The compelling moral argument from science for saving the Creation.*

[bending_sickle]

Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth
Edward O Wilson (2006)

Part 3: What Science Has Learned

Arguments for saving the rest of life are drawn from both religion and science. The relevant principles of biology, the key science in this discourse, are explained here.


11. Biology Is the Study of Nature

“In my opinion, Pastor, the ascent of Nature and the restoration of Eden do not need more spiritual energy. Of that people have a superabundance. Rather, spiritual energy must be more broadly applied, and more exactly guided by an understanding of the human condition. Humanity’s self-image has risen far during the past three hundred centuries. First lifted by religion and the creative arts, it can rise still higher on the wings of science.”

“Most researchers, including Nobel laureates, are narrow journeymen, with no more interest in the human condition than the usual run of laymen. Scientists are to science what masons are to cathedrals.”

“Scientists seldom make leaps of the imagination. Most, in fact, never have a truly original idea. Instead they snuffle their way through masses of data and hypotheses (the later are educated guesses to be tested) […]. The successful scientist thinks like a poet, and then only in rare moments of inspiration, if ever, and works like a bookkeeper the rest of the time.”

“Scientists by and large are too modest to be prophets, too easily bored to be philosophers, and too trusting to be politicians.”

“The power of science comes not from scientists but from its method. The power, and the beauty too, of the scientific method is its simplicity.”

“The invention of this remarkable engine of testable learning was the one advance in recorded human history that can be called a true quantum leap.”

“Without science there had to be religion, in order to explain man’s place in the universe.”

“Humans, in their evolving self-image, rose above Nature to follow the gods as children and servants. Tribes led unwaveringly by their personal gods were united and strong. They defeated Nature, erasing most of it in the process. Their destiny, they believed, was not of this world. They though of themselves as immortal, no less than demigods.
Along the way, commencing in Europe in the seventeenth century, a radical alternative self-image emerged. Art and philosophy began to disentangle themselves from the gods, and science learned to operate with full independence.”

“Science has become the most democratic of all human endeavors. It is neither religion nor ideology. It makes no claims beyond what can be sensed in the real world. It generates knowledge in the most productive and unifying manner contrived in history, and it serves humanity without obeisance to any particular tribal deity.
Biology now leads in reconstructing the human self-image. It has become the paramount science, exceeding other disciplines, including physics and chemistry, in the creative tumult of its discoveries and disputations.”

“Not least, biology is the logical bridge between the three great branches of learning: the natural science, the social sciences, and the humanities.”

“…the great goals of present-day biology. […]

• Create life: complete the mapping of a species of simple bacterium at the molecular level, simulate its processes by computers, then construct individual bacteria from the constituent molecules, or at least show how such construction can be accomplished.
• Using this approach and combining it with knowledge of the chemistry of early Earth, reconstruct the steps that led to the origin of life.
• Continuing to advance the same molecular reduction and synthesis to human cells, use the information with increasing effectiveness to cure disease and repair injuries.
• Explain the mind with models of chemical and electrical transmission and the molecular basis of nerve-cell growth and network formation; then simulate the mind with the combination of artificial intelligence and artificial emotion.
• Complete the mapping of Earth’s fauna and flora to the species level, including microorganisms, and expand exploration of diversity at the gene level for each of the species.
• Use the exponentially growing information about diversity within the biosphere to advance medicine, agriculture, and public health.
• Create a Tree of Life for all species and for major gene ensembles within them, thereby tracing the pathways of past evolutionary histories. Meanwhile, combining this information with paleontology and environmental history, establish definitive principles concerning the origin of biodiversity.
• Decipher how stable natural communities are assembled and regulated at the species level; use this information to protect and stabilize Earth’s biodiversity.
• Bridge, if not outright unify, the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities by exploration of the biological foundation of mind and human nature. In the process, unveil the coevolution of genes and culture.”

“Biology is a science of three dimensions. The first dimension is the study of individual species […] across all the hierarchical levels of biological organization the species have attained – molecules […] cells […] tissues and organs […] organisms […] societies and populations […] interactions of the species to form ecosystems.”

“The second dimension is the mapping of biological diversity, ‘biodiversity’ […], of all the species in a selected part of the world […]”

“The third dimension of biology is the history of each of these species, ecosystems, and genes. Ecologists track species through seasons and generations in order to understand how their populations wax and wane. By vastly expanding the scale of inquiry, systematic and genetics reconstruct history through enough generations to witness changes in the genes and, at a higher level, the splitting of the species into daughter species.”

“Try now to envision simultaneously the reach of the three dimensions of biology.”


12. The Fundamental Laws of Biology

“A law in biology is the abstract description of a process that evidence suggests is universal in living systems and possesses a logical inexorability for those systems.”

“…the two fundamental laws of biology. The first is that all known properties of life are obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry. This is not meant to imply that all the properties can be explained directly by physics and chemistry. It means only that when the complex machinery of life is cleaved into its elements and processes, these parts and what is known of the interaction among them conform to what is known of physics and chemistry.”

“The properties of the cell as a whole are called ‘emergent’, meaning they arise from the interactions of the molecules. But because of the large number and complexity of the processes at that level, the movements cannot be readily deduced from principles of physics and chemistry.”

“An emergent property, then, can be defined as one so complex and poorly understood that it must be described by an imagery and a vocabulary different from those used for the processes that create it.”

“The crucial link between biology and the physical sciences is the structure of DNA […].”

“molecular and cellular biology, the disciplines that enjoy the greatest support and activity from society”

“E. coli […] for its genetic simplicity and ultra-short generation time […] C. elegans for the simplicity of its nervous system and behavior”

“A large part of the success of molecular biology and cellular biology is due to their importance for medicine. […] in public perception and support molecular biology and cellular biology are virtually married in medicine. There is no Nobel Prize in biology, but […] there is a Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine. Molecular biology and cellular biology are rich and powerful not so much because they have been successful. They are successful mostly because they have been made rich and powerful.”

“The second fundamental law of biology is that all biological processes, and all the differences that distinguish species, have evolved by natural selection.”

“When a species changes substantially from its original state, it can be said to have evolved into a new species. When different strains of the same species diverge sufficiently from one another […] the mother species can be said to have multiplied into daughter species.”

“…the upper levels of the first dimension (organisms to ecosystem) plus almost all of the secondary dimension (biodiversity) and third dimension (evolutionary biology).”

“As biology matures and unifies, the second and third dimensions will with the upper reach of the first dimension come to overshadow molecular and cellular biology.”

“the three dimensions – hierarchy, diversity, and history”

“I would guess that existing biology is under one-millionth of what will eventually be known.”

“…the future of biology depends on interdisciplinary studies within and beyond biology.”


13. Exploration of a Little-Known Planet
“…we don’t know what is happening to most of the rest of life, because we don’t even know what it is. Humanity doesn’t need a moon base or a manned trip to Mars. We need an expedition to planet Earth, where probably fewer than 10 percent of life forms are known to science, and fewer than 1 percent of those have been studied beyond a simple anatomical description and a few notes on natural history.”

“Over geological time, and if averaged over many taxonomic groups, species went extinct at the rate of one species per million species per year; and new species were born at the same rate, one species per million species per year. The ongoing rate of species extinction and commitment to early extinction, measured to the nearest power of ten, is now 100 times the rate at which new species are being born, as most conservatively estimated. It is expected to rise to 1,000 or higher […].”

“…we are in the beginning of the largest spasms of extinction since the end of the Cretaceous Period, 65 million years ago.”

“…our ignorance of biodiversity is such that we are losing a large part of it before we even know it existed.”

“The number of species of organisms discovered to date, comprising all known plants, animals and microorganisms, lies somewhere between 1.5 and 1.8 million. Estimates of the true number […] vacillate wildly according to the method used […] from 3.6 million at the low end to 112.0 million at the high end.”

“The 100-million-plus figure, if it is ever reached, will come mostly from the diversity of invisible organisms. Bacteria and bacteria-like microbes called archaea are the dark matter of Earth’s living universe.”

“At least 700 bacterial species thrive as symbionts in the human mouth. […] contribute to oral health by excluding disease-causing bacteria.”

“…each person’s entire body harbors more bacterial cells than human cells. If biological classification were based on a preponderance of cells, a human being would be classified as a bacterial ecosystem.”

“…bacteria and microscopic fungi, collectively called the SLIMES (subterranean lithoautotrophic microbial ecosystems).”

“lithos, stone”

“The discovery of the SLIMES has given added hope to scientists that life will be found on the bitter cold and powder-dry planet of Mars – not at the surface but far beneath it, at the level of liquid water.”

“…an Encyclopedia of Life. […] Only with such encyclopedic knowledge can ecology mature as a science and acquire predictive power species by species and, from that fine-grained information, the same capability for individual ecosystems.
As one practical result, the human impact on he living environment could be assessed in far more reliable detail than is now possible.”

“Never again, with fuller knowledge of such extent, need we overlook so many golden opportunities in the living world around us, or be so often surprised by the sudden appearance of destructive aliens that spring from it.”

“An Encyclopedia of Life is logically inevitable if for no other reason that that the consolidation of biological knowledge is urgently needed.”

“…the principle that for every problem in biology there exists a species ideal for its solution.”

“…biology is primarily as descriptive science.”

“Each species is a small universe in itself, from its genetic code to its anatomy, behavior, life cycle, and environmental role, and a self-perpetuating system created during an almost unimaginably complicated evolutionary history. Each species merits careers of scientific study and celebration by historians and poets. Nothing of the kind can be said for each proton or hydrogen atom. That, in a nutshell, Pastor, is the compelling moral argument from science for saving the Creation.”


* ibid