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Tantum series juncturaque pollet Tantum de medio sumptis accedit honoris
(So great is the power of linkage and order That even the mundane becomes important) Epigraph of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, 1751 (1)
Imagine an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth, available everywhere by single access on command... Each species is a small universe in itself, from its genetic code to its anatomy, behavior, life cycle, and environmental role, a self-perpetuating system created during an almost unimaginably complicated evolutionary history. Each species merits careers of scientific study and celebration by historians and poets.
E. O. Wilson, The Encyclopedia of Life 2007 (2)
Why I think that there must be someone on top of that small speck of dust... He’s alone in the universe! I’ll just have to save him Because after all, A person’s a person, no matter how small.
Dr. Seuss, Horton Hears a Who 1954 (3)
PAIDEA, AS IN ENCYCLOPEDIA
Our new century hasn’t exactly fulfilled the Enlightenment dreams of reason and order. Our government can’t build levees or insure the sick, even as it remains in thrall to bible-thumpers who attack evolution as "atheistic theology posing as science. (4)
" On the other hand, there are signs that reason and order remain alive and well in modern biology.
This spring—a decade and a half into the genomic era—two important genomes were decoded: that of a macaque monkey and of James Watson. The macaque genome reflects 25 million years of evolution since the macaque’s ancestors split from those of chimps and humans. Macaque DNA, sequenced at a cost of $20 million and published in Science, differs no more than 7 per cent from that of humans. The DNA of chimps, which split from our line 6 million years ago, differs by only 1–2 per cent from that of humans (5)
. In Houston, James Watson was presented with a map of his own, unique genome which had been worked out by an academic/industrial group at a cost of $1 million. The results remain unpublished. Experts agreed that the cost to each of us for having our own genome mapped could soon drop to $1,000 a pop (6)
.
It’s clear that we face a formidable task if we want to link this mass of genomic information to human life, death and disease. More formidable still would be to set this material in the context of the world we inhabit. We’d probably have to invent an instrument that could encompass all of this knowledge in one place. We’d probably have to call it an encyclopedia, as Denis Diderot did when he defined the publication that made the 18th century the Age of Reason:
ENCYCLOPEDIA, noun, feminine gender (Philosophy). This word signifies unity of knowledge; it is made up of the Greek prefix EN, in, and the nouns KYCLOS, circle, and PAIDEA, instruction, science, knowledge (7)
A CREATURE’S A CREATURE, NO MATTER HOW SMALL
An equally ambitious voyage to Paidea was announced this spring when six major scientific institutions launched The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) (8)
. The mission, discussed for years among biologists devoted to ecology and evolution (2)
, is to create a web-based compendium, with one page for every living species on the planet. Eventually, we will all appear in the Encyclopedia: animals, plants, fungi and microbes—each of us—on one website, at one click, and with open access to all. The Encyclopedia will not only assemble everything known about the 1.8 million species already named and catalogued, but also help in the hunt for the perhaps 100 million species still out there waiting for binomial recognition.
While there are six founding institutions (the Smithsonian, the Field Museum of Chicago, Harvard University, the Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Hole, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and the Missouri Botanical Garden), it’s clear that the guiding spirit behind the work is Harvard’s E. O. Wilson, who laid down the plan in 2003 (8)
. As work on the Encyclopedia progresses, Wilson expects that it will encounter the new and unexpected:
New classes of phenomena will come to light at an accelerating rate. Their importance cannot be imagined from our present meager knowledge of the biosphere and the species composing it. Who can guess what the mycoplasmas, collembolans, tardigrades, and other diverse and still largely unknown groups will teach us? (8)
The demonstration pages already available on the Encyclopedia’s website (www.eol.org) show us creatures great and small, known and lesser-known, simple and complex. We find polar bears (Ursus maritimus) and rice sprouts (Oryza sativa), poison mushrooms (Amanita phalloides) and "Yeti crabs" (Kiwa hirsuta). The crabs have clusters of miniscule bacteria (unidentified so far) clinging to their claws. So new are the crabs to our ken, that when plans for the Encyclopedia were being formulated in 2005, the Kiwa family of crustaceans was unknown. Who, indeed, as Wilson asks, can guess what we’ll learn from the bugs on the claws of the crab?
Each page of The Encyclopedia of Life will feature its own, carefully vetted Table of Contents that will link to a creature’s evolutionary history and taxonomic description, pictures, maps, videos, sounds, and sightings, as well as to its physiology, molecular biology, behavior, ecology, diseases, life span, etc. The first version of EOL will take about 10 years to complete and is expected to fill about 300 million pages, which, if lined up end-to-end, would be more than 83,000 kilometers long, able to stretch twice around the world at the equator. The MacArthur and Sloan foundations have given $12.5 million to pay for the first 2 1/2 years of the effort (2)
. Like Wikipedia, the project will have open access. In sections reserved for the general public, amateur birders, naturalists, school children, and others will be able to contribute their bits; but unlike Wikipedia, all material to appear in the main, or "expert" section will be refereed by scientists before publication (2)
.
The Scientific Advisory Board (with Wilson and Gary Borisy of the MBL as co-chairs) will supervise scientific sites around the world where the primary work will be done: scanning millions of pages, ordering data, setting appropriate links, and posting the material for publication on the web. Much of the information technology is already up and running, thanks in no small part to my colleagues at the MBLWHOI Library’s uBio project (Cathy Norton, David Remsen, David Patterson, and Patrick Leary), who worked out methods for reconciling the global Babel of conflicting taxonomies and now have 10 million names (not species) under their belts (9)
.
One species, one title page, may seem a fair allotment to the biologist; it remains to be seen whether critics like Senator Brownback will appreciate having humans (Homo sapiens, Linnaeus, 1758) granted encyclopedic equality with the oriental cockroach, also first tagged by Linnaeus (Blatta orientalis, Linnaeus, 1758). Senator Brownback insisted in the New York Times that "Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order. (4)
" And not Blatta orientalis or the Yeti crab?
VERITÉ AND THE EARTHWORM
The Encyclopedia of Life has a noble goal, however bland the prose of its mission statement:
To transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating all known data about every living species. And ultimately, to increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity (2)
The EOL mission statement suffers somewhat by comparison with Denis Diderot’s plan for his Encyclopedie:
In fact, the purpose of an encyclopedia is to gather knowledge from the four corners of the earth and to present it in an organized fashion to our contemporaries as well to those who will live after us; in order that the work of ages past will not become meaningless in the future, and that our successors, better educated thanks to this effort, will become happier and more ethical, and that we will not have died without having been of service to human kind (7)
Of course it all sounds better in French (...que nous ne mourions pas sans avoir bien mérité du genre humain.)—and of course Diderot didn’t have to submit his draft to a committee.
The Encyclopédie had its start in 1747, when Diderot and the Abbé Gua de Malves signed on with a commercial publisher for a new encyclopedia based on Chamber’s Encyclopedia of London. Diderot had cut his teeth on the non-profitable Dictionnaire de Médecine (1746). He now assembled his fellow philosophes including d’Alembert, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu as La Société de Gens de Lettres to prepare and distribute the more ambitious Encyclopédie to subscribers, among them the gentry of Enlightenment Europe (10)
. Eschewing Royal societies and academies—as they slighted him—Diderot insisted that the work be carried out by "a society of men of letters and artists in order to assemble every talent. I will have them dispersed, because there is no existing society [i.e., Royal societies] from which one can draw all the knowledge that is needed, and because, if you wanted the project to be forever in the making and never completed, you could do no better than to create such a society."
The first volume of the Encyclopédie appeared in 1751, and despite random interruptions by crown and censor, eventually reached 35 volumes. Diderot himself edited 28 of these between 1751 and 1766. Diderot’s viewed his Encyclopédie as a "machine de guerre" aimed at the stiff hierarchies of his day, clerical and secular alike. He hoped that "both the man of the people and the scientist will always have equally as much to desire and instruction to find in an encyclopedia. (7)
"
He would have been delighted to hear our own Encyclopedists proclaim: "The EOL is intended to be a bridge between science and society and between scientists and citizens, as well as a research environment for scientists (2)
."
A 1772 edition of the Encyclopédie sported a frontispiece that might well serve a similar function on the website of The Encyclopedia of Life. The engraving shows Truth (Verité) at the apex of the composition with Reason and Philosophy lifting her veil to reveal Enlightenment. Verité sheds her light equally on the various arts and crafts (on the left) and on the sciences including mathematics, optics and geometry (on the right). At the foot of Verité sits Theology, with her back to the light and her gaze fixed at the clouds. The entire plan of the Encyclopédie was so structured as to cast theology in a supporting role to the Verité of the useful Arts and Sciences (11)
. The space allotted to "Divine Science" was not larger than that devoted to "The Manufacture and Uses of Iron."
Robert Darnton has pointed out that the ultimate triumph of the philosophes came when scholarly disciplines displaced parochial dogma during the 19th century. "But the key engagement took place in the 1750s, when the Encyclopedists recognized that knowledge was power and, by mapping the world of knowledge, set out to conquer it (11)
." They did more, they sought diversity in nature. Diderot, author of a textbook of physiology and a devotee of natural science in general, went on to take a pre-Darwinian poke at creationism in his Reve d’Alembert:
...you assume that animals were originally what they are now. What foolishness. We don’t know any more about what they were than we do about what they’ll become. The imperceptible earthworm which moves around in the mud is perhaps developing into the condition of a large animal, and an enormous animal, which astonishes us with its size, is perhaps developing into the condition of the earth worm and is perhaps a unique and momentary production of this planet (12)
Diderot got it right: the dinosaur line went bust, but the imperceptible earthworm went on to stand tall. A creature’s a creature, no matter how small.
THE HAIRY GODDESS
Diderot’s Encyclopédie was based on the notion that empirical descriptions of the here and now are preferable to the imaginings of metaphysics:
I have believed that the wing of a butterfly, well described, would bring me closer to divinity than a volume of metaphysics (13)
Diderot would have been reassured to find that the Encyclopedia of Life, another product of modern scholarship, pays careful attention to the here and now:
The Yeti crab is distinct from other related crab families in overall carapace morphology, leg morphology vestigial eye and extraordinary setose nature of the claws. Examination of the setae (hairs) revealed several different types of bacteria which likely included sulphur-oxidizing strains.
The discovery of the Yeti crab is not only a story with a French (and Woods Hole) connection, but reassures all of us that we can learn something new if we describe it well, be it butterfly wing or crab hair.
The crab was a serendipidous finding in the course of a 2005 expedition designed to discover how creatures found in deep hydrothermal vents in one part of an ocean can colonize other vents in vastly distant parts. To this end, an international team of marine biologists probed the ocean floor, 7200 feet down, at a site 1000 miles south of Easter Island in the Pacific. They were at the end of a six-hour dive in a deep submersible vehicle called "Alvin," a craft best known for exploring the sunken Titanic (14)
, when they struck scientific gold. Michel Segonzac, from the Institut Fran
ais de Recherche pour l’Exploitation de la Mer (IFREMER) in Brest, noticed unusually large, half-foot long, albino creatures in areas where warm water from geothermal vents was seeping into the ocean floor. The pilot of the Alvin, Anthony Tarantino of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (where Alvin was developed) suctioned one of the blind, lobster-like creatures into the vehicle by means of a vacuum-like hose known as the "slurp gun (15)
."
It took less than a year of morphologic and molecular genetic analysis for Segonzac and his associates to ascertain that they had found not only a new species of an unknown genus, but—bigger still in the world of taxonomy—an entirely new family of crustaceans. They called the new family Kiwaidae (from Kiwa, the goddess of shellfish in Easter Island mythology), and the crab’s new Latin name became Kiwa hirsuta. But among marine biologists, the crab immediately became known as the "Yeti crab," after the hirsute snowman of Himalaya legend. It seemed better than calling the creature a Hairy Goddess. The data were rushed into print in the major French Journal of taxonomy, Zoosystema (16)
and soon fell into taxonomic order on uBio (17
, Table 1
).
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The biology and evolutionary history of the Yeti crab will be forever linked in The Encyclopedia of Life to other living creatures with which it shares our fragile planet, including Homo sapiens. Linkage and order, as in the Encyclopédie’s epigraph, make the Hairy Goddess one of those creatures, "created during an almost unimaginably complicated evolutionary history. Each species merits careers of scientific study and celebration by historians and poets."
Merci, Messrs Wilson et Diderot.
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FOOTNOTES
The opinions expressed in editorials, essays, letters to the editor, and other articles comprising the Up Front section are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of FASEB or its constituent societies. The FASEB Journal welcomes all points of view and many voices. We look forward to hearing these in the form of op-ed pieces and/or letters from its readers addressed to journals{at}faseb.org.
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