TAKING BIODIVERSITY TO SCHOOL

IANAS Conference and General Assembly

Ottawa, CanadaAugust 26-28, 2010

Jorge V. CrisciAcademia Nacional de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales

Argentina

Biodiversity is the variety and variability

of living things.

• Genes• Species• Ecosystems

NUMBER OF KNOWN SPECIES(major groups)

Insects1,000,000

Other animals210,000

Virus4,000

Bacteria 4,000

Fungi70,000

Algae40,000

Protozoa40,000

Higher plants300,000

TOTAL1,713,000

Vertebrate45,000

NUMBER OF SPECIES ON EARTH

Known1,713,000

Unknown13,400,000Extrapolations from empirical data(Stork, 1999)

- Why Biological Systematics ?

The specific objectives of this presentation areto answer the following questions:

- Why “Taking Biodiversity to School” ?

- Why Now ?

- Why IANAS ?

- Why “The Medium is the Message” ?

- Why the Need of a “Narrative” ?

Why “Taking Biodiversityto School” ?

Biodiversity is being lost around the world in an escalating epidemic of extinctions.

CAUSES OFBIODIVERSITY LOSS

• Loss or fragmentation of habitats.

• Accelerated exploitation of resources.

• Invasion of introduced species.

• Water, soil, and air pollution.

• Global climate change.

“Biodiversity provides humans with renewable resources such as food, fuels, fertile soils, clean water and air, medicines, as well as surroundings of inspirational value.”

National Science Education Standards (National Research Council, USA; draft version proposed for release in 2011).

“A far greater effort in education in biological diversity is needed to create world-wide public awareness of the issues at stake. Only an educated, global constituency for biodiversity can build up the pressure to ensure that we take the path to a sustainable future”.

Koïchiro MatsuuraFormer General Director UNESCO

Why Now ?

• 2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity (United Nations).

• 22 September 2010 high-level meeting at U.N. on biodiversity (65th session, General Assembly).

• The target adopted by the world’s Governments in 2002 to achieve by 2010 a significant reduction in the rate of loss of biodiversity, HAS NOT BEEN MEET.

• be severe for all,

• affect the poor first and most severely,

• compromise Millennium Development Goals (UN, 2015) – food security, eradication of poverty, and a healthier population.

This collective failure will:

Why IANAS ?

Megadiversity Countries concentrate a major portion (2/3) of the Earth’s species. Seven of the seventeen megadiverse countries of the world are located in the Americas: USA, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Brazil.

Why Biological Systematics ?

Biological Systematics is a scientific discipline that classifies, describes, names, and determine relationships among the Earth’s biodiversity.

Species Homo sapiensGenus HomoFamily HominidaeOrder PrimatesClass MammaliaDivision or Phylum ChordataKingdom Animalia

HIERARCHICAL SYSTEM

CATEGORIES TAXA

Homo sapiens is by nature a classifying animal. Our continued existence depends on our ability to recognize similarities and differences between objects and events in our physical universe and to communicate these similarities and differences linguistically.

EARLY SYSTEMATICS

It’s a mammoth.

Classification systems are not unique.

The challenge is to find good reasons to choose a particular solution.

• is more fruitful in suggesting scientific laws, and

• generates better explanatory hypotheses.

Scientifically, one classification scheme is better than another if it:

A condition to produce a classification with explanatory power is the existence of a generative system responsible for the observed attributes.

A scientific classification should reflect the generative system.

THE GENERATIVE SYSTEM OF

BIODIVERSITY IS BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION

1- Discover the history of life (= phylogeny), and

2- investigate the processes that account for this history.

THE GOALS OFEVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY

PHYLOGENY

Ovary

Flowers

Seeds

Supporting tissues with lignin

Conducting tissues

CAUSAL PROCESSES OF EVOLUTION

• Mutation• Recombination• Natural selection• Genetic drift

• Populations different species

THE UNITY AND DIVERSITY OF

SPECIES

- EVOLUTION EXPLAINSAND

- SYSTEMATICS REFLECTS

SPECIES

Genetic relationships between organisms that arise through reproduction and that should play a major role in the delimitation of the species / Processes of evolution.

Phylogeny

GENUS

FAMILY

ORDER

CLASS

DIVISION OR PHYLUM

KINGDOM

“THIS WILL TEACH YOU NOT TO DO SYSTEMATICS”

During the last 30 years systematics has lost some credibility among scientists.

A central misconception:

Systematics is purely descriptive and consists only of observations.

• Classification systems are hypotheses of order in nature.

• Scientific hypotheses go beyond the evidence (observations) for which they purport to account.

• They have greater scientific content (e.g., predictability) than the empirical propositions they cover.

Drosophila melanogaster Meigen

Meigen’s hypothesis about order in nature has predictive and explanatory power that were used by geneticists, when they studied a few individuals and assumed that the results were valid for all the members (past, present, and future) of the species Drosophila melanogaster.

“Without systematic biology, ecologists and conservationists do not know which species exist within ecosystems, and cannot discover which are thriving and which are under threat of extinction... The science of systematic biology, therefore, is a vital discipline that underpins the conservation of the earth's biodiversity”.

House of Lords – UK (2002)Select Committee on Science and Technology

3rd report

1993

Sample standards (ages 6 -12) The study of biodiversity should include

experiences with living organisms of diverse groups so that students can:

- Distinguish living from nonliving. - Develop simple classification schemes. - Relate organisms to other organisms. - See themselves as part of Earth's biodiversity. - Realize that biodiversity is a vital part of our everyday life.

2002

• Modernize the teaching of systematics in high school by using inquiry-oriented instructional methods;

• use systematics to teach student about the nature and methods of science;

• connect systematics with evolution; and

• illustrate the personal and social implications of biodiversity and systematics.

THE MAJOR GOALS OF “CLIMBING THE TREE OF LIFE”

National Science Education Standards (National Research Council, USA; draft version proposed for

release in 2011).

Emphasize inquiry-based instruction and focus on only four “core ideas” in the life sciences. One of the four is “biological evolution” and inherent in it, biodiversity and systematics.

Why “The Mediumis the Message” ?

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)Fellow RSC (1964)

We are especially in Marshall McLuhan’s debt for his restatement, in alliterative language, of John Dewey’s belief that “we learn what we do.” McLuhan means much the same thing by his famous aphorism, “The medium is the message”.

The best message would be inquiry-oriented

activities that convey the major concepts of biodiversity and

systematics.

2008

1.Know, use, and interpret scientific explanations of the natural world;

2.generate and evaluate scientific evidence and explanations;

3.understand the nature and development of scientific knowledge; and

4.participate productively in scientific practices and discourse.

Students who are proficient in science:

ACCORDING TO

2008

Why the Needof a “Narrative” ?

In considering how to conduct the schooling, we have two problems to solve:

1- An engineering problem.2- A metaphysical one.

The engineering problemis essentially technical. It is the problem of the means by which the young will become learned.

To become a different person because of something you have learned -to appropriate an insight, a concept, a vision, so that your world is altered- that is a different matter.

For that to happen, you need a reason (“narrative”). And this is the metaphysical problem.

For school to make sense, the young, their parents, and their teachers must have a narrative or even better several narratives. If they have none, school is pointless. Nietzsche's famous aphorism is relevant here: "He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how."

NARRATIVES THATMAY SERVE

Earth as our one and only home

Biological evolution

Jacob Bronowski’sThe Ascent of Man

• Humanity’s destiny is the discovery of knowledge.

• Science, Arts, and Humanities are essential part of our unending quest to gain a unified understanding of nature and our place in it.

“A small child is taken to the zoo for the first time. This child may be any one of us, to put it another way, we have been this child and have forgotten about it. In these grounds -these terrible grounds- the child sees living animals he has never before glimpsed; he sees jaguars, vultures, bison, and -what is still stranger- giraffes. He sees for the first time the bewildering variety of the animal kingdom, and this spectacle, which might alarm or frighten him, he enjoys. He enjoys it so much that going to the zoo is one of the pleasures of childhood, or is thought to be such.

How can we explain this everyday and yet mysterious event?”

“The child looks at the tigers without fear because he is aware that he is the tigers and the tigers are him or, more accurately, that both he and the tigers are but forms of a single essence”.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)