Long before humans built computers, nature built a better one. Razan Al Mubarak sees biodiversity as the planet’s original information network.
In a commentary published on Mongabay, Al Mubarak, president of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, offers a framing that has stayed with me. She argues that biodiversity is not simply a collection of species but a vast, self-sustaining archive of information written in DNA—the planet’s most sophisticated data system, one that has been storing solutions to survival for millions of years. Every organism, she notes, encodes evolutionary knowledge refined through trial and error across deep time.
Seen through that lens, extinction is not just the disappearance of beauty or ecological function; it is the deletion of irreplaceable data from Earth’s biological memory. Every lost species erases knowledge that evolution spent eons compiling—a loss more profound than we yet grasp. To understand extinction as a form of data loss is to recognize that humanity’s security depends on maintaining the integrity of this planetary information network.
In nature’s vast ledger, each species records a chapter of life’s experiment. In her commentary, Al Mubarak cites examples from her native United Arab Emirates: the Arabian oryx, once extinct in the wild, carries genetic instructions for surviving extreme desert heat; the ghaf tree has mastered the art of locating water in parched soil; and coral polyps store architectural blueprints for building reefs that can withstand turbulence and acidification. Each of these organisms holds a line of code in the operating system of life—one we can neither replicate nor fully comprehend.
This concept of biodiversity as a living knowledge system becomes even clearer when one considers how often nature’s code has inspired human innovation. The history of science is full of such borrowings: flight inspired by birds, sonar by bats, adhesives by mussels. But few examples illustrate the stakes of this information loss as dramatically as the story of the Gila monster and the modern class of diabetes and weight-loss drugs known as GLP-1 agonists.
In the 1980s, a gastroenterologist named Jean-Pierre Raufman experimented with animal venoms at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Among the samples offered by a reptile enthusiast was venom from Heloderma suspectum, the Gila monster—a slow-moving, thick-tailed lizard native to the deserts of Arizona and northern Mexico. The venom produced a striking reaction in pancreatic cells. Years later, another scientist, endocrinologist John Eng, revisited the find and identified a compound called exendin-4. The molecule resembled a human hormone known as GLP-1, which regulates insulin and appetite, but with one crucial difference: the lizard’s version was extraordinarily stable, lasting hours in the bloodstream instead of minutes.
That quirk of reptilian biochemistry became the foundation for a multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical breakthrough. Today’s GLP-1 drugs, such as Ozempic and Wegovy, trace their lineage to a molecule evolved in a creature that spends most of its life hidden underground, feeding only a few times a year. The Gila monster’s slow metabolism—once a curiosity of desert survival—turned out to be key to treating one of humanity’s most pervasive health challenges.
This is biodiversity’s information network in action: data stored in the physiology of a venomous lizard becomes a lifeline for millions of people. It is also a reminder that when species vanish, so too may the cures, technologies, and insights they hold. The loss of an unstudied frog could mean the loss of an undiscovered antibiotic. The disappearance of a coral species might erase lessons in carbon sequestration or structural resilience. Nature’s R&D operates across genomes, habitats, and millennia; humanity’s is a recent and often clumsy attempt to interpret it.
Al Mubarak’s framing invites us to move beyond sentimentality toward strategy. Protecting biodiversity is not merely about saving charismatic species or scenic landscapes. It is about safeguarding the planet’s distributed intelligence—the code that sustains agriculture, medicine, and climate stability. Each extinction, she writes, represents a breach in this global data system, compromising not just ecosystems but the potential for future discovery.
Institutions and governments play a critical role in maintaining that system, yet preservation cannot rest on policy alone. Each person can act as a node in the network by observing wildlife, contributing to citizen-science databases, reducing consumption that drives habitat loss, or supporting organizations that defend key ecosystems. Every act of attention helps sustain the flow of information between species and environments—a connectivity as essential to our collective resilience as any fiber-optic cable.
The analogy may seem technological, yet it is fitting. In our age of artificial intelligence and big data, humanity has become obsessed with information—collecting, processing, and protecting it. But the most valuable dataset of all remains biological, not digital. DNA is nature’s original code, refined through 3.8 billion years of iteration. No server farm can match its efficiency; no algorithm can rival its capacity for adaptation.
As Al Mubarak observes, biodiversity offers the ultimate backup system—a decentralized repository of survival strategies that no human technology can duplicate. Preserving that system is not only an ethical duty but an existential one. The extinction crisis is, in essence, an information crisis. We are losing the libraries before we have read their books.
When the world gathers in Abu Dhabi for the IUCN World Conservation Congress, the task is not simply to protect wildlife. It is to ensure the continuity of the planet’s intelligence—a living, breathing archive of solutions written in the language of life itself.
