The marvels evolution has produced (and we are destroying)
We currently are wiping out entire species at an accelerating rate. Given evolutions slow trudge up Mount Improbable, we are being incredibly foolish—so perhaps evolution didn’t do such a good job, eh? Thomas Lovejoy writes in The Scientist:
Every living thing—plants, animals, microorganisms—shares an extraordinary history that stretches back 4 billion years to the origins of life on Earth. Although countless species have come and gone in that grand interval, today we share the planet with tens of millions of species, simultaneously shaping the Earth’s very form and function. Akin to the miracle of loaves and fishes, living things have turned, and continue to turn, stone into soil. The presence of life on Earth is so robust that it has markedly affected the composition of our atmosphere and continues to do so. Indeed, the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration rises and falls in an annual rhythm tied to the seasons by biological activity—almost as if the planet itself was a living organism.
When I studied biology in high school, the tree of life consisted basically of two sturdy trunks, one the animals and the other the plants, with some “lesser” things around its base. Today, with 1.9 million species so far discovered and the ongoing mapping of their phylogenetic relationships, that tree resembles something more like a spreading bush with three terminal twigs at one end that represent animals, plants, and fungi. All the rest consists of different microorganisms, many representing forms dating from the early history of life on Earth. Many of these microorganisms have strange appetites and strange metabolisms. In a sense they are the real “environmental extremists.”
Because each species represents a set of biological solutions to problems particular to its own survival, the diversity of Earth’s organisms is, in essence, an incredibly valuable reference library with a countless number of volumes, most of them yet to be cataloged. Societies, excepting the most despotic, place enormous value on libraries and never justify them in terms of their economic benefit.
There are many reasons to value biological diversity as we do any great library. The life sciences are transformed regularly by the discovery of previously unknown biological properties in organisms that had been considered esoteric or lacking in utility. A case in point is . .
