Attack of the Killer Brain Worms

The good folks at the National Wildlife Federation sent me an email last week warning me that Moose were disappearing from northwestern Minnesota because of global warming.

Because of global warming? Nonsense.

Moose are disappearing in northwestern Minnesota because of a type of brain worm or fluke that has spread into the area with a rapid rise in non-native Whitetail Deer densities.

"Global warming" may be the "cause du jour," but it is not what is causing Moose populations in northwestern Minnesota to plummet. Cyclical episodes of "Moose sickness" have been documented in Minnesota since 1912, and brain worm has been implicated since 1965.

This is not the first time I have seen "global warming" trotted out as a make-weight excuse for one problem or another. Up at the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Maryland, for example, where the marshy ground has been channeled, plowed, planted in corn, and invaded by non-native nutria (coypu), a droning video in the visitor's center says the threat to Blackwater is "global warming." Horse feathers! The threat to Blackwater is (and always has been) humans who have channeled, plowed, planted, drained, and brought non-native nutria into the marsh. Global warming has nothing to do with that one. Let's not oversell global warming, eh? If it's a real disease (and it very well may be), we shouldn't have to invent symptoms, and crying wolf when it is not there will only harm the cause. More science and less marketing might be a good idea at this point.

Of course, it hardly matters what I think; "global warming" is now a "meme" that is self-replicating across the nation.

About 30 years ago, Richard Dawkins coined the term to refer to a unit of cultural information that propagates itself from one mind to another like a viral email, a parable, a pop tune, or an urban legend.

A successful meme is not necessarily "good" culture; often it's low-brow stuff like a TV-show catch phrase ("Where's the beef?") or a commercial jingle. Sometimes it's a news story or a joke. At other times it's a story as resonant as Moby Dick or a value expressed in such deeply meaningful phrases as "Tune in, drop out and turn on."

If you're following me up to now, then stick around and watch this little video clip of Dan Dennett talking about memes and brain worms, terrorists and radical Islam. It takes a while to load, even with a broadband connection, but it's well worth a watch. I promise.