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Murray Gell-MannThe Quark and the Jaguar336/337 |
Cultural and biological evolution as additional stakes in conservation
The struggle for survival of organisms in tropical forests leads to chemical arms races and other processes that generate chemical substances with potent biological effects, many of them useful to human beings, especially in medicine. Such chemicals are being sought by two different means. One method, ethnobotany, exploits the knowledge of indigenous peoples, obtained by trial and error over hundreds or thousands of years, and thus makes use of cultural evolution as well as the biological evolution that produced the chemicals in the first place. The other method is direct chemical prospecting, in which specimens of plants and animals (insects, for example) are brought from the forest to the laboratory, where new chemicals are isolated using modern merthods of extraction. Here, the results of biological evolution are exploited without the helpful intervention of indigenous cultures. Both methods aim to find at least a few chemicals that will finally be utilized, say by drug manufacturers, often in developed countries. Even when such chemicals are used in modified or synthetic form, ways must be found for a significant fraction of the profits to be returned to the people of the forest or the surrounding areas. Only then can the process of exploration and utulization give those local people an additional stake in preserving the forest.
The same is true of the many schemes for maketing other nontimber forest products, such as nuts and succulent tropical fruits.’As usual, incentives create selection pressures on the schemata for human behavior.