Pauls Blog

New Scientist reports that the Cronulla Fisheries Centre in New South Wales has a new plan to save the endangered Grey Nurse Shark.

Grey Nurse Sharks start with around 40 embryos per pregnancy. However the embryos have a tendency to eat each other in the womb, meaning that only a couple make it to term.

CFC are building a series of artificial uterus’ so that each embryo can be removed from the mother and brought to term. “No eating your brothers and sisters now!”

Ok.. this sounds like a good plan on the face of it – except for a couple of things. An artificial uterus? Pregnancies are hard to pull off even using the original equipment, so it will be interesting to see how successful an artificial womb is.

But aside from that, nature rarely does things without reason. Not mindful reason of course, but billions years of trial and error reason. Forty embryos are fertilised each with the capability of coming to term, so what is the evolutionary benefit of wasting this energy in a cannabalistic feeding frenzy?

Nutrition? Why convert energy into an embryonic shark only to then use it as a food source? Efficiencies are lost in this process.

Many animals “stress test” embryos for suitability before allowing them coming to term. Even in humans as many as one in three embryos don’t make it. It would seem that the most likely explanation what is happening is that the world that these sharks will be entering is a harsh one, particularly when they are young, and this process helps weed out all but the strongest of the pups to be – those with that have the greatest edge.

So while interfering with this process may increase the quantity of sharks born, surely the quality will be diminished.

These sharks are near extinct, so while the idea of bringing as many into the world as possible would seem a good strategy, the consequences of releasing so many sharks that would not normally be brought into the world could have longer term detrimental effects – the gene pool quality is reduced and this would surely have an impact on the long term survivability of the species.

With Dark Energy, Dark Matter and Inflation, I can’t help but think that in 50 years or so that cosmologists and physicists are going to snigger a bit about the lengths we would go to to protect a deep belief in relativity.

Perhaps a few years more than fifty, as doctrine often takes a long old while to shake off.

So you start with the axim that relativity is right – and absolute. Then find a bunch of observations that say that it doesn’t seem to fit the whole picture… then rather than look for ways to refine it, start inventing undetectable stuff that makes it all hang together just like Einstein says.

Inflation – the universe looks the same in all directions. So what? Well the universe is too big for light to have traversed it in the time available considering how old it is. So there hasn’t been time for all the everything to even out like that.

Dark energy and matter were invented to cater for the fact that there isn’t enough gravity to hold galaxies together.

Of course there is no conceivable explanation for inflation, or for what dark energy and matter might be.

So if it was me, I would be saying “yes I know that relativity is excellent and all, but it doesn’t work at small scales or high energies so should we seriously be focusing so much time and effort trying to make the universe fit to it (when quite frankly, it doesn’t give a damn), instead of trying to find a theory that better matches observation? A theory being something testable remember?”