Does it matter if species become extinct?

grizzleb

Well-known member
Just think people put too much of a premium on 'experience', whatever the fuck that means. Machismo at its worst. Go and rape people, Gill, then you'll know what it feels like to be a rapist. That'll be enlightening.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
I stared square into the eyes of a leopard in Singapore. About three feet from my face. Singapore Zoo, night safari. He walked up, stared me right in the eyes & just stood there. The concentrated ferocity coming off him was electric. He was beyond charisma. Just unbelievable. & huge - 300lbs probably. Twice the size of the African leopards you see on the telly. Never forgotten him. African game wardens say that a leopard attacking you is like someone throwing a chainsaw in your face. You just can't believe how fast, how strong, how insane.

Superpredators are so cool. They have such amazing adaptations. There's this crocodile in Australia that's a couple of million years old and it has a special sensory system under/in its skin, so it can feel the slightest disturbance in the water from any angle and at great distances, almost like radar. It uses this information to pounce directly on its prey.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Um, species go extinct all the time as part of the "natural way of things" and always have - you do know that, right?

The mere fact of extinctions is not what's worrying; it's the pace of extinctions, which is very much higher than "usual", by geological standards. And I think it's a lot more worthwhile, both from a philosophical POV and in terms simply of getting people (meaning governments) to try and do something about it, to emphasize the effects it has on us when species disappear, rather than making appeals to other species' innate "right" to exist. What happened to the stegosaurus's "right to exist"?
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
"If all the insects on earth disappeared, within 50 years all life on earth would disappear. If all humans disappeared, within 50 years all species would flourish as never before."

yes, well, considering that there are over a million different species of insects that's not much of a claim. w/all respect to Jonas Salk, it's a pretty silly quote.

please, enough w/the guilt-ridden moralizing & the sophomoric misanthropy. I say that to you as a well-documented misanthrope who was a (fairly moralistic) vegan for for more than a decade. humans are a plague, humans are a virus, whatever whatever, it's a lot of cheap talk that neatly skirts the real issue of getting humans to stop having such a deleteriously large effect on the environment & its constituent ecosystems.

also, please stop abusing the term "natural" - which in the sense you're using it is, ironically, anthropomorphic.
 

Dr Awesome

Techsteppin'
"If all the insects on earth disappeared, within 50 years all life on earth would disappear. If all humans disappeared, within 50 years all species would flourish as never before."

I don't think the various animals that inhabit the undersea thermal vents would care if insects died off. Likewise they probably wouldn't notice a (the?) nuclear apocalypse.

There have been catastrophic events in the earth's history which have wiped out vast swathes of the biomass and biodiversity.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I know that. That's natural extinction, not forced extinction.

"Forced" by what/whom, exactly?

Unless you call what we do now natural. It could be argued that it's all part of our natural progression though I suppose.
Yes, of course it is. See padraig's answer. The misanthropic attitude that "nature" was in perfect harmonious stasis before these awful humans turned up and started ruining everything is, for one thing, ironically anthropocentric as padraig says and also not terribly helpful to any kind of intelligent environmentalist cause.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Forced by humans. I say forced meaning hunted to extinction by humans for things other than food.

But how many species are going extinct because bad men with guns and traps are going around intentionally killing them? Granted, this may have happened in the past to iconic species like the dodo, and is still happening to some of the 'charismatic macrofauna' (essentially, big animals people care about like whales, tigers and apes) today - but the vast majority of extinctions are happening because of habitat destruction/degradation and/or climate change. And it's these extinctions, often of small animals like bees and often for poorly-understood reasons, that stand to wreak the real devastation on the ecosystem as a whole and prove disasterous for us.

Sperm whales disappear: OK, it'd be horribly tragic, but life would go on.
Honey bees disappear: mass (human) starvation worldwide.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
With respect, an experiment on one beehive is no experiment at all - anything could have could have caused that hive to collapse. And what percentage of hives are "next to" a mobile phone mast anyway? I'm not an entomologist but my feeling is that climate change, agrichemicals and land use are probably much more important factors in the decline in bee populations. That, and the introduction of foreign species with foreign pathogens and parasites. There's a whole thread about CCD in this sub-forum, have a look if you're interested.

Edit: here, since it's too old to show up if you just browse the Nature forum - http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?5499-Colony-Collapse-Disorder&highlight=colony
 
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sufi

lala
so how come noone eats dolphins?
they look right tasty to me (the only time i ever saw 1 in the wild was around breakfast time)

they seem to enjoy an excessive degree of respect for a mammal or a fish, otherwise how come we're not farming them?
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
The environmental factors are definitely the primary causes. People won't do anything to change this. The amount of selfishness and apathy within the human race is pretty disgusting. Even if you explained the current situation of the bees to most people they wouldn't bat an eye lid, let alone attempt to do anything about it.

a couple things. to say that environmental factors (EF for short) are the cause of extinction isn't really to say anything, though. I absolutely don't mean to sound condescending, but the most basic underpinning of Darwinian evolution is the idea that a species (or population) gradually adapts over time to its environment by the natural selection of traits which are favorable to survival in that environment. so EF are always the "primary cause" of extinction, as they are the primary cause of all evolutionary success or failure. what you really mean by EF, I think, is changes to the environment caused by humans, yeah? the thing is, "environmental factors" is a staggeringly huge & diverse category. not only is it often very difficult to pin down cause & effect generally, but it's also usually very difficult to draw any kind of definitive line where human cause stops & factors beyond human control take over. that's simply the nature of science, especially when dealing with something as endlessly complex as an ecosystem, let alone the world as a whole. that's not to say that there hasn't been a massive human-driven effect on the environment; almost (like 99.99%) certainly there has been. but it's one thing to say that, & it's another to produce hard data about specific issues that can convince policymakers to institute change, or their constituents to demand it from them (admittedly this is also very much an issue of media, how science is presented to the lay public, etc). there's also the problem of developing a correct strategy, which again, usually isn't easy. what "should be done" about bees? keep in mind that any strategy implemented has be to be feasible or it's not worth implementing in the first place (i.e. one can't just demand that people completely stop using fossil fuels tomorrow - or you could, but obviously it wouldn't happen).

sure, humans can be selfish & apathetic. going on about it doesn't help anyone. individual selfishness & apathy isn't really the issue - certainly, it doesn't help, but realistically we're talking about massive readjustments, not only structural (tho certainly those) but also in the way we approach life, organize our societies, etc I'm not arguing against personal responsibility, in fact the opposite. but say an individual does devote his or her life to bees - there are still a hundred other issues of equally pressing importance. further, the great majority of people simply are not in a position to devote their lives to bees or anything else even if they wished to. we most of us have to spend the bulk of our time dealing with day-to-day economic realities, which is not unconnected to the environmental stuff, as well as another place where the readjustment business comes in. the real issue is whether it will be voluntary or involuntary, as things get so mucked up that what we have now simply isn't sustainable. I obviously hope for the former but I rather fatalistically tend towards the latter. either way tho, complaining about selfishness isn't really doing anything.
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Padraig, some people reading your post would accuse you of being a strong adaptationist. But you'd be in good company with Dennett and some others.

Anyway, I think it's all one big process. And I think it's going to correct for our presence and problems, probably sooner rather than later... but we probably won't be here to appreciate life without our bullshit. Unless we like colonize Mars.

I had an interesting conversation with someone in my calc class on Thursday. He said he has two other degrees in business and whatever, but he decided to go back for a degree in environmental engineering because the environment is the new growth industry. He said, and this is a direct quote, "I'm not a hippy or anything, I want to make money". And I was like, yeah, I didn't really mistake you for a hippy. The polo shirt was a dead giveaway.
 
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