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Biodiversity Realism: Preserving the tree of life

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Abstract

Biodiversity is a key concept in the biological sciences. While it has its origin in conservation biology, it has become useful across multiple biological disciplines as a means to describe biological variation. It remains, however, unclear what particular biological units the concept refers to. There are currently multiple accounts of which biological features constitute biodiversity and how these are to be measured. In this paper, I draw from the species concept debate to argue for a set of desiderata for the concept of “biodiversity” that is both principled and coheres with the concept’s use. Given these desiderata, this concept should be understood as referring to difference quantified in terms of the phylogenetic structure of lineages, also known as the ‘tree of life’.

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Notes

  1. Character set usually refers to biological trait held by organisms. I am using it to refer to features of any biological kind.

  2. The features or units are relative to the biodiversity measures we use. For example, assume species richness is what counts as biodiversity. If we preserve a habitat with 12 species, we have 12 units contributing to biodiversity. If we preserve another habitat with the same 12 species we will have added no new units of biodiversity; there is no complementarity between the habitats. Only complementary or new species would contribute to biodiversity.

  3. Faith (2016, p. 70) introduces an important alternative to the units and difference approach to biodiversity defended in Maclaurin and Sterelny, variety in which a set of elements are counted up. In this paper, I am not committed to the framework of Maclaurin and Sterelny, indeed, I am not strongly committed to any one measurement procedure over another but I lean towards difference in terms of Sarkar’s (2016, p. 46) definition. My focus is on what features of the world we should measure not how to measure them. But I am open to future developments in the bioinformatics literature.

  4. My criteria converges with Hull’s (1997) criteria for ‘an ideal species concept’, which is generality, applicability, and theoretically motivated.

  5. Often just the branch splitting events are depicted.

  6. The ends of the tree will sometimes feature many populations which are only vaguely distinct. They are in a process of speciation but they could possibly recombine or subdivide again. For discussion of how lineages of populations, species, and phylogenies relate see: Velasco (2013).

  7. There are currently numerous variations on these different phylogenetic methods. They include a range of ways of providing relative weights to the branches or adding other variables, such as weighting population abundances.

  8. Note that I will use the term Phylogenetic Diversity (PD) to refer to all measures of phylogenetic distance, the target of the paper. The particular measure of phylogenetic diversity that Faith (1992) proposed, that many studies use, I will refer to as Faith’s PD.

  9. Phylogenies can be constructed with other data. Constructing trees from proteins is still common.

  10. Hox genes between such distant lineages are unaligned and cannot be used to make comparative phylogenies but can be used to identify homologies between distantly related lineages.

  11. http://www.edgeofexistence.org/index.php.

  12. Nehring and Puppe have proposed their own measure of phylogenetic diversity (2004) as a development of their project formalizing diversity simpliciter (2002).

  13. See Sarkar et al. (2006) for an explanation of multi-criteria analyses and systematic conservation planning. Sarkar et al (2016) is a case where the procedure is used to design and implement conservation areas in West Papua, Indonesia.

  14. For an extended argument that biodiversity should be taxonomic rather than ecological, see: Lean and Sterelny (2016).

  15. See the Biology and Philosophy Special Issue ‘Biology and Philosophy of the Tree of Life’ for an in-depth debate about these issues.

  16. There are now hundreds of papers using Faith’s PD to measure microbial diversity.

  17. Thanks to Rob Lanfear for this point.

  18. The description of the same gene across different bacterial lineages is subject to the problems of establishing a ‘gene’ identity. This is easier in microbes than macrobes but is by no means unproblematic. For discussion of ‘genes’ and identity see Griffiths and Stotz (2013).

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Lindell Bromham, Rachael Brown, Daniel Faith, Thiago Gonçalves-Souza, Elizabeth Irvine, Chad Lee-Stronach, James Maclaurin, Kim Sterelny, Keaghan Yaxley, and the papers reviewers (in this and other venues) for providing comments on ancestors of or versions of this paper. None of the above people necessarily agree with the ideas expressed here, and any errors are my own.

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  1. School of Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, 2601, Australia

    Christopher Hunter Lean

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Lean, C.H. Biodiversity Realism: Preserving the tree of life. Biol Philos 32, 1083–1103 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-017-9592-0

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