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[C]onservation biologists often use species' evolutionary history – their phylogeny – to identify groups of species to save."
This idea is based on the assumption that preserving phylogenetic diversity among species preserves more functional diversity than selecting species to preserve by chance. Functional diversity is important, Pearse says, because it drives ecosystem health and productivity.
"Yet measuring the effectiveness of functional diversity is difficult," he says. "So using phylogenetic diversity as a surrogate for functional diversity has made conservation biology much easier and more effective."
Building an ark to help the Earth weather ecosystem collapse has become a recurrent element of science fiction. How best would one go about it in practice?
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday July 24 2018, @02:18AM
Conservation prioritization, biology speech for some good ol' ethnic cleansing. Sorry you are not worthy of a spot on THE ark, time to die! That said we probably won't have to worry since they'll probably not be able to agree on anything. The worm-guy wants all the worms to live, the bird-person wants all the birds to live etc.
If one wants to be all sci-fi about it one would think the best solution would just be to invent a souped up version of the replicator, then we could just store the DNA sequence for anything and print on demand as was needed after the eventual flood.
Beyond that one would think Noah had left some blue prints around due to his prior work in the area. Lazy git ...