The Meaning of Human Existence by Edward O. Wilson

Author:Edward O. Wilson [Wilson, Edward O.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2014-10-05T20:00:00+00:00

11

The Collapse of Biodiversity

Think of Earth’s biodiversity, the planet’s variety of life, as a dilemma wrapped in a paradox. The paradox is the following contradiction: the more species that humanity extinguishes, the more new species scientists discover. However, like the conquistadores who melted the Inca gold, they recognize that the great treasure must come to an end—and soon. That understanding creates the dilemma: whether to stop the destruction for the sake of future generations, or the opposite, just go on changing the planet to our immediate needs. If the latter, planet Earth will recklessly and irreversibly enter a new era of its history, called by some the Anthropocene, an age of, for, and all about our one species alone, with all the rest of life rendered subsidiary. I prefer to call this miserable future the Eremocene, the Age of Loneliness.

Scientists divide biodiversity (keep in mind, I mean all the rest of life) into three levels. At the top are the ecosystems, for example meadows, lakes, and coral reefs. Below it are the species that make up each of the ecosystems in turn. And at the base are the genes that prescribe the distinguishing traits of each of the species.

A convenient measure of biodiversity is the number of species. When in 1758 Carl Linnaeus began the formal taxonomic classification still in use today, he recognized about twenty thousand species in the entire world. He thought that he and his students and helpers might be able to account for most or all of the world fauna and flora. By 2009, according to the Australian Biological Resources Study, the number had grown to 1.9 million. By 2013 it was probably 2 million. Yet this is still only an early point in the Linnaean journey. The actual number in nature is not known even to the nearest order of magnitude. When still-undiscovered invertebrates, fungi, and microorganisms are added, estimates vary wildly, from five million to one hundred million species.

Earth, to put the matter succinctly, is a little-known planet. The pace of mapping biodiversity has also remained slow. New species flood laboratories and museums everywhere, but are being diagnosed and named at a pace of only about twenty thousand a year. (I have described about 450 new species of ants from around the world during my lifetime.) At this rate, and taking a low-end estimate of five million species remaining to be classified, the task will not be completed until the middle of the twenty-third century. Such a snail’s pace is a disgrace of the biological sciences. It is based on the misconception that taxonomy is a completed and outdated part of biology. As a result this still-vital discipline has been largely squeezed out of academia and relegated to natural history museums, themselves impoverished and forced to reduce their research programs.

The exploration of biodiversity has few friends in the corporate and medical world. This is a serious mistake. Science as a whole loses as a result. Taxonomists do far more than name species. They are also experts and primary researchers on the organisms of their specialty.

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