Species go extinct all the time and biodiversity is maintained throughout. I don’t believe BD was ever endangered. The best reasons I could think of is a high human dependence, whether direct or indirect, and to protect the species up to the time it can be studied and recorded for posterity. The latter is in view of the fact that knowledge of more than 90% of all organisms that had lived and gone extinct are lost to us.
You can’t and don’t choose whether to believe in evolution. It isn’t a theory, it’s a plain fact. HOW it happens can be argued about, but the evolution itself is proven.
Also, “survival of the fittest” is a generally misunderstood phrase. Too often, it’s thought of as an end, like, “Exterminate the inferior and elevate the superior.” It’s not. It’s a description of a boring sub-process within a much larger, incredibly long-term, process of generating different lifeforms who find different niches. “Survival of the fittest” was the objective of the Nazi SS. It is not, in any way, either the overall objective of evolution nor its general normal effect.
Nonsense. Species do go extinct under natural conditions, and are replaced by new species that evolve in the meantime. Most of the time these rates are fairly similar so that biodiversity is maintained. But the problem now is that species are going extinct a much higher rate than before humans began dominating the planet. Estimates are that present extinction rates are 1000 times higher than they were before humans. This is far higher than the speciation rate, so that species diversity is in fact being reduced.
The question now is not whether biodiversity is declining, but just how bad it will get. Some biologists believe we are creating the Sixth Mass Extinction that life has undergone in its history. I personally don’t think we’re facing a KT level extinction event just yet, but it could happen if the impacts of climate change are even worse than predicted.
All other things which have been mentioned having their relative merits, I’ll also mention finances.
Change is expensive.
For example, right now a significant proportion of the country’s food is farmed in California. While some of that comes down to the natural fitness of the region for farming, there’s also a large infrastructure cost which has gone into it, ranging from the obvious things like building all of the tubing and aqueducts that allow us to feed water through the whole valley at an even spread, but also less obvious things like the whole shipping infrastructure to get fertilizers in, package fruits for long-distance transport, and transport it all out of there. There are probably a lot more schools specializing in agricultural science, in California, and there is probably a whole legal system that has evolved around the industry to promote and regulate it in a sane and reasonable way.
Now let’s say that the climate has changed, the San Fernando Valley is a barren wasteland, and instead all of the prime farming in the country is squeezed up against the Canadian border. Well, now you have to go back in and recreate centuries worth of work that allowed California to be what it is along the Canadian border. You’re looking at probably hundreds of billions of dollars - and all for really no gain. You’re just doing what you have to do to maintain parity with what we had before, because the situation changed.
Within biology, there’s the idea of a keystone species, where you can remove and remove and remove different type of species and overall not much happens - the remaining species just expand to fill the gap at roughly the same proportions - but then you hit this special, specific one species and everything just implodes, maybe one species takes out the rest of everything, maybe the whole food system collapses and nearly everything dies out.
Our food systems are not wholly within the complete control of human technology. A lot of fish are naturally caught from the sea, not farmed. Some amount of plant pollination is naturally occurring and we depend on (some amount is not). Moving away from these things would be very costly, and that’s assuming that the effects of whatever we have done stay fairly macrocosmic. There’s a whole slew of bacteria, viruses, and other little beasties that is completely outside of our purview, that we don’t rely on in the food chain at all, but which we currently expect to stay more or less consistent from year to year. What if the loss of some little-known species of frog suddenly causes an outbreak of some weird ebola-like disease for cows?
Now it is true that the more you’re reliant on nature, in general, the less efficiently you’re producing things. A human generated landscape would, for example, be all California all the time - or even better; there would be no diseases; there would be no bacteria that weren’t genetically engineered to be - in essence - autonomous nanobots to help aid the production of whatever we were making; and so on.
The fact that we are reliant on nature is, in essence, bad and there would be value in divorcing ourselves from the limitations that nature imposes on us. And at that point, what all species that are or are not doesn’t matter (except as research subjects, to see if evolution has produced some novel idea or molecule that we haven’t). But we are not to that point, and don’t even have enough knowledge nor resources to build everything we would need to completely separate ourselves from nature. We are reliant on it and will be for at least another century. During that time, trashing it and expecting there to be no cost would be foolhardy.
Not it’s not, and whoever told you that is deceiving you.
Fuck evolution. I like wolves, bald eagles and California condors. End of story. The problem with human caused extinction is that we haven’t figure out how to make it work on rats.
Ok, that last part was a joke. Mostly. Well, partly.
This!
:mad:
Even in the world you describe, Sage Rat, there’s still some value to these species. When we are master’s of our environment to that extent, I would hope we keep a few parts of the world as game preserves (and why Not? We will be able to produce food so efficiently, we will have plenty of space). There is value in the wonder a child feels the first time they see an elephant at the zoo, or the sense of connection you feel when you make eye contact with a gorilla and realize, we really ARE cousins. (And then your cousin gobbles down a fistful of his own poop, and you realize that there are differences, too). More than that, when you see a great migration of a million flamingos or a pod of dolphins racing by, you really feel the majesty of nature. Even if the environment isn’t doing anything practical for us, even if we don’t need it for survival, there’s value in that.
For the same reason that we, as a species value beauty in anything. Just because evolution is a fact (which it is), doesn’t mean we should not strive to protect species from going extinct. Especially since, in most cases in recent history, it’s US who are causing the species to go extinct.
What a silly question.
If you just let evolution take it’s course, we’d eat all the tasty animals and the only animals left would have evolved to taste awful.
Note that the OP is in fact a non sequitur. “Believing” in evolution does not entail that you think it is a good thing, let alone that we have a responsibility to stand aside.
But yes the main issue is that many endangered species are endangered because of human activities. I know that some people like to file human activities within “natural selection” because humans themselves are a product of nature. But I disagree. In contexts like this there is good reason to draw a separation between organisms competing in an ecosystem, and humans using their knowledge and technology to make whatever changes to the biosphere that we choose.
(or, alternatively, if one were to insist that human activity is natural selection, then us choosing to save some species would be natural selection too)
Just a quick aside, people saying that deforestation or pollution or what not are not ‘natural.’ That’s incorrect. Humans are natural (unless you believe in special creation.) We’re just highly successful and better than every other animal on the planet at pretty much everything . We’re a ‘super-species.’ Us building hundreds of millions of cars is different in scale, but not in kind from a chimp sticking a stick in a termite mound. Not unnatural, just really, really successful. If we ‘scour the planet to look like Coruscant,’ there’s nothing unnatural about it. (Probably not even immoral depending upon your ethical system.) We are nature, just really, really destructive nature. No different than rats who land on an island and kill all of its seabirds. It’s simply something that happened that may or may not have positive impacts for various groups of organisms. Whether or not you think a species going extinct is good or bad for humanity (or more accurately you as an individual, there’s really no natural reason your opinions must be made to benefit humanity. Your genes are the selfish ones, what do you care about a palm tree plantation owner in Indonesia except as he relates to your own ability to rear successful offspring?) is likely a matter of opinion.
Why? How is building a road any different than building a beaver dam or how is building a city different than building a termite mound? Your argument seems to be simply that we’re really good at building things and lots of different things, therefore, we’re unnatural. I don’t think that is true.
You’re totally right though about how us saving species is part of natural selection though. Cows evolved to be relatively calm and relatively yummy, so they are one of the most successful animals on the planet. Cats evolved to eat pests and have big eyes and flat faces so that they take advantage of our parenting instincts and are one of the most successful animals on the planet. Pandas lucked into being cute, so they are going to be successful. Being a snail? Not so much. Natural selection ain’t gonna help you buddy. Charismatic megafauna are the place to be (as long as you don’t have any distinguishing features that Chinese people think give out bigger erections), so animals that ‘look cute’ are going to be selected for as well as animals that can piggy back on the environments that those megafauna will see preserved. Natural selection at its finest.
Your question implies that you don’t understand the difference between extinction brought on by “natural selection” through the normal course of nature and extinction brought on much more quickly and on a much greater scale by the reckless abuse of the environment by man.
The environment cannot be abused. It lacks feelings or consciousness.
Mass extinctions are part of the natural process. The late Devonian extinction was likely brought on very quickly by the evolution of land plants which caused algal blooms which sucked the oxygen out of the oceans. 75% of all species went extinct. Was this unnatural in some way simply because it was quick and on a huge scale? Land based plants were simply an ultra-successful species that altered the environment in drastic ways, nothing unnatural about it.
If we lived in the Devonian and were making decisions that would impact whether or not 75% of all species should die or not, you’d have a point. But we weren’t around back then, so I’m not sure what that has to do with anything.
The difference is that the extinction going on right now is caused by us, and it’s up to us if we want it to happen or not. I don’t know about you, but I would like my grandkids to be able to be wowed by a show like Planet Earth, and feel the same sense of awe at the natural world that I have gotten to feel.
The issue is not whether or not you want something or not. That’s fine, you can want whatever you want. My point is that it’s not unnatural. Humans are nature, we’re just way better at outcompeting other species and modifying our environment in ways which benefit us. We’re not some sort of non-natural alien. You’re right that it’s a perfectly fine thing to say “I think that biodiversity benefits me and mine in some way, so I wish to preserve it.” The fact that we can kill lots of things really fast is a feature of our particular benefits from natural selection, not a bug.
Why would alines be considered non-natural? Your terracentrism is showing. 