This post is my personal response to our professor’s questions – “what have I learned?” and “why it is important for an environmental scientist to know about evolution?”.
Briefly, I learned from our interview with Dr. Scholes and my readings of Dr. Barnosky’s findings the importance of establishing realistic parameters in evolutionary research. Whether these parameters are temporal, spatial or functional, too broad a range can disguise (“average out”) important results while too narrow a range can yield too small a sample to demonstrate any result at all. Dr. Barnosky tested ever larger ranges of time until one proper to his team’s research interests was found; they broadened the spatial range until it was greater than a single population being studied, yet smaller than an entire biome. Only then did relevant trends become apparent. When I consider the public discourse regarding our impact upon the environment and biodiversity, these methods highlighted instances of flawed reasoning, many of which I was guilty of prior to these experiences.
Additionally, I learned that human activities generally impact the biosphere through greater rates of extinction and the results of such extinction events. Speciation as a result of our impact upon the climate is very unlikely, perhaps impossible, due to the brief range of time we are likely to affect the environment. That very fact is startling as it reminded me of the average lifespan of mammalian species Dr. Barnosky mentioned and our place within it.
Finally, I think it is essential that an environmental scientist be well educated in the mechanisms, trends and effects of evolution, as the environment is in part comprised of all of the living forms within it. Knowledge of evolution is required to understand why the environment was as it was, why it is what it is today, why it is changing, and what it may be in the future. I think that any approach to environmental science in the absence of evolution is like trying to understand a machine comprised of a vast number of unpredictable parts, with no knowledge of what force causes the whole to operate as it does. In this way evolution is a force applied to a ‘medium number system’ (Weinberg 2001) thus, understanding evolutionary forces exempts an environmental scientist from having to know every single part and action amongst this vast number – the trends applied to an appropriately chosen sample are sufficient as the theory of evolution is one of the most successful scientific generalizations ever developed.
-nrw
Weinberg, GM. An Introduction to General Systems Thinking.
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