[Scpg] A Call For The Discovery of All Life-forms On Earth

[Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson]

A Call For The Discovery of All Life-forms On Earth
http://www.all-species.org/
   What we'll get from the All Species Inventory
   "All" is the crucial term
   The All Species Inventory is a Grand Scheme
   Here is a challenge to anyone hoping to leave his or her mark

                   If we discovered life on another planet, the first thing we
                   would do is conduct a systematic inventory of that planet's
                   life. This is something we have never done on our home
                   planet. The aim of the All Species Inventory is simple:
                   within the span of our own generation, record and
                   genetically sample every living species of life on Earth.
                   This audacious goal will be accomplished by using one
                   billion or more dollars of philanthropic wealth to fund and
                   train a network of local collectors and naturalists
                   throughout the world, and to employ the latest in
                   information technology to manage this surge of
                   bio-information

What we'll get from the All Species Inventory
1) It will give us, for the first time, a complete list of "who is here," 
the roster of our
fellow inhabitants. 2) It will provide a reliable baseline for counting 
populations and
determining endangered species. 3) It will form the foundation for developing a
complete genome of all life, and a new understanding of nature. 4) It will 
uncover
multitudes of new species, many of which will have immediate cultural and
economic impacts. 5) It will train many people as naturalists and 
scientists, who
can leverage these skills further in their own lives and that of society. 
6) It will
distribute wealth from the developed world to far corners of the Earth by 
employing
indigenous and native observers and collectors. At the present time, scientific
estimates of the number of living species on Earth, including microbes, 
range from
1.4 million to 200 million. This laughable range means we are simply clueless
about the number, let alone types, of living creatures on Earth.

Here is biologist E.O. Wilson on our deep ignorance of life on Earth: In 
the realm of
physical measurement, evolutionary biology is far behind the rest of the 
natural
sciences. Certain numbers are crucial to our ordinary understanding of the
universe. What is the mean diameter of the earth? It is 12,742 kilometers 
(7,913
miles). How many stars are there in the Milky Way, an ordinary spiral galaxy?
Approximately 1011, 100 billion. How many genes are there in a small virus? 
There
are 10 (in X174 phage). What is the mass of an electron? It is 9.1 x 10-28 
grams.
And how many species of organisms are there on Earth? We don't know, not even
to the nearest order of magnitude. For several centuries naturalists have
relentlessly explored Earth's wilds to catalog the incredible variety of 
species (both
living and extinct). Each year their collective work takes us a few small 
steps closer
toward the implicit goal of recording all species on Earth. In the last decade
taxonomists have proposed a number of programs to accelerate this natural
process, and to incrementally expand the scale of inventories around the world.



"All" is the crucial term
The All Species Inventory builds upon these earlier proposals but with the
additional and crucial explicit goal: to catalog ALL living creatures 
within the time
span of one human generation (twenty-five years). "All" is the crucial 
term. The
difference between "many" and "all" is the difference between, say, a local 
public
library and the universal library of all documents and texts. Knowledge 
crosses a
threshold when it goes from"most" to "all." Geography crossed the threshold 
when
it went from knowing a lot of the world to creating a globe with all 
continents in
rough form; anatomy crossed the threshold once it produced a diagram of all the
bones, all tissues, and all organs in a human body. "Imagine doing chemistry
knowing only one third of the periodic table," says biologist Terry 
Gosliner. "Sure, it
can be done, but with an immense handicap. We are trying to do biology knowing
perhaps only a tenth, or one hundredth, of our species. It is an immense 
handicap
that does not need to exist."

Fixing the crucial figure of all species on Earth, and drawing up the list 
of all life,
would enrich and enable the following fields of knowledge: 1) Natural 
History: The
identification of a species triggers a whole field of inquiries into that 
species. What
isn't named won't get attention. Cataloging each species is the best thing 
in the
world to do for every living thing in the world. 2) Conservation: While the 
concept of
focusing limited conservation resources on a few species-rich hot spots is
probably wise, there is no definitive way to assess hot spots (are those 
spots really
hot? are they really where we think they are?) unless we have an all species
inventory first. Biocensus tallies can only follow inventory counts. 3) 
Ecology: The
web of interactions between organisms and their environments, including other
organisms, is woefully incomplete in every case if we cannot even list the 
other
organisms in each environment. Ecologists are working with two cards out of the
full pack. 4) Evolutionary and Molecular Biology: A full understanding of 
evolution at
the genetic level will require the full outline of genetic innovation 
provided by all
species. Many insights in molecular evolution will depend on a snapshot of the
entire range of genomic life, much as progress in deciphering human genetics
required the sequencing of the entire human genome. 5) Biologic Wealth: The
commercial benefit of discovering millions of new species is staggering, based
only (to begin with) on the pharmacological and biotech billions made from 
the few
species we have already identified.

But why set a goal to accomplish this within one generation, and why now?
Because technology is making the inventory of all species both possible and
urgent. The following innovations make it thinkable to catalog all species:

      Foggers for arboreal insect species
      Remote viewers and trawlers for deep-sea species
      Cheap electron scanning microscopes for insect identification
      Transmission light microscopes and microvideofor protoctists GPS for
      reliable location determination
      Hyperlinked keys for quicker identification Online databases for 
access to
      museum and herberium collections
      DNA samplers for unculturable bacteria
      World Wide Web for globalocal bioinformatics

However, the most important technologies for this project haven't been 
invented yet.
Furthermore there is a self-accelerating nature to technology in this 
realm: the
faster/cheaper that technology fosters new species discovery and 
description, the
more attractive it makes further innovations, compounding the discovery 
rate. Also,
a global-scale effort to catalog all species self-amplifies discovery. 
Plant hunters,
for instance, can uncover new insect, fungus, nematode, and mite species
dependent on those plants, or vice versa, accelerating discovery. This 
means that
the normal glacial pace and cost of species discovery could be shortened by 
many
degrees fairly quickly. E.O. Wilson estimated that employing the 
traditional methods
of long academic training, slow publishing, and no new technology, a full-scale
inventory of life on earth could be accomplished in fifty years. New 
technologies for
training, publishing, probing, and identification could certainly shorten 
the duration
to twenty-five years, or one generation.

But this same technology, disguised as consumer technology, is accelerating the
pressure on species habitat. The next fifty years will be a bottleneck 
where inflating
human population and development will press against shrinking natural habitat.
(After fifty years, declining world population and better technology will 
probably
relieve this pressure.) The result of this near-term conflict will be the 
loss of
species. Estimates of the loss range from 10 percent to 25 percent of all 
species.
Taking a liberal guess of the number of species actually on Earth and the most
benign-case scenario of human impact in the next fifty years, the total 
loss still
tallies up to millions. In other words, sooner or later we'll accumulate 
the list of all
species if we let science proceed incrementally. But even in a best-case 
scenario, if
we wait another generation to compile an All Species Inventory, we'll come 
up with
a final list that is several millions shorter than if we do it now. But 
making a list does
not save the entries. While an all species inventory is the foundation for 
protecting
endangered species (and must be), it is important to distinguish these two
endeavors. The All Species Inventory is not a census nor a complete 
geographical
distribution map. It counts a species with a population of one the same as 
one with
a population of one million. This is a roster, an elemental list of all 
life, an inventory
of all the parts. As simple as it is to state the goal of this project - to 
make life's list -
there are many extremely difficult challenges to overcome. These include: the
ever-slippery issue of deciding which varieties are species or subspecies 
or mere
variants, and overcoming the sheer physical hurdles of surveying the Big
Remaining Primreview Vastness: the Congo, the Amazon, the Deep Oceans, the
Coral Reefs, Soil and Benthic Sediments, and Islands (oceanic and continental).

Most challenging of all will be dealing with the intellectual property 
issues such a
large-scale effort will birth. How shall ownership, credit, and reward be 
divvied up
among native residents, governments, collectors, backers, hosts, 
commercializers,
and the global public? While the taxonomic and systematics community has
evolved methods that work in many cases, it is not clear that these ways 
will scale
up or withstand new technologies. The more successful this project is, the more
visible the issues will be, and the more complex the solutions. The wealth
ultimately generated by this project will likely be staggering--new drugs and
materials, better understanding, restoration, and management of ecological
systems, higher quality of life due to attention to our natural capital, 
and (this is a
hunch) appropriate genetic manipulation--from insights derived from a full 
genome
of all life. (Eventually, though, in more than twenty-five years, every 
"species" will be
genetically sequenced; the more species sequenced the fuller and better the
picture.) But because this project will take at least two decades to 
payoff, it is
unappealing to crass commercial economics. For that reason, it is an ideal 
project
for the immense wealth being generated by digital technology in this 
generation.
This wealth, created by imaginative individuals, is looking for imaginative 
ways to
leverage the world. The All Species Inventory meets almost all the criteria 
of a lean,
cascading good deed. It is truly global, fast (for natural history), deep, 
nature-based,
technology-savvy, and entirely doable. And it feels good.



                      The All Species Inventory is a Grand
                      Scheme
                      The All Species Inventory is a grand scheme.
                      Self-made wealth is both intrigued and leery of grand
                      schemes. The attraction of grand schemes is that
                      they can be mythic. They connect with the spirit. They
                      touch a lot of people. They can change viewpoints and
                      thereby change the world. The All Species Inventory
                      can do all that. The caution about grand schemes is
                      that their elaborate infrastructures can internally
                      consume most of the available resources, so that the
                      final result is decimated by the actual everyday
operations trying to put the scheme into effect. In the end grand schemes 
are often
not funded because they are grand, and incremental utility is funded 
instead. The
All Species Inventory is worth funding because it is both urgent and 
important, and
because it can combine incremental utility and mythic depth. It can be big 
but lean.
It will be result oriented (the more species the more successful) but grand 
(ALL
species).



Here is a challenge to anyone hoping to leave his or her
mark
This project can be accomplished in a very decentralized manner. It may be a
paragon of globally decentralized work of any type. The inventory actually 
benefits
from the redundancy natural in such decentralized efforts. Most of the 
collecting,
preliminary sorting work, and an increasing volume of taxonomic naming, 
will take
place in small corners of the world, thus spreading the work to a diverse 
group of
nationalities and biomes. Most of middle management can be accomplished by
Linux servers. Most of the money poured into the project will make its way to
collectors and naturalists far from the source of that money, and often in 
places
where precious little other money flows in. Lastly, the many students, or 
indigenous
naturalists, or lonely local experts put to work by this project would come 
away with
both traditional taxonomic skills (now rapidly disappearing from science) 
and other
marketable new skills of managing global databases and information flows. Here
is a challenge to anyone hoping to leave his or her mark in a big way. Can you
imagine a project other than All Species Inventory with a larger global 
impact (more
countries touched), that would consume less internal resources, require 
less staff,
generate more scientific knowledge and more commercial products, serve the
beleaguered environment more, further increase appreciation of Earth as much,
and do a better job of satisfying our longing to do something bigger than
ourselves? Write us if you do.

-- Kevin Kelly



Mr. Kelly is editor and publisher of Whole Earth from 1984 to 1990, 
continues his
amazingly Big Picture pursuits. In this neo-biological civilization, he has 
integrated
his digital past (the WELL, the Hackers Conference, Cyberthon, and WIRED) with
urgent concerns for environmental crises. His books include: Out of 
Control: The
New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World; and New
Rules for the New Economy.