CREATION OF BOOK OF LIFE OF
world's 1.75 million known species of
plants, animals, bacteria, viruses etc
In the course of study of SCIENCES OF CREATION AND
LIFE contained in the sNskRUt
language text called veD,
one would quite often the statement:
NO ONE CAN KNOW CREATOR bRH`m's
INFINITE POWERS
OR
INFINITE CREATIONS CREATED WITH
THESE INFINITE POWERS.....
Creator bRH`m wished to become
many and thus stated the creation...each creation is made of
aat`maa (soul) which is a
transformation of Creator bRH`m
chaeetn`y (conscious power)...this
aat`maa acquires infinite number of
physical bodies made from Creator bRH`m
pRkRUti in its travels called
sNsaar in this universe ...each
physical body is made by aat`maa
itself to perform kARm (actions)
desired by the aat'maa in that
sNsaar travel... each
sNsaar travel is a birth and death cycle
of the created body and the kARm to be performed and is time-limited by what
humans call life span....(preceding knowledge shared by
SRii chmpklaal Daajibhaai miisTRii of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada)
veD is pure
TRUTH....and based on this fact...see what you think about the huge
amount efforts that is going to be required to create a list of all biological
creations on this planet earth in a BOOK OF LIFE...read
more about this from Canadian
Globe & Mail
by clicking the red hilite or by read the article on this web site by clicking
on the next line.....
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Scientists strive to create
the book of life
By STEPHEN STRAUSS
Canadian
Globe & Mail: Saturday, February 28, 2004 -
Page F8
Scientists around the world have begun an enormous enumeration effort last
attempted by Noah, the Bible's biological census-taker.
If all goes according to plan, by 2011 all the world's 1.75 million known
species of plants, animals, bacteria, viruses etc. will be listed on easily
available websites. While the project, somewhat grandiloquently known as the
Catalogue of Life, will initially simply record the scientific names of Earth's
known organisms, those involved see the project as part of a larger effort to
create the Internet's official index for every living thing.
"Eventually we will have the species' distribution, images of it, genetic
information, other names it is called by, common names used in different
languages, life cycle information, and more," says Pamela Harling, a spokeswoman
for the England-based Species 2000, which is one of the participating agencies
in the organization of the Catalogue of Life.
But the first problem the catalogue is trying to address is the fractured state
of species listings as they exist today. "Information is held partially in
museum collections or is printed in regional flora and fauna catalogues. It's
somewhere, but it's nowhere in a format anyone can reach easily," Ms. Harling
says.
This disorganization is due to the reality that the efforts to record all the
world's living matter have been intrinsically local and thus subject to local
naming and cataloguing idiosyncrasies. While no one is sure of an exact number,
it is estimated that upward of 50 per cent of today's listings containing the
most basic species information -- what a thing is called -- is in a printed
format not available to most people.
One result is that even the richest and best-organized countries in the world
don't know basic things about species found in their territories. "It's kind of
amazing, we don't even have a simple list of all species found in North America
or, in our national case, of all the species in Canada," says Guy Baillargeon,
the Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada scientist who is in charge of co-ordinating
species-name gathering in this country.
In the past, this organizational eccentricity might simply have been chalked up
as another feature of the quirky world of taxonomists, the scientists who name
and categorize living creatures.
However, the growth of environmental consciousness and the awareness of the
careless way in which species are being driven extinct have raised interest in
knowing what we have before it disappears. It has been estimated that 3,000 to
30,000 species go extinct annually and that in the 20th century alone 250,000
were driven out of existence.
"But it is difficult to make an assessment of how common or rare something is if
we don't know where it is distributed, and you can't know that if you don't know
what it is called in different places," Ms. Harling says.
Equally important may be the movement of species across national lines. "If you
have what are thought to be invasive species which come across the border, you
need to know whether it is native or not. That requires having a standard to
compare it to," says Mike Ruggiero, a scientist with the Smithsonian Institution
in Washington, which is another of the partners in the Catalogue of Life effort.
While the advantages of having a single book of life in which all the things are
listed is obvious, completing the compendium is hard. One problem is that while
taxonomy is necessary, it is almost the reverse of sexy science. "It is a lot
easier to get funding for some big genomic project than to get funding to
basically make a list of names -- no matter how much it is needed," Mr.
Baillargeon says.
And then there is the tedium. You have to sort through alternative names and
misspelled names to pin down the agreed-upon appellation for an organism. This
is a kind of scientific grunt work that Agriculture Canada has allowed to be
done, at least in part, by skilled amateurs who have volunteered their services,
Mr. Baillargeon says.
Indeed, there is a non-professional tinge to the Catalogue of Life enterprise
already, with some of the individual species databases -- notably that for the
scarab beetle -- already being run by knowledgeable amateurs.
If successfully completed by 2011, the Catalogue of Life will mark a beginning
as much as an end to the modern attempt to catalogue life on the planet. What
Mr. Ruggiero playfully calls the "telephone book of life" lists only known
species. Various estimates have put the total number of species existing at
three million to 10 million.
The irony that most of the species on Earth will not be listed in a Catalogue of
Life is not lost on those involved in the project. "We are gearing up to go to
Mars, but we still don't know how many species there are on Earth," Mr.
Baillargeon remarks.
And finally, those involved in the project humorously point out that when
completed, the project would allow a modern-day Noah to "scientifically"
construct an ark that actually did contain all the planet's life forms. "The
database will tell you how many species there are and which taxon they fall into
and you build your ark according," Mr. Ruggiero says.
Moreover, if he follows this database, a modern Noah will also be able to
circumvent the command to take two of each creatures with him, as most of the
single-celled organisms and many plants can generate asexually.
Stephen Strauss writes on science for The Globe and Mail.
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