From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Sep 14 2000 - 00:40:31 MDT
At 07:04 AM 13/09/00 -0700, James Rogers wrote:
>Maybe I am alone in this, but I don't see anything wrong with extinction
>in principle. For every species that becomes extinct, a new one pops into
>existence to take its place, and probably does a better job of it.
I'd like to write a lengthy, pungent response to this, but don't really
have time just now. Sketchily:
As it stands, this is nuts. It might be true that `For every species that
becomes extinct' one already extant spreads to fill the slot, but I doubt
it, and anyway I'm not that enthusiastic about slashing diversity. During
Pangea, there was a vast dieback, as local island biogeographies became
crowded into a single world-island ecology. Vast amounts of biological
information were lost. We have recreated this circumstance, to a large
degree, with global shipping and air transport. Chris Lavers makes the
argument compellingly in a new book with the crowd-titillating title WHY
ELEPHANTS HAVE BIG EARS. The successful hyperanimals (rabbits, say) do not
add much in the way of useful diversity except, perhaps, at some microlevel
of nearly-neutral intragenomic drift. This sort of
extinction-by-competition is usually aversive these days, I should think.
And not what one associates with a term such as `extropian'.
Damien Broderick
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