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The case against the concept of biodiversity + The extinct species within

#1
C C Offline
The Extinct Species Within
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opini...thin-69061

INTRO: The genomes of living animals are littered with DNA from long-gone relatives, providing a lens on evolution, past extinctions, and perhaps even solutions to agricultural problems... (MORE)


The case against the concept of biodiversity: It’s more controversial than you might think.
https://www.vox.com/22584103/biodiversit...ion-debate

EXCERPTS: In 2017, an evolutionary biologist named R. Alexander Pyron ignited controversy with a Washington Post commentary titled “We don’t need to save endangered species. Extinction is part of evolution.” He wrote: “Conserving a species we have helped to kill off, but on which we are not directly dependent, serves to discharge our own guilt, but little else.”

Pyron’s take challenged the decades-old idea that biodiversity is a good thing — that humans should strive to preserve all forms of life on Earth and their interconnectedness across ecosystems. It prompted scientist and writer Carl Safina to mount a passionate defense of biodiversity, calling Pyron’s stance “conceptually confused” and containing “jarring assertions.” Safina’s most cutting rebuke was that belittling biodiversity derails environmental conversations. “It’s like answering ‘Black lives matter’ with ‘All lives matter,’” he wrote. “It’s a way of intentionally missing the point.”

Nobel Prize winners co-signed more rebuttals. Professors blogged long meditations on why endangered species need to be saved. [...] Ginger Allington, a landscape ecologist and professor at George Washington University who tracks the scientific debate around “biodiversity,” says this scientific back-and-forth reflects increasing conflict about the importance of biodiversity and species loss.

The most common way to measure biodiversity is to count the number of species in a certain place, also known as “species richness.” But critics question the usefulness of this number and argue that the concept has always been fuzzy, even to scientists, akin to a “new linguistic bottle for the wine of old ideas.”

A handful of scientists want to do away with the term biodiversity altogether — and have been trying to do so since the late 1990s. The concept, they say, is hard to quantify, hard to track globally over time, and actually isn’t an indication of what people commonly picture as a “healthy” ecosystem. (Scientists are generally reluctant to describe ecosystems in terms of “healthy” or “unhealthy,” which are value judgments.)

Last year, the United Nations reported that the world has failed to reach even one of the major biodiversity conservation targets it had set for itself in 2010. In the face of accelerating species and habitat loss, countries are now committing to protecting 30 percent of land and water by 2030...

[...] Against this backdrop, a new generation of scientists is taking up the debate about what to do about “biodiversity” itself — the scientific concept, its popular understanding, and indeed the very word. As Allington told Vox: “There’s just a lot of drama.”

[...] A practical question flows from this history: Does saving every species still matter?

Allington has seen colleagues try to address this kind of question publicly, and their answers, she says, tend to get misinterpreted. [...] “The bags show that not all species play the same role in the ecosystem,” she said. Some species, like oysters, make key contributions to the ecosystem, and their disappearance would threaten all the rest. “The problem is that we still don’t know what functions the majority of species actually provide,” she said.

Scientists in today’s save-all-species debate disagree about where the science ends, and where the subjective idea of right and wrong begins. In this sense, debates about biodiversity may ultimately be debates about ethics, implicit human values, and whose ecological knowledge matters.

[...] The late biologist Michael Soulé, the “father of conservation biology,” was unequivocal that biodiversity is good — though its goodness, he wrote, “cannot be tested or proven.”

But in specific places, biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake is not necessarily good. On islands, for example, plant diversity is generally increasing because non-native species are arriving; some rare island plant species may go extinct as a result, but not always. Biodiversity might also be the wrong lens in ecosystems that weren’t diverse to begin with, like boreal forests close to the Arctic, which have low numbers of species that rarely face extinction even in the face of logging.

[...] But others see an opportunity to expand the notion of biodiversity into something more inclusive and more just.

[...] Conservationists could also gain from a broadened notion of biodiversity that centers Indigenous and traditional knowledge, which has long been diminished by establishment science. Research shows that lands managed by Indigenous people are home to much of the world’s biodiversity, and that biodiversity tends to decline more slowly on those lands.

[...] This kind of “pluralistic” perspective, as some scientists call it, aligns with what Reid calls “two-eyed seeing” — a way of bringing together Indigenous and Western understandings. “It’s not about throwing something out, or just walking away from ‘biodiversity’ and its metrics,” Reid said. “It’s about enriching our understanding by bringing multiple perspectives to bear.” (MORE - missing details)

RELATED (scivillage): Why science is not objective
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#2
Syne Offline
As with most things, diversity for diversity's sake alone is, at best, pointless and, in this case, working to alleviate evolutionary pressures and, at worst, destructive. Exact same can be said of "black lives matter." At best, it's pointless to differentiate it from "all lives matter," and at worse, it's overtly racist and causes riots, looting, and deaths.
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