cyrus’s blog

Here's the unedited version of my notes from EO Wilson's talk at TED2007:

E.O. Wilson

"Wondered what mind-boggling meant." After two days here, he's boggled.

Come on a special mission on behalf of his constituents, 10^18 insects and other small creatures.

Please keep in mind that if we were to wipe out insects alone which we are trying hard to do, the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear within a few months.

As a little boy, fascinated by the diversity of life. Butterfly period, snake period, bird period, ..., ant period. By college became a devoted formicalogist.

Concern and an ambition in his wish. Choice is culmination of life-time commitment. As far back as he can remember, enchanted by natural beauty and almost tropical exuberance of plants and animals that grow in the gulf.

Pin-fish blinded him in one eye when he was 7. Hard of hearing. Lousy at bird watching, couldn't track frogs. "The little things" -- insects compose the foundation of our ecosystems, the little things who run the world.

Fronteir of biology so rich that it seems as if it were on another planet.

Last 30 years biologists have added 1/3 of the known frog and amphibian species to 5400. Two new kinds of whales along with 2 new antelops, dozens of monkeys and a new kind of antelope and gorilla.

Newly descrived marine bacteria - Prochlorocoxi - likely the most abundant organism on earth. Repsonsible for most of the photosynthesis on earth. So small that they cannot be seen with conventional optical microscopes.

Fungi - mushrooms, rust, molds, etc... 60,000 species known, but 1.5M speculated to exist.

Nematodes - 4 out 5 animals earth are nematodes. 16,000 species discovered, could be 100's of thousands or millions.

"Dark matter of biological world of bacteria" -- 6,000 species of bacteria known worldwide, but that number can be found in 1 gram of soil in the 10,000,000,000 bacteria in that simple. One ton contains approximately 4M species of bacteria. "What are they all doing?" - fact is we don't know.

We are living on a planet with a lot of activities done by faith and guess alone. Our lives depend on these creatures. There are over 500 species of bacteria known to live in your mouth and throat. Probably necessary for holding off pathogenic bacteria.

[Film - music by Billy Holiday]

Viruses, pro-phages, gene-weavers, are virtually unknown. A world unto themselves. What constitutes a viral species is still unresolved. The variety of genes on the planet in viruses is likely to exceed that in all of terestrial life combined.

Scientists are like explorers tossed into the pacific with a rowboat.

Genomics tools. Sequence a bacteria in under 4 hours. In the future we will be able to sequence bacteria genomes as we watch birds today.

As we move past mammals, birds, frogs, plants, etc... to countless millions of organisms in the invisible world, what we thought were bacteria were in fact two kingdowms, eubacteria, archea.

Might find aliens, stocks that arrived from outer space. We know that some bacterial species of earthly origin are capable of surviving in unimaginably difficult conditions.

May be a tempation to treat the biosphere holistically. And to treat all species together, But each species is a masterpiece of evolution that has persisted for millions of years and is exquisitely adapted to the ecosystem in which it lives.

We will destroy these ecosystems at the peril of our own existance and unfortunately we are destroying them with ingenuity and ceaseless energy.

1956 in Cuba, search for metallic green, metallic blue, and metallic gold ants.

The human juggernent is prevalently eroding nature's ancient biosphere.

HIPPO

Habitat Destruction - climate change by greenhouse gasses
Invasive Species - Fire ants, grasses, pathogenic bacteria viruses
Pollution
Population Expansion
Overharvesting - driving species into extinction by hunting and finishing

HIPPO will reduce half of earths species to extincition by the end of species. Climate change alone can eliminate 1/4 of these species over the next 50 years.

Will lose environmental stability, new pharmaceuticals and other products. Health, security and spirituality will suffer. Previous catastrophes took 5-10 million years to recover.

200,000 known species in USA, only partial in coverage. Most of these species are basically unknown. Only 15% have been studied will enough to know ???. 20% of these 15% are endangered.

Flying blind. Urgently need to change this.

Need to settle down before we wreck the planet.

Big science project - equivalent to the human genome project

Biological Moonshot

E. O. Wilson's wish:

I wish we will work together to help to create the key tool we need to inspire preservation of earth's biodiversity: The Encyclopaedia of Life.

Transform the science of biology in ways of obvious benefit to humanity. Inspire next generation of scientists to search for life, to understand it and to above all preserve it.

Other than seeing my life flash before my eyes as the old lady in the car next to me began to change lanes into me and as I inched ever closer to the tanker truck inches off my left flank on 80W/580E (don't get me started on the idiocy of our highways going E and W at the same time), it's been a good day so far. 101 is really a rather enjoyable freeway in the middle of the day with no traffic. The phenomenon is similar to the "poor-man's tour of Oakland", as my father called it, that I used to get taking the 15 from east oakland to downtown Berkeley every day in grades 4-6. Except that in this case one is picking up on the "gestalt" of the valley, rather than east, downtown, and north Oakland. Still, you pass, if not the major landmarks, at least signs pointing to many of the landmarks of the peninsula and you get nice views of two major airports plus Moffett field, and you get the feeling of the growth of the whole bay area as you drive in the carpool lane (single driver, off-carpool hours, of course) down in Morgan Hill. Who knew the carpool lanes went that far south? It's good to see though.

Anyway, I only almost died once and I eventually made it to TED. Which is an experience. I'm still suffering some sort of culture shock as I try to figure out "why am I here?" and "why is everyone else here?".

Jonathan Widom gave a good took on the nucleosome positioning code to which Chris Anderson's response was "what does this all mean?" While I get what Chris was trying to ask, personally, I was much more interested in the details, but perhaps I'm in the minority. But, come to think of it, I think more people than you might expect are interested in the details, not just the high-level platitudes. Then again one can only do so much in 20 minutes, especially to such a diverse audience as this one.

The pixel-perspective guys gave an _amazing_ demo of the "multi-touch" stuff. I've been somewhat skeptical of this in the past, thinking that it's just "teh shiny" and not necessarily generally useful. But, I've drunk the kool-aid. The demo was mind-blowing. The question I have is what is the API? How does one write applications for this? A collaborative genome annotation tool with this would be phenomenal.

More later. Right now it's off to the Grey Goose Party. Personally I would have preferred the local fare from, say, Santa Lucia Highlands, but, hey, you can't have everything.

Oh, one last thing. That new ls600h lexus looked pretty neat. 435 HP and low-to-mid-20's MPG. not a bad combo.

Vox looks pretty neat. Time to find some photos and what not to upload to try this thing out.