Science book of
the Year 2000
Awarded a
"Distinctive Merit"
by the
New York Art Directors Club
in 2001
| If we want to be around for the next fifty thousand, it behooves us to learn how life really works |
Life Counts
Cataloguing life on earth
(Together with Michael Gleich and Fabian Nicolay)
Berlin
Verlag,
Berlin 2000
ISBN 3-8270-0350-4
288 pages
22 Euro
Paperback:
Berlin Taschenbuch Verlag
Berlin 2002
ISBN 344276033X
287 pages
14,90 Euro
Preface
by Stewart Brand
This is one of those books that's tough to have a bedmate
reading.
"Listen to this! It says here that …"
- … all ants weigh the same as all humans.
- … there are three hundred species of bacteria in your mouth, dear.
- … five thousand species of plant were introduced to the United States from elsewhere; that's 29 percent of all the plants here.
- … parts of Europe have more species now than before
humans arrived. - … biodiversity can be saved at one-fourth the cost of
destructive subsidies.
Understanding is driven by facts (numbers). Policy is driven by facts (numbers). Biology is still a young science because its data collection is still so rudimentary, given the seething diversity and complexity out there. These days I'm working with an organization that aims to identify and catalog all the species on Earth in the next twenty-five years. Two of the scientists on the project - Edward O. Wilson and David Hillis - claim that when all the species are known, "then biology becomes a predictive science."
Life Counts is a report - a superb report - on a great work in progress, far beyond merely finding and naming all the species. We are just starting to ramp up on finally understanding the dynamics of life on Earth, which is the infrastructure of human life. Earth life is 3.5 billion years old. Modern humans have been around for maybe fifty thousand years (i.e., the last 1/70,000th). If we want to be around for the next fifty thousand, it behooves us to learn how life really works, because we're now affecting the whole system, for good or ill.
A data-intensive science like biology is not driven by hypotheses and models so much as it is by tools and toil - ingenious new devices and the passion to apply them globally. GPS locators, the Internet, and ever-faster DNA sequencers are already revolutionizing field biology. The coming of nanotechnology will open up the teeming world of microbial life - where we'll study most of the biomass, most of the metabolism, most of the evolutionary history, and most of the remaining mystery of life on the planet.
It used to be that taxonomists sequestered their data; that was how they acquired power as experts in their particular twig on the tree of life. The Internet has changed all that. The Human Genome Project demonstrated conclusively that discoveries instantly published online in GenBank could move the science much more rapidly, with no loss of quality in the work, because public visibility allowed quick correction of wrong information. Good new data now acquires its value from being widely shared, not from being hidden.
A major element still missing in biological data collection is duration. Megalife lives in megatime, yet our best datasets still measure in minitime - forty years of animal census data from the Serengetti in Africa (see p. 46) is considered to be exceptionally lengthy. We can infer some long-term trends from fossils, from lake and ocean sediments, from packrat middens, from tree rings, but it's not the same as numbers carefully collected in the present and carefully preserved and correlated over decades and centuries. I hope there's a Life Counts and Global Biodiversity (the specialist companion book) version 2.0 in 2012 and version 10.0 in 2102. That's when the deepest trendlines and cycles will turn up.
When you have data you're confident in, at the right degree of resolution of detail, then you get to do fun science and realistic policy. The fun is figuring out how life works; the responsibility is figuring out what civilization should do with that knowledge.
For instance, to take a current debate, how large is human-caused species extinction, really? How important is it, really? These are knowable! Then: what activities can we change to improve the situation? The better information we have, the more finely tuned our response can be.
As Life Counts demonstrates, we have a lot of information already, a good start, enough for a first cut at intelligent public policy. But the best is yet to come, and this book shows why it is so important to press on, and how fascinating it will be.
Stewart Brand, cofounder, All-Species Inventory and The Long Now Foundation.
Copyright © 1996-2011 Dirk Maxeiner and Michael Miersch.
All rights reserved.
