NATURAL 

 HISTORY 



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Primed in the USA 



Stinking Birds and 

 Burning Books 



Want to make new discoveries in cliemical ecology? 

 Talli with a tribal liunter 



by Jared Diamond 



Most scientists think of the golden age 

 of iield biology, when explorers could 

 travel to any part of the globe and count on 

 returning with amazing discoveries and 

 undescribed species, as a bygone era. The 

 dwindling number of biologists who still 

 journey to remote lands are suspected of 

 doing it for the adventure. Other scientists 

 would have us believe that biology's real 

 discoveries today are being made in the 

 laboratory, where molecular biologists are 

 supposedly closing in on the secrets of life. 

 Attention has also shifted to extraterres- 

 trial space, whence some astronomers 

 continue to await radio signals from intel- 

 hgent beings on other planets. 



Actually, the vast majority of this 

 planet's species are still undescribed and 

 unknown. In addition, remarkable new 

 knowledge has only recently been gained 

 about many previously described spe- 

 cies — such as the mouse that sheds its 

 skin, the frog that broods its young in its 

 stomach, the naked rat that Uves under- 

 ground in colonies, the African monkeys 

 that use different, gruntlike "words" to 

 warn one another of particular species of 

 predators, and the chimpanzees that use 

 stone tools and wage genocidal wars. 



To scientists, these are exciting discov- 

 eries. But they are not really discoveries, 

 because much of this was already known 

 to indigenous peoples. Technologically 

 "primitive" peoples, who still depend 

 heavily on hunting and gathering for their 

 subsistence, routinely distinguish and 

 name hundreds of species of local plants 

 and animals and can recite the species' in- 

 dividual life histories. The New Guineans 

 who guide me in the jungle, for example. 



often point out plants that they use as con- 

 traceptives, antimalarials, wound-healers, 

 and abortion-inducing agents. 



Much of this knowledge would be com- 

 mercially valuable in the outside world. 

 As a result, drug companies hire ethnobi- 

 ologists — biologists who study the folk 

 knowledge of natural phenomena — to col- 

 lect plants and animals for testing as 

 sources of new drugs. Tribespeople tell 

 ethnobiologists which species to collect 

 and what to test each species for. The sci- 

 entific study of the chemicals produced by 

 Uving plants and animals is called chemi- 

 cal ecology. A promising trend in conser- 

 vation biology is for drug and chemical 

 companies to buy "chemical prospecting 

 hcenses" in remnants of the world's belea- 

 guered tropical rain forests. 



The encyclopedic knowledge of the nat- 

 ural world possessed by New Guineans 

 (see "This-Fellow Frog, Name Belong- 

 him Dakwo," April 1989, and "The Eth- 

 nobiologist's Dilemma," June 1989) is on 

 my mind now, as I have just returned from 

 a month studying birds among the Keteng- 

 ban people of Indonesian New Guinea. 

 Showing the voluminous knowledge typi- 

 cal of New Guineans, my Ketengban 

 guides described the habits of 165 local 

 bird species. They did not, of course, use 

 English or Latin names but names in their 

 own language, such as toktokpani, biila- 

 biila, and amkeri-tololop. Much of what 

 my guides told me I knew to be scientifi- 

 cally correct; other things were new to me, 

 but they sounded plausible. Some of them 

 must have taken great acuity to observe. 



For example, one morning my one- 

 eyed guide, Robert Uropka, claimed that 



4 Natural History 2/94 



