I pretty much just totally agree with this actually. I think that evolutionary distinctness should be a MUCH larger part of conservation conversations about biodiversity than it is now. There are monotypic families going extinct in preventable ways while we pour tremendous resources into things which are not that evolutionarily important (though still morally relevant, of course!) like the Eastern Wolf. Obviously human favoritism will come back in (otherwise, as you say, Coleoptera would dominate, which is hard for human aesthetic sensibilities), but at least evolutionary lineage distinctness is relatively objective. I’m literally just repeating you. Totally agree. In conservation, the “species” conversation is an unhelpful tangent, and in an ideal world we would just cut the Gordian knot of splitters and lumpers and come up with better metrics.
However, I think the species conversation is still important to have in basic research into ecology, macroecology, statistical evolution, etc. The ring species conversation, for example, is totally handicapped by the fact that we don’t have a consistent understanding of what we mean when we say “species.” It is, depending on who you talk to and their personal definition, either totally explicable and unsurprising, just a spatial replication of how speciation usually happens in time, or it’s a total refutation of the entire species concept, period. These kinds of disagreements resemble the “does a tree falling in an empty forest make a sound” debate, in that people essentially never disagree about any facts-of-the-matter, and are instead arguing unproductively about definitions, often without realizing it. This is bad for science. We should stop doing it. The best way to do that is to actually define the “species” concept consistently and scientifically.
So in conservation, ideally we would stop having the conversation by getting better metrics for our goals. In basic science, the project of just accurately describing and talking about the world, we would also stop having the conversation by just defining the term, applying it consistently, and moving on.
Hi Tandena,
I pretty much just totally agree with this actually. I think that evolutionary distinctness should be a MUCH larger part of conservation conversations about biodiversity than it is now. There are monotypic families going extinct in preventable ways while we pour tremendous resources into things which are not that evolutionarily important (though still morally relevant, of course!) like the Eastern Wolf. Obviously human favoritism will come back in (otherwise, as you say, Coleoptera would dominate, which is hard for human aesthetic sensibilities), but at least evolutionary lineage distinctness is relatively objective. I’m literally just repeating you. Totally agree. In conservation, the “species” conversation is an unhelpful tangent, and in an ideal world we would just cut the Gordian knot of splitters and lumpers and come up with better metrics.
However, I think the species conversation is still important to have in basic research into ecology, macroecology, statistical evolution, etc. The ring species conversation, for example, is totally handicapped by the fact that we don’t have a consistent understanding of what we mean when we say “species.” It is, depending on who you talk to and their personal definition, either totally explicable and unsurprising, just a spatial replication of how speciation usually happens in time, or it’s a total refutation of the entire species concept, period. These kinds of disagreements resemble the “does a tree falling in an empty forest make a sound” debate, in that people essentially never disagree about any facts-of-the-matter, and are instead arguing unproductively about definitions, often without realizing it. This is bad for science. We should stop doing it. The best way to do that is to actually define the “species” concept consistently and scientifically.
So in conservation, ideally we would stop having the conversation by getting better metrics for our goals. In basic science, the project of just accurately describing and talking about the world, we would also stop having the conversation by just defining the term, applying it consistently, and moving on.