Analysis Questions:
Article Two:
1. Read the second article.
2. Using a blue colored pencil, highlight 2 facts that you find in the article. Explain how you verified these facts in the margin next to your highlighted statement.
3. Using a yellow colored pencil, highlight 2 inferences.
4. Using a red colored pencil, highlight 2 illogical conclusions either based on fact or fantasy (IF POSSIBLE).
Extension Activity:
Write a 5 - 6 sentence paragraph discussing the Nitrogen cycle. You have been asked to write this paragraph for the “Weekly World News,” a tabloid. Write another 5-6 sentence paragraph but this time as is you were writing for a Scientific Journal like NATURE. Be sure to include at least 3 facts, 3 inferences in each paragraph.
ARTICLE ONE
Killing off wild predators is a stupid idea
They're not serial killers, Quartz
By Loren Grush, Arielle Duhaime-Ross, and Elizabeth Lopatto on September 10, 2015
The headline looked like a joke: "To truly end animal suffering, the most ethical choice is to kill wild predators (especially Cecil the lion)." Instead, it was an apparently serious opinion piece published earlier today on the news site Quartz. Walter Palmer — the infamous dentist who shot and killed Cecil the Lion — actually did the world a favor, the article says, since Cecil would have killed many more animals before he died. The authors argue that humans should hunt and kill predators in order to save prey animals from dying horrible deaths.
extended entry
Several readers of the Quartz piece assumed it was satire. But Quartz's Editor-In-Chief, Kevin Delaney, told us in a Twitter direct message that it's "not satire; it’s an ideas piece on the issue." (The authors, Amanda MacAskill and William MacAskill, are — respectively — a philosophy Ph.D. student at New York University and an associate professor of philosophy at Lincoln College, part of Oxford University.) It's too bad they're serious; the arguments put forth are ridiculous. The piece is riddled with generalizations, faulty analogies, and propositions that have no evidence to support them. It is an embarrassment to ethicists, who typically have higher standards for public argument.
“When I read the article in Quartz, I had to laugh, because I thought the article was written as a straw man to illustrate the many potential ethical points of view you can take regarding killing of top predators," Karl Cottenie, an associate professor of ecology at the University of Guelph, told The Verge. "The arguments made in the article seems relatively far-fetched."
The authors describe predators as murderers, comparing them to serial killers "intent on murdering several people over the next year." This is the anthropomorphic fallacy at work — projecting human emotions and attributes onto animals. It also serves as what philosophers call an "intuition pump," a problem framed in a specific fashion in order to elicit an author’s desired intuitive conclusion. Actually, predators aren't cold-blooded killers bent on destroying other animals' lives. Predators’ kills aren’t just necessary for their own survival; the kills also maintain a balanced ecosystem. It’s not a coincidence that keystone species — so named because they support an environment like a keystone supports a building — are predators. They eat quickly-reproducing prey that could otherwise overwhelm an area’s resources; this service lets animals that have slower reproductive cycles also have access to food.
So reducing the size of predator populations, even by a little, could have dire consequences. Prey animals might live longer, but their lives would be dominated by competing for food with other animals, and many — if not all — would eventually starve. This is to say nothing of the increased incidence of disease that comes with tightly-packed populations. "Let's say you kill the predators to prevent the prey from suffering." said Dan Blumstein, an ecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. "That means there will be more prey, but they're going to suffer anyway. They'll become overabundant."
Case studies have shown that prey populations drastically increase when left unchecked by predation. For example, scientists found that in North American forests, deer populations averaged six times higher in places without wolves, compared to areas with the predator. A paper published in Science in 2011 found that the loss of lions and leopards in sub-Saharan Africa resulted in a giant increase in the region's baboon populations.
The increase in baboons, predictably, had consequences. The now more-numerous animals had to find new sources of food, so they started foraging closer to human-populated settlements. As a result, more people were infected with intestinal parasites that originated with the baboons. Arguably, intestinal parasites increase suffering in their hosts.
This is something that the MacAskills actually seem to address. They write that "the cases that we are considering don’t involve a large-scale intervention." Rather, they want individual hunts, since those "are unlikely to have knock-on effects on the ecosystem of the region." On what evidence do they base this statement? None.
What evidence does show is that small changes, like a decline in a certain kind of predator, can have very large effects. A decline in insect-eating bird species worldwide, for instance, led to an increase in the pests they normally consume. That has, in turn, led to plant damage — damage that affects humans who rely on plants to live. These are the types of cascading effects that the authors seem to ignore entirely, probably because scientists barely understand these food web connections in the first place.
“The historical wildlife management record makes it quite clear that it is very tricky to anticipate the full range of complex ecological ramifications put into play whenever humans choose to cull top predators," says John Fryxell, a biologist also at the University of Guelph.
That's not the only problem. There's a more basic one: the authors use "predator" freely but don’t define it. "Predators are everywhere," Blumstein said. Some predators, like cats or minks, are obligate carnivores — they cannot survive on plant-based diets. Other predators — humans among them — have more flexibility. Some predators are microscopic — do they count for the purposes of this argument? What about predators, like spiders or frogs, that eat pests like mosquitoes — which are themselves the source of suffering in their bites, and also in the diseases those bites transmit. What about predators like the killer whale, which prey largely on other predators like seals and sea lions?
The MacAskills suggest taking predators out of their natural environment and giving them "good lives that don't involve hunting prey." However, they offer no explanations for how to pull off such an incredibly labor-intensive and land-consuming endeavor, nor do they explain how obligate carnivores will survive on plant-based diets; asking a tiger to eat plants, food its body cannot process, for the rest of its natural life seems like a sure-fire cause of animal suffering. You know, for the tiger that is now starving to death.
It’s not enough to state that "interventions" — what interventions? — "could be justified following a rigorous risk analysis." (One thinks of Ben Franklin: "So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.") What the MacAskills are asking is that we undertake tremendous ecosystem upheaval and damage, at staggering expense and at considerable risk to the lives of people involved — to "prevent suffering."
Life is suffering; nature is red in tooth and claw, as Lord Tennyson rightly noted. Pain is an exquisite warning system, meant to keep an animal alive; the only sure-fire way to avoid suffering is to die. Perhaps, then, the true way to alleviate suffering is to increase, rather than decrease, the number of predators. There will be more deaths — and more animals that are no longer suffering, for that very reason.
ARTICLE TWO
The story of Walter Palmer, a Minnesotan dentist who hunted and killed Cecil the lion, rocked the internet—and indeed the world—this summer. PETA president Ingrid Newkirk has even called for Cecil’s killer--who went back to work this week despite a crowd of lingering protesters--to be hanged…
As long-term vegetarians who abstain from meat for ethical reasons, we are both supporters of animal activists who seek to improve the lives of animals. So you might expect us to agree with activists like Ingrid Newkirk that the killing of Cecil is a terrible thing. But we don’t. In fact, we think it may be the case that animal rights activists should support the killing of predatory animals like Cecil…
The animal welfare conversation has generally centered on human-caused animal suffering and human-caused animal deaths. But we’re not the only ones who hunt and kill. It is true (and terrible) that an estimated 20 billion chickens were born into captivity in 2013 alone, many of whom live in terrible conditions in factory farms. But there are estimated 60 billion land birds and over 100 billion land mammals living in the wild. Who is working to alleviate their suffering? As the philosopher Jeff McMahan writes: “Wherever there is animal life, predators are stalking, chasing, capturing, killing, and devouring their prey. Agonized suffering and violent death are ubiquitous and continuous.”
If we believe that we should protect animals from unnecessary suffering and death, then it seems that we should be focusing much more on reducing the non-human causes of animal suffering and death that occur almost continuously in the wild. Which brings us back to Cecil. Just as we may be able to alleviate the suffering caused to wild animals by disease or natural disasters, we might also be able to do something about predation and the often-brutal competition that permeates the natural food chain.
Predatory animals cause many animal deaths in the wild. Lions hunt their own prey and scavenge kills that have died naturally or that have been killed by other predators like hyenas. Although male lions will leave the bulk of the hunting to females, they create greater demand for prey kills from both female lions and the predators from whom they scavenge. A male lion requires about 15 pounds of meat per day and the kill rate for lions is estimated at anywhere between 10 and 47 kills per year. These kills can be difficult towatch, but they are an inevitable outcome of allowing predators to continue to live.
By killing predators, we can save the lives of the many prey animals like wildebeests, zebras, and buffalos in the local area that would otherwise be killed in order to keep the animals at the top of the food chain alive. And there’s no reason for considering the lives of predators like lions to be more important than the lives of their prey…
A final objection to the view outlined here is that we should not prevent animals from engaging in hunting behavior because such behavior is “natural.” And we can’t blame animals for behaving in accordance with their nature. (Of course, hunting behavior in humans is also natural, but people have not offered this as a defense of Cecil’s killer.) But a behavior may be natural—and may even be required for survival—without thereby being good. If a species emerged that had to viciously torture humans in order to survive, we would not conclude that their torture of humans is morally OK. It’s also important to emphasize that we are not making any moral judgments about predator behavior. Predators don’t have the kind of cognitive awareness that is probably required for moral responsibility. But we don’t need to think that actions have been undertaken by morally responsible agents in order to think that we are required to intervene and prevent them from happening. An infant with a handgun is not morally responsible if she accidentally shoots someone, but we are morally required to take the handgun from the infant as soon as we see that she has it. Similarly, we may think that predators are not morally responsible for their actions, but that we are morally required to prevent them from harming local prey populations.
Given the facts, therefore, it seems hard to see why animal welfare advocates would be in such uproar over the killing of Cecil. Walter Palmer killed one animal, but in doing so he saved dozens of others.
Separating Fact and Fiction
Good Science
Bad Science
Define:
Fact:
Inference:
Bias:
Article One:
1. Read the article.
2. Using a blue colored pencil, highlight 2 facts that you find in the article. Explain how you verified these facts in the margin next to your highlighted statement.
3. Using a yellow colored pencil, highlight 2 inferences.
4. Using a red colored pencil, highlight 2 illogical conclusions either based on fact or fantasy.
Analysis Questions:
- What are 3 clues in this article that alert you to it being “good” or “bad” science?
- What are 3 ways you can identify sound (good) scientific evidence from the bad?
- Why might it be important to be cautious about some inferences? (Hint: Think about what they are based on)
- What bias does the publisher of this article have? (Hint: this is a blog.)
Article Two:
1. Read the second article.
2. Using a blue colored pencil, highlight 2 facts that you find in the article. Explain how you verified these facts in the margin next to your highlighted statement.
3. Using a yellow colored pencil, highlight 2 inferences.
4. Using a red colored pencil, highlight 2 illogical conclusions either based on fact or fantasy (IF POSSIBLE).
Extension Activity:
Write a 5 - 6 sentence paragraph discussing the Nitrogen cycle. You have been asked to write this paragraph for the “Weekly World News,” a tabloid. Write another 5-6 sentence paragraph but this time as is you were writing for a Scientific Journal like NATURE. Be sure to include at least 3 facts, 3 inferences in each paragraph.
ARTICLE ONE
Killing off wild predators is a stupid idea
They're not serial killers, Quartz
By Loren Grush, Arielle Duhaime-Ross, and Elizabeth Lopatto on September 10, 2015
The headline looked like a joke: "To truly end animal suffering, the most ethical choice is to kill wild predators (especially Cecil the lion)." Instead, it was an apparently serious opinion piece published earlier today on the news site Quartz. Walter Palmer — the infamous dentist who shot and killed Cecil the Lion — actually did the world a favor, the article says, since Cecil would have killed many more animals before he died. The authors argue that humans should hunt and kill predators in order to save prey animals from dying horrible deaths.
extended entry
Several readers of the Quartz piece assumed it was satire. But Quartz's Editor-In-Chief, Kevin Delaney, told us in a Twitter direct message that it's "not satire; it’s an ideas piece on the issue." (The authors, Amanda MacAskill and William MacAskill, are — respectively — a philosophy Ph.D. student at New York University and an associate professor of philosophy at Lincoln College, part of Oxford University.) It's too bad they're serious; the arguments put forth are ridiculous. The piece is riddled with generalizations, faulty analogies, and propositions that have no evidence to support them. It is an embarrassment to ethicists, who typically have higher standards for public argument.
“When I read the article in Quartz, I had to laugh, because I thought the article was written as a straw man to illustrate the many potential ethical points of view you can take regarding killing of top predators," Karl Cottenie, an associate professor of ecology at the University of Guelph, told The Verge. "The arguments made in the article seems relatively far-fetched."
The authors describe predators as murderers, comparing them to serial killers "intent on murdering several people over the next year." This is the anthropomorphic fallacy at work — projecting human emotions and attributes onto animals. It also serves as what philosophers call an "intuition pump," a problem framed in a specific fashion in order to elicit an author’s desired intuitive conclusion. Actually, predators aren't cold-blooded killers bent on destroying other animals' lives. Predators’ kills aren’t just necessary for their own survival; the kills also maintain a balanced ecosystem. It’s not a coincidence that keystone species — so named because they support an environment like a keystone supports a building — are predators. They eat quickly-reproducing prey that could otherwise overwhelm an area’s resources; this service lets animals that have slower reproductive cycles also have access to food.
So reducing the size of predator populations, even by a little, could have dire consequences. Prey animals might live longer, but their lives would be dominated by competing for food with other animals, and many — if not all — would eventually starve. This is to say nothing of the increased incidence of disease that comes with tightly-packed populations. "Let's say you kill the predators to prevent the prey from suffering." said Dan Blumstein, an ecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. "That means there will be more prey, but they're going to suffer anyway. They'll become overabundant."
Case studies have shown that prey populations drastically increase when left unchecked by predation. For example, scientists found that in North American forests, deer populations averaged six times higher in places without wolves, compared to areas with the predator. A paper published in Science in 2011 found that the loss of lions and leopards in sub-Saharan Africa resulted in a giant increase in the region's baboon populations.
The increase in baboons, predictably, had consequences. The now more-numerous animals had to find new sources of food, so they started foraging closer to human-populated settlements. As a result, more people were infected with intestinal parasites that originated with the baboons. Arguably, intestinal parasites increase suffering in their hosts.
This is something that the MacAskills actually seem to address. They write that "the cases that we are considering don’t involve a large-scale intervention." Rather, they want individual hunts, since those "are unlikely to have knock-on effects on the ecosystem of the region." On what evidence do they base this statement? None.
What evidence does show is that small changes, like a decline in a certain kind of predator, can have very large effects. A decline in insect-eating bird species worldwide, for instance, led to an increase in the pests they normally consume. That has, in turn, led to plant damage — damage that affects humans who rely on plants to live. These are the types of cascading effects that the authors seem to ignore entirely, probably because scientists barely understand these food web connections in the first place.
“The historical wildlife management record makes it quite clear that it is very tricky to anticipate the full range of complex ecological ramifications put into play whenever humans choose to cull top predators," says John Fryxell, a biologist also at the University of Guelph.
That's not the only problem. There's a more basic one: the authors use "predator" freely but don’t define it. "Predators are everywhere," Blumstein said. Some predators, like cats or minks, are obligate carnivores — they cannot survive on plant-based diets. Other predators — humans among them — have more flexibility. Some predators are microscopic — do they count for the purposes of this argument? What about predators, like spiders or frogs, that eat pests like mosquitoes — which are themselves the source of suffering in their bites, and also in the diseases those bites transmit. What about predators like the killer whale, which prey largely on other predators like seals and sea lions?
The MacAskills suggest taking predators out of their natural environment and giving them "good lives that don't involve hunting prey." However, they offer no explanations for how to pull off such an incredibly labor-intensive and land-consuming endeavor, nor do they explain how obligate carnivores will survive on plant-based diets; asking a tiger to eat plants, food its body cannot process, for the rest of its natural life seems like a sure-fire cause of animal suffering. You know, for the tiger that is now starving to death.
It’s not enough to state that "interventions" — what interventions? — "could be justified following a rigorous risk analysis." (One thinks of Ben Franklin: "So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.") What the MacAskills are asking is that we undertake tremendous ecosystem upheaval and damage, at staggering expense and at considerable risk to the lives of people involved — to "prevent suffering."
Life is suffering; nature is red in tooth and claw, as Lord Tennyson rightly noted. Pain is an exquisite warning system, meant to keep an animal alive; the only sure-fire way to avoid suffering is to die. Perhaps, then, the true way to alleviate suffering is to increase, rather than decrease, the number of predators. There will be more deaths — and more animals that are no longer suffering, for that very reason.
ARTICLE TWO
The story of Walter Palmer, a Minnesotan dentist who hunted and killed Cecil the lion, rocked the internet—and indeed the world—this summer. PETA president Ingrid Newkirk has even called for Cecil’s killer--who went back to work this week despite a crowd of lingering protesters--to be hanged…
As long-term vegetarians who abstain from meat for ethical reasons, we are both supporters of animal activists who seek to improve the lives of animals. So you might expect us to agree with activists like Ingrid Newkirk that the killing of Cecil is a terrible thing. But we don’t. In fact, we think it may be the case that animal rights activists should support the killing of predatory animals like Cecil…
The animal welfare conversation has generally centered on human-caused animal suffering and human-caused animal deaths. But we’re not the only ones who hunt and kill. It is true (and terrible) that an estimated 20 billion chickens were born into captivity in 2013 alone, many of whom live in terrible conditions in factory farms. But there are estimated 60 billion land birds and over 100 billion land mammals living in the wild. Who is working to alleviate their suffering? As the philosopher Jeff McMahan writes: “Wherever there is animal life, predators are stalking, chasing, capturing, killing, and devouring their prey. Agonized suffering and violent death are ubiquitous and continuous.”
If we believe that we should protect animals from unnecessary suffering and death, then it seems that we should be focusing much more on reducing the non-human causes of animal suffering and death that occur almost continuously in the wild. Which brings us back to Cecil. Just as we may be able to alleviate the suffering caused to wild animals by disease or natural disasters, we might also be able to do something about predation and the often-brutal competition that permeates the natural food chain.
Predatory animals cause many animal deaths in the wild. Lions hunt their own prey and scavenge kills that have died naturally or that have been killed by other predators like hyenas. Although male lions will leave the bulk of the hunting to females, they create greater demand for prey kills from both female lions and the predators from whom they scavenge. A male lion requires about 15 pounds of meat per day and the kill rate for lions is estimated at anywhere between 10 and 47 kills per year. These kills can be difficult towatch, but they are an inevitable outcome of allowing predators to continue to live.
By killing predators, we can save the lives of the many prey animals like wildebeests, zebras, and buffalos in the local area that would otherwise be killed in order to keep the animals at the top of the food chain alive. And there’s no reason for considering the lives of predators like lions to be more important than the lives of their prey…
A final objection to the view outlined here is that we should not prevent animals from engaging in hunting behavior because such behavior is “natural.” And we can’t blame animals for behaving in accordance with their nature. (Of course, hunting behavior in humans is also natural, but people have not offered this as a defense of Cecil’s killer.) But a behavior may be natural—and may even be required for survival—without thereby being good. If a species emerged that had to viciously torture humans in order to survive, we would not conclude that their torture of humans is morally OK. It’s also important to emphasize that we are not making any moral judgments about predator behavior. Predators don’t have the kind of cognitive awareness that is probably required for moral responsibility. But we don’t need to think that actions have been undertaken by morally responsible agents in order to think that we are required to intervene and prevent them from happening. An infant with a handgun is not morally responsible if she accidentally shoots someone, but we are morally required to take the handgun from the infant as soon as we see that she has it. Similarly, we may think that predators are not morally responsible for their actions, but that we are morally required to prevent them from harming local prey populations.
Given the facts, therefore, it seems hard to see why animal welfare advocates would be in such uproar over the killing of Cecil. Walter Palmer killed one animal, but in doing so he saved dozens of others.