Confirmation

I have written about the need to embrace complexity and the limitation of labels, and how so much of our world refuses to be bound in discrete categories but rather occurs as a spectrum, or a continuum. The December issues of Scientific American and Wired contain articles that support this contention.  Wired demonstrates the problem of defining a species as needed to save it under the Endangered Species Act, while Scientific American writes about how the quantum world is not quantum (not discrete particles) but a continuum of wave action.

The Scientific American article author even uses my example of Pluto to make his point that nature is continuous and that where we draw distinctions in science is arbitrary.  Some interesting highlights: if we break a "particle" into three component smaller pieces, was the original "particle" a discrete parent particle, or was it always those three smaller pieces? The author describes a particular fermion that if you could hold it and turn it 360 degrees would find it was something completely different.  To get back to the original fermion, you would in fact have to turn it 720 degrees, meaning that the fermion doesnt exist in just 3 dimensional space as we define it.

The wired article describes efforts to save a small population of fish in an aquifer at the edge of Death Valley.  Due to shrinking populations which have nothing to do with human activity, but rather environmental pressures (as one would expect of a fish that makes its home at the edge of Death Valley), the population has reached a point where genetic diversity is so small that mutations will doom the fish to extinction.  The possibility of breeding the fish with larger populations of relatives from elsewhere would make that genetic line extinct, but save the notion of having fish in this particular aquifer.  The idea that the offspring of the two different fish populations would be a hybrid is challenged by the fact that the two populations are more genetically similar than I am with a person from Kenya.  Again, given the genetic similarity, the two populations may not actually be seperate species after all, in which case breeding them for the survival of one population isn't such a bad idea, but challenges their place on the Endangered Species List at all making saving them less a question of saving a species but rather preserving their location in this particular aquifer.  In short, we dont have a good definition of what constitutes a species, but the old Linnean system of counting scales and fins  is wholly insufficient given our understanding of genetics.  And using genetics, which offer so many places to draw arbitrary lines as to be useless, demonstate the continuous nature of animal life from single cells to complex organisms such as ourselves.

Interesting!