Google doesn’t just track everything there is, it’s able to track things that imminently won’t exist. A bunch of computational biologists working on ways to map endangered ecologies to find critical species thought “Hell, Google can do everything else” - and they were right.
Scientists from the Universities of Chicago and Michigan were faced with the incredibly complex problem of shrinking ecologies. It’s hard to know which species’ loss is survivable, and which will turn out to be the lynch-pin of the whole area. They turned to a system which already prioritizes incredibly complex and ever-shifting environments, Google’s PageRank algorithm, MacGyvering it to deal with organisms instead of online items.
Species which depend on each other are said to be “linked”, and anything which dies goes into a “detritus pool” which is used as raw organic matter by the plants in the program. Then, by iterating the PageRank over a number of cycles, the critical species rise to the top of the search rankings. It’s an excellent example of inter-discipline thinking, and why all scientists should make sure to read outside their field - as well as avoiding the brain-popping which can be caused by relentless focus, it provides inspiration for alternate solutions.
Of course the system has problems. For one, it can only rank systems that we already know about - meaning that anything incompletely studied, which many newly-discovered and already-endangered ecologies are, can’t give correct results. The second, and far more significant, is that it’s still only counting the cost of the ecological catastrophes inflicted on the environment - at best it’s another example of academics only able to analyze exactly how fast irreplaceable organisms are exterminated.
Those interested in ecological issues should follow Stephen Fry’s (aka Mr Twitter’s) adventures in Last Chance To See - retreading Douglas Adams footsteps (and finding that fully a quarter of them aren’t there anymore).
Luke McKinney
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