EDWARD O. WILSON
Professor Wilson, who received the Cosmos Club’s McGovern Award in December 1996, presents his views on biological diversity.
I
N T R O D U C T I O N
BY THOMAS E. LOVEJOY (CC ‘82)
A number of years ago I accompanied Edward O. Wilson on his first visit to the Amazon. It was the sheer diversity of life to be found in these forests that drew him to what he termed the “serious tropics.” His zest for the study of life was such that with less than four hours sleep he found his way to a scruffy little square near our hotel and, much to the amused but encouraging delight of passing pedestrians and indolent bench loungers, he identified several species of ant before breakfast.
It was the great forest, that cornucopia of life which was the real object of this odyssey. I learned a great deal about the Lilliputian world of invertebrates by tagging along as he explored the forest with all the energy and barely contained excitement of a youngster on Christmas morning.
Edward O. Wilson is one of the great biologists of the 20th century. He knows how to mix Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” as well as Virgil with molecular biology, evolution, and ecology into a cocktail both refreshing and palatable.
Ed Wilson is a great authority on ants, the subject of his second Pulitzer Prize–winning volume, the first Pulitzer winner being On Human Nature. He presents the diversity of invertebrates in ways that leave one with newfound respect for the spineless majority, what he once called the little things that run the world.
Thinking back to when I met Ed Wilson in Woods Hole in the 1970s, I realize that we were actually talking about biological diversity and how to conserve it before that phrase even existed. Today, this term, referring to the variety of life on earth, exists in contracted form as biodiversity.
I have been said to have been the first to use it in print, although I have reason to believe that Ed and I may have finished in a dead heat in doing so. But there is no one who has done more to advance the subject or who deserves more to be called Mr. Biodiversity. There is no one more eloquent about the extinction crisis. In 1979 he said “This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive.”
The journey through these most fundamental aspects of who, what, and where we are, culminates in a profound and chilling thought he articulated in The Diversity of Life. The ultimate irony of organic evolution may be that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life may have doomed its most beautiful creations.
EDWARD O. WILSON
I am going to begin with
a scenario from science fiction. Imagine that on one of the icy moons of Jupiter,
such as ![Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson [photo]](wilson1.jpg)
Ganymede,
lays hidden a space station of an alien civilization. For millions of years
scientists there have been watching the earth by means of satellites equipped
with sophisticated sensors. They have mapped the spread of large assemblages
of organisms from forests to grasslands, and tundras to coral reefs. They have
recorded thousand-year cycles of the climate, the arrival and departure of glaciers,
and long sequences of volcanic eruptions.
The watchers on Ganymede were waiting for the Moment of the great change on Earth. When that Moment came, it occupied no more than a few centuries, a mere tick in the clock of geological time. The forests shrank back to less than half their original cover. Atmospheric carbon dioxide rose to the highest level in a hundred thousand years. The ozone layer of the stratosphere broke open at the poles, plumes of nitrous oxide and other toxins rose from fires in South America and Africa, settled in the upper troposphere and drifted across the oceans. We are living in that narrow interval of time.
Before you is a collage of the night sky showing the whole world as it would look to our space visitors. See the bright lights of the U.S. eastern industrial zone and of Europe, of an incandescent Japan and of Middle East natural gas flares. But notice too the numerous pinpricks of light in less populated areas of the world, especially across tropical America and Africa. They are brush fires as well as fires coming from cut and dried-out timber falls and burning grassland. NASA has estimated that about 5% of the land surface is burned over every year.
It was all but inevitable that from the great diversity of life and particularly the large animals, given enough time, one species would gain intelligent control of Earth. That role has fallen to Homo sapiens, a primate that evolved 5 to 8 million years ago in Africa from a lineage that split away from the line leading to chimpanzee.
THE HUMAN IMPACT
Man is the first creature in the history of life to become a geophysical force. In the midst of an extraordinary population explosion, the human species has doubled in size during the past 50 years to 5.7 billion and is expected to grow by at least another third in the next 50 years. No other species in evolutionary history has even remotely approached the mass in protoplasm generated by humanity.
The human superorganism has laid clumsy hands on the climate. It is also erasing the natural habitats in which most of the rest of Earth’s organisms live. Consider this melancholy list of species extinguished by human actions:
Gone are more than 80 percent of the 100 bird species native to Hawaii, more than a half by the original Polynesians and another quarter by Europeans and others after 1778.
Those extinguished include a native eagle, a long-legged owl, a flightless ibis, and large birds that resembled geese with tortoise-like bills. The cerulean paradise fly-catcher of Indonesia is gone. The golden toad of Costa Rica, only discovered as a new species several decades ago, is gone.
In the world as a whole, one–fifth of all the bird species have been lost during the past 2,000 years, with 11 percent of the remaining 9,040 endangered. More than half of the 266 species of exclusively freshwater fishes of Malaysia are gone. All 11 native tree snails of Moorea in the South Pacific, and most of those on Hawaii as well, have been extinguished. Upward of 90 plant species from a single mountain ridge in Ecuador have likewise vanished.
The tropical rain forests, covering only 6 percent of the land surface, contain more than half of the species of plants and animals in the world. Their summed area is about equal to that of the 48 lower United States, down about one-half of the original cover before the coming of humans. There are probably at least 10 million species in the rain forest. Biologists believe that the destruction of rain forest dooms as many as 25,000 species a year.
If the human population were to reach 10 billion, a better than remote possibility, there would be almost no room left for plants and animals except those that we consume or put to other practical uses. We are eliminating large numbers of species before they are even discovered. The number of named species known to science is now about 1.7 million. The actual number is unknown. Various estimates have placed it between 10 million and 100 million. We therefore do not know the variety of life by a factor of 10. More is known about the surface of Mars and the moon than we know about the surface of planet Earth. Millions of new kinds of insects and other small invertebrate creatures remain unstudied. Even new kinds of whales are being discovered every decade or so.
DECLINE OF LIFE FORMS
Why should we care about the decline of the rest of life, including all these creepy crawlies and weeds? Consider ecosystems services. The rest of life enriches the soil. It purifies the water. It creates the very air we breathe. The more the kinds of plant and animals that live in the natural ecosystems of the world, the healthier they are, the more productive, the more stable, the better for human beings, and the less we have to worry about them, and ourselves.
Consider this matter of security a bit further. As our populations increase our habitats become more artificial, filled with unstable agrosystems and imported plants and animals of small variety. We must exist in a system of prosthetic devices, of energy procurement of soil restoration, of constant fights and struggles to restore chemical balance to the world around us. The more of the natural systems we have the more we can relax as a species and do what we are best at, rational inquiry and progress in science, the arts, technology, and self-understanding.
Add to this the potential avalanche of products on which we depend for life. Forty percent of drug prescriptions in the United States come from wild species of fungi, plants and animals. Cyclosporin, harvested from an obscure Norwegian fungus, permits organ transplants to succeed through its exceptional power as an immuno-suppressive agent.
The rosy periwinkle, an obscure plant that originated in Madagascar, has provided alkaloid substances that give a majority cures for Hodgkin’s disease and acute lymphocytic leukemia.
Finally, consider that we need natural environments and the diversity in them for our psychological health. We need to know that there still exists an unexplored world within reach in which new phenomena, new creatures and living systems, and ways of looking at the world, remain to be found. One species of fungus, one butterfly, one mouse, contains from one billion to 10 billion genetic letters, approximately the same amount of information as in all the editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
When a species goes extinct we lose a vast reservoir of potential scientific knowledge and a million-year history—because, on average, the evolutionary lines of species last between one million and 10 million years before they go extinct. We have sped up the extinction rate between 100- and 1,000-fold.
There have been five great extinction episodes since the origin of large animals 450-500 million years ago. After each one it took about 10 million years on average for evolution fully to restore the distinctive groups that biologists use as a measure of diversity at a higher level.
Humanity has begun the sixth great spasm. Our descendants must wait millions of years to replace what we are carelessly destroying. They will regard us as the most destructive generation in all history.
SOLUTIONS
It is inevitable that we are going to lose a lot of species all over the world. But we can slow the hemorrhaging. One of humanity’s great goals should be to carry as much of life as possible through the bottleneck of the next 50 years, during which a still-expanding population must learn to live decently on shrinking natural resources.
What then is to be done? First is the need to complete the mapping of the world’s biodiversity. To know the living world is more important for ultimate human welfare than to know the ultimate physical particles, the far reaches of space, or even our own complete gene map, because once it is gone, there is no other opportunity to achieve its preservation, management, and use.
Second, let us give the saving and management of the world’s species and races and genes the high priority agreed to in the 1992 Earth Summit, by combining it with economic development that utilizes biodiversity instead of destroying it. A new kind of regional planning is required that answers all these questions: Where are those species of plants and animals, where are they rarest, where are they concentrated, where are the people, where are the major industrial and agricultural developments, where are the main river systems, what is the topography, what are the soil types, where is the distribution of the wetlands and other major habitats, where are the best places for manufacture and distribution, and where is the population concentrated, and settling most rapidly?
If we put all of that complex information together, making it the substance of the political process in regional planning, the remnant biotas and ecosystems might have a fighting chance.
THE NEW ETHIC
The cost of the new ethic will be found to be relatively small. The benefits will potentially be very great. We are entering, I believe, the century of biology and of the environment. The opportunities before us of providing everywhere in the world a good life, in a stable, healthy environment, will be closely tied to the wise management of the natural environment.
Environmental change calls for an ethic uncoupled from other systems of belief. Those who are committed by religion to believe that life was put on Earth in one divine stroke will recognize that we are destroying the creation. And those who see biodiversity to be the product of blind evolution will agree with them.
We need to hold on to every species and race that we possibly can, because along with culture itself, this inheritance is the most precious gift that we can give to future generations.
D I S C U S S I O N
Carl Sagan said that less than one percent of our members of Congress have any significant scientific background. How can we get your message across?
We must do what we can and take whatever point of access we are afforded. I believe that the issue is not only intellectual but moral.
The stewardship of the environment is a domain on what I like to call the near side of metaphysics, where all reflective persons, religious and secular, can surely find common ground. What in the final analysis is morality? I suggest that a fundamental moral precept is one that serves all generations. And an enduring environmental ethic is one that aims to preserve not only the health and freedom of our species, but access to the world in which the human spirit itself was born.
The best way to redress the current imbalance, in fact the only place, is obviously public education. The National Science Foundation has urgently suggested the revitalization of liberal arts programs in our colleges. The number of colleges and universities requiring at least one course in science has declined to around 15 percent from twice that number in the 1960s. Liberal arts includes science and humanities and social sciences and should be taught as a primary goal and not abandoned to a slurry of specialized courses and vocational tracks of opportunities for job-hungry college graduates, with literal moral input.
My teacher, Melvin Calvin, pointed out that plants could be used to produce petroleum. There have been many apostles of what you are talking about but I fail to see the mechanism through which their words will reach the general public, let alone the Congress.
We are talking about sustainability, using resources that are exhaustible. It is more profitable to roll up rain forests like a carpet and turn it into plywood than it is to strip-cut, or practice partial harvesting or other techniques that might yield permanently sustainable products from single localities. That is what international protocols ought to be all about.
How do biologists make a connection between an obscure fungus in Norway and the treatment, say, of HIV?
There are literally millions of kinds of organisms in the world. Only a very small number have been examined for potential new pharmaceuticals. These organisms have been in an arms race with one another and with bacteria and viruses for literally hundreds of millions of years.
In the arms race, they have invented a huge array of biorational molecules by chance and by random testing through natural selection. Most of these substances are molecular structures still novel to science. They await discovery and use, and the potential is endless.
Molecular engineering is advancing at a rapid rate, especially by transgenetic transfer, taking species from one species, genes from one species, and planting them by recombinant DNA into another species.
Some environmentalists are worried about this. They feel that unnatural monstrosities will be released into the world like weeds and displace the products of millions of years of natural evolution. How serious is the problem?
I do not believe for a minute that such productions are dangerous. I think transgenetic engineering is an outstanding way to increase productivity and the extension of agriculture and animal husbandry.
I know of no case of a strain of a plant or animal being altered either by artificial selection or transgenetic change that was reintroduced and not quickly out-competed by the natural species in the natural ecosystem.
Things done for the best of purposes to increase output have reduced the genetic diversity within the stock of a whole series of fundamental plants such as grains and corns, rendering large segments of those populations vulnerable to a pest or a blight that might occur. This represents a parallel loss of diversity.
Generally speaking, those working on biodiversity conservation and the study of biodiversity as a science recognize three levels of biodiversity.
I was concentrating here on only one of them, species diversity. The other two are the ecosystem diversity, i.e., major habitats, and gene diversity within each species. The current general practices of agrobusiness, which aim to maximize productivity, thereby allow many of the wild strains or races to become extinct. That puts the crop itself ultimately in peril.
The vast bulk of food eaten by human beings comes from only about 20 species of plants. They happen to be the species of plants that were around and available at the beginning of the agricultural revolution in the Fertile Crescent, China, and the Andes. What we eat and what we depend on today is just an accident, a handful of species that happened to be growing in the birthplaces of agriculture.
At first there was a fair amount of genetic diversity in the crops. Nowadays we are swiftly reducing that diversity by our mass production methods that utilize only a small number of strains.
Talking about political culture, what about the popular culture of countries like Brazil, where biodiversity is most threatened?
Brazil, like almost every other country, presents a mixed picture. What you see is an increasing concern in the populace and in the government itself about protecting biological diversity, but a lot of natural environment still being carelessly, and unnecessarily, destroyed.
Edward O. Wilson (CC ‘97)
is the
Pellegrino University Research Professor at
Harvard University,
26 Oxford Street,
Cambridge, MA 02138;
phone: (617) 495-2315;
fax: (617) 495-1224;
email: ewilson@oeb.harvard.edu
![[back]](../../left.gif){kind=small}
Return
to COSMOS 1998 Table of Contents
Return
to COSMOS Journals
Return
to COSMOS Home Page