Engineers, butterflies, worldviews

Abstract

An adequate ethic for the preservation of species requires an unprecedented mixing of biological science and ethics. Duties to other humans concerning species are insufficient. Humans can also have duties to species as historically persisting forms of life. Engineers have a tendency to think of wild nature as undeveloped, raw, even waste. To the contrary, natural systems, characterized by speciation, are engineering projects worthy of admiring respect--in the sense that they represent inventive, ingenious, trial and error solutions to problems in survival.