Systematists are often ridiculed as unimaginative and abstruse as they
study the taxonomy and evolutionary relationships of living things. A prime
example is the entomologists portrayed in the film The Silence of the Lambs.
These bio-nerds play chess with their insect specimens in a museum attic;
meanwhile, back in the real world, more interesting people are busily shooting,
bludgeoning and eviscerating each other.

With a deep sense of commitment, systematists are fighting off the stereotype
and joining the biodiversity battle with great fervour. And if politicians
and the public do not recognise that systematists offer crucial insights
in these dangerous times, then all is lost.

Niles Eldredge, a leading evolutionary biologist, fights the good fight
with this slim edited volume. He sets two goals: the first is to explore
the ecological and evolutionary meanings of biodiversity; the second is
to look at how systematists can use both their skills and their museums
to help to save the dwindling biodiversity of our planet. The book grew
out of a symposium held in 1990 at Eldredge’s institution, the American
Museum of Natural History in New York, and 7 of the 13 chapters are by Eldredge
and his colleagues at the museum. The remaining authors come from museums
and universities elsewhere in the US and Latin America.

Eldredge begins with his own chapter, a discussion of the relationship
between systematics and ecology. He argues that the ecological hierarchy
(organism, population, community, ecosystem, biome) is separate from the
evolutionary hierarchy (organism, population, species, genus, family and
so on). Although we measure biodiversity loss within the evolutionary hierarchy,
in terms of species extinctions, our conservation efforts are targeted
at communities, a part of the ecological hierarchy. Eldredge’s distinction
sets the stage for a debate that has important practical implications.

Joel Cracraft elaborates on Eldredge’s arguments and challenges a well-entrenched
notion: the hypothesis of diversity-dependent diversification. This is the
idea that the long-term evolution of the world’s plants and animals can
be viewed by looking at how organisms divide up ecological resources, with
a limited amount of global ‘ecospace’ available and, therefore, a limit
to global diversity. Cracraft points out that there is no reason to expect
local, ecological processes to scale up to global, evolutionary dynamics.

But the fact is that they do. In the next chapter, John Sepkoski brings
his palaeontological research to bear on the problem. The ecological and
evolutionary hierarchies may well be different, but they have been tightly
intertwined for most of the history of life. Global patterns of diversification,
extinction and environmental distribution are the sums of interactions in
local communities. Therefore, biodiversity could recover community by community,
but it will be a painfully slow process.

George Barrowclough organises and summarises the major issues of biodiversity
and conservation. His chapter is of broad scope and is a practical counterpoint
to the theoretical discussions of Eldredge, Cracraft and Sepkoski. Barrowclough
discusses specific areas in which systematists can contribute to conservation.
They are clearly best equipped to tell us what species are out there and
how they are related to each other; you can not know what to preserve without
this information. Michael Novacek and Judith Winston also make this point
in their chapters.

Not all habitats, ecosystems and species can be saved. Barrowclough
confronts the problem of choosing what to preserve and what to let go. Norman
Platnick argues in his chapter that we should give priority to areas with
a lot of endemic species: species that are found only there. Melanie Stiassny
takes a different tack, drawing from her research on fish evolution. She
advocates saving areas of particular evolutionary interest: areas inhabited
by the species that will best help us to understand the history of evolutionary
relationships.

Of course, only systematic research will enable us to identify those
particularly important species and areas, as both Novacek and Barrowclough
point out. Surprisingly, none of these authors mentions a third possible
criterion, which several researchers have suggested elsewhere: preserve
areas where diversification is actively occurring.

One thing this book makes abundantly clear is how little we really know
about the world around us. Basic questions remain unanswered, such as
why, or even whether, diversity is greater in tropical forests than at
temperate latitudes (Platnick and George Stevens) or why Madagascar’s lemur
species do not show simple habitat preferences (Ian Tattersall). The oceans
are even less well understood than life on land, and Winston writes of the
crying need to study and preserve that great unknown before it is too late.

What should natural history museums be doing? Nathan Flesness believes
that they should focus their limited resources on the problem at hand.
While museums in developed countries can bring technology to bear in preserving
irreplaceable collections and disseminating data electronically, Third World
museums face an entirely different set of socioeconomic and political realities,
as Cuban biologist Gilberto Silva Taboada relates. On the other hand, since
they are located in some of the most threatened areas of the world, P. E.
Vanzolini recognises their potential for carrying out long-term studies
and taking an on-site, proactive approach to conservation.

The two major themes of the book are connected: if evolutionary and
ecological diversities are distinct to any degree, then systematists as
well as ecologists need to participate in conservation efforts. Vanzolini’s
prescription – that systematists must integrate ecology and evolutionary
biology in a multidisciplinary approach – should be obvious from the start.
However, it bears emphasis given Eldredge’s initial dichotomy between the
ecological and evolutionary hierarchies.

Each of the book’s themes could occupy a volume larger than this one,
so the chapters are primarily summaries of what has been said before and
short position papers, without vast quantities of data. The book will appeal
to students and to general readers with a background in biology, but the
price will discourage many of them from purchasing it.

Richard Aronson is a research fellow at the Institute of Marine and
Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University, New Jersey.

Morowitz assigns species into four categories of value. Some organisms
have direct and immediate economic value. Others have potential value for
medicine and biotechnology. A third group is important for the sake of knowledge
– the physiological uniqueness of whales, for example, argues for their
preservation and continued study. The fourth group has ‘amenity value’ because
of their charisma – pandas, lions and redwood trees, for example.

He points out that assigning values to species and ecosystems to ensure
correct management of the biosphere will call for collaboration between
biologists, economists and technologists. The answer to ‘How much is a species
worth?’, he concludes, is ‘What kind of a world do you want to live in?’

This last remark highlights an important feature of the biodiversity
movement – it is primarily a middle-class, intellectual affair, conducted
from a position of safety. In the front line, however, people such as the
few impoverished Latin American peasants who take up the conservation banner
to improve their lot risk death at the hands of wealthy landowners. A celebrated
example is Chico Mendez. Mendez organised rubber tappers in Brazil to save
the forest that was their livelihood from destruction by cattle ranchers.
He was assassinated.

Weltschmerz (‘world-weariness’), due to worries about extinction, is
purely a bourgeois luxury: the terrible state of the environment in poverty-stricken,
once-Communist Eastern Europe is proof of that. When Third World governments
cite their need to feed the poor as the reason for cutting down forests,
the fact is that the poor – and the wealthy – of those nations are generally
unconcerned about conservation. Both are concerned with the short-term:
the poor out of economic necessity, the wealthy for personal enrichment.

To a dispassionate observer, it seems that the motivation for scientists
to preserve species and habitats is partly aesthetic: coral reefs are more
appealing than underwater landscapes covered with bacterial slime.

Although some scientists may find that hard to admit, most of us got
into the business in order to study the beauty of the Universe. ‘Aesthetic
value’ is a good selling point in a Western middle-class market and ‘popular’
conservationists have never denied it (just look at the next publicity material
that you receive from, say, the World Wildlife Fund). But people who are
desperately poor, generally speaking, care less about aesthetics than they
care about feeding their children.

In the same issue of Science, Paul Erlich of Stanford University and
Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University freely admitted their aesthetic motivation.
But they also argued the importance to human survival of ‘integrated ecosystems’;
for example, the structure of living reef coral is essential to the survival
of reef fish, which people eat.

Will this argument dissuade Filipino fishermen from using dynamite to
blow up reefs? Should we not simply force them to stop? Is enforcement practical
in countries such as the Philippines and the Bahamas, which are composed
of large numbers of small islands? Can morality justify Draconian measures?

Conservation of species for future applications – Morowitz’s second
category of values – is a common argument put forward by scientists. But
will poor people reap any immediate benefits? If not now, when? Simply to
ask them to restrain their harvesting activities for a future return is
futile. A fishery conservation project in the overfished waters of north
Jamaica has run up against just this problem: conservation is often not
economically acceptable to the fishermen because they want more food now
to sustain their own progeny.

There seems to be only one effective way to persuade the downtrodden
– and those who tread on them – to save this planet: provide economic benefit.
Unappealing as it sounds, we must ransom the remains of the biosphere. ‘Debt
for nature swaps’ are now being promoted by organisations such as the US-based
Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund and the Smithsonian Institution.
These programmes, in which part of the debt of developing countries is waived
in return for a commitment to conservation, are steps in the right direction.

We in the developed world must also give maximum support to conservation
movements at the grassroots level, such as the late Chico Mendez’s rubber
tappers union.

Richard Aronson is a research fellow at Rutgers University, New Jersey.