(FORTUNE Magazine) – Along about the third month of the latest endangered-species row -- the one pitting a subspecies of the red squirrel against University of Arizona astronomers -- your servant got interested in the theory of the Endangered Species Act. We continued inquiring into its point even after the red rodent was miraculously assigned a lower priority than the university's telescope. Basic question: Why is it a great idea to require protection of every species of plant and animal, no matter what the economic, social, and scientific costs? What is so special about today's species? Over the eons, something like 99% of all the animal species that have ever existed are now extinct, for + reasons having nothing to do with economic development. Why deem all the remainder protection-worthy? We now know that it is a mistake, and a time waster, to get interested in the theory of the Endangered Species Act of 1973. There is no theory. Seemingly produced by 535 zombies taking orders from the environmental movement, the act nowhere addresses the above questions. We could think of some possible answers that proponents of the act might have made. They might, for example, have made an ethical case: that we humans have no right to put our interests above those of other species. (To be sure, it would seem a bit weird to apply this reasoning to plants.) Alternatively, there might have been an ecological argument: that the survival of all lower animals was somehow complexly required for our own long-term well-being. But no, that wasn't in the act either; and in the congressional hearings preceding passage, we also couldn't find anybody staking out any such extreme ecological position. So why do we have this act? The closest you come to a stated rationale is in a congressional ''finding'' that all fish, wildlife, and plants, down to and including tenement rats and poison ivy, ''are of esthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value . . .'' There is no sign of any research behind this finding. The act itself proving ideologically barren, we next turned to the congressional debate preceding passage, hoping to extract the point of it all from the clash of ideas in Congress. Alas, there was no debate. Nowhere in the House or Senate could you find a single solon challenging the need for universal species protection. Wait. There was one challenge of sorts. Senator James Eastland of Mississippi arose to demand that certain insect pests -- the boll weevil was mentioned -- remain unprotected. Eastland got his way, but again without debate. His amendment passed in a voice vote, and the act itself sailed through the Senate unanimously. There are days when it seems that an edifice so totally lacking in support must crumble. To be sure, there are also days when you suspect that Congress will start worrying about protection for the boll weevil.