CONCEPT
The Informational Argument for Conservation
Wilson's late-career shift from aesthetic, utilitarian, and ethical arguments for conservation to the informational one — the argument that acquires its full force in the AI age.
Across his career, Wilson made multiple arguments for conservation: the aesthetic (biodiversity is beautiful), the utilitarian (biodiversity provides ecosystem services), the ethical (species have rights independent of human utility). Each had its audience and limitations. The aesthetic moved those already sympathetic to nature and failed to move those who were not. The utilitarian was vulnerable to economists' objections that artificial substitutes could replace natural services. The ethical was philosophically compelling but lacked the empirical grounding Wilson considered essential. The informational argument — that biodiversity constitutes an irreplaceable information substrate produced by evolutionary computation — acquired special weight in Wilson's final decades and achieves its full force in the AI era.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The argument proceeds as follows. First: biological diversity is information — specific configurations of genetic sequences, protein structures, metabolic pathways, and behavioral repertoires that encode evolutionary solutions to environmental challenges. Second: this information was produced by a computational process — evolution — of vastly