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Distributions and Anecdotes

We observed in the last chapter that keeping score in the game of natural selection involved the use of statistical analysis of populations. Correspondingly, we have suggested that it’s mostly about mass; the greater the accumulated mass of a particular species, the better off it is faring in the game. Scoring the selection mechanism presented by social ecosystems is not nearly so objective. Indeed, the rules are more arbitrary and the scorekeeping is largely subjective. Within social ecosystems, there is often significant asymmetry, if not total indirection, in the cause and effect feedback loops that impact the evaluation. We can contrast the evaluation processes for physical versus social ecosystems through a metaphorical representation of the two processes: statistics and anecdotes.

Statistics comprise an objective evaluation mechanism. While we may cast statistics in a pejorative light (a quotation attributed to Mark Twain suggests “…there are lies, damn lies and statistics!”), they provide a measure of the effects of processes, and in the case of processes applied to large populations, they are really the only objective way to effect such a measure. Anecdotes, on the other hand, attempt to evaluate the effects of processes through metaphorical understanding. As we’ll hopefully understand in better detail through the next couple of chapters, this approach is well attuned to the cognitive and emotional facilities of the human mind. Consider some (dare we say it) anecdotal assessments.

Up to the early 1800’s, the passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) was one of the more prevalent species of bird in the United States. The size of the native flocks was estimated at somewhere between 5 and 15 billion birds. Yet, by just after the turn of the century, the passenger pigeon species was extinct. In a somewhat perverse twist, we actually have an attribution of the last member of the species; its name was “…Martha and it died alone at the Cincinnati Zoo at about 1:00 pm on September 1, 1914,” as noted on the Chipper Woods Bird Observatory Web page. It would appear that the species fell victim to the appetites for food of the emerging cities along the eastern reaches of the United States in the last half of the XIX^th century. While some stories relate that the birds were hunted to extinction, in fact they were apparently harvested to extinction. Hunting might evoke an image of a hunter and a gun, but passenger pigeons were harvested with gigantic strings of nets to catch the birds in flight and through picking the chicks up off the ground before they had achieved flight. The birds were packed in barrels by the millions and shipped off to feed the populations in the growing industrial centers. The decline and demise of the passenger pigeon is a story told rather plainly and simply through statistics.

Birds in the wild are elements of an ecosystem. The sustenance for them to survive within the ecosystem is a function of their numbers. Their propagation as a species requires a density of members that allow them to procreate; a density that obviously has a threshold below which the continuation of the species becomes problematic. In the case of the passenger pigeons, by depleting their nesting areas, depriving them of their natural foods and diminishing their numbers in an incredible fashion (millions of birds per day were harvested) it finally became statistically unlikely that they could continue; and, in fact they didn’t.

We might compare this to the whooping crane (Grus americana). From flocks of perhaps 1500 birds in the mid-1800’s, the species had declined to only 20 birds by the early 1900’s. Statistically, the whooping crane was destined to go the way of the passenger pigeon, but in this case the story took a different twist. Actions by humans to protect them, to modify their ecosystem if you will, by denying their hunting by humans and by preserving their natural habitat has brought them back from the edge. The story isn’t over by any means; an out of season hurricane

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