Slashdot Mirror
Finding Every Species
Microsofts slave writes "A hugely ambitious project to find and name every species on Earth within the next 25 years has been launched by scientists. The internet and the development of DNA sequencing technology make the goal achievable, they say."
This will be a monumental undertaking. The current rate of discovery is a mere 10,000 a year. With an estimated 100 milion species, it'd take, well, forever.
.1% of all estimated species of microorganisms out there. Finding, isolating, and cataloging all of the microorganisms will take us much longer than animals simply because they're so tiny. This probably will take much longer than 25 years.
Animals won't be so bad. We figure we have a good knowledge of 10-15% of the animal species out there. It's only so long before we have them all. 25 years is a pretty long time for that.
However, we only have catalogued something like
Hell, even if we had them all, we'd never know what makes these species special and significant. The most important parts of species discovery could be lost in the mad rush.
Not to mention:
"Instead of the time-consuming present system of comparing new discoveries with museum species, there will be a worldwide web-based database."
The issues of hacking/cracking, stability, reliability, and verification all boggle the mind. There's no way we'd be able to be sure.
I think this guy is just trying to get publicity behind the idea that we should speed things up. Like a rallying war cry for the science nerd community.
At a national meeting I attendent before Christmas we learned that the All Species Foundation is for all intents and purposes defunct, with only a small governing board still existing (this from a board member). The whole project depended on philanthropy from Dot Com millionaires (the effort led in part by Kevin Kelly (sp?)), when the boom when down the tube so did the dream. There are still efforts to name all species and many posters here will mention the problems associated with this. Needless to say it won't happen in 22 years.
P.S. this is a dupe of an earlier slashdot article, on which I ranted on the difficulty of the whole deal...
(Goes back to describing species...)
Taxonomists will be renaming and reclassifying species at a greater rate than anyone can discover and name them.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Great point. The best distinction that I've seen is simply that of "reproductive isolation", rather than phenotype. It's possible for two different species to mate and bear fertile offspring; however, they almost always don't. External phenotype on the other hand is a very poor marker of speciation.
These nuances are almost always missed in evolution vs. creation debates. An population of organisms does not suddenly *poof* become a new species. There's no good way to measure speciation; it's a combination of environmental and genetic factors that builds up over time.
The best book I've read on this is "The Diversity of Life" by Edward O. Wilson; it has a very clear and non-technical description of exactly how speciation occurs, and is very relevant to this article.
This is the All Species Foundation, Kevin Kelly's latest brainchild.
Kevin Kelly basically figured out how to give away a billion dollars.
The real Webmaven is user ID 27463. I don't rate an imposter, because my ID is such a lame-ass high number.
Dingos can mate with dogs and produce fertile offspring. Dogs can mate with wolves and procuce fertile offspring. However, Dingos cannot mate with wolves and still produce fertile offspring.
In othe words, your definition is flawed because it assumes that species are static, whereas they REALLY are always in the process of splitting into multiple species. Plus, there's that time thing. A species not only has to be able to be classified solidly in today's environment, but it also needs to have a set classification that spans time so that we can deal with paleontological species as well. And since you can't mate two Tyrannosaurus skeletons and see if they produce viable offspring...well, I'm sure you get the point.
If not all sentients are human, couldn't it be possible that not all humans are sentient either?
Actually, it's more like this. Generally, the species is well evolved to its environment. Individuals in ALL extremes die regularly, so the only ones to survive and breed are those in the middle of the bell curve. This maintains that bell curve. However, a change in the environment suddenly occurs because we all know that the environment is not static. Suddenly, the individuals on one extreme are not dying out and the individuals on the other extreme are dying out much more. The morphospace that the species takes up then shifts until the individuals dying out on both extremes balance each other.
Also, remember that it's species, not individuals, that evolve. Individuals survive or don't survive. That is all.
If not all sentients are human, couldn't it be possible that not all humans are sentient either?
You may not, talk radio hosts may not, but there are plenty of people who have spent their entire lives studying the field who do. I know you probably think that they're full of B.S. because their conclusions clash with your extreme anthropocentric world view, but your filter doesn't change objective reality.
iI just always get somewhat bemused when people hold the opinion that "nature" is the world in the absence of humanity, that humanity is not part of the natural world. If the lions eat all the zebras, that's nature. If human beings kill all the lions, that's not nature. Seems like a rather foolish viewpoint to me.
I could use that line of reasoning to justify any action whatsoever, because anything that I'm capable of doing is, by definition, just "natural". "Oh, that bomb I threw into the crowd was made of elements. It was a part of nature. I threw it, but I'm part of nature. Things like that just happen in nature; death is natural, after all. Anyway, nobody has any idea whether those people would have spontaneouldy dropped dead even if I hadn't thrown that bomb. There's just no way you can prove it isn't impossible!"