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I work in biotech, and effectively the entire field is rifling through Nature’s LEGO bin to find the parts it needs. There’s a weird overlap happening here of e
by roughly 3y ago
I work in biotech, and effectively the entire field is rifling through Nature’s LEGO bin to find the parts it needs. There’s a weird overlap happening here of environmental collapse at the same moment that we’re learning just how rich that diversity is, what it means, how to use it. Hell, transgenic rices and grains - the engine of the green revolution - were all remixed landrace species, which are in danger now of being replaced by monocrops.
The loss of species is a tragedy because it’s a tragedy, but it’s also a tragedy because we’re destroying our inheritance at an alarming rate before we ever really get to see what it is or what it could be. Billions of years of prior art, gone.
- civilitty 3y agoVice had an episode years ago where they followed cannabis breeders as they went to the Democratic Republic of Congo in search of the original Congolese landrace strain [1]. Environmental collapse hurts everyone! [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3nmep/we-went-hunting-for-a-rare-congolese-weed-strain-with-the-kings-of-cannabis https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3nmep/we-went-hunting-for-a...
- BenFranklin100 3y agoI work in biotech as well, and the idea that the extinction of 21 species from an estimate 8M+ species has any sort of meaningful impact on biomedical research or the understanding of basic biology is ludicrous. Further your post is histrionic. ‘Environmental collapse’, ‘destroying our inheritance’, ‘alarming rate’, suggests an individual who is pushing an agenda rather than rationally appraising the current state of the ever-changing environment and biological ecosystem.
- NPC82 3y ago>suggests an individual who is pushing an agenda Well, being wealth has been increasingly concentrated in fewer people and wealth has always been on the side of fossil fuels and climate denial, would that not illustrate a plausible narrative? At the very least, those aforementioned people probably could have done something about these issues before any of us knew about them.
- geysersam 3y agoIf you think those 21 species were the only ones going extinct you're badly informed. About 200 plant and animal species go extinct every day.
- refurb 3y agoMillions of species even went extinct before modern man was ever here.
- FranzFerdiNaN 3y agoOh well then i guess it doesnt matter we destroy the earth. Fire up those coal plants and slap some more meat on the barbecue, nothing matters after all because things have happened in the past!
- refurb 3y agoHow did you that conclusion from what I said?
- _factor 3y agoThe timing and placement of your statement comes off as a challenge to the original statement. It appears you’re implying that what we’re doing today is ok because it is part of a natural process. While true, we also have agency to transcend the natural process or perpetuate it. Just because it has happened, doesn’t mean we should endorse and accelerate it. What we do determines the future.
- 3seashells 3y agoBot: claim of role, rank relevant to the discussion + I agree with you butt (missing) + counter claim or talking points. "it's just a series of ever warmer summers, nothing to see here" style suggests oil industry? Regarding extinction, my suggestion is biome transplants. Take a endangered biome slice and transplant it where the temperatures and conditions for the biome will reemerge post climate change stabilization, preferably in an area where humanity has no economic interest.
- PBnFlash 3y agoTransplanting hundreds of species around the world in viable groups is probably a bad idea too.
- pvaldes 3y agonot so ludicrous. Some species are more important than the other. In terms of biomedicine, the lack of a single species having evolved a unique substance could change the human history. Without knowing the list, we can't infer a lot about the impact or lack of impact. Some of those species could be obscure hybrids without real impact, the lack of other could be potentially catastrophic; but the effects would have been forgotten by now and assimilated as "the new normality". This is a glimpse of 1950's.
- da39a3ee 3y agoYou missed the bit where the person you're replying to said they knew something about the field. The loss of some species in a genus of Hawaiian honeycreepers is not tragic because of the potential for making medicines out of honeycreepers.
- RGamma 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
- rollcat 3y agoI find your take quite odd, considering your background. Biodiversity is not a hit points bar that knocks out your player character when it falls below a certain level. You remove a single keystone species and the whole local ecosystem collapses, creating a butterfly effect of disasters.
- roughly 3y agoYes, you’re right, I’m pushing an agenda. That agenda is this: rendering species extinct is bad.
- depr 3y ago>suggests an individual who is pushing an agenda >rationally appraising the current state both are an agenda. You can't escape ideology.
- william_T 3y agoThis is a lot closer to my thought as well. No one is saying extinction is beneficial. However, in the grand scheme of things, how critical was the unique Catfish that was only found in 1 river in Ohio? How many species have come and gone completely undetected? Now that a species near the top of the food chain is missing, what species can grow and change to fill the gap? Isn't that evolution, you respond to a change in your environment.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoBiodiversity is decreasing at a rapid clip. Yes, biomass will remain constant, but increased homogeny has its own risks.
- mlsu 3y agoI think of it in terms of energy. Evolution is a process that takes a lot of energy. Every lifetime is a lifetime of energy that has been harnessed to continue the process. So when a species goes extinct, it's not just the energy of all of the living members, but all of the ancestors of all of the living members as well that is destroyed. Sort of like expending a bunch of energy to train a neural network, and then rm -rf the weights. Such a waste.
- leptons 3y ago>the energy of all of the living members, but all of the ancestors of all of the living members as well that is destroyed The law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
- klysm 3y agoIt sure as hell can be wasted though
- steve_adams_86 3y agoIn this context, what’s destroyed isn’t the energy itself but the product that was yielded from the work it enabled.
- everforward 3y agoIf you want to be pedantic, the correct term is probably entropy. That being living irreversibly increased the entropy of the universe, and we wasted that increase in entropy.
- leptons 3y ago"energy" the way OP is using it is bordering on woo. I was simply reminding them of the proper use of the word. I don't think entropy is necessarily more correct, either. I don't think you or anyone possesses the omniscience to declare that entropy was increased. It could just as well be that some living being decreased entropy in some way, but then we're getting into defining order and disorder and that's outside the scope of what I want to discuss on an internet forum. OP's asserting that all that "energy" was somehow wasted, but they don't take into account the place those species occupied within ecosystems. Depending on what species you are, the other species being gone is either a good thing or a bad thing or an indifferent thing. No energy was wasted, nothing lasts, nothing is lost. It's the way of the world, or this universe for that matter. If the sun exploded today wiping out the entirety of humanity and everything else on this planet, what is "lost"? My guess is nothing outside of our planet would even notice. And our "energy" will still live on, in our radio transmissions. So maybe not all would be lost.
- da39a3ee 3y agoThat's the wrong reason to mourn Bachman's Warbler. I suspect you're a nice person but your post completely misses the beauty and the tragedy of these species, instead focusing on a non-existent advantage to humans they might represent. That's the big mistake of the last decade: conservation and environmentalism are not about making the planet more beneficial for humans. There's plenty of genomes around for your transgenics, don't worry. Our duty and mission is to prevent habitat loss and the extinctions it causes.
- roughly 3y agoIt’s strange that I got misread by one person as a fuzzy-headed hippie and by another person as a cold-hearted extractivist.
- da39a3ee 3y agoI don't think you're a cold-hearted extractivist. That's what I meant when I said I thought you were a nice person (though I totally failed to come up with a turn of phrase to match yours!). The thing is I am utterly depressed by the way that "climate change" has caused an entire generation to think that conservation is about managing atmospheric chemistry and planetary climate. Conservation is about preventing habitat loss and extinction. Human well-being does not trump avoidance of habitat loss in all cases by any means. And so, I criticized your post for (somewhat analogously to climate change) suggesting an utterly spurious reason for extinction avoidance when no-one should need any reason. But the generation of people who care about climate change (not you, I'm just ranting) by and large don't know the difference between a eucalyptus/pine monoculture that results from one of their afforestation schemes and a natural forest habitat. Climate change avoidance may well be an important thread of conservation, but the fact that we have lost the simple rallying call of "Save the rainforests" threatens to be a tragedy, and if it turns out so, I will partially blame the last 20 years of climate change discourse.