That’s Life

IN one sense we know much less about Earth than we do about Mars. The vast majority of life forms on our planet are still undiscovered, and their significance for our own species remains unknown. This gap in knowledge is a serious matter: we will never completely understand and preserve the living world around us at our present level of ignorance. We are flying blind into our environmental future.

Since the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus inaugurated the modern system of classification two and a half centuries ago, biologists have found and given Latinized names to about 1.8 million species of plants, animals and microorganisms — an impressive number but probably 10 percent or less of the total. Rough estimates of the number of species that remain to be discovered range from 10 million to more than 100 million.

But a new project in biology, an ambitious effort to create a vast new electronic database of known species, should make it possible to discover the remaining 90 percent of species in far less than 250 years, perhaps only one-tenth that time, a single human generation. On May 9 of this year, a consortium of institutions from Harvard and the Smithsonian to The Atlas of Living Australia began compiling The Encyclopedia of Life, which one day will provide single-portal access to all knowledge of living organisms.

Why bother making such an effort? Because each species from a bacterium to a whale is a masterpiece of evolution. Each has...

It is crucial that we move quickly, as ecosystems and species are disappearing — due to habitat destruction, pollution, overpopulation and excessive hunting and fishing, as well as invasive species like fire ants, zebra mussels, bacteria and viruses. Human-caused climate change alone could eliminate a quarter of species during the next five decades.

Edward O. Wilson, an emeritus professor of biology at Harvard, is the author, most recently, of “The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth.”

Argh! He had to screw up an OpEd for a good idea with PC crap!

''The vast majority of species are unknown.''

On what scientific basis do you make that statement, you Slimes dildo? (NOT an unknown species, btw).

The vast majority of life forms on our planet are still undiscovered

how could you know this without discovering them? And then,

Rough estimates of the number of species that remain to be discovered range from 10 million to more than 100 million,

that is a pretty big margin. So basically the scientists are just taking a guess- and hoping for some nice big grants to do "appropriate and necessary" research.

On what scientific basis do you make that statement, you Slimes dildo? (NOT an unknown species, btw).

The lack of exploration in places that haven't been explored much, IMHO, such as ocean depths, under the Arctic Ocean, jungles, etc. He doesn't work for the Times. Would you call L. PAUL BREMER III a Slimes dildo? Here's his OpEd column.

How I Didn’t Dismantle Iraq’s Army

We don't know what we don't know. That should be obvious.

4 posted on 09/05/2007 11:21:55 PM PDT by neverdem (Call talk radio. We need a Constitutional Amendment for Congressional term limits. Let's Roll!)

E. O. Wilson gained fame via his scientific work on ants and pheromones, then he endeared himself to the enviro-weenies with his pronnouncements on altruism: the native beasts are, we aren't (altruistic, that is.) Having established that humans are not "natural," he joined the ranks of Paul Ehrlich and Rachel Carson in demonizing Homo sapiens and sinking his reputation as a rational scientist.

Agreed. We don't know what we don't know. Fair enough.

Therefore, it is completely irresponsible to make a declaratory statement, particularly a quantified statement, based on extrapolation. There might be 6 undiscovered species or there might be 100,000,000. But, we don't know.

For someone in a hard science discipline to postulate some quantity of unknown species and state said quantity as fact in support of a political agenda is outrageous, and dissolves that someone's credibility.

As to 'Slimes dildo', I merely erred on the subspecies. Should read 'academic dildo', a much more populous species.

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