Pixelated Semantics

A schizotypical inventory

Got your Barcode of Life yet?

The "International Conference for the Barcoding of Life" plans to take "a snippet of DNA from all the known species on Earth and linking them to photographs, descriptions and scientific information". Reuters reports that

"less than a fifth of the Earth's estimated 10 million species of plants and animals have been named. Researchers working on the Barcode of Life Initiative hope that genetically identifying all of them in a standardized way on a global scale will speed up the discovery of new ones."

Not a word is said about conservation or reversal of species loss - this is about facilitating exploitation by assisting identification and discovery. Wonder how they will classify the human-animal hybrids that the Chinese are engineering?

Item posted by AutoEditor at 11:31 am ::