Perhaps one of the greatest failings of modern education is the failure to teach children how to recognise common species. Ask most people to name as many species of tree, bird, or mammal as they can, and they’ll likely come up with a handful at most: oak, ash, beech, cedar; robin, kestrel, dove, eagle; cat, horse, fox, badger. See how many of each you can come up with without looking it up. Give yourself a full morning to think about it.
This is a shame, because there are more than 60 tree species native to the UK, more than 600 bird species, and over 100 mammal species. All on one small island in the higher northern latitudes, where biodiversity tends to tail off. In the US, there are 950 tree species, more than 1100 bird species, and nearly 500 mammal species. And that’s just trees, birds and mammals. The world is teeming with grasses, ferns, bulbs, fungi, insects, lizards, fish and all manner of other lifeforms.
Our lack of acquaintance with most of nature blinds us to how much of it there is. There’s so much life on earth, in endless varieties, that no-one actually knows how much there is. Estimates for the number of species currently found on planet Earth range from 5.3 million to 1 trillion.
In the 1980s, an entomologist named Terry Erwin sprayed insecticide into a tree canopy in Panama. Over 1,200 species of beetles fell out, of which 163 lived only on a single species of tree. Given that beetles make up 40% of all life on Earth (we think), by doing a few calculations he placed his estimate for total species worldwide at 30 millions. Others claimed this was too high, but lower counts tend to ignore microscopic species, and species that live inside other species.
The picture is even more remarkable when we consider the millions of species that have gone extinct over the 3.7 billion years that life has been in existence. For example, there have been at least 15 species in the genus Homo (ie, human), of which we Homo sapiens are the only one still extant.
And all this despite the fact that there have been five mass extinction events over the course of Earth’s history. The biggest, around 250 million years ago, killed off some 96% of marine species and 70% of land species and appears to have been due to a large volcanic eruption which lasted a number of years.
And yet, despite these setbacks, life bounces back. We see from the graph above that there is a clear trend toward an explosion in the diversity of life whenever nature is allowed to get on with populating the planet. Why?
The second law of thermodynamics states: In a spontaneous process, the entropy of the Universe increases. Oxford dictionaries define entropy as: “lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.”
It is this process which causes things to literally fall apart. Given enough time, livings creatures die and decay, cloth distegrates, cars rust, concrete collapses. That’s entropy. In biology, this process plays out every time one species splits into two, or three, or four, increasing biodiversity when it does. It was the spontaneous increase of entropy that split Hominini into Panina (chimps) and Australopithecines, and the Australopithecines into four new genera: Australopithecus, Kenyanthropus, Paranthropus and Homo, which in turn gave rise to the various human species, including us. From one came many.
Homo hablis, one of the earliest human species, lived 2.5 million to 1.6 million years ago. H. habilis ate more meat than their close relatives, giving rise to larger brain size.
“Well, and what of it?”, you might ask. We humans like order. We measure our success by how neatly we can order our environments and each others behaviours. “You’re out of order!” we yell when we’ve been wronged. “Order! Order!” cries the Speaker of the House as he brings our politicians in line. But nature does not, and for good reason.
As counter-intuitive as it may seem to us, in our neat 21st century environments in which we congratulate ourselves for being the most successful species on the planet, greater (bio)diversity leads to greater stability. This is true across populations and ecosystems for a couple of reasons (at least).
The first is very simple: the more diversity there is, the greater chance that someone will make it through a cataclysmic event.
Had every species on Earth been a large lizard when the asteroid hit 65 million years ago, there would be no more life on Earth now. But not every species was a large lizard. Some of them were plants of course, some were fish, some of them were small lizards which would go on to become birds, and some were small furry creatures which were trying out a whole new way of life as mammals. And so life went on in new and exciting ways.
Humans have also had their own brush with an extinction event. Around 75,000 years ago, a supervolcano named Toba, located in present day Sumatra, Indonesia, erupted. The resulting ash cloud pitched the world into a six year winter. The human population dropped from a few hundred thousand individuals to no more than 10,000 breeding pairs, according to estimates. The one in 100 who made it through were, by definition, the fittest of the species, both in terms of physical fitness (the very young and very old are unlikely to have made it), and environmental fitness.
But cataclysmic events on a global scale happen extremely rarely, only every few million years. Yet diversity is still important in every age in between, due to local fluctuations in environment.
One of the reasons that humans are so successful as a species is our vast diversity within the species, which allows individuals to become highly specified in terms of lifestyle. This means that, across our population, we can exploit almost every niche the planet provides. Think of it this way: a tribe of fishermen will eat well when the seas provide plenty, but in a bad year they will starve. A tribe of hunters will eat well when there is plenty of prey, but in a bad year they will starve. A tribe comprised of both fishermen and hunters can switch between the two as necessary: when fish populations are low they will eat more meat; when prey populations are low they will eat more fish. And they won’t starve.
Diversity is our strength
The Woke have made ‘diversity’ a dirty word for many, with their insistence on ‘creating diversity’ through quotas and discrimination. However, they misuse the word. In order to have true diversity, you need to maintain distinctions between groups. Mixing everything together doesn’t create diversity — diversity is the natural order of things when a system is left alone to fall into entropy. On the contrary, interfering in the system by mixing everything together, especially when there is an insistence on breaking down the distinctions between groups, creates uniformity.
True diversity in human culture doesn’t look like one global culture to which everyone belongs. True diversity has nothing to do with skin colour or sexuality. True diversity is found in an abundance of cultures and lifesyles. It looks like the hundreds of thousands of tribes that once existed before nation states became the norm.
I want to underscore here that I am NOT talking about race. Remember, the more diversity the better. Therefore I’m not advocating for splitting the world along racial lines and segregating everyone. I am advocating for re-discovering the local cultures that once existed in every corner of every one of our nation states.
Great Britain, for example, was not always Britain. Nor was it always England, Scotland and Wales. Before these countries’ borders were decided by kings, there were dozens, perhaps hundreds of tribes. When the Romans turned up, they encountered the Iceni, the Selgovae, the Cornovii, the Regni, the Caledones, and many, many more. That’s true diversity.
I am also not saying that there can never be any interaction between groups. On the contrary, for the species to thrive there has to be some interaction, partly because trade allows us access to far more resources than each tribe could gather on their own, and partly because genetic diversity is required by nature. Preserving cultural diversity doesn’t mean walling ourselves off from one another. It does mean not imposing our own preferred way on each other.
To summarize, the more options there are through diversity of lifestyle strategy, the more likely that at least one of them will be the right one for any given circumstance. This adaptability creates population stability over time.
But this means that 21st century humans, who prize uniformity, has a looming problem — one which could soon spell our total failure as a species...
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