NOTHING SO BECOMES THE DARWINISTS AS THEIR INSISTENCE ON STASIS:

A home from home: saving species from climate change: How can we save some of our most charismatic animals from extinction due to climate change? One US biologist, Camille Parmesan, has a radical suggestion: just pick them up and move them (Suzanne Goldenberg, 2/12/10, The Guardian)

Camille Parmesan, a butterfly ­biologist at the University of Texas at Austin, has been monitoring the effects of rapid climate change on ­species – particularly those threatened because they cannot adapt to or ­escape from rising temperatures – for more than a decade now. But her idea for a modern day's Noah's ark remains hugely controversial.

"The idea is that, for certain ­species at very high risk of extinction due to climate change, we should actively pick them up and move them to ­suitable locations that are outside their historic range," she tells me in her ­office at the university campus, near the biology laboratory in which she and her ­husband keep myriad caterpillar samples in the cold store.

One ought never underestimate the degree to which Darwinism was accepted among the smart set because it is self-flattering.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 12, 2010 7:33 AM