WIKIMEDIA, DAVID MONNIAUXA meta-analysis of more than 12,000 years of world history and climate data, collected by nearly 190 researchers in diverse disciplines, provides some of the strongest evidence yet that human violence does increase with warming temperatures and precipitation extremes. Specifically, interpersonal violence, such as domestic violence or rape, is expected to rise by 4 percent for every standard deviation of change, while the frequency of intergroup conflict could rise by 14 percent. By 2050, global temperatures are expected to increase by at least two standard deviations. “The paper is remarkably strong,” Thomas Homer-Dixon, an environmental and political scientist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, told The Scientist. “[It means] the world will be a very violent place by mid-century if climate change continues as projected.”
There remains, however, the question of why. Coauthor Solomon Hsiang from the University of California, Berkeley, suggested that the changing availability of resources like water or crops could underlie the problem, causing economies to falter and more fights to break out. Alternatively, increases in violence could stem from the mass migration, urbanization, and/or growing inequalities that come with a changing climate.
WIKIMEDIAEthnic diversity is one key to scientific progress, argues W. Malcolm Byrnes of Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, DC, in an opinion piece at www.the-scientist.com. Byrnes highlights the life of Ernest Everett Just, an early 20th century African American biologist credited with discovering what is known as the fast block to polyspermy, as an example of how diversity can bring different experiences and perspectives to the table. Just emphasized the importance of the cytoplasm in cellular differentiation, whereas other big hitters of the time, such as Thomas Hunt Morgan, argued that genes were the dominant driver of cellular processes. And although Morgan’s camp was right in many ways, as the ENCODE project recently revealed, gene activity is highly dependent on extranuclear determinants. Brynes argues that Just’s ability to hold his cytoplasmic view in the face of such strong opposition was due, in part, to his cultural background.
“As a professor at Howard University, Just was familiar with the landscape of black intellectual thought,” Brynes writes. “He knew about the writings of scholars such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke. Du Bois, for example, believed that ...
