LETTERS

The Future of Farming and Conservation

THE RESEARCH ARTICLE BY R. E. GREEN ET AL. Farming and the fate of wild nature (28 Jan., p. 550) adds to the already burgeoning literature on agroecosystems and conservation. The authors are to be commended for their attempt to develop a model that could be of use in decision-making about agricultural development and wildlife conservation. Unfortunately, this work contains some critical errors, conceptual flaws, and missing literature that invalidate its conclusions. We list here a few such problems. 1) The assertion is made that existing agroenvironment schemes depend on farmers receiving large amounts of financial compensation from the government. Although a popular vision in Europe, this is not true throughout the world. A growing number of wildlife-friendly schemes rely on premium prices paid by consumers for environmental services (e.g., organic certification or the Smithsonian Bird Friendly Certification for coffee). This also brings up an issue of which the authors seem unaware, the hidden costs of conventional intensive agriculture, which have been widely exposed and documented over the past 20 years (15). 2) Given the extensive literature on the effects of pesticides and fertilizers on nontarget organisms and wildlife outside farming areas (68), ignoring this in the construction of the model is not justified and could be very misleading to policy-makers. 3) The unwarranted assumption is made that wildlife-friendly agriculture (which includes a wide variety of practices and techniques) reduces yield. However, there is accumulating evidence that organic farming can produce as much, if not more in some cases, as conventional agriculture (9, 10). 4) Most conservation biologists have gone beyond the simplistic idea that there is wild habitat and agricultural land. Most land is subjected to some sort of human interference, and the goal for conservation is to preserve as much biodiversity as possible in landscapes that include mosaics of different types of land use. 5) Almost all landscapes are currently fragmented, with patches of more or less native vegetation interspersed among a matrix of different land-use systems, including agriculture. Metapopulation and metacommunity structures are likely to exist among those patches (1113) and organisms need to migrate from patch to patch to maintain these structures. If the so-called high-productivity agriculture includes monoculture and/or the including ones in which density increases or use of biocides, this may result in the death of remains constant with respect to yield, at many organisms attempting that interpatch least over some interval. Our paper is an migration, which is necessary to avoid what argument for the need to know, for a wide almost all agree will be range of organisms and farming the inevitable extincsystems, what the relationships tions from the patches between species density, farming that, on their own, are methods, and yield actually are. almost certainly too Vandermeer and Perfecto imply small to sustain most that the answers are already populations. known and that, for many farm6) Green et al.s ing systems, species densities and assumptions about province-wide species persistfood needs and how to ence are neutral to increases in meet them are largely yield. However, the literature they political. Not all cite does not provide the quantitaexperts agree on how tive evidence required to establish future food needs this, and the widespread need for should be metmany agri-environment payments and focus on equity and price premiums suggests that food security rather A woman prepares the ground yield penalties are instead for planting in Mozambique. than production. commonplace. Moreover, price Although the issue premiums can only be levied on of agriculture and biodiversity preservation produce that is sold to wealthy consumers, so is certainly an important one, Green et al. they are not applicable to the rising producpresent an analysis that is misleading to tivity needed to meet food demand from those not familiar with recent literature. poorer nations. JOHN VANDERMEER1,2 AND IVETTE PERFECTO2 Vandermeer and Perfecto are concerned 1Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, that we concentrate on food production 2School of Natural Resources and Environment, rather than distribution. Hunger is undeniUniversity of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. ably linked to equity of access, but given E-mail: jvander@umich.edu, perfecto@umich.edu that food demand is likely to at least double References by 2050, it is essential to consider how pro1. P. A. Matson, W. J. Parton, A. G. Power, M. J. Swift, duction can be increased. Science 277, 504 (1997). Vandermeer and Perfecto raise important 2. D. Pimentel et al., Science 267, 1117 (1995). points about our model not addressing the 3. D. Pimentel et al., Oikos 34, 126 (1980). 4. D.Tilman, Proc. Natl.Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 96, 5995 (1999). external effects of intensive farming on 5. National Research Council, Alternative Agriculture wildlife in nonfarmed areas, and its move(National Research Council, Washington, DC, 1989). ment between habitat patches. We agree that 6. P. M.Vitousek, H. A. Mooney, J. Lubchenco, J. M. Melillo, Science 277, 494 (1997). these are serious limitations, and we raised 7. D. Pimentel, C. A. Edwards, Bioscience 32, 595 (1982). them at some length in our paper as needing 8. K. Freemark, C. Boutin, Agric. Ecosyst. Environ. 52, 67 further research. However, as we pointed (1995). 9. M. Altieri, Environ. Dev. Sustainabil. 1, 197 (1999). out, both high-yielding and low-yielding 10. J. Pretty, R. Hine, Reducing Food Poverty with agriculture can have negative effects on bioSustainable Agriculture: A Summary of New Evidence diversity in nonfarmed land, and those (Centre for Environment and Society, Essex University, UK, 2001). effects associated with low-yielding agricul11. K. McCann, P. Yodzis, Am. Nat. 144, 873 (1994). ture, while they may be lower per unit area of 12 I. Hanski, Metapopulation Ecology (Oxford Univ. Press, farmed land, can have a severe effect if they Oxford, 1999). 13. S. Nee, R. M. May, J. Anim. Ecol. 61, 37 (1992). require farming of a larger area. We are producing an extended version of our model, Response which incorporates negative externalities VANDERMEER AND PERFECTO RAISE SEVERAL and effects of habitat fragmentation, and points that require clarification. They assert hope that this will suggest practical ways of that we assume that wildlife-friendly farm- better quantifying the relevant effects. In sum, we maintain that the key to idening is always associated with yield penalties. We explicitly say the opposite. We state in tifying how best to reconcile food producour section describing wildlife-friendly tion and biodiversity conservation is through farming that it is clearly beneficial if it does explicit models guiding systematic data colnot involve yield penalties. We also explore a lection, rather than by qualitative inference. RHYS E. GREEN,1,2* STEPHEN J. CORNELL,1,3 very wide range of shapes of species-speJRN P.W. SCHARLEMANN,1,2 ANDREW BALMFORD1,4 cific density-yield functions in our model,
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1Department

of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EJ, UK. 2Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, The Lodge, Sandy, SG19 2DL, UK. 3The Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK. 4Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, University of Cape Town, Private Bag, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa. *To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: reg29@hermes.cam.ac.uk

dard deviation of the character in a population at a given horizon.

KRISHNA R. DRONAMRAJU Foundation for Genetic Research, Post Office Box 27701-0, Houston, TX 77227, USA. E-mail: kdronamraj@aol.com Reference
1. J. B. S. Haldane, Evolution 3, 51 (1949) [reprinted in The Selected Genetic Papers of J.B.S. Haldane, K. R. Dronamraju, Ed. (Garland Publishing, New York, 1990), pp. 127132].

ent variates; for example, tooth crown height evolves more rapidly (~0.1 d) than tooth length (~0.03 d) in some extinct grazing horses, an example of mosaic evolution (4). With some important caveats (2), Haldanes method is an effective way to compare morphological rates evidenced from the fossil record, including the Family Equidae.
BRUCE J. MACFADDEN Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA. E-mail: bmacfadd@flmnh.ufl.edu References
1. 2. 3. 4. J. B. S. Haldane, Evolution 3, 51 (1949). P. D. Gingerich, Science 222, 159 (1983). B. J. MacFadden, Biol. J. Linn. Soc. 35, 37 (1988). G. de Beer, Adv. Sci. 42, 1 (1954).

Fossil Horses and Rate of Evolution

IN HIS DISCUSSION OF THE EVOLUTION OF fossil horse teeth (Fossil horsesevidence for evolution, Perspectives, 18 Mar., p. 1728), B. J. MacFadden does not mention the interesting suggestion of J. B. S. Haldane (1) that these fossil data could be used for measuring the unit of evolutionary rate, for example, a darwin, for an increase or decrease of size by a factor of e per million years, or an increase or decrease of 1/1000 per 1000 years. The horse rates would range around 40 millidarwins. Haldane wrote that the unit for the character may be a unit increase in the natural logarithm of a variate, or alternatively one stan-

Response
DRONAMRAJU CORRECTLY POINTS OUT THAT quantitative rates of morphological evolution have been calculated from the fossil record. Haldane (1) originally proposed the darwin (d) to compare morphological rates of evolution in dinosaurs, fossil horses, and fossil humans. Since Haldanes time, over a halfcentury ago, more key fossils have been found and the precision of geological dating has vastly improved. Gingerich (2) analyzed rates of morphological change in many fossil groups ranging from invertebrates to mammals. He found relatively high rates (>1 d) within adaptive radiations of some primitive mammals. Using tooth measurements in ancestral-descendant pairs of fossil horses from North America, I (3) found that morphological rates of evolution vary widely in differ-

IN THEIR PERSPECTIVE HIV: EXPERIENCING the pressures of modern life, D. Nolan et al. depict the complex interaction of this pathogen with us humans as its host (4 Mar., p. 1422). The authors conclude that HIV is highly adaptable. As an example of a less adaptable organism, they mention vaccinia virus as the cause of smallpox. Although under certain conditions, vaccinia virus infection may cause lesions similar to those of smallpox in humans (1), smallpox in

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HIV and Smallpox

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humans was caused by variola virus, which was eradicated in the late 1970s (2).
ROB A. GRUTERS AND ALBERT D. M. E. OSTERHAUS Department of Virology, Erasmus MC , Dr. Molewaterplein 50, 3015 GE Rotterdam, Netherlands. E-mail: r.gruters@erasmusmc.nl, a.osterhaus@erasmusmc.nl References
1. R. R. Redfield et al., N. Engl. J. Med. 316, 673 (1987). 2. J. G. Breman, I. Arita, N. Engl. J. Med. 303, 1263 (1980).

receptors (1). This virus, now extinct in its natural form, may have been responsible for enriching (3, 4) or maintaining (5) the CCR5 32 mutation within Northern European populations, thus providing their descendants more than a thousand years later with relative protection against HIV infection and disease progression (2, 6).
DAVID NOLAN, IAN JAMES, SIMON MALLAL Centre for Clinical Immunology and Biomedical Statistics, Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia 6000, Australia. References
1. L. R. Dunlop et al., Microbes Infect. 5, 1049 (2003). 2. D. Nolan et al., AIDS 18, 1231 (2004). 3. A.P. Galvani, M. Slatkin, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 100, 15276 (2003). 4. F. Libert et al., Hum. Mol. Genet. 7, 399 (1998). 5. S. R. Duncan et al., J. Med. Genet. 42, 205 (2005). 6. M. Samson et al., Nature 382, 722 (1996).

Response
GRUTERS AND OSTERHAUS ARE CORRECT IN pointing out that the virus responsible for smallpox was variola. Vaccinia is a relatively nonpathogenic virus that has served as the basis for smallpox vaccination since Jenners first fortuitous discovery. Knowledge of the diversity and adaptability of naturally occurring variola virus is limited, with only two of the 200 variola proteins characterized (1), although it is presumed that the high degree of homology between these related poxviruses as well as their lack of diversityhave contributed to the success of this global vaccination strategy. The variola virus may also be relevant to the genetics of the chemokine receptor 5 (CCR5)-HIV interaction (2), as variola encodes a high-affinity secreted chemokinebinding protein that binds CC-chemokine

How Similar Are Poxviruses?

I N HIS ARTICLE U NNOTICED AMENDMENT bans synthesis of smallpox virus (News of the Week, 11 Mar., p. 1540), M. Enserink refers to the October 2004 Act to reform the intelligence community of the United States, which outlawed, inter alia, knowing production, engineering, synthesis, acquisition, pos-

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session, usage or threatening to use variola virus, specified in the bill as a virus that can cause human smallpox or any derivative of variola virus that contains more than 85% of the gene sequence of the variola major or variola minor virus. In connection with the Act, Peter Jahrling from USAMRIID points out that many poxviruses, including vaccinia virus, have genomes more than 85% identical to variola major, and suggests that overzealous interpretation of the Act would put a lot of poxvirologists in jail. It is undisputable that many poxviruses share high degree of similarity of their nucleotide sequences; however, this similarity is pertinent only to specific portions of their genomes and not to the overall genomes. Alignments of variola major virus strain Bangladesh-1975, camelpox virus strain CMS, and vaccinia virus strain Copenhagen were shown to share nucleotide identity 91% throughout the conserved central region of their genomes (1). Nevertheless, for the interpretation of the Act, the global alignment of the whole genomes would be more appropriate than the local alignment of their conserved portions. Global alignment by Lalign program with scoring matrix dna.mat and gap penalties -14/-4 (2) shows that variola major virus

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(NC_001611) shares identity of only 28.2% with variola minor Garcia-1966, 28% with vaccinia virus WR, and 27.9% with Camelpox virus CMS.
ROMAN MEZENCEV AND KAY MEREISH United Nations, 866 United Nations Plaza at 48th Street, New York, NY 10017, USA. References
1. C. Gubser, G. L. Smith, J. Gen. Virol. 83, 855 (2002). 2. E. W. Myers, W. Miller, Comput. Appl. Biosci. 4, 11 (1988).

did the work on mice overproducing glial cell linederived neurotrophic factor and suggested that GDNF maintains and possibly repairs dopamine receptors. Kenneth Alper is not at Columbia but is associate professor of psychiatry and neurology at the New York University School of Medicine. ScienceScope: Alaskan coral preserved (18 Feb., p. 1027). The image credit was incorrect. It should have been Alberto Lindner/NOAA. News Focus: RNAi shows cracks in its armor by J. Couzin (12 Nov. 2004, p. 1124). The story inadvertently omitted mention of Sumedha D. Jayasena at Amgen. His team helped explain how small interfering RNA molecules unwind, which plays a role in how they target genes.

RESPONSE TO COMMENT ON The Involvement of the Orbitofrontal Cortex in the Experience of Regret
Giorgio Coricelli, Nathalie Camille, Pascale Pradat-Diehl, Jean-Ren Duhamel, Angela Sirigu
We recently showed that in contrast to normal subjects, patients with orbitofrontal lesions do not experience the emotion of regret. Eagleman argues that the task parameters we used may have provoked frustration, rather than regret. We demonstrate that this alternative explanation fails to consider several of our findings and is therefore implausible.
Full text at www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/308/5726/1260c

CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS

News Focus: Ibogaine therapy:A vast, uncontrolled experiment by B. Vastag (15 Apr., p. 345). The article incorrectly described work by Deborah Mashs group at the University of Miami.The brain bank she runs is sponsored by the National Parkinson Foundation and is primarily devoted to that disease. Her research on cocaine and alcohol did not demonstrate brain damage, but that the two drugs combine to form a lethal metabolite. Ibogaine has been shown to slow the heart only in cocaine-dependent patients with depleted blood volume. Mash holds no patent on ibogaine but has patents on the use of its metabolite, noribogaine. This metabolite, not ibogaine, was described as acting like super-sticky longacting Prozac. Mash says she has not published all her data on noribogaine because they are proprietary. In addition, Dorit Ron and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco conducted research on mice addicted to alcohol, not opiates. Robert Burke and colleagues at Columbia University

TECHNICAL COMMENT ABSTRACTS

Letters to the Editor

Letters (~300 words) discuss material published in Science in the previous 6 months or issues of general interest. They can be submitted through the Web (www.submit2science.org) or by regular mail (1200 New York Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20005, USA). Letters are not acknowledged upon receipt, nor are authors generally consulted before publication. Whether published in full or in part, letters are subject to editing for clarity and space.

David M. Eagleman
Camille et al. (Reports, 21 May 2004, p. 1167) hypothesized that regret is useful for steering decision-making.They sought to show that patients with lesions of the orbitofrontal cortex perform more poorly on a gambling task because they do not experience regret. However, choices in the task design raise questions about their interpretation.
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COMMENT ON The Involvement of the Orbitofrontal Cortex in the Experience of Regret