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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."
...is to find and sample one of each of these tasty species within 20 years.
People for the Eating of Tasty Animals that is.
So they finally got too bored with trying to cure cancer?
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.
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.
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"
It's a safe bet that the rate of speciation has gone down, though, given the shrinkage in available natural habitat.
Ah, quite the contrary. It's my (imperfect) understanding that the rate of speciation goes up when resources are limited, and goes down during times of plenty.
The theory is that differences in individuals aren't sufficient to lead to speciation until they become survival traits. In a lush environment, individuals with all sorts of different characteristics can be equally successful. But in a more constrained environment, different traits become survival factors, and individuals with specific survival traits will tend to interbreed, leading eventually to speciation.
To use a really simple example, imagine a grassland populated by browsing mammals. The population is stable, the food and water sources are plentiful, the predation is low. Now kill off all the grass. Most of the browsing mammals will die off immediately. Some of them will have the (probably recessive) trait of being able to eat something other than grass; tree bark, maybe. Those individuals will survive and interbreed. Another group of the browsers will have the recessive trait of being able to eat dead browser. Those will survive-- thrive, even, given all the handy dead browserbeast carcasses lying around-- and interbreed. Eventually the two varieties of ex-browsers will drift far enough apart that they can no longer breed to produce fertile offspring. They'll become different species.
That's the theory, anyway.
I write in my journal
Single cell analysis is fairly routine. You isolate a single cell, culture it, and analyze the colony.
But doing what you thought I was talking about is still not impossible -- amplifying the DNA of a single cell using the polymerase chain reaction, and fingerprinting what you get.
As for cheap DNA fingerprinting, we're close already. You may be thinking of a complete sequencer, where every base is accounted for. But a fingerprinter is just some enzymes to cut up the DNA in the right places, and some electrophoresis to separate the resulting fragments by molecular weight. This can be automated inexpensively if there is a big enough market for it. The forensic process has to be good enough to hold up in court. The species finder does not, as the results will have to be reproduced anyway, and a good hit on a new species would be enough to send the sample to a lab with better equipment.
Free book: Science Toys You Can Make
I think it's possible that somebody wildly overestimated the scope of the project. Or wildly underestimated the resources that could be applied to it. Or both.
Many different factors caused the project to take less time than initially planned, not the least of which was clever algorythmic techniques to speed up the decoding process. All of them combined led to a quicker result.
As I understand it, the vast majority of pure research is being funded by private companies now. So even if that research is being done at universities-- which it is, largely-- it's being paid for with corporate dollars. Which, some people's opinions to the contrary, is not inherently a bad thing.
I believe you meant "basic" research rather than "pure" research. Basic research (as opposed to "applied" research) is "experimental and theoretical work undertaken primarily to acquire new knowledge without a specific application in view". There has been a general decline in spending on basic research by corporations in recent years due to the high cost and uncertainty of return on the investment, leading to the shift of basic research to universities. This has had good and bad effects on universities, who have benefited from the funds but have also found increasing limitations and restrictions placed upon them by their corporate sponsors. For example, there have been well documented reports of drug companies putting restrictions in grant contracts to public researchers preventing them from telling the public of any hazardous effects of their drugs, even when those same drugs are in current use by the public.
So their is no black or white answer to which is better, public or private research. Perhaps it is good to have both, just as it is good to have a multiplicity of competitors in a market economy. It may just help to keep everyone honest.
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?
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"
In a lush environment, individuals with all sorts of different characteristics can be equally successful.
Thanks, dude. You've just explained to me why rock music has sucked so much since the early '90s.
Like what I said? You might like my music
Oh.
Ew.
~Idarubicin