Professional Documents
Culture Documents
• There are many species of minnow, thus the snail darter was phylo-
genetically uninteresting.
• The snail darter was not phenotypically distinctive.
• The snail darter had no economic importance and, as it had only re-
cently been discovered, there were no important cultural traditions
associated with it.
• The snail darter was a species with a small population and limited
distribution. Its extinction was unlikely to have flow-on effects on
the biota at large.
As the historical excursion above will have made clear, the concept of
biodiversity was coined at the intersection of science, applied science,
and politics. Moreover, though most who talk about biodiversity think
that there is something important about it, there are very different ra-
tionales for its preservation. Thus, some have argued that biodiversity
ought to be conserved because it is a feature of the natural world that
people enjoy and find useful. It has what conservation ethicists call
“demand value.” It is a human end in itself. However, there are alter-
native, instrumental reasons for defending biodiversity. For example,
an influential line of thought connects biodiversity to ecosystem func-
tion (see 6.4), and ecosystem function is of great economic importance.
Such instrumental rationales for the preservation of biodiversity are