Biodiversity Conservation Requires the Cooperation Between Natural Science and Humanities

Abstract : Biodiversity conservation lacking of humanistic dimension is incomplete and inadequate action, with all the advantages and disadvantages of scientism. Scientism is not a science, but an over-optimistic belief, which is conceited and has an impulse to change the world. Designing oversimplified scientific models does yield clean and efficient results, but they may not reflect the original look of ecosystem. Ecology and biodiversity conservation involve multi-variables and long-term prediction of complex systems, and natural science alone is insufficient, so science and technology policy authorities need to invite humanities scholars to participate in studying and evaluating. In early 2022, ex-situ conservation suddenly became a hot phrase in Chinese scientific community, and some of the original data of species were re-labeled as this new term. However, biodiversity protection should be mainly based on in-situ conservation, with ex-situ conservation as supplementary approach. To protect 85% of the native species of China by ex-situ conservation seems to be lack of sufficient basis.