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Taxonomy Red in Tooth and Claw 5

of jobs should not be put at risk for the protection of an undistinguished


species. They argued that:

• 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.

Americans care about endangered species. It was a strong and persistent


public outcry about the fate of the whooping crane that caused the first
piece of endangered species legislation to be passed in 1966. But the
snail darter saga tells us that most Americans (and we are willing to bet,
most people everywhere else) don’t care about all endangered species
equally. And surely this discrimination is rational. From the point of
view of conservation biology, the argument that seems to have carried
the day was the claim that the snail darter was just not sufficiently dis-
tinctive, or as we might say now, that the loss of the snail darter did not
constitute the loss of significant biological diversity. So even if we take
the aim of conservation biology to be that of conserving species rather
than biodiversity conceived more broadly, we are still faced with the
problem of ranking. Which species should be conserved and at what
cost?

1.2 biodiversity and biodiversities

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

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