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From: colonel@sunybcs.UUCP (Col. G. L. Sicherman)
Newsgroups: net.sci
Subject: Re: Extinctions
Message-ID: <1056@sunybcs.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 2-Oct-86 13:42:01 EDT
Article-I.D.: sunybcs.1056
Posted: Thu Oct  2 13:42:01 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 4-Oct-86 05:52:21 EDT
References: <2357@milano.UUCP> <566@gargoyle.UUCP>
Organization: DALEK Reproducing Equipment, Inc.
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> No one knows or will ever know the exact number of species of all
> types of organisms that have become extinct since 1600.  One
> difficulty is that we don't know how many living species there are
> even within an order of magnitude.  About 1.6 million species have
> been catalogued and described, but this is probably well under half
> of the total.  

It's sometimes a matter of taste whether to classify two organisms as
different species or just different varieties of the same species.
With livestock or trees it's easy to decide; not always so with
bacteria or viruses.  In the course of evolution, species sometimes
merge or split; then how do we keep score?

There's only one species whose impending extinction worries me.  It's
the one that forms prayers to broken stone....


	"Although men are not laboratory animals, they often
	 behave as though they are."
				--Eric Berne (1972)
-- 
Col. G. L. Sicherman
UU: ...{rocksvax|decvax}!sunybcs!colonel
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