3 ms·

Would there be a way to use "information entropy" as the measurement? Late in the day so I'm struggling to finish my thoughts, but putting this here in case yo

• lisper 6y ago
  Yes, but it's tricky for two reasons. First, we don't really know how to quantify the relative value of two different species. It's kind of like trying to quantify the value of a book. Losing a volume of Aristotle's Poetics is probably worse than losing a Harlequin romance. And second, the information is not just resident in the genome. We can quantify how many bits of information is contained in DNA, but just knowing the complete gene sequence of a salamander is not enough to be able to make a salamander. You need to embed those genes in the right environment, and we have no idea how to quantify the information needed to describe that. So actually putting a number on it is hopeless. The best you can do is look at the effort it would take to reproduce that information once it's lost, which is essentially infinite.
  • smiley1437 6y ago
    Thank you, you are thinking much clearer than I And when you put it like that, it's particularly upsetting that we lose up to 150 species a day
  • acomjean 6y ago
    They can use genetics to make aproximate evolutionary trees since different species share a lot of common genetics. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetic_tree https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetic_tree That being said changes are very slow and extinction is pretty tragic.
  • edmundsauto 6y ago
    The more I learn about genetics, the less I feel like we know. It’s definitely fascinating, thanks for your perspective!