So, ok. Most endangered species that I actually hear about in the news seem to have 2 things in common :
a. They are a variant on base species that is still quite prevalent. The “spotted” owl. A particular tree frog.
b. The species is an “inferior” variant, possessing traits that make it suboptimal for the modern world. For example, the “Scottish” wild cat is extremely similar visually to and can interbreed with house cats, yet likes to hide instead of harassing humans for food. The dodo bird couldn’t fly. The passenger pigeon was in some way dependent on being in gigantic flocks, which is why after human hunters killed a portion of them, the rest all died.
So you hear all the time how development gets held up in the USA because of some rare species present on the land. This is an abysmal policy, I think.
1. A species should only be on the preservation list if the species is actually unique, *without* having absurdly common members of a closely related species. Something like the Scottish wild cat isn't even a species because it can interbreed. I'd say this means elephants should be preserved (there aren't very many gigantic land animals similar to elephants) but the spotted owl shouldn't and tree frogs shouldn't, etc.
2. The argument that some rare cure to a disease is hiding in an endangered species is basically bullshit. It actually is true that certain drugs have been derived from rare plants and animals, but if you want to find a drug without terrible side effects, you cannot search blindly. You need to study to actual biochemical pathways and design a molecule that binds strongly to a key enzyme, not guess in the dark by trying billions of compounds until you get lucky. This method is obsolete and will never find anything that isn't a suboptimal solution with side effects. Also, modern drug research does not have to try substances from rare plants, it can systematically create variants using chemical synthesis or synthetic DNA and test each one.
3. If the federal government does decide that a piece of land can't be developed on, it should make a decision. Not "delay" things for decades, wasting time and slowing down progress. Yes or no, not "the next hearing is scheduled for next year"
Most people think animals have intrinsic value, and animal diversity is worth preserving. We have laws in place to ratify this.
From your examples at (b).
Wild cats are wild. Duh.
Dodos evolved on an island with no land based predators. Flying wasn’t necessary to survive, so they stopped. Humans messed up their ecosystem.
Humans didn’t kill SOME of the passenger pigeons. Humans killed them ALL.
I was watching a video today where eagles had learned to throw goats from cliffs. The first thing that crossed my mind was that if the eagles established that routine in the species they could cause that particular species of goat to go extinct. It seemed like such an effective strategy that the goats would not have time to adapt to a different method of grazing. I feel like it is always best to leave nature alone but I was also tempted to want to see all the eagles that had learned this technique to be taken out. Curious how it will play out over the years.
This is an absurdly ignorant understanding of what endangered species are, why they are endangered, and why they might be of value. I suggest that you try to get information on endangered species from some source other than the news.
Seriously, you are starting off with such a limited understanding of the subject that I wouldn’t know where to start to try to explain it.
This is pretty much complete nonsense. It would be impossibly time-consuming and expensive to try every possible variant of a chemical compound looking for one that’s effective. This is really what is searching blindly.
More than half the medicines we use today were developed from natural compounds. Organisms have evolved an enormous number of compounds that have biological activity (bioactive). They use these to defend themselves against their enemies or competitors. And these bioactive compounds may have activity against other organisms instead of the original ones targeted by the plant. A toxin is a toxin because it affects the physiology or metabolism of another organism. Very often a plant compound that is a toxin against insects or herbivores will be found to be active against cancer cells or disease organisms or have some other beneficial affect. Toxins from predatory snails have been used to develop pain medications. There are many other examples.
I certainly don’t agree with the OP, but he’s more right about this one than you are. Humans killed large numbers of passenger pigeons, and it seems like it was enough to where they couldn’t breed, but we didn’t hunt down and exterminate anywhere near every one. They were some kind of special case where without a flock of thousands or tens of thousands they would no longer breed.
Generally, destroying part of a genome is destroying something we can’t replace. And destroying something you can’t replace is usually evil by definition.
I’m not sure how to explain that to you if you can’t see it.
Or we could just write down the genome we want by freezing a sample of it. Very few large molecule drugs will even work in the human body at all without triggering an immune response : Colibri, you are incorrect.
Aside from completely misunderstanding how chemistry and drug research actually work, you’ve missed the biggest argument for protecting endangered species: we don’t really know what else will die when we lose one. Ecosystems are enormously complex networks of codependency, and we don’t really understand all the possible connections in any given system to guess what species we can safely lose, and which ones are critical.
You might look at a particular endangered hummingbird that lives just in this one marsh, and think, “Big deal, we get dozens of those things in my backyard every spring.” Except, it turns out that this hummingbird evolved to pollenize one particular species of orchid, and it’s the only animal that can pollenize it. So now that orchid goes extinct, too. And it turns out there’s a type of deer that relies on that orchid as part of its food sources. It wouldn’t have been that big a deal to lose it, except they also ate this type of grass that grew in one place in the marsh, and there’s a subdivision there now. Having lost two of their major food sources, they don’t have enough forage to get through the winter, and most of them starve. This also affects the local wolf population, which relies on the deer for their food, so they starve, too. Although the wolves relied on deer in the winter, they preferred mice and rats in the spring, and with the wolves gone, the rat population explodes. They devastate the local bird population, and wipe out several more plant species. The large amount of animals that froze in the winter thaw out in the summer, and rot, becoming, along with the rats, a major disease vector. It’s a bumper crop of maggots, and a blossoming of spiders in response. And eventually, a nice little marsh with birds and flowers is now a pestilential bog filled with rats and bugs.
If a tree falls and there’s no one to hear it, what difference does it make if it makes a sound?
Human-induced extinction is such an incredibly new concept there is no way to accurately predict any possible long-term effects. Evolution is normally an inconceivably slow ‘process’ and, again, only a recently discovered one. But if things effect one another in that way it’s somewhat logical to think that sudden, short-term changes will cause problems.
The bigger question however, is how do we measure a species impact? The answer is: How does it impact us? Unless you simply believe humans shouldn’t dominate the planet the way that we now do, what other answer can there be. We’ve deliberately eradicated smallpox and polio, how do we know that those ‘species’ not existing isn’t important?
Right now, the major factor of (higher) species importance determination is what it’s always been: How cute are they? Again, how they impact us (in wanting to be able to see them)…
That’s retarded. Exactly what are we preserving if the genetic difference is “red instead of brown pigment” and “some kind of missing component so they can’t breed with regular squirrels” and “some random junk”.
Saying that it all matters is just ignorance. Do you even understand what evolution does as an algorithm? It adds small, random, incremental changes. A sub-species that split off recently is not going to have changes that are helpful to human science.
For that matter, we are now capable of making our own sub-species.
Are you qualified to speak on how drug research or chemistry works? I actually have personally worked in labs on the cutting edge. I am not going to say I know all about it, but the lab I worked on actually tried to create monoclonal antibodies to specific sites and to figure out the in vivo conformations of the proteins in question. Other lectures I attended, the effort was to design a small molecule, rationally, not blindly, that would bind to a specific site on a target. One lecture, they had a working drug created completely rationally, without guesswork at all.
None of these efforts would benefit from rare species in any way, what the industry needs is an animal that has been genetically modified to be more like a human being, such as a rat with human genes. I literally cannot think of any possible way to use a rare plant or animal given modern tools.
I, like millions of people, am alive today because I took artimisinin to cure malaria. It’s a real-life silver bullet miracle drug for an overwhelmingly devastating disease that was quickly threatening to becoming untreatable.
It was discovered by a Chinese government research program to trawl ancient Chinese manuscripts and systematically test plants identified as medicinal. The results were published in 1979, to much skepticism, and finally accepted in the 1990s. It is the most effective treatment for malaria falciparum (the most deadly strain) and the primary researcher received a Nobel Prize for her work.
Then you are suffering from a severely limited understanding of drug discovery and a lack of imagination. Just because you worked in a lab developing a biologic and attended a few lectures on rational drug design does not mean that you have experienced the entire scope of drug discovery. Natural products drug discovery hasn’t been in fashion as much these last few decades, but even then it has produced about~15% of new molecular entities since 1990. Previously it was responsible for ~30% of new molecular entities.
But, to go back to your original question:
Some people think there is intrinsic value to preserving species and ecosystems. Clearly you disagree. That’s fine, we don’t have to all share the same values, and as long as you aren’t in charge of environmental policy we can agree to disagree.
Ecosystems provide economic services that would be extremely expensive to replace with engineered solutions. Providing species diversity to support natural products drug discovery is just one small part of all ecosystem services. For instance, riverine and coastal wetlands prevent flooding, reduce pollution, and are the home for economically valuable species like fish stocks. If all wetlands were filled and used for urban development, these services would have to be replaced with expensive flood control and water purification systems. Coastal pollution would increase and destroy tourism and fisheries (e.g. the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, where fertilizer runoff has produces huge areas that do not have enough oxygen for fish to live). Overall, the economic consequences of filling wetlands to make room for a few more subdivisions and shopping centers can far outweigh the benefits.
There are some environmentalists that grudgingly accept that we cannot save every species, and argue that it is more important to preserve ecosystems. So if the left-handed purple spotted tree frog is being out-competed by the right-handed magenta spotted tree frog, so be it. But if it’s being replaced by giant predatory tree frog, that could have dire consequences for the ecosystem.
Still, by drawing a line in the sand to preserve certain species, you’re also going to prevent habitat loss and preserve whole ecosystems. And the public will support the preservation of some charismatic species more than they will support the preservation of random parcels of undeveloped land.
The genetic difference between subspecies is virtually never limited to a single trait like coat color. There are normally many other genetic traits involved that may not be visible phenotypically. In any case, this totally ignores any ecological role that particular species or subspecies may play.
This is extremely ironic, given that you are the one arguing from a position of ignorance.
I’ve studied evolutionary biology for 40 years. This is a complete misstatement of the evolutionary process.
How do you know this, exactly? And this does not address the many very distinct species that are endangered, nor, as I said above, the ecological role of species or subspecies.
I’ve worked with or been involved with several programs that are “bio-prospecting” for new drugs developed from natural projects, including two International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups, one in Cameroon/Nigeria and one in Panama. This program is funded by NIH, NSF, USDA, and DoE, and each group is required to have industry participation in the form of a partner from a major drug company. All these organizations and private companies find enough value in this strategy to invest major resources in it.
One of the compounds discovered by the Panama program, coibamide,has been found to have a new mode of action against cancer. Even if this never results directly in a drug, the new mechanism provides a new means of attack against cancer.