Long Reviled as 'Ugly,' Sea Lampreys Get Some Respect (2023)
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
Despite looking gross, they are indeed delicious.
Wait, does this mean there are also land lampreys??
https://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-surfeit-of-...
Ugly: most other insects, maggots, spiders, deep sea fish, proboscis monkeys, lampreys...
Thinking that some ugly creatures aren't ugly, or that beauty isn't real and objective, is part of of the aesthetic inversion of our time. It's the same phenomenon which put toilets and unmade beds into art galleries.
None of this implies that we can't disagree about specific cases, or that beauty is easy to define, or that we shouldn't treat animals well!
To be clear, I think you're claiming:
1. beauty _is_ objective
2. this beauty-is-subjective thing is a recent phenomenon
I disagree with both of those claims, but the second one is more interesting to me. At least in the 1700's some people believed that beauty is subjective [1]. But perhaps you consider the 1700's recent?
After billions of years how many species are not of ecological importance? Maybe some primates?
Ecological importance is more about the role they play, and whether it's essential or inessential, and if the former if it can be easily substituted by another species or mechanism.
It matters because we're not that smart. A species deemed "inessential" to ecological importance might very well turn out to be critical for unforeseen, even unforeseeable reasons. Not just to the species itself, which you seem to discount despite their ancient pedigree, but even to us through second order effects.
The amount of time a species has been around is a strong clue that they're fulfilling a role in the ecosystem. Nature doesn't really do 'superfluous'; everything connects. Not in a hippy dippy way, but in the realest way, and in ways beyond our comprehension. The classic examples when I was growing up of 'nature being wasteful' - the appendix and 'junk DNA' - have now been revised... Because we learned more.
No one knew how wolves change rivers [0] until it was studied. In hindsight it's obvious and makes perfect sense, but we didn't deem wolves "essential" when we killed them all.
Sure, but that's an argument for "evolution being so complex and long process, we don't know much about which species is essential or not".
Not for the original claim "After billions of years how many species are not of ecological importance? Maybe some primates?" which seems to imply that all/most specific are of ecological importance just because they're old, except maybe some more recent ones like primates.
Evolution has taken place over billions and billions of years in a system that's far beyond our comprehension in complexity.
Evolving - or even not evolving - in this system over billions of years and surviving implies importance. I can't say it guarantees that a species is "essential", but that was never the argument.