Colleagues: Is marking getting just too much for you? Tired of collating spreadsheets of course work marks? A solution awaits!
Students: Escape your studies & do something for the sheer enjoyment of Biology.
Café Scientifique meets this Wednesday at 7:00pm in Costa Coffee. The speaker is one of our very own - Professor Phil Hammond. Come along, & bring the family, for a good cup of coffee & an excellent discussion.
Please note that Costa management asked us to move to the more intimate rear of the shop last month, so if you look into Costa at ~7:00pm & don't see us, it's probably because we are sequestered down the back away from the noise of the cappuccino machine.
Costa Coffee, Market St, St Andrews
Wednesday 18th January 7.00pm
"The International Whaling Commission: whales, science and politics"
The IWC was established in 1946 with the aim "to provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry". For the first 25 years, the IWC "managed" the destruction of whale populations around Antarctica. Catches were set to try to sustain the industry and the IWC Scientific Committee's advice to reduce catches was ignored. It took the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment to galvanise the IWC to pursue rational management.
Problems continued however and, aided by the rapidly emerging grassroots environmental movement, a moratorium on commercial whaling came into effect in 1985. Since then, some whaling has continued under the (legal) loophole of so-called scientific whaling. The science has moved on, particularly with the development and adoption of a long-term, precautionary method of setting safe catch limits for whaling. But the IWC has reached a stalemate between countries opposed to whaling and those who support it. Furthermore, the politics is embedded in the Scientific Committee, where scientific objectivity concerning matters relating to whaling is often lacking.
Should science play any role in determining whether whale populations are hunted or not? Or is this purely an ethical issue?
Prof. Philip Hammond
Sea Mammal Research Unit, School of Biology, University of St Andrews
Former Chairman of IWC Scientific Committee