Imagine the most incredible library, filled to the brim with books. Millions of them, the most amazing books ever written. Texts that would inspire billions, that may teach immortality and the cures to all diseases, that demonstrate arguments on the origins of things, forgotten or hidden ideas and knowledge. Few have been read, and fewer yet have been read in detail.
And every day a stack is wheelbarrowed out the back and unceremoniously burned.
I refuse to use an emotional appeal, because such things are overdone and seldom sway your sort. Nor will I use economic or medical arguments, because those are too shallow for my purpose. The Second Alexandrian Tragedy, the accelerated extinction of species and lineages, is a loss of information. The great library described above is but mere scraps in comparison to what once existed, the fossil record and extant species a few torn pages compared to the greater diversity lost to time. This archive is a key to our very own existence, and holds illuminated manuscripts to the chain of being stretching back to Progenitors. We have barely scraped the surface. And each extinction is another book burned, forever lost, never to be known or understood.
All we have is scraps, and fewer tomorrow.
Never thought of it quite that way, thank you, Kai.
Wow. That's a great analogy. Gonna borrow that, if I may?
Quote from: Jenne on September 22, 2011, 07:56:09 PM
Wow. That's a great analogy. Gonna borrow that, if I may?
Sure, with attribution. "Second Alexandrian Tragedy" (the term) is not mine though, it originates from a paper by FPD Cotterill (1997). He used it to refer to the global lapse in care of natural history collections, but it works for this metaphor just fine as well. Guess I should have put that somewhere...
yeah, I won't be copying and pasting, just sharing the idea behind it :)
For reference, these are the two papers that inspired me to write this down.
The second Alexandrian tragedy, and the fundamental relationship between biological collections and scientific knowledge (http://planet.uwc.ac.za/nisl/Biodiversity/pdf/2nd%20Alexandrian%20Tragedy%20and%20Biological%20Collections%201997.pdf)
A pervasive denigration of Natural History misconstrues how biodiversity inventories and taxonomy underpin scientific knowledge. (http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B4EJArn6pHvdY2JkOTUzYTMtNjE5My00MzkzLWJhOWItN2Y2MGY0ZjA3NTQ2&hl=en&invite=CMjDs9gF)
Both are pretty good reads, IMO.
That's a really intriguing analogy, especially because it offers a frame of reference that is immediately accessible to someone like myself, with limited understanding of the scientific methodology that normally underpins theoretical studies on this subject.
Without detracting from the science involved, it stimulates my imagination to explore avenues that perhaps I wouldn't have considered, and that can never be a bad thing. (Can it?)
The sacking of the Alexandrian Library may have set the renaissance back by maybe 500 years, we'll never know for sure, or what was lost there, but we also don't know that we haven't recovered much of the data since, either.
If you look at all life on this planet as a Library, or data storage system, using DNA as the data storage medium, then every species might be considered as an integral program, part of the evolutionary equivalent of a kind of Windows Operating System. Self upgrading, when necessary, in order to keep the relevant data accessible to the Whole Planetary Macrocosm.
From what (I understand) we understand of our own DNA, coded within it, is a backup copy of amphibian, reptilian, and earlier mammalian models, going back for . . . . . probably centuries! So in every subsequent generation, the data backs itself up, creating some kind of restore point within us. Then it lets us run around playing W.o.W or The Sims, with the higher end software, or whatever it takes to motivate us into keeping the meat moving along, while it ticks away in the background, creating a runtime environment, conducive to it's propagation.
And it's doing this with every species! So the software package called "Humanity", exists in it's own virtual gameworld, with certain 'moderator priviliges' according to it's place in the Macro, and access to the information regarding the rest of this 'Uber Windows XP', is on a 'need to know' sort of basis. So we've just gotta be what we've gotta be, and trust in the programming capabilities of whatever cosmic equivalent of Bill Gates coded the whole operating system.
Maybe. I don't know, I'm just running with an interesting looking bone you threw down an hour or so aqo, and from a totally unscientific point of view. It may not yield any profound new insight to anything relevant to the big picture, but to the smaller picture in my own OS it's certainly chewing up some RAM. I'm going to reboot now though, in case I crash, and lose the lot. *Save document to P.D* *Create shortcut on desktop post in relevant thread* *Exit program*
Quote from: ϗ, M.S. on September 22, 2011, 10:34:43 PM
For reference, these are the two papers that inspired me to write this down.
The second Alexandrian tragedy, and the fundamental relationship between biological collections and scientific knowledge (http://planet.uwc.ac.za/nisl/Biodiversity/pdf/2nd%20Alexandrian%20Tragedy%20and%20Biological%20Collections%201997.pdf)
A pervasive denigration of Natural History misconstrues how biodiversity inventories and taxonomy underpin scientific knowledge. (http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B4EJArn6pHvdY2JkOTUzYTMtNjE5My00MzkzLWJhOWItN2Y2MGY0ZjA3NTQ2&hl=en&invite=CMjDs9gF)
Both are pretty good reads, IMO.
Awesome, thank you!
And BB, that's exactly what I was thinking.
I've never really understood why this problem needed an analogy.
Imagine the only planet in the known universe with living organisms, and you are one of them. You share the same structure and function, the same basic cellular processes, the same family history with every living thing on the planet. You are not metaphorically related. You are literally, factually, actually related, sharing the same genes. Everything you love about the world, everything good that has ever happened to you, has happened on this planet. You are currently fucking it all up. You are permanently killing whole branches of your living family, and they can never be returned. You are destroying the only home you've ever had. Not metaphorically. This isn't a fancy analogy. Here, look:(http://www.occc.edu/biologylabs/Images/Evolution_Images/forelimb%20copy.JPG)
you have the same forelimbs. Books getting lost out of a library is a joke compared to this.
Quote from: Jenne on September 23, 2011, 02:07:44 AM
Awesome, thank you!
And BB, that's exactly what I was thinking.
We must have both re-booted from the same restore point. After that virus thing. That was going round. Or was that just me?
Quote from: Phlogiston Merriweather on September 23, 2011, 02:54:07 AM
I've never really understood why this problem needed an analogy.
Imagine the only planet in the known universe with living organisms, and you are one of them. You share the same structure and function, the same basic cellular processes, the same family history with every living thing on the planet. You are not metaphorically related. You are literally, factually, actually related, sharing the same genes. Everything you love about the world, everything good that has ever happened to you, has happened on this planet. You are currently fucking it all up. You are permanently killing whole branches of your living family, and they can never be returned. You are destroying the only home you've ever had. Not metaphorically. This isn't a fancy analogy. Here, look:(http://www.occc.edu/biologylabs/Images/Evolution_Images/forelimb%20copy.JPG)
you have the same forelimbs. Books getting lost out of a library is a joke compared to this.
That's the appeal to emotion. Frankly, knowing the amount of extinction that has occured without any human intervention (especially the Great Dying), the emotional appeal doesn't work for me. I know very well that if biodiversity got pounded down to the level it was at the end of the Permian, it would take possibly 4 million years but humans would be gone and ecosystems would thrive again. We can fuck things up for ourselves, but the planet? The planet will go on. Life will go on. So, no, it doesn't work for me all that well. And my thought is, it doesn't work well for most people on here.
You post a picture of animal forelimbs exhibiting the homology (go look it up) of bones in vertebrates. Of course, of COURSE you chose megafauna. But what about protozoan conservation? No no, the appeal to emotion always uses megafauna like mammals and birds, barely a drop in the diversity bucket compared to insects or nematodes or oceanic plankton. Which shows you just how shallow it is. It's always the most aesthetically pleasing, charismatic and familiar species that people bring up. Fuck that shit. Not that vertebrates aren't cool, they just are in a no more privileged position than any other taxon, and yet are always chosen for this because they appeal to peoples emotions of FUZZY CUTE AND SHINY.
Quote from: BadBeast on September 22, 2011, 11:31:01 PM
That's a really intriguing analogy, especially because it offers a frame of reference that is immediately accessible to someone like myself, with limited understanding of the scientific methodology that normally underpins theoretical studies on this subject.
Without detracting from the science involved, it stimulates my imagination to explore avenues that perhaps I wouldn't have considered, and that can never be a bad thing. (Can it?)
The sacking of the Alexandrian Library may have set the renaissance back by maybe 500 years, we'll never know for sure, or what was lost there, but we also don't know that we haven't recovered much of the data since, either.
If you look at all life on this planet as a Library, or data storage system, using DNA as the data storage medium, then every species might be considered as an integral program, part of the evolutionary equivalent of a kind of Windows Operating System. Self upgrading, when necessary, in order to keep the relevant data accessible to the Whole Planetary Macrocosm.
From what (I understand) we understand of our own DNA, coded within it, is a backup copy of amphibian, reptilian, and earlier mammalian models, going back for . . . . . probably centuries! So in every subsequent generation, the data backs itself up, creating some kind of restore point within us. Then it lets us run around playing W.o.W or The Sims, with the higher end software, or whatever it takes to motivate us into keeping the meat moving along, while it ticks away in the background, creating a runtime environment, conducive to it's propagation.
And it's doing this with every species! So the software package called "Humanity", exists in it's own virtual gameworld, with certain 'moderator priviliges' according to it's place in the Macro, and access to the information regarding the rest of this 'Uber Windows XP', is on a 'need to know' sort of basis. So we've just gotta be what we've gotta be, and trust in the programming capabilities of whatever cosmic equivalent of Bill Gates coded the whole operating system.
Maybe. I don't know, I'm just running with an interesting looking bone you threw down an hour or so aqo, and from a totally unscientific point of view. It may not yield any profound new insight to anything relevant to the big picture, but to the smaller picture in my own OS it's certainly chewing up some RAM. I'm going to reboot now though, in case I crash, and lose the lot. *Save document to P.D* *Create shortcut on desktop post in relevant thread* *Exit program*
That's interesting, though I wasn't using it that way. The book/library metaphor wasn't about what species are but rather what stories they tell, the depth of information. I could have as well said that every species is a magic well, that the more you draw in learning from species the more there is to learn, the more questions raised. Plus, the book/library metaphor fit well with the Library of Alexandria nod. Not particularly fond of the computer metaphor, to be honest, because it seems to indicate some sort of intelligence to natural selection, where the process is more of those who don't survive to reproduce disappear, and those who do, continue. Natural selection is stupid.
Quote from: Phlogiston Merriweather on September 23, 2011, 02:54:07 AM
I've never really understood why this problem needed an analogy.
Imagine the only planet in the known universe with living organisms, and you are one of them. You share the same structure and function, the same basic cellular processes, the same family history with every living thing on the planet. You are not metaphorically related. You are literally, factually, actually related, sharing the same genes. Everything you love about the world, everything good that has ever happened to you, has happened on this planet. You are currently fucking it all up. You are permanently killing whole branches of your living family, and they can never be returned. You are destroying the only home you've ever had. Not metaphorically. This isn't a fancy analogy. Here, look:
you have the same forelimbs. Books getting lost out of a library is a joke compared to this.
Way too emotionally dramatic. And when you say "You" in this post, is that everyone? Or everyone except you? Or are you "fucking it all up" too? I'm not "permanently killing whole branches of my living family" either.
And as for "Not needing an analogy" it certainly needs something. And those forelimbs might have similarities, but they are not the same. They are different models, with different functions, form different species. Species that share DNA sequences, sure, but the deviations in the coding are permutations of ongoing equations, that may or may not be viable to the sum total. You speak as if you have broken the fourth wall, and you haven't. If you had, you'd have evolved into a fuck knows what, and currently be in a different runtime environment to us, and quite plainly, you're not.
As much as we might strive to find all the answers, it's only part of our particular 'program'. There will be questions we don't even have an inkling of yet, otherwise there would be no evolution. And even the grasp of evolution that we have got, is incomplete, and largely intuitive guesswork. We can't even trace our own evolution much past say, 20,000 years with much accuracy. So how can you presume to say analogy isn't the way to push the boat out a little farther?
When there is no definite map of logical progression in a particular direction, then analogy is as good a tool as any for entertaining new hypothesis. You may however, have found a better tool, so instead of pointing at the flaws you imagine speculative analogy has,, show us your bit of the map, the bit where you broke the 4th wall perhaps?
Rather than the (I thought, at any rate) excellent "Books getting lost out of the library" analogy that you think is such a joke, try smaller. Try "Pages getting lost out of your books". You've read the books, and you think you've got the whole story, but the last page is missing. (and a few less important ones from about two thirds of the way through) Rather than admit that there's a possibility of you not having all the data, you prefer to try and extrapolate an ending, using what you think is the complete book.
This is OK, but remember we're using a smaller analogy here. The book has a sequel. Indeed, it's part of a multi volume set of Encyclopedias. All directly relating to the Human part of the program. And these books are part of a Library, the size of which we cannot even begin to imagine. Yet. Until we've read the last page of your book. Then the sequel.
So let's say chimpanzees, were the previous volume. They can't begin to read your book, until they've figured out the Bonobo / Chimp schism, perhaps. We know it's the Congo River, but we can't tell them that because we're in a different book /program to them. Our interaction with them, our closest relatives, is horribly flawed. Because we assumed their book was the preceding volume, when it's really just contiguous series, and specific to them. Just as we share their DNA, they share ours. In the same time frame too. For all we know, we could be the superfluous part of the mammalian program, and they could just as easily be the more viable equation. The necessary genes, that carry the relevant code, are just as likely to be peculiar to them. Or to Orangs. Or Gibbons. But you'd see that as a step backwards, or devolution, and it wouldn't be. Because we don't have all the facts, and we never will.
I may have actually put the 'anal' in 'analogy' by now, but it's the only way I have to work this shit out. I'm not looking for a final answer, just reading the next page. Or writing it. It depends whether I'm working with a 'read only' data stream or not. And I'm not privy to that until the sub-routine shuts down. And nor are you.
Badbeast, you are delving waaaay deep into this. :lol:
Quote from: ϗ, M.S. on September 23, 2011, 05:04:59 AM
Badbeast, you are delving waaaay deep into this. :lol:
Yeah, I know, but it's fun. And a bit "Planet of the Apesy"
But I agree that natural selection is stupid. If natural selection was the primary dynamic, then why do we carry around so much 'inert' DNA? Might as well call it "Natural De-selection". Or "Survival of the fattest". Or say that life in the Sea evolves around "survival of the buoyant". :?
Quote from: BadBeast on September 23, 2011, 05:19:40 AM
Quote from: ϗ, M.S. on September 23, 2011, 05:04:59 AM
Badbeast, you are delving waaaay deep into this. :lol:
Yeah, I know, but it's fun. And a bit "Planet of the Apesy"
But I agree that natural selection is stupid. If natural selection was the primary dynamic, then why do we carry around so much 'inert' DNA? Might as well call it "Natural De-selection". Or "Survival of the fattest". Or say that life in the Sea evolves around "survival of the buoyant". :?
A) a great deal of that junk DNA is either parasitic (from viruses and bacteria), or promoter regions that bind to transcription factors and regulate gene transcription rates.
B) The term Natural Selection was chosen to compare and contrast it with Artificial Selection, i.e. what humans do to domestic animals. The misunderstanding is that it indicates some sort of progress, while there is nothing about it that does so. Variation is eliminated by failure to reproduce. This means the variation in populations and species will change over time. The result is eventual population divergence and cladogenesis (branching off of new species and lineages), otherwise known as evolution. "Survival of the fittest" is a term you should slash from your mind, a popular phrase by a Darwin contemporary. It is misleading.
If you want a "survival of the ___" phrase, try "Survival of whatever works". :wink:
I know "Survival of the fittest" is totally fail, it wasn't a typo when I said "Survival of the fattest" as a comparable term. But do we know for sure that viral DNA is always detrimental? I mean, I think the idea of benign viral strains is too awesome to dimiss. Imagine a virus that would swim about in our systems, patching damage up, and reinforcing our own immune systems instead of bolloxing stuff up like flu. Something with specific and selective reproductive conditions, that behaved like a magic bullet, renewing old cells, or bullying malignant cells into behaving properly.
Hm. I get the idea, but let me extend this analogy a tiny bit further.
If it was just books, and keeping them around, you'd just scan them or hand them over to archive.org to preserve just the data in a way that survives the ages or something (they're pretty good at that, over there).
But these are living things. Not even that, they're species, you need a bunch of them, just like you need at least 6 H2O molecules to make something that behaves like water.
It's more like these ancient medieval manuscripts written on crumbly paper that all need their own pressure-sensitive humidity controlled climate room to survive in.
Except medieval manuscripts are comparatively easy to preserve in a proper state.
That's where this analogy falls apart for me. I'll immediately agree that yes this is very important data, so back it the fuck up already! Like I bet this old Library of Alexandria must have easily fitted on a 8GB memory card.
Except where that process (if we'd travel back in time before it got burned, with a bunch of scanners and photocopy machines) would probably take no more than a couple of years if you'd really work on it, and just wanted to make sure you extracted 99.99% of the most important data before it goes up in flames.
Unfortunately, in biology this doesn't hold up.
You can't just sequence the DNA and assume you got all the info that's in there. In fact we know that you won't.
They're not so much like ancient manuscripts. At least there you'd know that most of the important information content you'd like to know about them are contained in the shapes of ink squiggles on pieces of plant matter.
These biological information carriers are much more alien. You don't know. You need a full catalogue of all the complex chemicals and proteins it's made up of. But you also need a full description of how this object interacts with other objects that are near it. And the shape. And the configuration and structure.
You can't just "scan" them. Or perhaps just freeze a specimen or two. It's not enough, you gotta keep em around and living otherwise the precious information is lost.
So no it's not like a library, not at all. It's more like a zoo. Oh that's exactly what it is!
Yeah but the point I was making, is that maybe we don't have to scan them, log them, and freeze a specimen or two, it's just part of our routine to think that we must. Another part of the Macro environment takes care of all that, and the whole system is actually working as efficiently as it ever was. It did OK before we'd even learned to walk upright, and I dare say there would be enough DNA data knocking around in one form or another to start from scratch if the system has to reformat and re-install again. Our view of our own importance in it all, might be disproportionately large, as part of the pre-programmed options our species carries in it's DNA coding. Like the bit in Max Payne, when he's high on Valkyr, and suddenly realises he's a two dimensional character in a video game. And suddenly all the stuff that was puzzling him falls into place. The slo mo showing off of his combat moves, the feeling he had no control over his destiny, the feeling he was being watched by something he could never quite see. The cliched internal dialogue, etc. Then as the drug wears off, the fourth wall is rebuilt, and he turns back into predictable old Max again.
But what I'm getting from Kai's sense of urgency is that the whole system is in fact NOT working as it should because humans are fucking it up. And on the assumption of free will, we could choose not to.
Except my argument is that choosing not to, and preserving all this shit, is not at all like preserving a library full of ancient manuscripts. Not to mention comparing it to simply deciding not to burn it down (can you put out the fire that keeps you warm?).
At least museum archives preserving manuscripts get to take shortcuts. Photograph all of the pages, humidity-controlled-room preserve a couple of them in case someone ever wants to chemically determine what inks were used or some such. You don't need all books for that.
Comparing it to burning down a library or not, makes it sounds a LOT easier than it actually is.
and yeah life will go on whether we fuck it up or not--although depending on how FAR back we'll fuck it up, how many times can the Earth still grow a new civilisation, assuming that it'll take about as long as it took for us? I mean, before the sun stops working and all that?
Two or three times?
What if the intelligent bipedal cockroaches that'll come after us also don't manage to colonize space? And what if the gas-propelled sponges that come after them also won't make the space jump?
Then maybe life on Earth will do its thing and in a few billion years it'll stop and we never get a Star Trek Federation or an Asimov Foundation or Dyson Spheres or time travel or all that fun stuff.
Quote from: Triple Zero on September 23, 2011, 11:40:41 AM
But what I'm getting from Kai's sense of urgency is that the whole system is in fact NOT working as it should because humans are fucking it up. And on the assumption of free will, we could choose not to.
Except my argument is that choosing not to, and preserving all this shit, is not at all like preserving a library full of ancient manuscripts. Not to mention comparing it to simply deciding not to burn it down (can you put out the fire that keeps you warm?).
At least museum archives preserving manuscripts get to take shortcuts. Photograph all of the pages, humidity-controlled-room preserve a couple of them in case someone ever wants to chemically determine what inks were used or some such. You don't need all books for that.
Comparing it to burning down a library or not, makes it sounds a LOT easier than it actually is.
and yeah life will go on whether we fuck it up or not--although depending on how FAR back we'll fuck it up, how many times can the Earth still grow a new civilisation, assuming that it'll take about as long as it took for us? I mean, before the sun stops working and all that?
Two or three times?
What if the intelligent bipedal cockroaches that'll come after us also don't manage to colonize space? And what if the gas-propelled sponges that come after them also won't make the space jump?
Then maybe life on Earth will do its thing and in a few billion years it'll stop and we never get a Star Trek Federation or an Asimov Foundation or Dyson Spheres or time travel or all that fun stuff.
Well if you put it like that, then . . . . . . . http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9Pp_oaa_4U
Let me try again.
You are an organism on a planet full of organisms -living systems of matter that acquire materials and energy and respond to their environment in order to reproduce and maintain themselves as functioning systems. There are so many different kinds we still are only guessing at the number, and they take on all kinds of weird forms, mostly small single cells. You share an evolutionary lineage with them, i.e. you are related, and the same genes that direct your continued existence direct theirs as well, at the most fundamental and basic level.
The question is this: how should we prioritize efforts to avoid permanently and irrevocably eliminating groups of organisms which share a common ability to interbreed with each other based on genetic similarity and reproductive compatibility? If we can use these groups of organisms that we label "species" as sources of information, like books, should we prioritize their preservation more, or less? If species are not useful as sources of information, should we place a lower priority on their conservation?
I think we should keep them around because they are kind of cool. I think they are cool because I am fascinated by them, because it is interesting -which depends on them serving as sources of information. However, the only reason I value them as sources of information is because emotionally, that's what gets me excited, brings joy to my life.
I'm interested in getting to the bottom of the thought experiment though. Do we place value on species because they serve as sources of information? Are species less valuable if they do not?
Well, you can't keep all of them around anyway. Even if you be all hyper sustainable and shit. Not saying we shouldn't try, but "I think we should keep them around" is not an answer to the questions you pose.
The problem (as Kai describes in the OP) is that biodiversity is plummeting like a spontaneously materialized sperm whale at 10,000ft height.
I wonder if it's possible to stop it, though.
I'd rather first work on not making this planet unliveable for humans within this century, climate-wise, and if we manage that, conserving biodiversity (what's left) should be within reasonable reach. I believe if we actually survive the next 100 years as a species, we might have a reasonable chance of colonizing some planet or other, and then we're pretty much solid, I hope.
Looking at it from the other end of the human 'equation' maybe our genome is such a special combination, it's actually prudent for the macro-program to invest so much of it's resources in ensuring we survive, because of our totally awesome potential. And if it has to shut a few functions down, it's quite prepared to do so. If the price of getting us off the planet, is that we actually consume four fifths of it's available resources, that's a result all round isn't it? We get to trek off to the stars with our potential, and the planet gets an environment conducive to bringing it's next project along.
Quote from: BadBeast on September 23, 2011, 06:50:40 PM
Looking at it from the other end of the human 'equation' maybe our genome is such a special combination, it's actually prudent for the macro-program to invest so much of it's resources in ensuring we survive, because of our totally awesome potential. And if it has to shut a few functions down, it's quite prepared to do so. If the price of getting us off the planet, is that we actually consume four fifths of it's available resources, that's a result all round isn't it? We get to trek off to the stars with our potential, and the planet gets an environment conducive to bringing it's next project along.
Fuck yeah.
Also we're gonna need real lightbulbs in outer space, none of those eco friendly stupid fluorescent non-dimmable fucking things, and wild tuna marinaded in dolphin blood.
BRB, dumping motor oil in the toilet.
(Oops, I stepped on an endangered puppy that was in my way)
Quote from: BadBeast on September 23, 2011, 06:23:30 AM
I know "Survival of the fittest" is totally fail, it wasn't a typo when I said "Survival of the fattest" as a comparable term. But do we know for sure that viral DNA is always detrimental? I mean, I think the idea of benign viral strains is too awesome to dimiss. Imagine a virus that would swim about in our systems, patching damage up, and reinforcing our own immune systems instead of bolloxing stuff up like flu. Something with specific and selective reproductive conditions, that behaved like a magic bullet, renewing old cells, or bullying malignant cells into behaving properly.
We have no idea if viral junk DNA has any function whatsoever. We barely have noticed that there may be viral components to junk DNA in the first place. It's a strong point of attack for future researchers.
Quote from: Triple Zero on September 23, 2011, 08:27:04 AM
Hm. I get the idea, but let me extend this analogy a tiny bit further.
If it was just books, and keeping them around, you'd just scan them or hand them over to archive.org to preserve just the data in a way that survives the ages or something (they're pretty good at that, over there).
But these are living things. Not even that, they're species, you need a bunch of them, just like you need at least 6 H2O molecules to make something that behaves like water.
It's more like these ancient medieval manuscripts written on crumbly paper that all need their own pressure-sensitive humidity controlled climate room to survive in.
Except medieval manuscripts are comparatively easy to preserve in a proper state.
That's where this analogy falls apart for me. I'll immediately agree that yes this is very important data, so back it the fuck up already! Like I bet this old Library of Alexandria must have easily fitted on a 8GB memory card.
Except where that process (if we'd travel back in time before it got burned, with a bunch of scanners and photocopy machines) would probably take no more than a couple of years if you'd really work on it, and just wanted to make sure you extracted 99.99% of the most important data before it goes up in flames.
Unfortunately, in biology this doesn't hold up.
You can't just sequence the DNA and assume you got all the info that's in there. In fact we know that you won't.
They're not so much like ancient manuscripts. At least there you'd know that most of the important information content you'd like to know about them are contained in the shapes of ink squiggles on pieces of plant matter.
These biological information carriers are much more alien. You don't know. You need a full catalogue of all the complex chemicals and proteins it's made up of. But you also need a full description of how this object interacts with other objects that are near it. And the shape. And the configuration and structure.
You can't just "scan" them. Or perhaps just freeze a specimen or two. It's not enough, you gotta keep em around and living otherwise the precious information is lost.
So no it's not like a library, not at all. It's more like a zoo. Oh that's exactly what it is!
I think you may be taking the the book metaphor too literally, but I'll run with this. Yes, the problem with the matter is that you can't just scan a bunch of specimens into the computer. Organisms are n-dimentional hypersets of information, and our understanding of that hyperset is constantly growing. They're MAGIC books, okay, does that work? The problem of a race against time still stands. Also, natural history collections preserve a great deal of this information as publication archives and physical specimens. Millions of them. Not the same as a living species, but much better than having nothing.
Quote from: Triple Zero on September 23, 2011, 11:40:41 AM
But what I'm getting from Kai's sense of urgency is that the whole system is in fact NOT working as it should because humans are fucking it up. And on the assumption of free will, we could choose not to.
Except my argument is that choosing not to, and preserving all this shit, is not at all like preserving a library full of ancient manuscripts. Not to mention comparing it to simply deciding not to burn it down (can you put out the fire that keeps you warm?).
At least museum archives preserving manuscripts get to take shortcuts. Photograph all of the pages, humidity-controlled-room preserve a couple of them in case someone ever wants to chemically determine what inks were used or some such. You don't need all books for that.
Comparing it to burning down a library or not, makes it sounds a LOT easier than it actually is.
and yeah life will go on whether we fuck it up or not--although depending on how FAR back we'll fuck it up, how many times can the Earth still grow a new civilisation, assuming that it'll take about as long as it took for us? I mean, before the sun stops working and all that?
Two or three times?
What if the intelligent bipedal cockroaches that'll come after us also don't manage to colonize space? And what if the gas-propelled sponges that come after them also won't make the space jump?
Then maybe life on Earth will do its thing and in a few billion years it'll stop and we never get a Star Trek Federation or an Asimov Foundation or Dyson Spheres or time travel or all that fun stuff.
The system is working just fine. What's not going to be working, is /humans/. Or possibly just living in biodiversity poverty for the next several million years because we were too stupid to preserve our biological heritage for our own benefit. All those unknowns never to be known. It's not like physics, or chemistry, or even cell theory. Cells aren't going anywhere, the laws of physics aren't going anywhere, the fucking STARS aren't going anywhere. But if we send diversity back to the Permian, then it's GONE. No second chances. That information is lost. The emotional appeal would be "extinction means forever", cue the depression music.
Quote from: ϗ, M.S. on September 23, 2011, 09:49:11 PM
I think you may be taking the the book metaphor too literally, but I'll run with this. Yes, the problem with the matter is that you can't just scan a bunch of specimens into the computer. Organisms are n-dimentional hypersets of information, and our understanding of that hyperset is constantly growing. They're MAGIC books, okay, does that work? The problem of a race against time still stands. Also, natural history collections preserve a great
deal of this information as publication archives and physical specimens. Millions of them. Not the same as a living species, but much better than having nothing.
Yes. I was just trying to describe how hard it would be to preserve such a "hyperbook" of information, besides keeping it alive in its ecosystem.
I mean it's not even just the species itself, its interactions with the environment could have valuable information as well.
So how to do it?
Either get lost as the human species and live and let live the rest of them, or try to save ourselves, deal with the biodiversity poverty somehow, and from that foundation of sustainability try to sorta regrow?
Quote from: Triple Zero on September 23, 2011, 10:44:31 PM
Quote from: ϗ, M.S. on September 23, 2011, 09:49:11 PM
I think you may be taking the the book metaphor too literally, but I'll run with this. Yes, the problem with the matter is that you can't just scan a bunch of specimens into the computer. Organisms are n-dimentional hypersets of information, and our understanding of that hyperset is constantly growing. They're MAGIC books, okay, does that work? The problem of a race against time still stands. Also, natural history collections preserve a great
deal of this information as publication archives and physical specimens. Millions of them. Not the same as a living species, but much better than having nothing.
Yes. I was just trying to describe how hard it would be to preserve such a "hyperbook" of information, besides keeping it alive in its ecosystem.
I mean it's not even just the species itself, its interactions with the environment could have valuable information as well.
So how to do it?
Either get lost as the human species and live and let live the rest of them, or try to save ourselves, deal with the biodiversity poverty somehow, and from that foundation of sustainability try to sorta regrow?
Ecological interactions define not just the information available, but the very identity of species, including humans. We are not separate entities from the rest of the world, both living and non-living. If we kill off a bunch of species and/or move to another planet, it will fundamentally change who we are as humans.
I think we know how. We certainly know enough to stop the majority of the damage we are doing. The problem is making conservation a priority.
Quote from: Triple Zero on September 23, 2011, 08:43:18 PM
Quote from: BadBeast on September 23, 2011, 06:50:40 PM
Looking at it from the other end of the human 'equation' maybe our genome is such a special combination, it's actually prudent for the macro-program to invest so much of it's resources in ensuring we survive, because of our totally awesome potential. And if it has to shut a few functions down, it's quite prepared to do so. If the price of getting us off the planet, is that we actually consume four fifths of it's available resources, that's a result all round isn't it? We get to trek off to the stars with our potential, and the planet gets an environment conducive to bringing it's next project along.
Fuck yeah.
Also we're gonna need real lightbulbs in outer space, none of those eco friendly stupid fluorescent non-dimmable fucking things, and wild tuna marinaded in dolphin blood.
BRB, dumping motor oil in the toilet.
(Oops, I stepped on an endangered puppy that was in my way)
Cool beans. Now it's no longer endangered, it's . . . space fuel!
(http://i748.photobucket.com/albums/xx128/ChuckFukmuk/lol%20jesus%20etc/1873president-bush-eats-kitten.jpg)
Quote from: Triple Zero on September 23, 2011, 10:44:31 PM
Quote from: ϗ, M.S. on September 23, 2011, 09:49:11 PM
I think you may be taking the the book metaphor too literally, but I'll run with this. Yes, the problem with the matter is that you can't just scan a bunch of specimens into the computer. Organisms are n-dimentional hypersets of information, and our understanding of that hyperset is constantly growing. They're MAGIC books, okay, does that work? The problem of a race against time still stands. Also, natural history collections preserve a great
deal of this information as publication archives and physical specimens. Millions of them. Not the same as a living species, but much better than having nothing.
Yes. I was just trying to describe how hard it would be to preserve such a "hyperbook" of information, besides keeping it alive in its ecosystem.
I mean it's not even just the species itself, its interactions with the environment could have valuable information as well.
So how to do it?
Either get lost as the human species and live and let live the rest of them, or try to save ourselves, deal with the biodiversity poverty somehow, and from that foundation of sustainability try to sorta regrow?
Here's the biggest issue, and the one I've been alluding to.
We not only don't know the species very well, most of them we don't /know at all/.
There are something like 1.8 million valid species names out there, and possibly 1 to 2 orders of magnitude left to be described in the most basic form. That is, most of the biodiversity out there is so unknown that it doesn't even have a name!
That's the first step. We can't do much until we have an idea of the scope, and for that we need a Planetary Biodiversity Inventory (http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=103065). Once we have closer to the majority of species described within various regions, we'll have a better idea of how to conserve that diversity. Until then, it's all just shots in the dark. Sure, you can talk about preserving prairie for bison or wilderness for grizzly bears, but what about parasitoid hymenoptera, soil nematodes, rove beetles, protozoans? We don't even have close to a handle on those groups diversity even at a local level. All we can do now is try to wholescale conserve regions that are known hotspots for biodiversity, at least for megafauna (which to me, is now everything bigger than a bumble bee).
But I didn't write this thread to think of solutions, because honestly I'm doing all I can already. I've been working the last 7 weeks on these issues on the taxonomic level. I don't have the resources to start purchasing land in the tropics, probably never will.
Sorry but, how long is that going to take? Even with decent funding? What I know of biology is that everything takes really really long and is really really hard work.
That's the point, you're doing everything you can, amazing job, and we know a littlebit more about a single species namely caddisflies. And it took, what, five years?
Then you tell me we've not nearly even described 1% of all species out there even in the most basic form.
And describing that 1% has taken biological science how long? 100 years? How many man-years?
So is building this inventory a realistic scenario? Cause it sounds to me like it would require at least 10,000 years to complete?
That's why I proposed to save the planet first, and get to work on the biodiversity problem later.
Quote from: Triple Zero on September 24, 2011, 11:12:16 AM
Sorry but, how long is that going to take? Even with decent funding? What I know of biology is that everything takes really really long and is really really hard work.
That's the point, you're doing everything you can, amazing job, and we know a littlebit more about a single species namely caddisflies. And it took, what, five years?
Then you tell me we've not nearly even described 1% of all species out there even in the most basic form.
And describing that 1% has taken biological science how long? 100 years? How many man-years?
So is building this inventory a realistic scenario? Cause it sounds to me like it would require at least 10,000 years to complete?
That's why I proposed to save the planet first, and get to work on the biodiversity problem later.
This. If we knew the exact habitat requirements of 100 million species of tartigrades, slime molds, weevils, and other un-charismatic microfauna, the answer to conservation would be what it is today: set aside land for protection from development, and strictly regulate pollution of water and air. We don't need to know all that biological detail.
Quote from: Phlogiston Merriweather on September 24, 2011, 03:01:23 PM
Quote from: Triple Zero on September 24, 2011, 11:12:16 AM
Sorry but, how long is that going to take? Even with decent funding? What I know of biology is that everything takes really really long and is really really hard work.
That's the point, you're doing everything you can, amazing job, and we know a littlebit more about a single species namely caddisflies. And it took, what, five years?
Then you tell me we've not nearly even described 1% of all species out there even in the most basic form.
And describing that 1% has taken biological science how long? 100 years? How many man-years?
So is building this inventory a realistic scenario? Cause it sounds to me like it would require at least 10,000 years to complete?
That's why I proposed to save the planet first, and get to work on the biodiversity problem later.
This. If we knew the exact habitat requirements of 100 million species of tartigrades, slime molds, weevils, and other un-charismatic microfauna, the answer to conservation would be what it is today: set aside land for protection from development, and strictly regulate pollution of water and air. We don't need to know all that biological detail.
You might not
personally need to know all that biological detail ,but what about the children? Should they be given a choice?
Quote from: BadBeast on September 24, 2011, 04:14:19 PM
Quote from: Phlogiston Merriweather on September 24, 2011, 03:01:23 PM
Quote from: Triple Zero on September 24, 2011, 11:12:16 AM
Sorry but, how long is that going to take? Even with decent funding? What I know of biology is that everything takes really really long and is really really hard work.
That's the point, you're doing everything you can, amazing job, and we know a littlebit more about a single species namely caddisflies. And it took, what, five years?
Then you tell me we've not nearly even described 1% of all species out there even in the most basic form.
And describing that 1% has taken biological science how long? 100 years? How many man-years?
So is building this inventory a realistic scenario? Cause it sounds to me like it would require at least 10,000 years to complete?
That's why I proposed to save the planet first, and get to work on the biodiversity problem later.
This. If we knew the exact habitat requirements of 100 million species of tartigrades, slime molds, weevils, and other un-charismatic microfauna, the answer to conservation would be what it is today: set aside land for protection from development, and strictly regulate pollution of water and air. We don't need to know all that biological detail.
You might not personally need to know all that biological detail ,but what about the children? Should they be given a choice?
I don't mean personally. I mean that as conservationists, we as humans don't need to know that much detail in order to make present day decisions. Building decent scientific models depends upon asking "how much do we need to know in order to know what we need to know?" If we need to know how to conserve biodiversity, and want to create a model predicting the consequences of our management actions on biodiversity, population dynamics, and extinction risk, do we need to fill that model with countless data on thousands of species? Does that improve our model? My answer is almost always no. If you want to conserve trichopterans, you pick some more charismatic umbrella species like river otters and set aside and manage land and water necessary for viable river otter populations, which captures the public imagination, and conserves countless other species at the same time. Do original research on whatever you want to, but the main obstacle to conservation is public support and the idea that economic development should take precedence over conservation, not lack of taxonomic detail.
Suppose I am a librarian in charge of conserving books. I don't need to read the books to know how to conserve them, I just need to keep them at the right temperature and humidity and keep assholes with kerosene and matches away from my library. Go ahead and read the books, that's what they are there for. That is why we are saving them but it isn't how we are saving them.
Advances in conservation are going to come from theoretical approaches to managing the complexity and volume of data inherent in the myriad interactions of a living ecosystem, not from more comprehensive catalogs of species. However, conservation is always going to depend upon setting aside some land and employing simple management actions like controlled burns and reducing pollution to watersheds in order to keep the land like it was before we sectioned it off and developed around it.
Quote from: Phlogiston Merriweather on September 24, 2011, 03:01:23 PM
This. If we knew the exact habitat requirements of 100 million species of tartigrades, slime molds, weevils, and other un-charismatic microfauna, the answer to conservation would be what it is today: set aside land for protection from development, and strictly regulate pollution of water and air. We don't need to know all that biological detail.
That was not exactly what I was trying to say, btw.
I was just wondering from a practical point of view and whether it's realistic, not if we "need" to know it or not, IMO we "need" to know as much as possible because it's awesome.
Human race first, must have. Preserving biodiversity as much as possible, awesome, nice to have, secondary.
Actually there's no reason why people that really want to can go ahead and catalogue everything out there right now, it's more that I wonder about Kai's statement we'd need to do it
first, before we know what to do because of the complexity in everything. Except I kind of worry that might be a reaally long term perhaps never-ending project, so if in the mean time the climate goes all wonky, we're gonna need to take some shortcuts and try our best current guesses at fixing it, or things (including the project) comes to a premature end.
And then you have this big catalogue with nobody around to read it anymore :(
Quote from: BadBeast on September 24, 2011, 04:14:19 PM
but what about the children? Should they be given a choice?
Sorry, but what does that even mean?
And my point was that maybe, bio diversity was being diverted by the macro system towards the species that is most likely to evolve itself into a viable post natal species, instead of a foetus, dependent upon the (by now) disappearing resources.
Buggering about trying to "put stuff back into the system" might be considered churlish, and ungrateful.
Quote from: Triple Zero on September 24, 2011, 05:27:49 PM
Quote from: Phlogiston Merriweather on September 24, 2011, 03:01:23 PM
This. If we knew the exact habitat requirements of 100 million species of tartigrades, slime molds, weevils, and other un-charismatic microfauna, the answer to conservation would be what it is today: set aside land for protection from development, and strictly regulate pollution of water and air. We don't need to know all that biological detail.
That was not exactly what I was trying to say, btw.
I was just wondering from a practical point of view and whether it's realistic, not if we "need" to know it or not, IMO we "need" to know as much as possible because it's awesome.
Human race first, must have. Preserving biodiversity as much as possible, awesome, nice to have, secondary.
Actually there's no reason why people that really want to can go ahead and catalogue everything out there right now, it's more that I wonder about Kai's statement we'd need to do it first, before we know what to do because of the complexity in everything. Except I kind of worry that might be a reaally long term perhaps never-ending project, so if in the mean time the climate goes all wonky, we're gonna need to take some shortcuts and try our best current guesses at fixing it, or things (including the project) comes to a premature end.
And then you have this big catalogue with nobody around to read it anymore :(
Quote from: BadBeast on September 24, 2011, 04:14:19 PM
but what about the children? Should they be given a choice?
Sorry, but what does that even mean?
It was a kind of an allusion to the fact that we always seem to exaggerate exactly what it is that we are responsible for. I'm not saying that there isn't any global warming, but I do question, A/ Exactly how much of it is directly due to our activities, and
B/ How effectual (if at all)any remedial courses we implement would be anyway.
I'm sorry, you guys lost me.
I think we were all sort of talking past eachother at this point anyway.
Better luck next time, or something :)
Quote from: Triple Zero on September 25, 2011, 12:41:21 PM
I think we were all sort of talking past eachother at this point anyway.
Better luck next time, or something :)
Yeah, sorry Kai, got kinda carried away there. A very thought provoking subject though.