Scientists on the Verge
Even as NASA’s intrepid little robot Spirit analyzes the surface of the Red Planet today, there’s a surprise reminder of how rudimentary our understanding of life on our own Blue Planet remains. The warning arrives in an editorial by three veteran “taxonomists,” published in today’s edition of the journal Science. They warn that their obscure field -- which aims not to take on the Internal Revenue Service but to understand how organisms live and die by classifying them into species -- may itself be on the verge of extinction.
As the paper’s lead author, Cornell University entomology (or bug) professor Quentin D. Wheeler explained in an interview Wednesday, “Taxonomy, already weakened by decades of neglect, now suffers the loss of positions and funding.” The field, he says, has been “decimated by almost every measure, including doctoral degrees granted, research funds, faculty positions, upkeep and expansion of collections ... and prestige.”
Just 1.7 million of the estimated 5 million to 13 million species of organisms on Earth have been identified. These species aren’t waiting patiently to be discovered. As many as one-third of all plant and animal species now living may become extinct by 2050 because of forces, including global warming, that are largely beyond human control, according to a study published this month in the journal Nature.
Wheeler acknowledges that National Science Foundation grants to taxonomy have not declined across the board. He and his colleagues, however, argue persuasively that over the last decade, federal funding is lavished on just one, relatively new kind of taxonomy in which scientists scan the DNA of museum specimens into computers, lay the genetic strands side by side and compare them.
In their zeal for this newfangled science, the authors argue, benefactors have forgotten to “recharge the well” by supporting a much older and, in some cases, more valuable taxonomy: field research. Think Aristotle categorizing creatures through observation as he wandered the Greek isle of Lesbos. Or Charles Darwin tramping around the Galapagos Islands in the 19th century. Without such field research, Wheeler explains, “ecologists and conservationists do not know which species exist within ecosystems and cannot discover which are thriving and which are under threat of extinction.”
Taxonomy has never been seen as sexy. As one taxonomist recently put it, the common image is “of fat guys in shorts running around with butterfly nets.”
But even Wheeler sells the field short. For, as his own paper in Science shows, taxonomy is not only about analyzing the dead, but about grappling with the forces that affect the living.
