It seems that every little living thing on earth has an interesting story around it. One that, in the long run, might increase our quality of life substantially. Maybe one day we will have crops that infest with viruses their predators?
It pains me to imagine all the stories that we have already lost. What impressive feats happened inside the Dodo's digestive system? Or its visual sensors? Or its virus spreading abilities? But then again, there are already way more stories that we could ever read, so who knows?
//Maybe one day we will have crops that infest with viruses their predators?// Not viruses, but crops already do that according to Loren Cordain see: http://thepaleodiet.com/grains-and-toxins/
and in the human ecosystem we also have organic (or pseudo-organic) entities that exploit and parasitize the human population, not using biological viruses, but propaganda viruses.
The voter bases of the liberal and conservative political tribes of the USA are infected with propaganda memes created by large corporations/the media in order to further the financial interests of the large corporations. But if you say that, a lot of people will call you a conspiracy theorists.
But it is no more a conspiracy than the wasps using biological viruses to exploit caterpillars. Just nature in action. And man and his society are also part of nature.
It's more like it's obvious, we all know it, and we all are pretty damned tired of the content-free repetition because it doesn't advance any conversation at all.
There are different types of value you can derive from these stories. There is the practical: crops that defend themselves from predators. Then there is entertainment value.
Arguing that practical value to be found in species past and present is akin to stating that all information can be found by in the digits of pi. Sure enough there are valuable things to find, but only amongst uninteresting things. Unless there is a mechanism to roughly draw out the interesting, such as evolution.
On the other hand, entertainment doesn't have a need to be fixated on anything particular. Details on the Dodo are lost, so you turn to the wasps. If the wasps are gone you turn to the snakes.
As for other types of value, I may miss something. Or our beliefs may fundamentally differ such that we cannot argue in terms of each others.
Don't endangered species contribute some portion of new pharmaceuticals each year? Didn't we just finish unraveling the complex dynamics of a bee's flight, which our previous models couldn't explain?
My impression was always that the study of ecology and such is a big driver for technology, and by extension the economy and quality of life.
My point stands. A non-endangered species is equally likely to yield useful insight as an endangered one.
Though I realise that I have made a weak argument and that I do have a, perhaps unreasonable, bias towards not expending effort to preserve endangered species. In my mind preservation of endangered species is hoarding on a larger scale: someday this species may be useful to us, so let us keep it around.
One fun implication of this is that most of our phylogenies derived from genetics assume little to no lateral gene transfer. In this case we have been able to trace a subset of genes back to a virus that mediates the transfer. However this suggests that LGT may be more common than our models suggest.
It pains me to imagine all the stories that we have already lost. What impressive feats happened inside the Dodo's digestive system? Or its visual sensors? Or its virus spreading abilities? But then again, there are already way more stories that we could ever read, so who knows?