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I work in biotech, and effectively the entire field is rifling through Nature’s LEGO bin to find the parts it needs. There’s a weird overlap happening here of environmental collapse at the same moment that we’re learning just how rich that diversity is, what it means, how to use it. Hell, transgenic rices and grains - the engine of the green revolution - were all remixed landrace species, which are in danger now of being replaced by monocrops.

The loss of species is a tragedy because it’s a tragedy, but it’s also a tragedy because we’re destroying our inheritance at an alarming rate before we ever really get to see what it is or what it could be. Billions of years of prior art, gone.

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I think of it in terms of energy.

Evolution is a process that takes a lot of energy. Every lifetime is a lifetime of energy that has been harnessed to continue the process. So when a species goes extinct, it's not just the energy of all of the living members, but all of the ancestors of all of the living members as well that is destroyed.

Sort of like expending a bunch of energy to train a neural network, and then rm -rf the weights.

Such a waste.

>the energy of all of the living members, but all of the ancestors of all of the living members as well that is destroyed

The law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

In this context, what’s destroyed isn’t the energy itself but the product that was yielded from the work it enabled.

It sure as hell can be wasted though

If you want to be pedantic, the correct term is probably entropy. That being living irreversibly increased the entropy of the universe, and we wasted that increase in entropy.

"energy" the way OP is using it is bordering on woo. I was simply reminding them of the proper use of the word.

I don't think entropy is necessarily more correct, either. I don't think you or anyone possesses the omniscience to declare that entropy was increased. It could just as well be that some living being decreased entropy in some way, but then we're getting into defining order and disorder and that's outside the scope of what I want to discuss on an internet forum.

OP's asserting that all that "energy" was somehow wasted, but they don't take into account the place those species occupied within ecosystems. Depending on what species you are, the other species being gone is either a good thing or a bad thing or an indifferent thing. No energy was wasted, nothing lasts, nothing is lost. It's the way of the world, or this universe for that matter. If the sun exploded today wiping out the entirety of humanity and everything else on this planet, what is "lost"? My guess is nothing outside of our planet would even notice.

And our "energy" will still live on, in our radio transmissions. So maybe not all would be lost.

Sorry. Let me clarify. For simplicity's sake, consider this hypothetical:

You spend 1 terawatt hour of energy powering a datacenter to come up with a novel protein for a drug by simulating protein interactions.

Your competitor studies an already existing fungus, which may have expended that amount of energy over the combined lifetime of all of its ancestors to arrive at the same design, and gets the novel protein "for free."

One of you had to pay the energy cost, and the other didn't. The fungus is "free" and when it is destroyed, "it" -- that energy expenditure -- is lost forever.

It's not a ridiculous hypothetical because many such things (medicines, food, etc) come from living beings. Some from very obscure living beings. And some that are impossible to buy at any price, like living things that pollinate food, regulate the soil, stuff like that. Thermodynamically it doesn't matter if humanity goes extinct but I think we can do a little better than that!

The existence of any proteins in any fungus is not an automatic solution for anything - even more energy has to be expended to find it, purify it, test it, and notice any benefit for anything. There are likely a billion such proteins in nature right now that will never be discovered as useful for anything.

Targeted research is likely a shorter and less expensive route to "finding" breakthrough medicines, especially since technology evolves exponentially.

> I don't think you or anyone possesses the omniscience to declare that entropy was increased.

It's the second law of thermodynamics. It's why heat only flows into objects colder than the source (in an isolated system). You can argue against it, but I'd be curious what your alternative is for why heat only moves one direction.

It's also what makes perpetual motion machines impossible. Otherwise you'd be able to do nutty things like reversing the flow of heat to expand/contract gases in a chamber, driving a shaft into a generator which would create energy (i.e. expand the total amount of energy in the universe).

> then we're getting into defining order and disorder and that's outside the scope of what I want to discuss on an internet forum.

I think you may be misunderstanding "disorder" in the context of entropy. It's disorder at the chemical level. Energy is stored in bonds in molecules. When those bonds are broken or formed, some amount of the energy stored in those bonds is released as heat. The universe has a constant amount of energy (it can be neither created nor destroyed), this means that heat used to be stored energy. Given that heat can only go from an atom/particle to a colder particle, at some point this means all (or nearly all) energy will eventually be converted to heat. If all the energy is heat, that means particles aren't bound together into molecules, and the universe is disordered at a chemical level.

It has a pretty specific meaning in this exact context.

> OP's asserting that all that "energy" was somehow wasted, but they don't take into account the place those species occupied within ecosystems.

This would be entropy: the amount of energy that was irreversibly converted to heat by those organisms metabolism, and growth, and the same for the things they ate. It's not wasted in the sense that it vanished, but in the sense that we'll never be able to convert some of that heat back into useful energy. At some point the universe will become particle soup, and them existing moved the universe an infinitesimally small amount closer to that soup.

I work in biotech as well, and the idea that the extinction of 21 species from an estimate 8M+ species has any sort of meaningful impact on biomedical research or the understanding of basic biology is ludicrous.

Further your post is histrionic. ‘Environmental collapse’, ‘destroying our inheritance’, ‘alarming rate’, suggests an individual who is pushing an agenda rather than rationally appraising the current state of the ever-changing environment and biological ecosystem.

I find your take quite odd, considering your background. Biodiversity is not a hit points bar that knocks out your player character when it falls below a certain level. You remove a single keystone species and the whole local ecosystem collapses, creating a butterfly effect of disasters.

>suggests an individual who is pushing an agenda

Well, being wealth has been increasingly concentrated in fewer people and wealth has always been on the side of fossil fuels and climate denial, would that not illustrate a plausible narrative?

At the very least, those aforementioned people probably could have done something about these issues before any of us knew about them.

not so ludicrous. Some species are more important than the other. In terms of biomedicine, the lack of a single species having evolved a unique substance could change the human history.

Without knowing the list, we can't infer a lot about the impact or lack of impact. Some of those species could be obscure hybrids without real impact, the lack of other could be potentially catastrophic; but the effects would have been forgotten by now and assimilated as "the new normality". This is a glimpse of 1950's.

You missed the bit where the person you're replying to said they knew something about the field. The loss of some species in a genus of Hawaiian honeycreepers is not tragic because of the potential for making medicines out of honeycreepers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

If you think those 21 species were the only ones going extinct you're badly informed.

About 200 plant and animal species go extinct every day.

But we will not realize it until 2073. This 21 are species that went extinct between 1960's and 1980's.

My money would be into the molluscs lost as collateral damages by the effects of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, and the birds by a combination of touristic development plus Mikonia tree invasion starting on 60's and 70's.

Millions of species even went extinct before modern man was ever here.

Yes but: 1. Many more species go extinct because of human activity. 2. That's a problem.

Oh well then i guess it doesnt matter we destroy the earth. Fire up those coal plants and slap some more meat on the barbecue, nothing matters after all because things have happened in the past!

How did you that conclusion from what I said?

The timing and placement of your statement comes off as a challenge to the original statement. It appears you’re implying that what we’re doing today is ok because it is part of a natural process. While true, we also have agency to transcend the natural process or perpetuate it.

Just because it has happened, doesn’t mean we should endorse and accelerate it. What we do determines the future.

So are you arguing we should prevent the extinction that would happen naturally? The extinction where man played no role?

Why?

Maybe. If that helpes us develop better medicines or food crops it sounds like the smart thing to do. Instead of waiting around for 2 million years until eco-system has recovered.

However, in my opinion, it's a rather uninteresting hypothetical because human activity absolutely does play a huge role in the extinction of species today.

> Maybe. If that helpes us develop better medicines or food crops it sounds like the smart thing to do.

What about the ramifications of doing so?

What about the ramifications of not preventing extinction caused by human activity (or other causes)?

That’s a separate discussion.

I’m not sure fiddling with natural levels of extinction are smart.

Delete your account.

Yes, you’re right, I’m pushing an agenda. That agenda is this: rendering species extinct is bad.

This is a lot closer to my thought as well. No one is saying extinction is beneficial. However, in the grand scheme of things, how critical was the unique Catfish that was only found in 1 river in Ohio? How many species have come and gone completely undetected?

Now that a species near the top of the food chain is missing, what species can grow and change to fill the gap? Isn't that evolution, you respond to a change in your environment.

Biodiversity is decreasing at a rapid clip. Yes, biomass will remain constant, but increased homogeny has its own risks.

>suggests an individual who is pushing an agenda

>rationally appraising the current state

both are an agenda. You can't escape ideology.

Bot: claim of role, rank relevant to the discussion + I agree with you butt (missing) + counter claim or talking points.

"it's just a series of ever warmer summers, nothing to see here" style suggests oil industry?

Regarding extinction, my suggestion is biome transplants. Take a endangered biome slice and transplant it where the temperatures and conditions for the biome will reemerge post climate change stabilization, preferably in an area where humanity has no economic interest.

Transplanting hundreds of species around the world in viable groups is probably a bad idea too.

That's the wrong reason to mourn Bachman's Warbler. I suspect you're a nice person but your post completely misses the beauty and the tragedy of these species, instead focusing on a non-existent advantage to humans they might represent. That's the big mistake of the last decade: conservation and environmentalism are not about making the planet more beneficial for humans. There's plenty of genomes around for your transgenics, don't worry. Our duty and mission is to prevent habitat loss and the extinctions it causes.

It’s strange that I got misread by one person as a fuzzy-headed hippie and by another person as a cold-hearted extractivist.

I don't think you're a cold-hearted extractivist. That's what I meant when I said I thought you were a nice person (though I totally failed to come up with a turn of phrase to match yours!).

The thing is I am utterly depressed by the way that "climate change" has caused an entire generation to think that conservation is about managing atmospheric chemistry and planetary climate. Conservation is about preventing habitat loss and extinction. Human well-being does not trump avoidance of habitat loss in all cases by any means. And so, I criticized your post for (somewhat analogously to climate change) suggesting an utterly spurious reason for extinction avoidance when no-one should need any reason.

But the generation of people who care about climate change (not you, I'm just ranting) by and large don't know the difference between a eucalyptus/pine monoculture that results from one of their afforestation schemes and a natural forest habitat. Climate change avoidance may well be an important thread of conservation, but the fact that we have lost the simple rallying call of "Save the rainforests" threatens to be a tragedy, and if it turns out so, I will partially blame the last 20 years of climate change discourse.

Vice had an episode years ago where they followed cannabis breeders as they went to the Democratic Republic of Congo in search of the original Congolese landrace strain [1].

Environmental collapse hurts everyone!

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3nmep/we-went-hunting-for-a...

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