Mario Cupello

I am an evolutionary biologist and coleopterist fascinated by the diversity of life. What are the other life forms with which we share this planet? What is the nature of this infinite variety and how did it come about? How are these organisms related to one another? How did the complex adaptations seen in any creature living in our gardens, farms, and cities, and especially the adaptations existing in our own bodies — the so deceitful illusion of design — evolve? The other illusion of design, the functioning of ecosystems, with a myriad of life forms appearing so finely adapted to one another and dependent on one another; how did this come about? And, from all this, what can we learn about our nature as humans? My life has been a journey through biology in search of answers to these and many other questions.

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But I would be lying if I said that my interest lies exclusively in these more sweeping questions. In fact, I think I live a "double life": on the one hand, I am constantly pursuing these broadly encompassing questions about the scale and nature of the diversity of life and the human condition. On the other, however, I also like to think of myself as a naturalist and, most importantly, as a specialist — a specialist in beetles, or, more specifically, in scarab beetles. My arrival at the scarabs was quite incidental — I only wanted to understand the history of life. As I learned quite early in my journey that it would not be possible to be a "specialist in everything", I concluded that Coleoptera, as one of the richest assemblies of animal species, seemed to be the best model for those seeking to understand the history of life. After all, the greater the number of species, I thought, the greater the number of histories to be told. And since Scarabaeoidea, with its amazing diversity of life stories and morphologies, is a microcosm of the diversity of Coleoptera, I thought it would be the perfect group to specialize in. And disappointed I have not been!

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It is really extraordinary how many mysteries still surround the scarabs. When did they arise? How was the generalized ancestral beetle morphology modified into the scarabaeoid forms? When and how did some scarabs become phytophagous while others moved to a coprophagous life? Why do some exhibit metallic and iridescent colors, whereas others are dull? How did sociality evolve in different scarab lineages? Why is the development of outgrowths used as armaments such a recurrent theme in the clade? And are all of those outgrowths really used solely as armaments? Or is it possible, as suggested by Darwin and Halffter, that some may play a different role in the life of scarabs? And, of course, one of the most fundamental questions about any taxonomic group: how many species of scarabs are there, after all? And how are they phylogenetically related?

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The latter two questions are the focus of most of my work. There is possibly nothing that I admire more than a taxonomic monograph. As an attempt to synthesize everything that has been possible to discover about a given group of organisms, these monographs lead to the emergence of patterns that would be forever hidden if the tiny pieces of scattered information had not been put together by the systematist. These taxonomic monographs, or encyclopedias of organisms, when written by passionate and knowledgeable workers, from Linnaeus and Charles Darwin to Edgar von Harold, Ernst Mayr, Edward O. Wilson, and Gonzalo Halffter, stand as the epitome of the Enlightenment dreams of universal knowledge. I try to follow this same spirit in my work.

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Over the years, as a result of my readings as well as from my practical work as a systematist, I have developed a special interest in the problems related to the nature and origin of species. What is a species, and how do they evolve through time and space, multiply, and some eventually disappear? How is it possible that, from a single origin on this planet, we have such diverse and complex communities of species, our various ecosystems? And why is this diversity arranged in the genophenotypic space into discrete clusters instead of a continuum of variation? What kinds of interactions exist between species that allow them to coexist and share the economy of nature but, at the same time, prevent their fusion? And how have we, humans, interpreted this variation across different cultures, times, and philosophical worldviews? What exactly do we mean when we say we want to conserve biodiversity? Taxa? Genetic diversity? Phenotypic diversity? As any biologist knows, these are among the most challenging questions of our discipline, and I believe they can only be satisfactorily answered through an integrative approach. No discipline by itself, whether systematics, phylogeography, population genetics, or philosophy, holds the key to all these problems. Because of that, I have been promoting the concept of Speciology, or the science of species, a multidisciplinary field to investigate all questions related to species as biological entities, integrating disciplines from systematics, phylogeography, and field ecology, to the history and philosophy of science, palaeoanthropology, ethnography, and conservation. This will, I hope, renew appreciation for the investigation of the nature of species. It will move us away from shallow debates about "species concepts" for purely practical purposes of identification, conservation, or macrophylogenetic investigation, and bring a sense of unity among species researchers, the realization that, despite different questions, methodology, and even terminology, we are all dealing with the same phenomena, biological species.