SHOULD scientists ever put a gloss on their data to bolster support for a “good cause”? Growing unhappiness about the Red List – the Oscars of extinction risk – underline why this is bad idea (see “Conservation’s ‘Red List’ is unscientific and often wrong”). Through the list, the International Union for Conservation of Nature has done an admirable job in alerting us to the threat of species loss, but in doing so it omitted to highlight the uncertainty in its findings. As a result, valuable resources may be going into saving the wrong species, and the list itself stands to lose…
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