Slashdot Mirror
New Mammal Species Found in Borneo
lemonysam writes "The BBC is reporting that a new mammal species has been discovered in Borneo by a conservation group trying to document the local species, as part an effort to prevent the destruction of their habitat by logging and agriculture. The species, which has not been identified by local experts or the indigenous population, is roughly the size of a domestic cat and is believed to be carnivorous."
I have a question: Aren't class, order, genus, and family entirely arbitrary? Shouldn't we now classify living things entirely with genetics?
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
...I don't think they exist.
So IT IS decided that these animals will go extinct is it?Documentaion of them is the main concern?!! huh.
Why does yahoo do this
New York is on the coast. It'll only take a few tsunami to shift it, and over millions of years there'll be plenty of those.
Perhaps, 60 million years or so from now, one would find traces of the megacities if one looked carefully in the right place. I suspect our deep earthworks might be longer-lasting; I can't see much that's likely to shift the Channel Tunnel, for instance.
And if the next intelligent race arises when we're as long gone as the last dinosaurs, I'll tell them one place they can look where they'll surely find some of our relics. And a message. 'Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969. We came in peace for all mankind. Signed, Richard Nixon.'
That will last a while, but the meteorites will eventually powder it, and the dying Sun will consume Earth and Moon alike. Will anything of ours last longer still? Thus far, I can think of four candidates. Pioneer 10 and 11, and Voyager 1 and 2. Maybe they'll be found. Maybe someone will come across them and know we were once here, long after the Sun is a dying ember of degenerate carbon. But I doubt it. Space is a big place in which to look for a few tiny, silent, eons-dead robots.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Right, god forbid those people actually living in Borneo be allowed to scrape out a living.
Shut up, your "righteous indignation" fails when people will have to starve for your conscience to be soothed.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
The taxonomic system is most certainly designed. There is no such thing as a "tree of life." It is a human construction. If you look back through biological history, you can plot the descendency of various genetic lines, and these plots look tree-like. But the only thing that exists, right now, are the "leaves" of that tree -- individual species.
But nature itself has no need for names and systems to organize the various types of life forms. Life simply is what it is. We humans impose our abstractions on reality, not vice versa. Taxonomy is synthetic.