Understanding the patterns of rarity of vulnerable species: some background

Why is this important? The identification and protection of rare species remains central to the task of conservation.  However, conservationists now know that there are several quite distinctive ways in which species can be rare.  In addition not all forms of rarity are equally significant for regional conservation planning.  Translating the different meanings of rarity into appropriate policy directives at a local scale requires research into both the patterns of rarity and the mechanisms that distinguish rare species from common ones.

Rarity is an important correlate of extinction vulnerability (one of a number of such correlates, it should be noted) (Davies et al. 2000); that is, rare species are more likely to go extinct than common ones.  Rare species are therefore afforded special attention in conservation circles (Lawler et al. 2003).  The familiar policy terms endangered, threatened, vulnerable species, rely heavily on rarity for designating extinction risk.  It is, however, an ecological truism that rarity is common.  This important concept alludes to the fact that a relatively few species may be abundant in an assemblage, but the  majority of species are rare, often being represented by as few as a single specimen in ecological surveys (Preston 1948, Magurran and Henderson 2003).  For example oak and hickory species typically dominate in an Oak Woodland, whereas most other species in the will occur in relatively low numbers.  Since most species are not commonly encountered, it is clearly useful to distinguish species that are inherently rare (those species whose relative rarity is related to, for example, its life history strategy and may therefore have a stable, non threatened population) from those that are both rare and vulnerable to immanent extinction (Maina and Howe 2000).  For instance, a species that is has a small population but which has a low variability in their populations numbers, rarely fluctuating from year to year, may have a reduced risk of extinction (Pimm et al. 1988). 

The determination that a rare species has a conservation priority status should be based on objective criteria (Ledant 1991, Mace and Lande 1991).  Delineating the type of rarity being addressed in a given conservation strategy can be a crucial criterion.  Both research and action that promotes rare species conservation must carefully also consider the issue of the geographical scale on which rarity is assessed (Fagan et al. 2005).  A species with scarce populations in one area may be geographically widespread and may therefore not be regarded as having as high a priority as a species with small population in a very restricted geographical range.  With this is mind, it is important that conservation reserve selection and design procedures that employ rarity as a decision criterion are implemented with a sensitivity not only to local needs but also takes the regional context into consideration (with a view to maximizing regional diversity) (Rodrigues and Gaston 2002).  Such sensitivity to the multiple scales contributing to rarity is embedded in recent attempts to classifying different types of rarity. 

Introducing a gray area: Foucault’s indebtedness to Nietzsche’s genealogical method

This post being primarily a comment on Michael Foucault’s Nietzsche, Genealogy, History[i]

'I would like my books to be a kind of tool-box which others can rummage through to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own area... I would like the little volume that I want to write on disciplinary systems to be useful to an educator, a warden, a magistrate, a conscientious objector. I don't write for an audience, I write for users, not readers.'  Michel Foucault, (1974) 'Prisons et asiles dans le mécanisme du pouvoir' in Dits et Ecrits, vol. II. Paris: Gallimard, 1994, pp. 523-4.[ii]

What kind of tool-box? 

Foucault’s text Nietzsche, Genealogy, History is on the threshold.  Methodologically it supposedly inaugurated a new approach for Michel Foucault the one-time archeologist[iii]: before this lies Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961), The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medicinal Perception (1963), The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (1966), after this Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) and The History of Sexuality Vols 1-3 (1976-84)[iv].  I stand on the threshold also, with little other than this one methodological text to illuminate a path forward and backwards through the work of Foucault.   That is, though I have spent a reasonable amount of time with several of these volumes, I am a Foucauldian beginner.  But why not initiate an encounter with a writer by way of his methodology?[v]  If Foucault intended his work for users rather than readers, an evaluation of his methods allows us to determine the degree to which we might want to use his scholarly tools.  Indeed if this methodology engendered for Foucault a productive renewal of his work, it is worth enquiring about the resources that genealogy provides him that his archeology could not.  One might also enquire if the ontogeny of the methodology described in Nietzsche, Genealogy, History has its “origin” explicitly in Nietzsche.  At the risk of being too clever, we might however perhaps we might launch this query about Foucault’s methodological “origins” using the very tools made available to us by Foucault.  Ultimately what are Foucault’s debts to Nietzsche?  And what debts should we as latter-day genealogists have to Foucault?

Portuguese Teeth and Skeletal Pathologies – the Agricultural Revolution and the Metaphysics of Decline

Studies of contemporary hunter-gatherers as they transition from traditional to modern lifestyles reveal a marked reduction in their health and in the nutritional adequacy of their newly acquired diets.  In addition to studies on extant populations, in the last few decades there is an increasingly sophisticated understanding of how environmental stressors and limited resources translates into pathologies detectable in ancient bones.  This has led to an especially interesting range of investigations by archeologists on populations before and after the Agricultural Revolution starting over 10,000 years ago.  Studies on the recently settled and on old bones may answer the perplexing question of why after the seeming ecological stability of the ancient human lifestyles (lasting, after all, from 200,000 to a mere 10,000 years ago) did the transition from hunter-gatherer modes of existence to an agricultural lifestyle occur at all?

Trugernanner (1812–1876)

The diet of Australian Aborigines has been reasonably well studied.  The modern self-selected diet of Australian aborigines reflects that of the cattle stations where many lived after the colonization of Australia by White pastoralists.[i]  Accompanying these dietary changes were disimprovements in Aborigine’s health – increased prevalence of hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease in adults was noted, as were low child birth weights, and increased childhood morbidity.  

The traditional diet for aboriginal Ngatatjara people, for instance, in the Western Desert was primarily vegetarian supplemented with small game; hunting was largely unsuccessful despite the effort.  Station diets consisted of flour, meat, sugar (usually consumed in tea) and powdered milk.  There was very little fresh fruit and vegetables, milk, cheese, and butter, though individuals supplemented their diets with “bush tucker” and with purchases from neighboring towns.  Ironically, the food at the stations may have reflected the food priorities of hunter-gathers with the ready availability of meat.  However, in the absence of other food items and the increasingly sedentary nature of their lifestyles and the “emotional stresses associated with dispossession” resulted in declining health.[ii] 

Merleau-Ponty and a Critique of Science

That Merleau-Ponty, among the continental philosophers, was uniquely hospitable to science is a commonplace observation in commentary on his work.  The case for Merleau-Ponty’s porosity to scientific insight can be made by recourse to the footnotes and bibliographies that accompany his major works: completed books, published essays, as well as work set aside or left incomplete at the time of his early death.  Indeed one can argue that the earlier phenomenological work builds upon scientific insights more that the later ontological turn in his work[i].  For instance, “Phenomenology of Perception” (1945) is dense with reference to psychology, physiology, and neurological studies, whereas “The Visible and Invisible” (unpublished at the time of his death in 1961) does not refer to scientific literature (with the exception of some infrequent and glancing references to some major European scientists, for example, Eddington[ii]), building its arguments in dialogue with his own previous work, other philosophers, and with literature.  That being said, his lecture course on Nature shows that even relatively late in his too brief career, he was willing to maintain a connection with the major scientists of his time when the topic called for it.  That lecture course: a meditation of the significance of Nature, a problematic term in many disciplines, balances its account of the philosophical interest in nature in Bergson, Descartes, Kant etc. with a lively account of contemporary theories in biology (in particular, he makes good use of work of Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, ethologists who later won the Nobel prize in Medicine for their work in setting the foundations of modern behavioral biology).   Although the lecture notes on Nature complicates a claim that the mature Merleau-Ponty had, in his later career, tempered his regard for scientific resources, nevertheless in his final published essay Eye and Mind starts with a succinct and forceful critique of science. 

Science manipulates things and gives up living in them.  It makes it own limited models of things; operating upon these indices or variables to effect whatever transformations are permitted by their definition, it comes face to face with the real world only at rare intervals.  Science is and always has been that admirably active, ingenious, and bold way of thinking whose fundamental bias is to treat everything as though it were an object-in-general – as though it meant nothing to us and yet was predestined for our use.[iii]

Civilization and its contents: how the world’s earliest cities manifest Neolithic carnal excesses

V. Gordon Chile (1892 - 1957)

“Libraries”, Foucault said, “are the habitat of Man.”  I was in a university library when I read this.  It was the Arts library at UCD in Belfield, south of Dublin city center, and I sat there, circa 1985, cloistered from a damp Dublin evening, digesting the dinner of an impecunious scholar – chips and sausage and a tin of mackerel.  The city, the university, the library, the book in my hand, calories from domesticated foodstuff, and even the lifestyle of writer and reader are part of a cluster of innovations that are all relatively recent in the making.  It was all so very civilized.  In fact, city, university, reader and writer, are some of the principles ingredients of civilization. 

   

Robert Bierstedt, a sociologist, reflected on those items that might serve as indices of civilization; his list is edifying and frustrating.   “Trousers and Bibles”, he said, “-these surely are unmistakable indices of civilization!”  His list  then proceeds by including traditional and less traditional indicators, for instance: “language, literacy, law, soap, paper, the wheel, money, government, religion, science, agriculture, the city, commerce, print, the domestication of animals, the breeding of cattle, the use of milk, the digging stick, the use of the fork, plumbing, dental caries, and even the dry martini.”[i]

A contemporary model of social evolution: an ecological conception of change in the context of the political economy. Johnson and Earle (2000)

Human social arrangements run the gamut from those groups who live largely without the domestication of plants and animals, like the !Kung of the Kalihari Desert, to the global societies of today, heirs, for better or worse, to the consequences of the agricultural, urban and industrial revolutions.  In a previous post I outline an approach developed by Julian Steward to explaining factors driving social evolution and producing this variety of social arrangements.  Julian Steward’s approach to social evolution had the virtue, according to Johnson and Earle, of providing a bridge between social evolutionism and economic anthropology.[i]  The intention of Johnson and Earle's approach is to reconcile “the structural Marxist emphasis of power and the control of resources into a larger, more ecological conception of the political economy as a set of solutions to problems arising in the subsistence economy.”[ii]  Of course contradictions emerge for people between satisfying ecological needs and contribution to political economies.  From an evolutionary perspective social change occurs, say Johnson and Earle, if the benefits to individuals or families participating in new arrangements exceed the cost of participating (assuming, one must suppose, the absence of extreme forms of coercion).  As population density increases, cooperation and group action is inevitability required to solve problems associated with that increase.  Those groups that form “outliers” from the centre of power are those that are outside the “benefit structure” of the political economy.