“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
— Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

What’s so important about the recent announcement (you didn’t miss it, did you?) about how many species are living on our little mudball?

Science reporters are announcing in bold print that there are “8.7 million species on Earth,” but a look at the fine print shows the error bars to be so enormous, there is more error than data.  What does this imply about the scientific validity of human classification schemes?

And how about National Geographic News‘s headline: “86 Percent of Earth’s Species Still Unknown?”

Right off the bat, questions arise about how anyone can know the 8.7 million number with only 14 percent data. It would seem that many among the to-be-discovered organisms in the 86 percent bin might not be species at all, but members of smaller groupings like subspecies or varieties – or even of larger taxa [biological categories] like families or phyla.

All of which would ordinarily be, at best, of marginal interest to us non-scientists:

Robert May (Oxford U) tried to argue that taxonomy is more than just stamp collecting. He asked, “Why Worry About How Many Species and Their Loss?”

His answer was, “we increasingly recognise that such knowledge is important for full understanding of the ecological and evolutionary processes which created, and which are struggling to maintain, the diverse biological riches we are heir to.”

The operative word is we, because May sees humans as beneficiaries of “ecosystem services” that classification helps us understand. It is difficult to see why this should be so, however, since the ecosystem is what it is, regardless of how we carve it up name-wise.

Lord May noted that we can count the number of books in the Library of Congress (at a given point in time) to eight significant figures, but cannot estimate the number of species within an order of magnitude (e.g., one million vs ten million).

Part of the problem, he said, is that some species get classified into two or more different collections. Another is that taxonomists carve up organisms into equal-size bins of plants, vertebrates, and invertebrates, even though “plant species are roughly 10 times, and invertebrates 100 times, more numerous than vertebrates.” And the big mammals get noticed easier than tiny microbes living under Antarctic ice.

Mora et al. [PLoS Biology] addressed the problems of subjectivity in the Linnaen classification system, but pushed ahead anyway, justifying their analytical estimate of 8.7 million species, aware that 86% of land organisms and up to 91% of marine organisms remain unknown to science. [Emphasis added]

It’s a hopeless task to close that gap, they lamented, because “describing Earth’s remaining species may take as long as 1,200 years and would require 303,000 taxonomists at an approximated cost of US$364 billion.”

And: “With extinction rates now exceeding natural background rates by a factor of 100 to 1,000, our results also suggest that this slow advance in the description of species will lead to species becoming extinct before we know they even existed.” Yet taxonomists must press on, they argued, because “High rates of biodiversity loss provide an urgent incentive to increase our knowledge of Earth’s remaining species.”

Three hundred thousand taxonomists working for twelve centuries earning over three hundred billion dollars — even the current profligate administration isn’t likely to spring for such a stimulus package (not, however, that they wouldn’t give it a few moments of serious consideration).

We hope the buzzword “biodiversity” didn’t escape your notice. It’s now much more than a term used only in biology. Thanks to the United Nations, biodiversity has become a full-fledged political program:

And there’s the political rub. Laws to protect endangered species assume biologists know what species are. Mora worried in the PhysOrg article that classification is “particularly important now because a host of human activities and influences are accelerating the rate of extinctions.” [Emphasis added]

But it’s much easier to discover a critter than classify it, National Geographic News explained: “Scientists must compare their specimen to museum samples, analyze its DNA, and complete reams of paperwork” to give it a place in the taxonomic tree.

It’s a long process. A biologist could only classify a few dozen in a lifetime, “if they’re really lucky,” one remarked.

Visualizing a crisis, with species disappearing faster than we can find them, Mora said, “With the clock of extinction now ticking faster for many species, I believe speeding the inventory of Earth’s species merits high scientific and societal priority.” [Emphasis added]

And this is where we get to the bottom line (i.e., “What’s it gonna cost and who’s gonna pick up the bill?”) and why this is of more than just academic interest:

This excursion into philosophy of classification is trivia except when the classifiers come after your wallet. Most of us can get by in life whether or not Pluto is dubbed a planet, but the Endangered Species Act has caused landowners [to lose] their livelihood.

Remember the snail darter? It is human beings, with their flawed schemes, who decide what constitutes an endangered species. Reclassify snail darters as members of a larger taxon with a wider range, and presto! the landowner gets his private property rights back. What changed? The snail darter? No; the society’s decision, based on political power.

All it takes for an ideologue with an agenda to stop a shopping center or factory that might create hundreds of jobs is to discover a weed or roundworm in the path of development and convince the EPA it is endangered.

Classification looms large as a political issue in such cases.

For more details, see the CEH article, “8.7 Million Species Is Not a Scientific Fact”, here.