Showing papers by "Edward O. Wilson published in 1995"

Building a Scientifically Sound Policy for Protecting Endangered Species

Abstract: The primary legislative tool for protecting imperiled species in the United States is the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973. The pending reauthorization of this law has sparked a fierce debate on the science, economics, and ethics of protecting vanishing species; the outcome of the debate will influence domestic and international conservation policies for years. Recent advances in our scientific understanding of biodiversity have underscored the importance of species protection for human welfare. Each species, by virtue of its genetic uniqueness, is the source of information we can learn from no other source. Species can provide us with novel molecules and new understanding of genetic capacities, which can be used to fashion new agricultural products, medicines, and other chemicals of direct benefit to humans. Indeed, prospecting for biogenetic information could well become a major scientific exploratory venture of the 21st century. Species also provide essential ecological services to humanity by regulating climate; cleansing water, soil, and air; pollinating crops; maintaining soil fertility; and performing other life-sustaining functions (1). Despite the importance of species to people, a significant fraction of the biota of the United States is at risk of extinction or already lost. Somewhat in excess of 100,000 native species (terrestrial and freshwater) have been described from the United States, including 22,750 vascular plants; 3110 vertebrates; and (very roughly) 75,000 insects. Within those taxa most carefully classified and studied to date, about 1.5% of the species alive at the turn of the century are now considered to be certainly or probably extinct. Extinction estimates range from 0 in reptiles and gymnosperms to 8.6% in freshwater mussels. In these groups, the overall percentage of species ranked as imperiled or rare is 22.2%, with a peak of 60.1% in freshwater mussels (2). Recent scientific discoveries and assess-

Science and ideology

Abstract: I have composed this text with considerable humility because it is addressed to scholars and scientists many of whom speak more authoritatively on the history and philosophy of science than I. My own preferred reading list on the subject would include Gerald Holton's Science and AntiScience and the wonderfully scorching book, Higher Superstition, by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt. For a full reading list that could compose a complete college course on the subject, I would add John Passmore's Science and Its Critics, published in 1978, and Steven Weinberg's adamantine image of the power and ideology-demolishing reach of m o d e m physics in his book Dreams of a Final Theory. In many ways I would defer to these authors. I hope they nonetheless might agree with me that the nobility of science as a human endeavor was well encapsulated by the physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar when he used the Icarus metaphor in praise of Sir Arthur Eddington. He said, "Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings." And on the appropriateness of the rosette of the National Academy of Sciences, the other NAS, that is splendidly symbolic in this sense: the gold of science is placed solidly in the center, surrounded by the purple of natural philosophy. Members are elected primarily or solely on the basis of objective discoveries they have made, expressible in clear declarative sentences, and not by any ideological test. By science in common parlance is meant natural science, which gathers knowledge of the world as an organized, systematic enterprise and attempts to condense it into testable laws and principles by a wide-ranging and shifting set of methods. The diagnostic features of science that distinguish it from pseudoscience are, first, repeatability: the same phenomenon is sought again, preferably by independent investigation, and the interpretation given it confirmed or discarded by means of novel analysis and experimentation. And second, economy: scientists attempt to abstract the information into the form that is simplest, most easily recalled, and most esthetically pleasing--the combination called elegance--while yielding the largest amount of information with the least amount of effort. Third, mensuration: if something can be properly measured, using universally accepted scales, generalizations about it will be rendered less ambiguous. And fourth and finally, heuristic: the best