Extinction as a natural process

¶ … Biology of Species Extinction -- Argument

When it comes to the issue of the extinction of animal species, there are two main schools of thought. According to the first, the extinction of species is simply the naturally course of evolution and not a tragedy that human beings should devote time, energy, and effort to preventing. According to the second school of thought, there is an inherent value to every species and even if extinction is a natural phenomenon, the fact that the rate of species extinction has increased as a result of human activities is sufficient justification for trying to preserve species facing extinction and, at least, to try to minimize the effect of human activities on the premature or accelerated extinction of animal species. While the second position is admirable in some respects and does reflect a certain sensitivity toward nature, it is the much weaker argument.

The extinction of animal species is strictly a function of their ability to adapt to changes in their environment. It is a process that has bee ongoing throughout the natural world for billions of years, ever since the first microbes evolved into different microbes and simple organisms that were better able to thrive in their environment. The evolutionary process predates human activity by such a long period of time that the entire period of human existence on earth amounts to the equivalent of seconds if the history of the planet were represented by a 24-hour clock. On that clock, human beings first appeared only a few seconds before midnight.

The principal reason that there is such ecological diversity in the first place is that biological species have continually evolved by changing their form and functions as necessitated by their external environment. In that respect, the addition of human beings in general and of human activities in particular to the environment is no more or less part of the external environment of other species than all of the environmental changes that have driven evolution (and extinctions) since the first form of life emerged on earth. Just as changes in the populations of predatory and prey species directly influence the success of one another's species, so does the addition of human beings to the equation. In that sense, human activity -- even if it has contributed to or accelerated the "natural" extinction rate of other animal species -- is nothing more or less than another element of the natural world to which other species must adapt if they are to succeed.

To put human activity and its possible influence on animal extinction rates into perspective, just consider that a meteorite that struck the earth near modern-day Siberia is now known to have been the cause of the largest number of simultaneous extinctions likely to have ever occurred on earth from a single cause. It wiped out all of the dinosaurs and probably is the reason that smaller mammals managed to evolve into human beings a hundred million years or so afterwards. Without the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, is doubtful that human beings would ever have evolved in the first place. By comparison to the effects of the that meteorite, all of the human activity in the world that has ever occurred since the first human being who hunted for prey or started a fire is infinitesimally small and utterly insignificant.

More importantly, human concern for animal species extinctions seems to be largely predicated on our anthropomorphic impulses: that is, we have the greatest empathy for animals that remind us of ourselves or that seem appealing or "cute" to us. Consider the different way that we regard tuna and dolphin for just one example. We hunt the former so aggressively that we are on the verge of having to maintain wild tuna populations artificially if we hope to continue eating as much sushi and tuna fish sandwiches as we wish. Other than our self-interest in having enough tuna to eat, we express little if any empathy for the millions of tuna that are herded into nets, hooked, and clubbed to death. What (some) humans do to sharks is even worse: Japan, in particular, routinely fishes for shark and because the only economically valuable part of the shark are their tails and fins, they simply haul them out of the water, slice off their fins, and toss them back into the ocean to suffocate and drown as they sink to the bottom of the ocean.