Sitting down to finish up my environmental science homework today, I realized that something was bothering me about the way the book was written. I couldn’t quite place it until I came to a discussion in Chapter 11 on “The Value of Wild Species.”
As we study the problem of loss of species, we find that some claim that no species on Earth except Homo sapiens has any intrinsic value. However, if no other species are held to have intrinsic value, then it is difficult to justify preserving many that are apparently insignificant or very local in distribution.
And the textbook proceeds happily on its way, having satisfactorily demonstrated that species other than Homo sapiens must indeed have intrinsic value.
What’s wrong with this picture? This seems like the kind of reasoning only the authors of Of Pandas and People would consider putting in a serious scientific textbook. Indeed, Environmental Science: Toward a Sustainable Future (8th edition) shares a deeper similarity with the folks that came up with intelligent design. Both carry an underlying, unproven assumption on which all following arguments are based. Now, there’s nothing wrong with unproven assumptions like that - ordinary people call them axioms (things like “An object in motion tends to remain in motion”). In the case of ID, the assumption is that the there hasn’t been enough time for evolution to happen. For APES, it’s this:
It is worthwhile returning the global ecology to a pre-neolithic state
With this in mind, the intrinsic value problem makes sense, as does the rest of the book. But it’s not an axiom - the assumption is never stated (ID also has a problem because their assumption is so obviously untrue). It’s painful - our textbook is so close to being legitimate science, but they miss that one little detail that brings everything else tumbling down.
Josh T.
on Friday 28 September, 2007 at 7:38:47 am
Science…hahaha. Like, phrenology? Feel free to join/ridicule the American Phrenelogical society. I’d link you their page, but they seem to have lost any sort of intrinsic value…assuming of course that they had any to begin with.
Nice site.