Species richness promotes healthy ecosystems
| February 26, 2013 | Posted by David Tyler under Intelligent Design |
People who love the countryside and open places tend to value biodiversity and rich ecosystems. There is a perception that a high species diversity helps to stabilise ecosystems by buffering the effects of environmental change, and in addition create ecosystems with greater functionality. According to MacDougall et al. (2013), “Biodiversity can stabilize ecological systems by functional complementarity, with different species thriving under different conditions.” However, scientific underpinning has lagged behind tacit knowledge and we are faced with the growth of monocultures in agricultural husbandry and commercial land use. Nevertheless, the situation is changing, and the benefits of biodiversity are being increasingly recognised. Researchers face the problem of complex patterns of human interventions.
[snip]
The punchline:
If we start with evidence (that diversity is beneficial) and infer that mechanisms exist for promoting diversity, then we will approach the observational data quite differently from Darwin and the Darwinists. We will recognise mechanisms that deliver diversity (e.g. via recombination of DNA during sexual reproduction). We will find that the genome exhibits plasticity, so that many phenotypes can emerge from the same genotype. Scholars today are developing understanding of phenotypic plasticity – a phenomenon that owes nothing to Darwinism. For more on this topic, go here. For case studies, go here and here.
‘Diversity by design’ is a rational and reasonable starting point for the study of ecology. Those who set out with this perspective will find that they travel along a different path from the one taken by Darwin, and it leads to quite different conclusions. This is a Kuhnian paradigm shift. Dominant and recessive genes are the tip of the iceberg! Speciation that is rapid, rather than gradual, is an indication of diversity by design. When we find non-random mutations or mutation hot spots, these are pointers to designed mechanisms. Epigenetics has the potential for expanding our understanding of the ways for diversity to develop. The more diversity by design is probed, the more it presents itself as a viable and interesting research paradigm.
For the full text, go here.
10 Responses to Species richness promotes healthy ecosystems
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How do “people who love the countryside” measure biodiversity? Do they estimate the total number of species present before they decide their degree of love?
Do they know how many crypto-species are present in the microflora beneath their feet? Even an order-of-magnitude estimate would help.
What design criterion do you propose that we should use to decide whether a countryside is lovable?
Are you making this stuff up as you go along, or do you have some science behind your assertions?
Are you questioning Dr Taylor’s credentials, Timothy?
Oops
David Tyler
Dr. Tyler, you may appreciate this paper to go along with your phenotypic plasticity references:
How Predictable Is Evolution? – Feb. 19, 2013
“In all three populations it seems to be more or less the same core set of genes that are causing the two phenotypes that we see,” Herron said. “In a few cases, it’s even the exact same genetic change.”,,,
“There are about 4.5 million nucleotides in the E. coli genome,” he said. “Finding in four cases that the exact same change had happened independently in different populations was intriguing.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re.....172155.htm
Lovable shrubbery for rent on the Nullarbor Plain (20 million years of biodiversity in action):
http://resources2.news.com.au/.....n-area.jpg
Of related interest Dr. Tyler:
This following paper just came out recently
As to the interdependence of the ecosystem highlighted in the paper you referenced,
I think that the essential interdependence (though stunning in the paper,, a 50% improvement!) is perhaps best illustrated (and more problematic for Darwinists) at the foundational level of the ecosystem here:
These following sites have illustrations that shows some of the interdependent, ‘life-enabling’, biogeochemical complexity of different types of bacterial life on Earth.,,,
,,,Please note, that if even one type of bacteria group did not exist in this complex cycle of biogeochemical interdependence, that was illustrated on the third page of the preceding site, then all of the different bacteria would soon die out. This essential biogeochemical interdependence, of the most primitive different types of bacteria that we have evidence of on ancient earth, makes the origin of life ‘problem’ for neo-Darwinists that much worse. For now not only do neo-Darwinists have to explain how the ‘miracle of life’ happened once with the origin of photosynthetic bacteria, but they must now also explain how all these different types bacteria, that photosynthetic bacteria are dependent on, in this irreducibly complex biogeochemical web, miraculously arose just in time to supply the necessary nutrients, in their biogeochemical link in the chain, for photosynthetic bacteria to continue to survive. As well, though not clearly illustrated in the illustration on the preceding site, please note that a long term tectonic cycle, of the turnover the Earth’s crustal rocks, must also be fine-tuned to a certain degree with the bacteria and thus plays a important ‘foundational’ role in the overall ecology of the biogeochemical system that must be accounted for as well.
As a side issue to these complex interdependent biogeochemical relationships, of the ‘simplest’ bacteria on Earth, that provide the foundation for a ‘friendly’ environment on Earth that is hospitable to higher lifeforms above them to eventually appear on earth, it is interesting to note man’s almost comical failure to build a miniature, self-enclosed, ecology in which humans could live for any extended periods of time.
Of note: Professor Stein states in the following video at the 4:47 minute mark;
“We are dealing with plants that are ‘impossibly old’, 387 million years old!”
World’s Oldest Fossilized Forest Unearthed in NY – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBp3obZkX4o
Earliest fossil forests were complex – David Tyler – March 2012
Excerpt: The most significant element of this complexity is the “bifacial vascular cambium” that is found in so-called ‘modern’ trees today. The term refers to the way the central cambium divides to give off water conducting wood towards the inside and food conducting wood towards the outside (the inner layers of the bark). Although Aneurophylates are already known from other Devonian deposits, this is the time they have been shown to have secondary wood typical of both hardwood and softwood trees. Therefore two important features of ‘modern’ trees – bifacial cambium and secondary thickening – were present in the Devonian Period.
http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.....re_complex
timothya @ 1: “What design criterion do you propose that we should use to decide whether a countryside is lovable?”
This is not the point I am making. In my experience, and also I think in the experience of many others, people who have a serious appreciation (i.e. they “love the countryside”) for the world around us not only respond positively to a high species diversity, but also they think that high diversities are associated with more robust ecosystems.
I developed an argument that the science is now catching up with this tacit knowledge, and gave two the examples of two recent papers to support this. I do not think there is anything controversial about this approach.
Where I have sought to challenge conventional thinging is in discussing the concept of “diversity by design”. This is, in my view, the approach that should be taken by design-orientated scientists. I have suggested we revisit the arguments of Darwin in the “Origin” where he presents variation and diversity as an alternative to “fixity”. This seriously misrepresents scholars who were not pursuing an evolutionary perspective on life. Unfortunately, Darwin’s framing of the issues has subsequently adversely affected generations of biologists. It is time to move on and start interacting with each other, rather than firing pot-shots that do not achieve anything.
David Tyler posted this:
Please understand that the ecosystem in the picture I posted above extends for a thousand kilometres west to east and 500 kilometres north to south. Please stop a second and put yourself in the position of the aboriginal people who live(d) in that landscape.
Do you seriously believe their aesthetic appreciation of their surroundings was based on the biodiversity of their surroundings? Do you seriously believe that they loved saltbush because there were seven species of saltbush thereabouts?
There are good reasons not to anthropomorphise nature. Capability Brown made a living in your part of the world by constructing anthropomorphised landscapes. I think you are doing the same.
OT: “The impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God.”
Charles Darwin to Doedes, N. D. – Letter – 2 Apr 1873
http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-8837
“Nothing in evolution can account for the soul of man. The difference between man and the other animals is unbridgeable. Mathematics is alone sufficient to prove in man the possession of a faculty unexistent in other creatures. Then you have music and the artistic faculty. No, the soul was a separate creation.” –
Alfred Russell Wallace, New Thoughts on Evolution, Co-Discoverer of Natural Selection – 1910