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Biodiversity Surgery: Some Epistemological Challenges in Facing Extinction

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Abstract

Biological conservation has a long story, but what distinguishes Conservation Biology from previous conservation fields is its multidisciplinary scope and its character as a mission-oriented crisis discipline. These characteristics suggested the introduction of the metaphor of biological conservation as a sort of surgery. This paper is about the initial stages of such surgery. Firstly, some data about the so-called “Big Sixth”—the disease—will be presented together with some information about Conservation Biology—the surgeon. Then epistemic and epistemological difficulties in extinction assessment and conservation prioritization, and triage in particular, will be pointed out. It will be argued that, while data deficiency arising from empirical and practical constraints can in principle be overcome, a different order of difficulties stems from the competition among several species concepts. In this case, it will be suggested that the extent of complications is of such significance to require a thorough re-assessment of the very nature of the patients, i.e., outside the metaphor, of the concept of species.

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Notes

  1. See, among others, Eldredge 2001; Wilson 1988.

  2. Barnosky et al. 2011: 51.

  3. For a recent study confirming this hypothesis, see O’Leary et al. 2013.

  4. Even though biodiversity conservation cannot be reduced to species conservation only, species remain the primary target and the focus of conservation efforts.

  5. Notice, however, that the IUCN Red List is strongly biased towards terrestrial species, and towards animals rather than plants, even though “steps are underway of rectify these biases”, as it can be read in the IUCN Red List Overview (http://www.iucnredlist.org/about/red-list-overview).

  6. Barnosky et al. 2011.

  7. Mora et al. 2011.

  8. Barnosky et al. 2011; http://www.iucnredlist.org/.

  9. An additional source of discrepancy in counting species is the cognitive biases of researchers, such as count creep and lumper/splitter tendencies, as analyzed by Jody Hey (2001).

  10. Stutchbury 2013.

  11. “The criteria can be applied to any taxonomic unit at or below the species level” (IUCN Red List 2012: 4).

  12. Agapow et al. 2004.

  13. Zimmer 2008.

  14. Stutchbury 2013; Bottrill et al. 2008.

  15. Bottrill et al. 2008.

  16. Barnosky et al. 2011.

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Casetta, E., Marques da Silva, J. Biodiversity Surgery: Some Epistemological Challenges in Facing Extinction. Axiomathes 25, 239–251 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-014-9244-9

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