Selecting for Cuddliness (aka Cultural Evolution and the Future Parameters for Species Survival)

I feel like I've been inundated recently by all kinds of info on saving endangered species and how important it is to preserve habitat and dedicate funds to their protection. Just yesterday, I visited the Harvard Museum of Natural History, which had a special little section on the birds of North America (Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, Passenger Pigeon, etc) that have disappeared due to habitat destruction, hunting, and all kinds of other, uniquely human, sins. I was also particularly alarmed while watching the BBC Planet Earth episode on the poles and saw a cuddly little (and by "cuddly" and "little," i mean "really dangerous" and "fucking huge") polar bear swimming farther and farther between bits of melting ice. Loads and loads of guilt have ensued.

I began to notice something a bit striking about the skew of the publicity that different species get for being endangered. In the most recent issue of Scientific American 3.0, all about sustainability and environmental concerns, there is a graphic about endangered species. The graphic depicts lots of individual pictures of different species, with a certain number sort of faded out, representing the number of species that are in danger in the near future. After a brief inspection, I noticed that every one of these species had a backbone, and most had fur.

This may not seem like a big deal. lots of things have backbones, and lots have fur. Especially the ones that we consider very cute. As someone who spends lots of his time thinking about bugs though (which do NOT have backbones), I'm a bit miffed by this. For a little bit of taxonomic background, things with backbones are called Vertebrates, and things with fur (and mammary glands) are Mammals. Mammals are just one of many classes of Vertebrates. Vertebrates, in turn, belong to one Phylum (chordata). This phylum is one of 38 phyla in the kingdom Animals alone. Animalia is in turn one of four kingdoms (plants, fungi, and protists are the others) that make up one of three Domains of life. My only point with all this jargon is that, taxonomically speaking, what was represented in this visual on endangered species is hugely skewed toward a very narrow group of species.

And so, finally, as I was wallowing in my own bitterness of studying an underappreciated section of life, what I realized is that, if public recognition of the endangered-ness of a species is predictive of how much Endangered Species funding they get, and this funding actually results in their preservation and continued existence on the planet, then this represents a potential fundamental shift in what kinds of things are being selected for in animals.

Let me try to explain that a bit more coherently. I think that now, and probably increasingly, we are selecting for certain characteristics in animals. It seems to me that the attention and funding that goes to certain groups over others (I'm thinking in particular of mammals and other vertebrates) is greatly skewed, and this is based not on anything as practical as ecosystem functioning or potential usefulness for biomimicry, etc., etc. Rather, it seems to me that we are selecting species for how cuddly they are, or rather how much they appeal to our public sentiments and sensibilities, more than anything else. Their symbolic value may be more important than their ability to function in the natural world. I imagine a future for the biological world in which the defining traits of a species are not how well they survive and reproduce in the wild, but how well the concept of them survives and reproduce in our minds. In brief, perhaps in the future, the future genetic evolution of species will depends largely on the evolution of these organisms as memes in our own human minds.