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."
put a patent on every single one for purposes of commercial exploitation
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Good freakin' luck..
:P
As the pesimist I am, I say this is impossible. What about all the stuff that is so deep in the sea we can't even get to?
I think we'd have better luck finding life on Mars.
R4NT.com - A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
...is to find and sample one of each of these tasty species within 20 years.
List of species known gets larger each year...
List of species that aren't extinct gets smaller each year...
The two numbers will eventually meet.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
And start out by figuring out which species CmdrTaco, Hemos, and CowboyNeal are.
Esse quam vederi.
When will they find bigfoot?
"Scientist X declares 'we have identified EVERY living species on the face of the planet. Prove us wrong!'"
Is that even theoretically possible? Since new species are always evolving wouldn't there always be new species to name?
Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
Thats one more book that nobody will read.
People for the Eating of Tasty Animals that is.
So they finally got too bored with trying to cure cancer?
I guess it's a good thing they document all the different animal species before they are all dead, or become some part of the McDonalds "hamburger" (TM)
Also this documentation will help to aide in my hunting them all down and mounting them on my wall
Gotta catch em all!
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.
Evolution will someday cause those species to eventually become another species. Then what? We'll have to start the project all over again.
Beep. Boop. Beep. You have questions. I have answers and your home address.
We can't even get to where most species *are* yet.
And while I agree that taxonomy is an important part of biological science, cataloging life isn't the *point* of taxonomy. It might be rather more to the point to *preserve* these species, or at least their DNA (male and female, and put them, into the ark. Riiiiight)
Honestly, I *do* understand what they're trying to do here, but it has an odd, and rather pathetic, feeling of pointlessness to it.
KFG
Why don't they use this opportunity to create a large searchable database of every species while they are at it.
They could include information such as name, ncientific name (the latin? stuff), physical Description, a few photographs of male and female specimins, eating preferences, defense mechanisms, known locations of presence, and other various notes.
When it comes to the carnavores, you could make entries in their diet link to the victims' records.
Then just make it searchable. Filterable by geographical area, species, keywords, etc. Very powerful. Then all you need is to make it publically available. Read-only of course.
i thnik you spillde one too mnay code reds onyoru keybaord. :/
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
Firstly its going to be close to impossible to actually succeed in doing this. Never mind that new species are discovered very frequently (weekly? monthly?), the real question is how could someone say that with out a doubt, that every species has been accounted for?
What happens when species evolve enough to be considered a new strain of species? What happens when it is announced that "Every species has been identified" and then a new one comes along? Something like that will only serve the public perception that 'those scientists don't know everything: the earth really is flat! Baaaah Baaaah'.
What happens when a species becomes extinct? Do you erase it from the record? Just put a big 'red cross' next to it? Surely these people attempting this, and the people funding such a project could find something better to spend their resources on. Maybe actually preventing the extinction, not just recording its occurance.
What do you think?
I should start by saying that I think this is a noble project. The shadow that humanity is casting across the earth threatens to leave all other species in oblivion, except for those we have genetically engineered or deemed economically beneficial.
A major technical problem, however, is trying to define the limits that constitute a species. This is sometimes tricky with animals, and in some families of plants, it is practically impossible. (If I remember my bio 101 correctly from all those years ago). The project sounds similar to what Lineus and the other naturalists were trying to do just before Darwin and the evolutionists bollixed everything up.
I only hope we leave enough other species around so that when we go, the cockroaches inherit a viable planet. And in case they are listening, "we salute you, our insect overlords". Or perhaps an inanimate carbon rod will save us all.
Even heroes have the right to dream
"Professor David Hillis, of the University of Texas, US, says about 1.7 million species have been described so far, although estimates of the total number range from 10 million to 100 million. "
10 million to 100 million is a big gap.
Acaila
Growing Old is Inevitable; Growing Up is Optional.
Um, 1.
I have trouble with passwords among other things.
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...)
Evolution still exists. There are thousands of new species evolving every years, mostly single-celled organisms, but some larger ones.
The only way of naming every species would be to create a standard naming convention like the IUPAC system for chemicals, but this isn't even close to what the article is about
Jason
ProfQuotes
Why is the definition that I learned way back in junior high (that is, a group whose members can interbreed to produce viable and fertile offspring) not suitable? This definition tells us, for example, that horses (Equus caballus) and donkeys (Equus asinus) are different species. Although you can breed horses and donkeys to produce viable mules, those mules aren't fertile, so horses and donkeys do not belong to the same species.
What's wrong with that defintion?
I write in my journal
They hibernate by day, and at night engage in peculiar mating rituals involving hooting at moving images made by their god.
dammit... yesterday I offended the fantasy fans... tonight I offend the Everquesties... I must hate myself...
With some unicelluar organisms, it would be hard to say when a new speices has been created. How do you know when two groups are genetically different enough to be seperate species?
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Hmmmm I suppose one of the major problems in this undertaking to attempting to solve "grey areas", IE what is a different species and what it not.
A case in point is the Vancouver Island Marmot. This highly endangered animal is concidered a seperate species than the regular rocky mountain marmot. Even though the only major difference between the two is that the Vancouver island marmot has a patch on it's nose.
Compare this to the difference in animals of the same species. A dalmation and a bulldog are concidered to be the same species of animal, even though they are vastly different in apperence and behavior.
There are just examples of the thousands of grey areas the exist between species. So one must ask, how specific are they getting, what in these scientists eyes is a seperate species and what is simply a different race.
By setting the standard for what is a species high, the task of discovering every species becomes much easier than if the bar was set lower.
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
Even the unknown creatures that may live in Lake Vostok? Last I heard it was sorta hard to reach :)
All this will provide is a snapshot of the Earth's diverse species at a certain time, if successful.
How do they propose to go into the deep reaches of the Amazon basin or into northern Canada/Siberia ?
What about the minor localized species that exist now, but will be extinct in 20 years ? How do they plan to keep track of E V E R Y species and their current status ?
I see this as an idealistic endavour but not feasible.
It would be better to document the species that have more or less a direct impact on human living conditions and track them in detail. But I suppose that's already been done to a good extent.
The various surname projects could be sold the right to name a species after their family as a kind of tribal totem. The ecological range of every species occupying a given area could then contribute to the purchase of that land area and stock holdings by various surname groups could control the land area. Areas with naturally higher biodiversity would have a lot more surname sales and therefore more tribal totems resident. This would be a good way to get people to identify their familial bloodlines with various species that would statistically favor preservation of high-biodiversity areas.
At the time few of the surname projects that now exist on the internet were had come into existence. I think there is a lot more support for this sort of genealogical identity these days and totems may be a real commodity to sell in preservation of biodiversity.
Seastead this.
I don't think the difficulty is in analyzing DNA or any of that. They need to travel to remote locations to find the samples. They also need to rexamine locations and scour them for things they missed. Orchids, Insects, Grases are found all the time.
Previouly thought to be uninhabitble areas are found to hold life every 5 years or so and thought to be extinct animals are found alive about ever3 years, palnts and animals. Include Mutation to generate new species.
Now Add bacterial species and Virus(Not technically alive, I disagree)
Good Luck...Realse the Info for medicianl use and make the owner the UN as well as every nation on earth.
Not going to happen. They would first have to come up with an adequate universal definition of a species, and they haven't done that in the last 150 years (Darwin addressed this issue).
The lack of a definition for "species" is a problem for humans who like definitions, not for nature, which doesn't care if things become hard to define.
Some things, like pornography and race, are just not easily definable. Usually people use the standard of recognition (i.e. "I know it when I see it") which works well enough for most purposes.
We'll leave a load of copies floating in orbit around the planet before we nuke each other out of existence.
When the next dominant species emerges from the sludge and reaches a stage where spaceflight is possible then they can just pick one up.
Then all the archaologists in the new species can down tools and start working on more forward looking matters, such as working out new ways to kill each other en-mass.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
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They have to have a name... ...so we can put them on the Menu.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
how do you classify the differences between asexual species?
A Fatal OE Exception has occurred, Sig will now reboot.
They're all duplicates
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"
If you look at actual biological descriptions of new species these days, there is endless spagetti of Family, sub-family, sub-sub-family, Genera, sub-genera. They really have to bend the classificatory scheme to make sense out of every creature they run across these days.
So, likely no one will be able to agree if/when the task is finished (if it will ever be)..
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I'm a bit worried about this idea. I thought the search was over the day they discovered Spam.
...oOOo..'(_)'..oOOo...
And start out by figuring out which species CmdrTaco, Hemos, and CowboyNeal are.
Trolls?
What else could have thought of making slashdot anyway?
It doesn't work because there are known counterexamples.Orchids come to mind first off. Almost any orchid you can purchase at a greenhouse is a hybrid. They even produce fertile offspring with crosses from different genera.
Here is a list of genera, including what they call them when they are intergenus crosses (and just for the letter "A"). If you take the genus "Allenara", it is a hybrid of the naturally occuring genera Cattleya, Diacrium, Epidendrum, and Laelia. You get a cross of four genera by making two hybrids (say Cattleya x Diacrium and Epidendrum x Laelia) and then crossing the two hybrids.
Maybe that definition will work for most things, but it's a mystery to me how they decide that this orchid is a different (or the same) species from that one, much less that they should be in different genera.
"Bite me, it's fun!" - Crowe T. Robot
... there are more non-tasty specieses than tasty ones. Just like the every-flavor beans.
A legparnasom tele van angolnaval.
As each year there exist less and less species.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
Maybe all orchids really belong to the same species? ;-)
I see your point. Another poster already pointed out that my definition can't even be applied to asexual organisms, so it was dead before you even came along. Good info, though, about orchids.
I write in my journal
I think it will be interesting to see the types of creatures that we find in the deepest depths of the ocean.. Maybe we might even get some pictures of the elusive Giant Squid!
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
You might want to read this.
They are doing PCR on single cells.
Free book: Science Toys You Can Make
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.
The All Species Foundation website has a nice FAQ which answered some of the obvious questions which popped into my mind, like "How do you know when you're done?".
"I can't learn anything from you I can't read in some fucking book." -- Sean in "Good Will Hunting"
to qualify as a new species.....I asked my Ecology teacher who was also a genetics researcher in the summer, and he said it depends....humans are 2% away from chimps, but another 2 groups that are close on the tree could only be a fraction of a percent of more than 5%.
so is their any one hear who could confirm or deny this?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Seems that with our current rate of extinction it should be pretty easy. Hell, there may be no work to do; maybe all the ones tha we don't know about will be dead in 25 years anyway.
MDC
Do you have ESP?
A hugely ambitious project to find and name every species on Earth within the next 25 years has been launched by scientists.
Haven't they been doing that for the last couple of hundred years? What makes them think the can do it in 25 when a few hundred years of science has just barely scrapped the surface.
I could help them out, seeing as my room probably contains 300 or more here-to-unknown (or recently evolved) species alone (and i'm pretty sure i'm not the only slashdotter in this situation.
One way this group might go about collecting samples from every species (particulary from the ocean, where the greatest variety resides) is to run a sort of filter through the water/atmosphere at various depths, catching all manner of critters. Then, dump all the animals into some sort of machine that grinds them up processes them to collect DNA information which could be sorted into a large database.
The major drawback is that we might not know what sort of creature a specific entry represents or even what it looks like... but at least we could catagorize a lot of things in a short amount of time.
I'm not sure the technology exists to analyze so much organic material, but that could be something to work for.
"Leave the strategizing to those of us with planet-sized brains." -Tycho
Wow, I'm glad scientists have finally found a way around that pesky problem of not being able to prove negatives.
Now we can finally prove that:
a) There does not exist a species that we haven't found.
b) God does not exist.
These scientists seem to be morons if the slashdot headline is accurate (that'll be the day). An ambitious undertaking would have been to catalog 10x as many species next year as most years, and to continue doing so until we think we have them all. An impossible undertaking is to show that we haven't missed any in the process.
Justin Dubs
There are so many varieties and they evolve so quickly, that it would be impossible to catalog all of them because there are constantly new species being made. Besides, the distinction between divergent strains of a species and different but related species is completely arbitrary on that scale, because they don't have sexual reproduction. In mammals, the ability to produce fertile offspring generally draws the boundaries between species.
Repeal the DMCA!
I fail to see where this is a practical endeavor.
Hey, no problem, just have a peek inside my fridge, all sorts of new and exotic life forms growing in there.
I'd be cautious about doing the DNA testing though - I don't know if your gear will freak out at a triple helix strand.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
Well, to group all species, you'd have have to try to interbreed all species (n^n combinations?)... This is bound to make biology a far more interesting field of research.:
:P
"Well, dr. Smith... I think we can safely say that elephants and hamsters are NOT the same species..."
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
Scientists are still finding new species of ants frequently. The last number was 11,006 according to Antbase.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I've known this site since at least half a year ago.
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?
And we are simplifying the problem by killing off most species first--then we don't have to to bother identifying and cataloging them.
Life for Adam in the Garden of Eden was not an idle pursuit of berries and time with Eve. Adam was told to work the garden and care for it. The first task (see verse 19) though was to name the animals. Interestingly, modern-day scientists are now completing an extension of humankind's first job.
Genesis 2 (see verse 19).They should start asking the indiginous people of the various places they go to about the animals they encounter, especially if they are nomadic. The folklore, myths, traditions, stories, etc. often serve purposes beyond that of creating a basis for religion. Many of them have been created to help them survive the environment they live in. Not only that, but they also seem to allow to live within these environments without destroying them. This is something anthropologists have known for some time now. Western biologists often have the bad habit of dismissing these things, particularly if they are tribal, under the misconceived notion that they are "primitive" and could not possibly understand the plants and animals around them, when in fact it's their vast amounts of knowledge of the plants and animals around them that allows them to survive.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
I've been searching for nearly 6 years and I can't even find all my socks!
Anyway, if they want to try they can start by checking the unidentified species growing under my bathroom sink. I tried killing it a few times but, uhhh... I've learned that it is a very very bad idea to make it angry.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Cheers,
Ian
What does finding species of animals have to do with the use of internet? You sure won't find any live species of animals on teh internet? And anyway, 25 years is far too short considering no one has ever been toteh centre fo teh earth and proven that no life exists there. And they think that in 25 years time, they will be construct technology that allows them to travel through the crust AND the mantle into the core to check whats there. (And be able to find a living species of course.)
I have always believed that human beings real purpose in the eco-system was to serve as planet earths reproductive system. We transport the earths eco-system to other planets. Why do you think people from all ages have been fascinated with the stars and exploring. This attempt to catalog every living thing on the earth seems like a step in that direction.
What about trying to save some of this species...
Even if we know how to create a species from a genome sequence it would not live long without it's specific environment (in most cases). So all this talk about conservation by collecting genome sequences is bullshit.
Usually people use the standard of recognition (i.e. "I know it when I see it") which works well enough for most purposes.
At the risk of going offtopic, here goes. :)
The problem with this standard is that it only works on an individual level. Take love, for example. The most common definition of love that I've run across is "You'll know it when you feel it." Using this definition, I have seen quite a few couples get together and then get un-together because their definitions of love didn't mix. Each one knew that they loved the other, but the other didn't live up to some standard.
The reason this type of standard of recognition can't be used in science is because it depends on an individual viewpoint, and one of the fundamental principals of science is duplication. Without being able to duplicate somethign (research, observation, experimentation, etc.) with predictable results, then you can only continue to observe without concluding. When it comes time to conclude, your conclusions must be able to be duplicated by other scientists with completely different viewpoints (or worldviews, if you prefer).
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BTW can i patent myself, more specifically my dna? So that if it is found that i carry some weird mutated form of a gene that cures cancer or something similar, i will make profit off the use of such a gene to help other people.
Actually, I thought the only useful purpose of patenting your dna was so you could sue your kids for infringing your patent when they have kids of their own, or something like that.
But due to the short life of a patent compared to the realistic ages at which people seem to be reproducing these days, it seems like an unrealistic use to put a patent to.
Like what I said? You might like my music
Don't forget to put "humans" and "niggers" as different species.
Doesn't matter a whole lot when they show up on the menu side by side...
Like what I said? You might like my music
eventually there may be only 1 species.
That'd make for a real short menu. Hm...
Like what I said? You might like my music
Life for Adam in the Garden of Eden was not an idle pursuit of berries and time with Eve. Adam was told to work the garden and care for it. The first task (see verse 19) though was to name the animals. Interestingly, modern-day scientists are now completing an extension of humankind's first job.
Aha, now we see proof that the bible was written by a geek. Otherwise, REPRODUCTION would've been mankind's first job, to be interrupted only for feeding.
Like what I said? You might like my music
Let's see, God's very first positive command to humans - "name the animals". It's only taken 6000 years (traditionally reckoned) for them to start giving it a proper go. Hmmm, next we might start wondering about the sense of eating apples. In a few million years we might get up to the bit about "love thy neighbour". :-)
The standard of recognition still works well enough for submission to a database by an individual researcher, which is all that's really needed. They don't say whether it's going to be curated or not, but if it works like other bioinformatic databases, any individual researcher can upload species data into it after creating an account. Of course there may be some ambiguity about whether a given species is in fact a species deserving a separate database entry in this thing. The working standard they will likely use is, if someone uploads the data and makes an entry for it, it's a species. This will be replaced by another standard- a species is something that has a database entry.
And this will be fine. The people studying oysters (all 6 of them) will have one idea of what a species is, and it will probably differ from the one used by people studying protozoans. So there is ambiguity in the species definition as you go through the database, but biology is full of variation and ambiguity anyway. If ease of classification were a selective pressure on evolution, you would imagine the world would look a lot different.
Species ambiguity is the least of the problems this thing will have. If it turns out like other such projects, with hundreds of contributors from labs all around the world, it will look like an open sewer before long, with redundant entries, overloaded names, overloaded accession numbers, etc. If it's uncurated, writing a program to query it practically becomes an AI project. The ambiguity of species definition isn't an issue when the globally unique identifiers you're using turn out to be ambiguous as well. Biologists aren't very good at populating databases.
1. Man.
This task will be a lot more possible as years pass. Why?
According to this, in 100 years, there will be about half as many species on earth as there are now. We're actually in the middle of the biggest extinction epidemic since the dinosaurs died out.
Scratch that - according to this other site, this is actually the fastest mass extinction in earth's history. The fact that most people don't know about this is made even more strange by the fact that this extinction epidemic is man-made.
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
We can't protect things we don't know about.
Who cares? Things on this planet went extinct long before people came along, and will continue to long after we are done with the place. "That's nature's way" as the crocodile hunter puts it.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
The number of undocumented species is truly gargantuan, but within 25 years enough of them ought to have gone extinct that it shouldn't be so hard to find and name them all. Most of them are lower life forms anyway.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
You might want to check the NCBI taxonomy browser.
There you have at least a searchable database with the species names, their scientific names and links to sequences or other information.
It lacks the photos, the diet, their location and other 'higher level' stuff though.
Still a worthy goal though, and any even remotely credible attempt would most likely assist with all sorts of research.
"Success is based on knowing how far to go in going too far"
what about nessie?
Well if species keep disappearing at a high rate, and researchers keep discovering new ones at a moderately slow rate - then eventually these two should converge at some point.
So it follows that we should kill off more species to help these scientists in their noble task. ( amazing what absurd things can be done with pure logic )
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
The toughest thing about naming every speices will be finding every species to test and name. Here's my proposal for a brute force method for finding every species: create every possible DNA combination in a lab, inject the DNA into a plant seed or an animal egg and see if it grows into something. If it grows, name it. If it doesn't grow, rule it out as a species.
Give serendipity a chance.
Linnean nomenclature is what historians might call dog-latin, that is, a corrupt dialect or pidgin at least partially derived from latin roots. In many cases names are pseudo-latinized names of the discoverer's heroes, or relatives, or similar. Gary Larsen has a bird louse named after him, for example.
It's considered poor taste to name a species after yourself, and respectable scientists don't do it. But there has been a noticeable breakdown in the culture of science in the last decade or so, so I think you can expect to see more species named after their discoverers, and probably sponsoring corporations, too.
What's the big deal? Adam did this in like... a day or something!
Add to that the fact that biological ecosystems are dynamic systems where "species" appear and disappear, usually without human intervention, mind you, as part of its natural existence and process. This makes the idea of creating a encyclopedic master reference of species even more dubious because it is an already vague and definitely moving target.
It would be nice to track species if a definition could actually be defined in terms of something repeatably measureable (probably in terms of genotypic distances or something) to understand the dynamic systems they are part of, but such a project will probably be used for more cynical purposes.
JGski
For example, the Florida Panther used to be considered a separate species due to distinct phenotype and geographic isolation. Once the species was down to a single known individual, other panther species were introduced to the area as breeding partners (in an attempt to salvage as much of the genotype as possible).
To make matters even more confusing, mules are occasionally fertile; although they are sterile in general, individual exceptions have been reported to occur.
I suspect you know all this and merely mistyped, but I'm pointing it out for those who don't.
They are planning to clone each one and send the copies to the nearest planetary colony. I want an owl replica please.
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The real Webmaven is user ID 27463. I don't rate an imposter, because my ID is such a lame-ass high number.
So isn't it a bit weird that only now someone actually got around to doing it?
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good point. the idea of species being an abstraction of population dynamics makes sense to me. use of the term species is an attempt to impose a 'type' upon populations varying in many ways and degrees (i.e. sympatric and allopatric subspecies almost indistiguishable phenotypically, yet exhibiting little gene-flow - both examples in incipent speciation) understood this way, the concept of species, when unburdened from the load of intrinsic meaning, becomes much less problematic. such abstractions are only as valid only insofar as they are useful. and, of course, this concept IS very useful.
all opinions are not created equal.
That's okay. Within 25 years, so many countries will have nuculer (read George Bush) weapons, or WMD as we all know them today. Anything that scientists cannot name, they will either blow it up or not let anyone see the DNA sequencing that it takes to create the species. Either way, ***poof*** never exists.
(every notice how if you don't know much about something a news story seems to make sense, but if you do know something about the topic what appears in the news often has a major disconnect with reality? A good example would be any news story about DNS)
What is it they're actually doing? It doesn't sound to me like they're really going to "find and name every species" it sounds more like they're going to isolate DNA from all current species.
To wit: are they going to comb every square centimeter of darkest Africa? The sea bottom? How will they know when they're done?
Bill Eschemeyer at the California Academy of Sciences has already cataloged and put online all living and extinct fish species. So that part is done. But it took 10 years (and an NSF grant) just to do that, and all he did was identify all known species with references to their descriptions. Mammels aint too hard.
Insects are going to kill them. While we've more than scratched the surface, there's several lifetimes of work to find the rest. Who is going to pay for this? Will there be a team of scientists looking through the river and forest in my backyard to make sure they havn't missed one?
Worse, there's no consensus on "what is a species" or "what is a subspecies"
If they really have a plan to "find and name" all extant living species them I'm impessed as all getout.
Can I make a request they start with West African Killifish, from say, Cameroon and Ghana.
ISAGN.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Interesting, but of course not allways the case. For example, see the case of Morocco's miracle mule.
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
Just goes to show you that life is a more dynamic thing than most people give it credit for being. Mutations happen all the time. Mutations are common in human beings, as a matter of fact. We just never (or rarely) notice them because we're in a fairly non-competitive environment. If we were suddenly to find ourselves in a harsh environment, the die-off would be massive and the survivors would be the ones with the minute genetic abnormalities that gave them a slight advantage over the rest of us.
In fact, this process happens all the time, but we're not usually aware of it. There is a theory-- maybe it's better to call it a hypothesis at this stage-- that goes to explain why AIDS is having such a devastating effect on Africa. The people who live in Europe, central Asia, Australia, and the Americas are descended from the survivors of the bubonic plague epidemic in the middle ages. In 1348, one out of four Europeans was killed by the disease. Some of the survivors were just lucky; others were naturally immune to the disease. So the people who live in Europe, central Asia, Australia, and the Americas today have a fair chance of being genetically immune to the bubonic plague.
The theory (or hypothesis) is that this genetic trait also confers upon its carriers either a total immunity to, or a significant resistance to, HIV.
In Africa, on the other hand, there was no outbreak of plague to cause this culling. The people in Africa have no particular tendency toward immunity to plague, and consequently are more susceptable to infection by HIV and eventual death from AIDS than are the Europeans and ex-Europeans.
Like I said, it's just a hypothesis. But even if it's false, it's still plausible, and really interesting because of it.
I write in my journal