TED Community » Job van der Zwan

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• A reply on Talk: Allan Savory: How to fight desertification and reverse climate change

  Mar 14 2013: "It isn't the livestock per se, it is the reintroduction of life forms from their poo; i.e., microorganisms."
  
  Another thing just occurred to me: when I grew up in the countryside Netherlands one of the problems I kept hearing about was the algal blooms in the creeks and rivers. The cause of these was run-off of fertilisers. Now I want you to think about that for a second: the cause of algal blooms was a SURPLUS of certain nutrients.
  
  It could very well be that the grazing animals did not only fulfil the function of being walking biotanks with the right bacterial cultures to digest old plant material, but also changed the nutrient composition in such a way that there was no risk of algae overgrowing the soil.
  
  I'm no biologist, so I completely agree with you: this is a question for soil biologists to answer.
  
  But personally I do think that to mimic nature it would be sensible to also increase the amount of fauna biomass - I think many people do not realise just how teeming with wildlife nature used to be up until a few centuries ago.
• +2

  A reply on Talk: Allan Savory: How to fight desertification and reverse climate change

  Mar 13 2013: "What exactly did the animals contribute that was key?"
  
  Being walking incubators protecting the bacteria from the hazards of the outside world.
  
  "Massive herds of livestock may not be the answer in the long run: I can see it now- hybrids bred for African grasslands, all equally susceptible to particular diseases, and then the antibiotics start, and you know where that road leads."
  
  The intent is to mimic the original ecosystem, and you expect this will result in aiming for *less* biodiversity? Also, do notice that this method is aimed at helping farmers in poor developing nations to fix their economic and ecological woes, which are related. And it seems to do that by explcitily *not* Westernizing their practices.
• +5

  A reply on Talk: Allan Savory: How to fight desertification and reverse climate change

  Mar 13 2013: " He removed native people from their land, destroyed 40,000 elephants and THEN discovered he was wrong. How can this barbarian be invited to speak at TED?! "
  
  Yes, because learning from your mistakes and telling others how avoid them is the worst thing you can do. You know what I consider barbaric? Not giving someone a chance to atone for one's sins.
• +3

  A reply on Talk: Simon Berrow: How do you save a shark you know nothing about?

  Mar 4 2012: That's the biggest one...

• A reply on Talk: Annie Murphy Paul: What we learn before we're born

  Dec 29 2011: Isn't she advocating *against* considering every mental state an illness, saying that it would be better to consider PTSD an adaptation to different set of circumstances than those actually present?
• +2

  A reply on Talk: Annie Murphy Paul: What we learn before we're born

  Dec 29 2011: Yes , that's the idea behind the scientific method after all: the burden of proof is on you.
  
  I actually think it's dangerous to derive any ethical conclusions from this, like Annie Murphy Paul herself warns us. "You can't derive ought from is," as Hume would say. And in that sense I don't see any arguments for or against abortion derived from this lecture. Yes, there's a connection in the sense that both topics deal with the development of the embryo in the womb. But any ethical conclusions one derives from it will depend on ethical premisses he or she had before anyway.
  
  There are different mechanisms at work, most notably epigenetic effects and effects by the shaping of neural pathways in the developing brain. So the latter only applies to pregnancies already well on their way. I don't think this changes anything about arguments one might have about whether or not embryos are fully conscious, because science relating to that depends on neural pathways already being there and being active in the first place. It's more of the same, in that sense.
  
  The epigenetic ones have even less to do with ethics: it just says that cells respond to their context, and if the first cells in an embryo have fundamental properties changed, those changes will apply to whatever develops out of those cells. This says nothing about consciousness or about the sacredness of life. Whether or not one thinks all life is sacred, or at what point an embryo becomes conscious or so human it's "evil" to abort doesn't change, as far as I can see.
  
  The discussion about abortion boils down to whatever values are sacred to us, and if there's a gap there no rational discussion will ever bridge it.

• A comment on Talk: Alison Gopnik: What do babies think?

  Oct 10 2011: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." - Max Planck
  
  Above was quoted by Thomas Kuhn when talking about his concept of paradigm shifts in science.
  
  It applies to this talk in two ways: in the sense of how this psychology paradigm has shifted in the last twenty years (as she mentions at the beginning of the lecture) and in the sense of how Planck's quote fits with the notion that we're best at trying out new stuff when we're young.

• A comment on Conversation: Post your top 5 N-grams here!

  Sep 20 2011: "I have an idea"
  http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=I+have+an+idea&year_start=1700&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3
  I wonder how I should interpret this...
• +2

  A reply on Talk: Jessica Green: Are we filtering the wrong microbes?

  Aug 5 2011: Like you said: her point is more that we shouldn't try to sterilize the environment, but instead manage the microbial ecosystem to turn into a version that is more healthy for us. Sterilization is just one tool for achieving this, and a crude one at that. Which means it shouldn't be blindly applied.
  
  It's kind of like the ideas behind permaculture in that way. Sure, you can use chemical fertilisers, but if you don't take care of the soil ecosystem you will destroy your agricultural foundation in the long run.
  
  As for germs evolving into harmful or harmless variants, well, we can also figure out when and why that happens. That's why I mentioned Paul Ewald's talk in my comment below, he talks exactly about that:
  http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_ewald_asks_can_we_domesticate_germs.html
  
  Basically, when the disease requires human-to-human contact (the "attack vector" of the disease is physical contact), it tends to be less lethal. So the way to make diseases harmless is by cut off the routes through which it can spread.
• +6

  A comment on Talk: Jessica Green: Are we filtering the wrong microbes?

  Aug 4 2011: It's great that this false sense of natural and human-made environments being completely separated is breaking down. Biology is going to be the rocket science of this century!
  
  By the way, hasn't it already been shown many times that plants greatly improve the quality of air inside buildings?
  
  Also, I think this should be in the "what to watch next" section, since it explores really similar ideas:
  http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_ewald_asks_can_we_domesticate_germs.html