So I found a bunch of science books on Openstax and I've been refreshing what I know about science. I think I have finally memorized acid/base, ox/redox. But I also found cases of scientists making statements that fall outside their fields, never imagining they could be wrong and not thinking about the consequences of what they say.
First up was a statement in a text on geology about mammals dominating the earth. Never happened. Can't happen. First, the bottom of the food pyramid on dry land is not animals. It's plants. There's a 10% reduction in available energy as you work your way up the food pyramid. The mammals may be on the top but they get less than 50% of the available energy in any ecosystem. As well as being far less numerous than plants. And also far less numerous in both species and individuals compared to insects and one-celled life.
The second was an astronomy text claiming that the Cretaceous extinction wiped out plant life. Can't happen and let life on dry land survive. Two things. While some mammals hibernate now, where's the evidence that their Cretaceous ancestors hibernated? (or estivated) Second, as soon as mammals come out of lockdown, they have to find food within a couple of days. Not just any food but what they are adapted to eating. A carnivorous mammal that eats all the re-awakened mammals it finds will die, if the re-awakened mammals don't have their food -- which is plants. If they are adapted to fruit, there has to be fruit. If all plant life on dry land was wiped out, there could be buried seeds. But the other problem is they have to be buried near the re-awakened mammals or the mammals die before they can find the food.
Part two, acid rain. By the time mammals re-awakened -- if any of them went dormant, which the text does not discuss -- they needed water that wouldn't poison them. Their ancestors drank sweet water, not salt water or acid water. And dry land life dies of thirst faster than starvation. So while I don't doubt there was acid rain, there was at worst a gradient: some areas escaped acid rain and the acidity was lower around them and so on up the gradient to places wiped out by acid rain. If there were any.
Part three, birds. Birds cannot survive without eating more than their body weight most days, and some are food specific. While bug-eating birds are opportunistic and will eat berries or suet when bugs are dead (in the winter), seed and nut birds are not opportunistic. If plants were completely destroyed, these birds would die out pretty quickly. The claim that plant life was destroyed is tantamount to saying that Archaeopteryx and Hesperornis and so on left no descendants among modern birds. That is NOT what this website says.
https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/birds/birdfr.html
I realize that most of our familiar songbirds developed at the same time as humans emerged from the apes. However, the ancestry of ostriches goes back further than the Cretaceous disaster. That's impossible if they had no food to eat or all the water was poisoned with acid.
So when you are writing about your specialty field and you come to the point where it crosses boundaries with something you know nothing about, 1) stop and consult an expert in that field; 2) think hard before you set finger to key or speak into your recorder app; and 3) have that expert read what you wrote and tell you "no, it can't work like that because..."
It ought to be pretty embarrassing for Openstax that a non-specialist can pick up on the impracticality of what their experts wrote. They ought to pull their texts and edit them for more such mistakes. As long as people are allowed to publish texts that show they don't know what they're talking about but nevertheless talked about it, stupid ideas are going to persist. Kind of like what I said on my Gibbon page.
I'm just saying...
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