In a message dated 7/20/01 11:17:02 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<<
In a purely competitive model, it is hard to justify preservation of any
individual species, I think. In fact, one can justify the loss of a species
by saying that it failed to compete effectively and got its just reward.
But as we come to understand how nature collaborates, it seems that we can
regard any species as the repository of a set of solutions to the problems
of co-evolution. Loss of a species makes the ecosystem stupider, if you
will, which is a bad thing. I'll elaborate.
To the degree that species share information, through exchange of genetic
materials and the very act of co-evolution, loss of a species is the loss of
a set of solutions that could benefit the entire ecosystem. Of course, the
notion that species share information is a very new one and not especially
well understood. However, it seems increasingly clear that endosymbiosis,
exchange of genetic material via viruses and other mechanisms exist for this
to happen. Collaboration exists in nature; species are not as isolated from
one another as we often imagine, especially in schoolbook biology, which
tends to ignore, for example, the fact that the line between one species and
another is often fuzzy.
In other words, loss of a species is like the loss of a library in the world
of human information. At the very least, even if the information in the
library is duplicated elsewhere, it becomes less accessible. We don't
really know what is stored in the "libraries" of species-carried knowledge,
so the logic of preserving species is "keep as many libraries as possible,"
not "this genetic library, the spotted owl, has x, y and z in it, so it must
be saved." And some of those libraries hold human-benefiting medicines and
such, too.
>>
In general I agree with you but I would point out that species are always
being lost, that ecosystems are not stable in the long run. They tend to stay
relatively the same for a while because of internal feedback loops. Within an
ecosystem there can be quite vicious competition (predator prey, arms races,
all of the usual Darwinian stuff) but even these reactions are stable but
this stability is by necessity temporary. It also inevitable that ecosystems
will change even if we as humans act benignly. There has been a lot of talk
about globalization as an economic phenomena. But humans carry more than gap
shirts and McDonald's wrappers when they hop from continent to continent.
They carry microbes and bigger buggers inadvertently. So the planet is being
converted into a more interconnected series of large scale ecosystems. I
think it likely that the loss of biodiversity is inevitable in these
circumstances. I am not suggesting that we throw things (species) away
carelessly (in fact I think it means we must attempt to save a much as we
can). But we need to understand that while humans are the engines that are
causing these changes we are not in control of them.
The notion of species as carriers of information is quite hot now especially
as we come to see DNA as what it is - a digital code. Genomes are seen as
store houses of historical information. This is true in a way but I think it
important not to see this as the purpose of life or of DNA. It is not here to
store info, it is here because it is capable of replication.
