New Estimate Suggests 5.5M Species On Earth, Not 30-100M 256
An anonymous reader writes "How many species share our planet? According to a recalculation by an international research team, the number is significantly lower than we thought — only around 5.5 million."
That right... (Score:0, Interesting)
No more life on earth in 2160 (Score:2, Interesting)
So they say there are 5.5 million species on earth and the World Resources Institute [berkeley.edu] Says 100 species are going extinct every day!
So, by 2160 every species on earth will be extinct. Sounds good to me, lets eat!
Re:That right... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, being tasty to humans is one of the most advantageous adaptations a species can have. Well, either the best or the worst, depending on if we raise them or unsustainably collect them from the wild until the population collapses. You don't see cows or chickens or apples or oranges in any danger any time soon, but then again, things have been eaten to extinction. I don't think it's too bad of an idea to, where possible, try to introduce cultivated or farmed endangered species into the food supply. Preservation through consumption.
Re:Bzzt! Wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
The notion of interbreeding as the sole definition of species is simply wrong. Even where fertile hybrids are produced, as with brown bears and polar bears, it's still not enough to warrant declaring them the same species. There are a number of factors that go into determining when two populations are members of the same species or not, and producing fertile and fit offspring is only one of them.
Re:Bzzt! Wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
Well... "Two organisms that cannot produce fertile offspring are separate species" would probably be more accurate. Otherwise you would be lumping tigers and lions into the same species. And the reverse is not true, just because two species can produce fertile offspring doesn't mean they are the same species. For example, polar bears are able to breed with brown bears, false killer whales can create fertile offspring with bottle nosed dolphins; not to mention the countless plant hybrids that are possible.
Re:Well yeah, now... (Score:3, Interesting)
But we can ask the question: Is our wanton destruction of many of the ecosystems on earth a desirable thing?
Interesting. I'd certainly argue it's not. Good point.
Quibbling over whether it is properly described as natural or not sort of misses the point.
Granted. On the other hand, it's not a moral issue, in this case. It's a survival-of-our-race issue, in this case?
My underlying point is that many seem to hold to two opposing ideas, IMO...
1. There is no God, and evolution is how everything got here.
2. It's wrong to destroy species, etc. There's some moral/ethical/inherently-bad thing about it.
To me, there's a disconnect. #1 has some amount of backing (evolutionary theory). #2, combined with #1, seems to me to have no backing.
However, if it's simply a desirable or undesirable thing, that's a different argument, which I was not thinking about.
Due to my own beliefs, I actually think we are responsible to take care of the environment, and thus it CAN be actually wrong to kill off species.. or, as you aptly put it, wanton destruction.
What's in a number? (Score:3, Interesting)
Disclaimer: I'm not trying to discredit the dangers of biodiversity loss, but I have real trouble assigning any real meaning to the notion of "millions of species", and I don't think that those numbers are doing much to win over eco-skeptics either. The real issue to me seems to be overall genetic diversity and the need to preserve it; how many "species" you pigeonhole that diversity into has very little practical relevance and is probably impossible to do properly anyway.
Re:Well yeah, now... (Score:3, Interesting)
Smallpox.
Re:Well yeah, now... (Score:2, Interesting)
You make an important point that I totally agree with. But rather than astronomy, I like making a comparison to gravity and making it sillier in order to try to get the point across:
The theory of gravitation does not tell us whether it is or is not morally acceptable to drop a piano on someone's head. The theory of gravitation and the rest of physics and biology just explain what would happen if you did.
Tracking Biodiversity (Score:1, Interesting)
The Encyclopedia of Life (http://www.eol.org/) is aggregating much of the known scientific information about life on earth with a species page for every described species. I believe there is a placeholder for at least 1.4 million species but this will surely grow as new species are discovered and described.
Re:from the depends-how-you-count dept (Score:2, Interesting)
Um, so you're saying that because it is invertible in a structure's multiplicative monoid, that it is not a prime? That doesn't follow. The reason we mathematicians decided to make 1 a special case among primes, and say it isn't one, is to make the expressing the prime number theorem easy, in terms of unique factorizations, instead of unique factorizations modulo factorizations including 1.