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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   26498 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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I oftentimes wonder just how much microfauna taxonomy is fake. Like, this particular decision had major historical consequences, but the average guy doing minnow or crawfish taxonomy can probably get away with classifying whatever he finds in some obscure South American tributary as a new species without anyone calling him out on it. Are there actually 30,000 species of scarab beetle out there? All of the ones I ever see look the same.

At a broad guess, all of it.

I remember reading once about a particular 'species' of fish that was only found in a specific pond. Basically, it was an inbred version of another species that got stuck by the pond losing its connection to a larger body of water. The author noncritically repeated the argument by the researcher that it was important to save this species.

y tho

It seems arbitrary that we get to decide that all species must be preserved as they are now. Extinction and speciation are integral to how evolution functions. How can we justify trying to preserve the animal kingdom in aspic? Especially when the preservation mostly takes the form of preventing us from building anything.

That said, we obviously need to be preserving the cool ones. It would be a tragedy to lose any more charismatic megafauna.

The charismatic megafauna are the ones that most need to go! They make much more impressive trophies for humanity. We've accomplished so little in the "driving species to extinction" field in so long. We're close to getting some rhino species, but some others are still doing just fine.

Honestly, keeping them alive in an age of technology is the more impressive feat. We live in an age where we can fly into the air, destroy cities, or reduce a mountain to its raw materials. The live rhino is a more impressive trophy than a dead one.

It seems arbitrary that we get to decide that all species must be preserved as they are now. Extinction and speciation are integral to how evolution functions. How can we justify trying to preserve the animal kingdom in aspic? Especially when the preservation mostly takes the form of preventing us from building anything.

It feels remarkably similar in some ways to First Nations: whatever land a given tribe/confederation occupied at the time of contact with Europeans becomes permanently and historically theirs--like a game of Civ ending at an arbitrary cutoff year, then that save state being imported to the expansion/sequel. Doesn't matter when a people took possession of a given tract of land, or who might have been there prior.

I think the same. The old method of setting who owns what tended to resolve conflicts fairly quickly. Your lands are the ones you’re strong enough to keep. If you can’t they belong to whoever can. The reason so much of the world is stable is because their borders were formed before international busybodies could interfere in the natural order.

The problem with that method is that, as armaments technology advanced over the XIX and XX centuries, warfare became increasingly destructive to bystanders who had been minding their own business until their governments decided that they needed a distraction from their own inadequacies.

...are you implying that warfare was better for civilian bystanders in premodern times? I'm under quite the opposite impression.

From the perspective of 1945? Yes.

The upside is that such borders tend to be stable and since they fight to victory or defeat once the war ends the defeated are unlikely to continue rearming to retake territory that they lost substantial men attempting to defend or take. Once the war ends, it’s mostly over.

Like the war over Alsace-Lorraine was over in 1871?

Or Germany, in 1918?

Where exactly in the process of European development do you see that occurring?

Is it permanently and historically theirs, or do you just mean that sometimes people will say that this is “X group” land historically and then go about their business as normal?

The latter. Although I'm still hoping someone/a tribe files a formal lawsuit based on a Land Acknowledgement, preferably incorporating the phrase "put up or shut up."

What determines what a species is, turns out to be rather arbitrary and quite controversial within the field

Independently evolving metapopulation. Still a lot of grey area, but mostly because we can't really measure it very well. Ecological function is often more important anyway for conservation goals.

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