I’m no psychologist. But I wonder, what if it’s a holdover from much earlier, less settled times in human history, when it might have made sense to gather and hang on to portable, edible items? Hmm.
This is completely unscientific, of course, but if you do a web search, you’ll find that websites with the word “collection” or “collections” in them generally have something to do with debts. Type in “collectibles,” on the other hand, and that’s a whole new world. But it still boils down to having a collection of something.
Some collections are whimsical, of value only to their owners. Others vary in value; some are beyond price.
I suppose it all depends on your point of view. I have a few collections of my own. And there is a class of collections that is of special concern to me — natural science and natural history collections. Of most concern are taxonomic collections that are being neglected because they are just not “sexy” any more. Taxonomy and systematics these days are being done at the molecular level — DNA, ribosomal RNA, mitochondrial DNA. You get the picture.
And really, who would want to sit at a microscope and study all the different cusp patterns of rodent molars when you can just slap a blood sample into a gene sequencer and print out a histogram with easily readable and colorful squiggles? Plus you get to bat around terms like “polymerase chain reaction,” or the more mysterious sounding “PCR.” You can talk about Southern blots, DNA clones in plasmid vectors, shotgun sequences, and other obscure and perhaps ominous-sounding things. And I’ve done those things.
I would rather pull out a drawer of natural history specimens — say study skins of pocket gophers — and by just looking at them, be able to guess “these probably live in dark soil; these live in light-colored sand; these look like stronger diggers, so maybe they live in heavy soil.” Things like that.
It’s true you can get more specific information about how organisms are related, how long ago they may have diverged on the tree of life, what types of disease mechanisms they have that may be similar to ours — and perhaps why — and how all this can answer hugely important, life-saving questions. And, yes, that’s all very sexy indeed.
But I’m not. And I think that you can still get more information about an animal and the world it lives in when you have the whole animal. In the case of some specimens in natural history collections, a study skin is a relic of something that no longer exists — field mice collected from a site that is now a shopping mall. And why might that be important? Because we are a species of record keepers, and natural history collections are, more than anything else, a record of where we’ve been.
