The post wasn't about Popper, but taking on the hard problems. For example, bee decline. People ask me all the time, "What's with the bees, I hear they are going extinct?" I try to give a short answer but every time I do, I exceed their attention span.
They want a quick answer. I should just say "they're fine, don't give it a second thought." But then they would think I must be out of the loop. I'm up on it, all right.
For example, another article just came out using a computer simulation to show that pesticides are the most plausible cause of bee decline. They refer to alternate theories, and claim that those theories are too weak, and therefore do not falsify their theory, which then becomes the best or only explanation.
Meanwhile, a very competent paper comes out showing very clearly how IAPV rapidly multiplies in bees' brains, causing them to either get lost or abandon the hive, leading to colony collapse. Which brings us right back to the multiple causes theory.
And another group proposes a "systems approach" to understand bee decline. "We describe how a new integrated model could be built to simulate multifactorial impacts on the honeybee colony system, using building blocks from the reviewed models."
Everybody wants to get into the act
Bryden, J., Gill, R. J., Mitton, R. A., Raine, N. E., & Jansen, V. A. (2013). Chronic sublethal stress causes bee colony failure. Ecology Letters.
Li, Z., Chen, Y., Zhang, S., Chen, S., Li, W., Yan, L., ... & Su, S. (2013). Viral Infection Affects Sucrose Responsiveness and Homing Ability of Forager Honey Bees, Apis mellifera L. PLOS ONE, 8(10), e77354.
Becher, M. A., Osborne, J. L., Thorbek, P., Kennedy, P. J., & Grimm, V. (2013). Towards a systems approach for understanding honeybee decline: a stocktaking and synthesis of existing models. Journal of Applied Ecology.
Chicago
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