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Life: Cataloged
Today marks the unveiling of the first pages of the Encyclopedia of Life, a new website that seeks to catalog every living species in digital format. An international team of scientists are introducing the first 30,000 pages and predict that in about a decade those initial pages will multiply into 1.77 million more.
While many of those pages may be sparse at first, the authors hope that the world’s scientific community will pool all of its knowledge on the pages. Unlike a page of paper, a page of the Encyclopedia of Life can hold as much information as scientists can upload. “It’s going to have everything known on it, and everything new is going to be added as we go along,” said Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist who spearheaded the Encyclopedia of Life and now serves as its honorary chairman.
The site is geared for scientists and non-scientists alike, as a sliding button allows readers to choose how much detail they want. While the site is far from finished, the scientists involved are hoping the public will offer constructive feedback. So go take a look and see what you learn.
back to top19 Comments to “Life: Cataloged”
Speaking of encyclopedias, what do you do with old out-dated hard copies of same???
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VS, cut out the pictures to use at school.
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We used to buy them at thift store to use as set props.
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Looks like they are still having technical problems, but it would seem that this will be a very interesting and informative site!
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Wikimedia has worked on something like this, which they call Wikispecies.
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I read in the newspaper that it was unveiled Tuesday and promptly crashed-and-burned due to the volume of traffic.
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And what exactly constitutes a species? I know of no strict and uniformly applied definition. Camels breed with llamas, whales with dolphins, lions with tigers (yes, Napoleon, there really are ligers), etc. Many species hybrids are fertile.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_(biology)
Species were determined by scientists over the centuries. Over time, the fine taxonomy differences seem more and more arbitrary. It is based on whatever fine distinctions the zoologists at the time deemed important. It is a useful system, but I think most people believe it is more clear-cut than it is.
Many taxonomy classifications are very controversial. New information comes in all the time that forces revisions, and there is little consensus.
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amphipolis post 7,
excellent observation.
The concept of species is a convenience for humans, but nature does not seem so concerned about the distinctions!
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Amphipolis,
I believe it’s now based on a combination of morphology (the only tool originally availble?) and DNA analysis.
And you are right, the traditional Linnaen binomial taxonomies have other competing methods, and what is “best” is controversial, and subject to change over time as new knowledge and data are acquired.
It’s neither as clear-cut nor as static as most people believe, and as Musing correctly states is a scheme or model of nature used to aid human understanding. It is a map, and many forget that “the map is not the territory.”
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Oh, and morphology is a wickedly difficult way to distguish what species an individual belongs to. Wife works as a fisheries biologist; they take dichotomous keys out with them to identify fish. Right now, she’s analyzing ponar samples for macroinvertebrates. (To which I say, “YUCK!”)
If they get well and truly stumped they ship parts of a specimen off to a lab equipped for DNA analysis. They lack the resources, and my wife lacks the interest in biochemistry and genetics, to do it themselves. She’s more of a behaviour and wanting to handle it and cut it up kind of person. Me, were I a biologist, I’d go straight for the DNA.
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Thomas post 10,
it would seem that the DNA matching would be the gold standard for establishing taxonomies.
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You may end up drastically reducing the number of species.
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amphipolis post 12,
and this would be bad why?
We can already say comfortably that rigidly separating most of the big cats into different species does not appear to be rigorously correct. And of course bacteria defy classical speciation arguments with their exchange of DNA material with relative abandonment. Plants of course hybridize. Polar Bears and Grizzilies cross breed. And so on.
It would appear that our classical “tree of life models” with clean delineation of branches is perhaps confounding us here. At the branch points it would appear that it is more a cloud than a distinct crisp branching.
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And of course as we learn how to insert new genes into organisms which otherwise would not carry this gene, what perhaps becomes of more interest is the distinct genetic components, not the taxonomic entity itself.
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Fewer pages for their encyclopedia. That can’t be good.
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amphipolis post 15,
not neccessarily. We could perhaps reduce the number of species, but that does not mean that diverse variants would not need to be considered (al la the interesting article in National Geographic on blind cave fish: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/01/080108-cave-fish.html ).
What does seem to be breaking down is our rigid taxonomic structures which may make indexing harder.
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#11
this does not escape the typological fallacy that remains a major obstacle to an evolutionary understanding of speciation process and species delimitation.
the success of a pluralism of concepts and the failure of any one concept to work for all taxa is a strong argument against the existence of a species category. i tend to take the position that a species is whatever a taxonomist calls it. and that varies with a lot of things.
good friend says that species names and concepts are the last vestiges of creationism in biology. the move to a rank free classification does not seem to resolve these issues, as far as i can see. things need names for communication and that will never stop being an issue.
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erasmus post 11,
I guess I am puzzled by the following statement:
“this does not escape the typological fallacy that remains a major obstacle to an evolutionary understanding of speciation process and species delimitation.”
I believe my suggestion that the DNA should be used to establish taxonimes means that we would abandon the concept of species altogether and rather use DNA mapping to establish that one organism is closer to or farther from another.
If we combine DNA mapping with chromosomal data, then at least for natually evolved entities, would we not have established a “species free” taxonomy?
What am I missing?
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musing forgot to check this thread, hope you are still watching.
you are perhaps missing the fact that ‘distance’ is an arbitrary measure when discussing DNA sequences. since the function of much of DNA is unknown, there are many assumptions involved in such a measurement that are to say the least unlikely to be true.
Furthered by the old problem that regardless of what DNA sequences may say, diversity seems to be packaged in more or less discrete packages. there are discontinuities in nature that would not be captured by the single axis of ‘genetic distance’ or even more complicated measures. In short, one would have to construct an arbitrary threshold for delimitation (this threshold has been used in delimitation issues see ‘Nei’s Genetic Distance’ and plethodontid salamanders).
there are even more problems here musing. hybridization between differentiated forms (under other circumstances, forms delimited as disparate taxa) or contact between differentiated lineages of similar forms (including cryptic speciation which is genetic divergence unaccompanied by morphological or phenotypic divergence, a phenomenon which is being reported more frequently since the advent of the molecular revolution) cause severe problems for the construction of phylogenetic trees that would be the raw data for the delimitation procedures you suggest as an alternative.
one last problem is the issue of incomplete lineage sorting. Populations separated from ancestral areas by vicariant events may have differential genetic frequencies and private alleles not shared between the separated groups. These alleles could result from mutation/selection after the vicariance, or they could represent the structure of the ancestral population pre-vicariance. there is no known method that can distinguish between these two alternatives, so weak inference from other sources of data is the only possible method.
all of these issues demand as a solution the adoption of some arbitrary (arbitrary because such delimitations will necessarily be determined as a function of the taxa and history involved and not from first principles) standard for delimitation. This is the typological fallacy that is no different from standard morphological or biological species concepts.
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