Ecology of enlightenment

The beautiful image above illustrates a New York Science Times article about how “new research suggests that exotic species, instead of causing extinctions, may actually aid diversity.” This is a very big idea, and one that gives us insight into the globalization of humanity and ideas that is washing across our planet.

When Europeans began arriving in New Zealand, they brought with them alien plants — crops, garden plants and stowaway weeds. Today, 22,000 non-native plants grow in New Zealand. Most of them can survive only with the loving care of gardeners and farmers. But 2,069 have become naturalized: they have spread out across the islands on their own. There are more naturalized invasive plant species in New Zealand than native species.

It sounds like the makings of an ecological disaster: an epidemic of invasive species that wipes out the delicate native species in its path. But in a paper published in August in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dov Sax, an ecologist at Brown University, and Steven D. Gaines, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, point out that the invasion has not led to a mass extinction of native plants. The number of documented extinctions of native New Zealand plant species is a grand total of three.

Exotic species receive lots of attention and create lots of worry. Some scientists consider biological invasions among the top two or three forces driving species into extinction. But Dr. Sax, Dr. Gaines and several other researchers argue that attitudes about exotic species are too simplistic. While some invasions are indeed devastating, they often do not set off extinctions. They can even spur the evolution of new diversity.

The big idea here is the mechanism that is illustrated: openness both stimulates established factors through competition and makes room for new participants that are able to win ground. In the Golden Swamp that is the open internet, it is this mechanism that will release the generations now young into a global ecology of enlightenment. Education is breaking down its protection of varying species of ideas that are learned by children in each country and each culture. Ideas that can hold their own from each of these groupings will participate in the enlightenment and those that fail will require the loving care of cognitive gardeners and farmers.

The frog and fish and fly in the image remind us that the big idea of diversity has been around for a very, very long time. Somehow rocks and rivers once welcomed one-celled life, and that life grew more diverse as colonies of cells became individuals — and later on the fish, and then the fly, and then the frog found room in the ecology of life. I think what lies ahead for human thinking is a grand new stage of strengthening of established truths by competition, along with some making room by all of us to be nourished by some exotic thoughts that will enlighten us.

We need to be careful not to be too simplistic about exotic ideas.