Quote without (much) comment

[Kenelm Philip]

	Paul Ehrlich's name has come up a couple of times recently on
Leps-L. I thought the list might be interested in three quotes from the
Presidential Address he gave last year to the Association for Tropical
Lepidoptera.

	For those who might not know the approach to butterfly studies
he's been advocating for the last 30 years and more--he recommends that
people should carry out intensive work on taxonomically limited groups
(which he calls 'model systems') rather than diluting their efforts by
taking a "non-scientific 'shotgun' approach to nature".

	Here are the three quotes I found interesting:

	"Too much effort has been expended on the useless taxonomic des-
cription of subspecies......, something with which I wasted some of my own
time in my youth. In the United States, subspecies are important tools for
preserving biodiversity, because of the structure of the nation's laws
protecting endeangered organisms, but nobody should be deluded into think-
ing the naming of subspecies is of scientific significance."

	"It is quite clear that the lesser interest in, and much greater
diversity of moths gives them very few of the advantages that butterflies
enjoy as a model group. There is little scientific reason to do further
work on them."

	"I think that it would be wonderful if _Homo sapiens_ took the
necessary actions to preserve present day biodiversity for a millennium
or so, to permit it to be reasonably completely described. Or, humanity
might allocate enough resources to get a rough describing/cataloguing
largely done in a few decades, especially since the technical ability to
do so is increasingly in hand. That would be fine if it did not compete
with the funding of the much more important work on model systems."

	These quotes have been lifted out of context. Anyone who wants to
check context should find a copy of the ATL 'Lepidoptera News', June
2001 #2.

						Ken Philip
fnkwp at uaf.edu




 
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