This is an important and timely book for studies in the history of science. Aimed at a broad readership, it identifies what is certain to be a major enterprise of biology through the rest of the present century: the exploration of Earth—which, it turns out, is still a little-known planet.
Most readers, including a good many biologists themselves, still think that the task of finding and classifying every species of organism has been largely completed. In this very erroneous conception, a new kind of frog or butterfly might indeed seem newsworthy. But in fact, while it is true that perhaps 80 percent of the flowering plants and 95 percent of the species of birds are known, only a small fraction of the far greater diversity of insects and other invertebrate animals have been discovered. Fewer than 10 percent of fungi and many fewer than one percent of microorganisms are known.
Of the species known, less than a tenth of a percent have been studied in any depth—and even then across only part of the range of their entire biology. If in-depth examination of such “model species” constitutes the first dimension of present and future biology, the discovery and study of the full diversity of life can be said to be the second dimension. The third dimension is then the reconstruction of the evolutionary history of each species, called the Tree of Life initiative. Without the second dimension better developed, humanity is flying largely blind in its endeavors to stabilize and manage the living world. We are falling far short of even imagining, much less realizing, the benefits such knowledge can bring to our own species.
In Every Living Thing, Robert Dunn has made a significant contribution to the true picture of biodiversity by relating the stories of some of the key contributors in the centuries-long effort to explore the second dimension. To an extent that exceeds the biographies of laboratory-bound biologists, the lives of the biodiversity pioneers are physical as well as intellectual adventures. Through his friendship with some of the pioneers and his own experiences, Dunn conveys the spiritual commitment and excitement that biodiversity studies provide.
We are now on the cusp of two new paradigms destined to transform and hugely accelerate the exploration of the biosphere. Both are technology-driven. The first is genomics: The entire genetic code of a bacterium species can be read in only several hours, and at a rapidly dropping cost. This breakthrough has begun to light up the previous vast “dark matter” of the microbiological universe, and to bring microbial ecology to new prominence. It has also energized the Tree of Life through DNA-based phylogenetic reconstructions.
The second technological advance is the Encyclopedia of Life. Newly launched (officially in 2008), it will in time make available everything known about every species of organism, both previously catalogued and newly discovered into the future, through a single portal on command, any time, anywhere, to anyone, for free. Like an organism, it will be constantly growing in real time. The facility will be of enormous value to a large spread of human concern, from agriculture and biotechnology to medicine and public health. It is being accompanied by the Biodiversity Heritage Library, also now launched, which will eventually give free Web access to the complete original literature on each of the species. The number of pages to be scanned has been estimated to be as high as 500 million.
As Robert Dunn’s personality-based historical narratives show, the passion to know every living thing has been part of biology for more than 300 years. Now, what remains to be accomplished in this Great Linnaean Enterprise will be multiplied many times over, and most of the life of Earth illuminated during the present century.