Hacker News Reader

Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

Famously, when asked about a god, J.B.S. Haldane allegedly said that if there is a god or gods, they must have an “inordinate fondness for beetles.”

View on HN

There is a Discworld joke about this. After being introduced to the God of evolution, God shows off the magnum opus he has been developing, the cockroach.

This is because when they would lay a sheet on the ground and shake the branches of a tree, they would often find more species of beetles than anything else. However, they may have been extrapolating a bit far from the few places they tried this.

No, it’s because beetles have the most diversity of any animal order.

“The Coleoptera, with about 400,000 described species, is the largest of all orders, constituting almost 40% of described arthropods and 25% of all known animal species…”

First paragraph of the wiki article! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beetle

Note the caveats "described" and "known" species. It doesn't follow that they are actually the most diverse order. This is partly because they are pretty and tough and easy to discover and preserve, and collecting beetles became a very popular entomological pastime, so we have a more complete record of beetle species than, for example, parasitic wasps or nematodes.

Sure, there are caveats. But the current estimate is quite a bit more scientifically-backed than shaking tree branches and extrapolating from there - which, funny enough, seems like the foundation for one of the cited publications attempting to counter the claim of beetle diversity: "Remarkable fly (Diptera) diversity in a patch of Costa Rican cloud forest".

I read somewhere that some scientists now think there may be more species of wasps than beetles. Not least because many species of beetle seem to have a species of wasps that prey on them.

If only Haldane knew about how many microbes there are. He'd probably say god is on the side of the plagues.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com