David Lee's List: Science

• the first blowout in history to release oil in such deep waters, nearly a mile below the surface
• Far below the sea, the spill threatens organisms of all kinds and, indirectly, the ecosystem at large, though the extent of the danger is still obscured.
• The effects of oil in the water column and at the sea floor, on the other hand, remains a mystery.
• massive plumes of dispersed oil up to 30 miles long by seven miles wide and hundreds of feet thick
• Conventional wisdom suggests that oil is lighter than water and therefore floats, but that's not entirely the case when a complex mixture of crude oil and natural gas is gushing from a well a mile below the surface, at high temperature and pressure, as is happening right now in the gulf.
• oxygen levels in the water can drop rapidly and threaten the organisms living there
• water within the plumes was 30 percent less oxygenated than normal
• "It's like a lush jungle down there," Joye says. Even if oil exposure doesn't kill these organisms, it could have chronic, long-term effects, like impaired growth or reproduction.
• any impact on the deep-sea communities is likely to have more broad effects, since the whole ocean is connected by various biological processes
• any oil in the deep-sea environment could persist for a long time. The majority of oil on the surface evaporates, washes up on shore, or is degraded by natural weathering and oil-eating microbes. In the deep sea, on the other hand, it's dark and still, meaning no weathering and no evaporation. Microbial degradation is pretty much the only mitigating process—but it's slow.
• It's also essential to get an accurate measure of the amount of oil being released, as this would allow scientists to deduce how much oil could be hiding below the surface based on the size of the oil slick and estimates of other factors like evaporation.

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• evolutionary psychologists have developed a plausible account of the moral sense. They say it is in large part natural selection’s way of equipping people to play non-zero-sum games — games that can be win-win if the players cooperate or lose-lose if they don’t
• to say that God trusted natural selection to do the creative work assumes that natural selection, once in motion, would do it; that evolution would yield a species that in essential respects — in spiritually relevant respects, you might say — was like the human species. But this claim, though inherently speculative, turns out to be scientifically plausible.
• there are plenty of evolutionary biologists who believe that evolution, given long enough, was likely to create a smart, articulate species
• If evolution does tend to eventually “converge” on certain moral intuitions, does that mean there were moral rules “out there” from the beginning, before humans became aware of them — that natural selection didn’t “invent” human moral intuitions so much as “discover” them?
• any god whose creative role ends with the beginning of natural selection is, strictly speaking, logically compatible with Darwinism
• atheist biologists could try to appreciate something they still seem not to get: talk of “higher purpose” is not just compatible with science, but engrained in it
• an organism’s evolutionarily infused purpose is “as real as purpose could ever be.”

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