Science for University Students. Part II. Translations. Сологуб Л.И. - 58 стр.

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Text 10
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Illegal entry, sting operations, deception, aggression, bloodsucking, and
territorial greed are what the articles in this issue of Science are about. They are
also about cost-effectiveness, altruism, fertility, resource allocation, and
adaptive behavior. The ecology world is one in which there is only one standard
of ethics: survival. Species that can put together the smartest programs are going
to survive, often at the expense of others. Ivory-tower critics may talk about
animal rights or plant rights, but the mosquito is not worried about infiltrating
across a border, nor does the malaria parasite have fits of conscience because it
may be a stowaway in the illegal action. Nor is the swatter of the mosquito
particularly distressed by intruding on the reproductive cycle of this interesting
species.
Understanding the behavior of species and the survival strategies that they
have developed is essential for understanding the survival of all species
including humans. For evolution has finally succeeded in producing a species,
Homo sapiens, whose physical features are not that impressive but whose brain
has made its proliferation incredibly more efficient than it is in other species. As
a result, the population of the globe has lost proportion, and the number of
human beings is threatening all other species. Estimates of global species
numbers range from 5 million to 50 million in the world today but their numbers
appear to be dwindling rapidly. Efforts to protect a few endangered species such
as the red-cockaded woodpecker or the northern spotted owl can only succeed at
great expense and with knowledge of their habitat needs. Specialized programs
do not solve the problem of the relentless expansion of man, with his consequent
destruction of tropical forests, his defiling of wilderness areas, and his pollution
of the oceans. Ecology, the study of the delicate balance between species in the
environment, shows that evolution has developed clever strategies, not all of
them following the Marquis of Queensberry rules, to use resources to maximum
effectiveness. Those strategies sometimes involve symbiosis, sometimes tacit
agreements on territory, and sometimes murderous aggression, but all are based
on the assumption that resources are limited so that the clever and the
parsimonious will gain relative to the inefficient and wasteful.
Our ability to speak and write has tilted that equation so that we humans
are reproducing profligately while other species die. Are we likely to stop in
deference to other species? Curiously the animal rightists and anti-evolutionists
think in parallel in regard to the exalted status of man. Animal rightists suggest
that we have no right to attack other species. Anti-evolutionists say that we are
so different that we cannot learn from the behavior of lower species. Both are
partly wrong and partly right. Evolution makes no case for gifts of rights to
other species, and we have learned much about human behavior from studies of
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