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Playing the devil's advocate here but I believe humans do not need preserving. With 7 billion individuals and counting, it seems we're doing just fine. Regardle
by exch 15y ago
Playing the devil's advocate here but I believe humans do not need preserving. With 7 billion individuals and counting, it seems we're doing just fine. Regardless of how poor the living conditions are for many of us.
For this particular species of insect however, having the last 24 remaining individuals of the entire species (presumably) be dependent on a single small shrubbery makes me think the effort put into this rescue was more than warranted.
Specially considering their extinction was (indirectly) our fault and a mistake that could have been prevented with better education and oversight on who and what was brought along during our travels. Had their extinction been an entirely natural process, I might have agreed that their rescue would not have been such a high priority.
Of course there is the question of us disturbing ecological balance somewhere is natural or not. We are after all natural beings ourselves. Whether we are intelligent or not and have the capacity to reason about our actions is irrelevant in a strictly biological sense. But this discussion opens up a whole different can of worms.
edit: Fixed some grammar.
- jimrandomh 15y agoHumans are dying at a rate of 1.8 per second, and every human death is a tragedy of greater magnitude than the extinction of an insect species.
- sitkack 15y agoSome of those dying humans would like nothing more than to research and save insects. What we do in our life defines us. We all die. On the scale of human activities to cease, preservation of an insect species isn't something I would stop. There are much more fruitful candidates.
- derrida 15y agoSaving an insect species is human life.
- schiffern 15y agoDestroying the results of a genetic program that's reached an optima after hundreds of millions of years seems like an incredible waste of biological knowledge. When we can duplicate those results in an hour on a desktop PC, I'll agree with you. I'm not holding my breath.
- jholman 15y agoAside from the nit-picking fact that "optima" is a plural and you use it with a singular indefinite article ("an") ... There is no reason to believe that this is an optimum. (That is, an optimum for its environment, or any extant environment. Since, of course, a very wide range of possible forms are optimal for SOME environment, like the environment with a mad god that kills all life forms that do not exactly match XYZ, but that sort of reasoning is obviously just silly). Anyway, blethering aside, my point here is that if you think existing species are at all likely to be "optimal" in any meaningful sense, you have likely misunderstood evolution.
- y8af3 15y agoWhy do you believe that ONE human life is more important than the extinction of an entire species?
- jeremyarussell 15y agoHumans are dying at that rate, and being born at a rate well faster then our death rate. Otherwise how would we have gone from a population of six billion to seven billion? Also I'm going to drop back to an argument I hold near and dear. Lots of people are terrible, they hurt other people for their own gain. We start wars just because someone doesn't believe the same things as ourselves. We go out of our way to put others down with words just because we think that since words can't hurt then it must be okay to say whatever. All in all it's rather sad that a human being which is supposed to be superior to all other forms of life doesn't have the empathy to want to fix a problem we made for these animals in the first place. Call me crazy but as a human I'd like to leave things in a better state then they were in when I got here.
- baq 15y agonot fast enough.
- mixmastamyk 15y agoI'm surprised at your selfishness. Sitting at the table of plenty but won't spare a crumb for another. Disgusting, really.