Gelf Mag­a­zine doc­u­ments A Pri­mate Explo­sion:

Why are so many new pri­mate species being found? Such a sim­ple ques­tion has some intri­cate and inter­re­lat­ed answers. For starters, a renewed focus on con­ser­va­tion means that more sci­en­tists are spend­ing more time in more places where they are like­ly to encounter new ani­mals. It doesn’t hurt that defin­ing a new species means more fund­ing and recog­ni­tion for the area in which the ani­mals live and the orga­ni­za­tion that found them. Addi­tion­al­ly, a shift in how the sci­en­tif­ic estab­lish­ment defines species means that the clas­si­fi­ca­tion is broad­er; some believe it is eas­i­er for sci­en­tists to gain new species sta­tus for groups of ani­mals that pre­vi­ous­ly would­n’t have been eligible.

This is in response to the new mangabey found not long ago, as well as a host of oth­er species.

They point out some encour­ag­ing trends. Research focussed on areas of high rich­ness tends to find new species. Find­ing new species tends to bring more con­ser­va­tion efforts, which pro­tects all the species.

The arti­cle also indi­cates that some new species are described for con­ser­va­tion, rather than bio­log­i­cal pur­pos­es. I guess that’s prob­a­bly true, but I don’t know.

Species are tricky. I’ll step on John Wilkins’ toes by weigh­ing on species con­cepts, but he’s all the way over in Aus­tralia, so what can he do? Species con­cepts are a mess, and there’s a sim­ple rea­son. Species are a bit of a fic­tion. There’s some sort of thing that can rea­son­ably be called a species, but it’s all about the dif­fer­ences between two things, and there’s no mag­ic dis­tance, and it isn’t even clear what the axis is we’re sup­posed to be mea­sur­ing on. In large part, that’s what Dar­win was argu­ing in the Ori­gin. Species are vari­eties by a dif­fer­ent name.

Some say it’s about mat­ing incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty. That’s OK, but what about species which can’t mate in the wild, or don’t as a prac­ti­cal mat­ter, but which can have viable off­spring. And don’t get me start­ed on asex­u­al organisms.

So peo­ple have start­ed lik­ing the Evo­lu­tion­ary Species Con­cept, that a species is a group of organ­isms on a unique evo­lu­tion­ary tra­jec­to­ry. That’s fine, but is still pret­ty subjective.

Oh well.

Is this new mon­key a new species? Prob­a­bly, for the right definition.

What I real­ly want to point out is that good sur­veys of under­ex­plored areas are vital if we’re going to cat­a­log the diver­si­ty of life. Call them species, vari­eties, oper­a­tional tax­o­nom­ic units, what­ev­er. We need to find them before the for­est gets cut down.