Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Plant Sciences, Zoology & Evolution => Topic started by: John Ellingson on 20/12/2016 09:35:15
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John Ellingson asked the Naked Scientists:
We spend a good deal of time and emotional energy trying to prevent the extinction of species, when the ultimate fate of all species is extinction -- as a part of the total process. Extinction seems to be essential for the emergence of new species. Why don't we consider the larger picture that by preventing extinction we may also be preventing the emergence of new species. The explosion of new species -- such as that at the start of the Cambrian, or the K/T boundary is the rule. Is it emotion or science that pushes us to prevent extinction. I do think the best policy is to preserve extinction, as an essential part of evolution, instead of preserving species.
What do you think?
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Hi John,
in principle, you are right. Nature itself has seen a lot of extinctions and it actually "does not care" if some species vanish from the earth or not.
It is, however, a misimpression that nature conservation or species conservation is in general a selfless act just done to protect nature for it´s intrinsic values. Although some people might feel that those intrinsic values are enough reason to try to safe nature or parts of it, on the grand scale, conservation efforts of any kind are only convincingly justified by taking humans into account. It is usually anthropozentric reasoning that makes us invest in nature conservation. Trying to sustain nature as it is at the moment is a logical step for as species in the aim to preserve itself. The "current" situation has been proven to be able to support humankind. Or to look at it from the other side - we adapted to this situation best and know how to deal with it. Every change, especially when not fully predictable, poses a risk to humankind. It might take us a while to adapt to new conditions, entailing calamities and maybe death of thousands. In the worst case the new cicumstances will never allow us to conserve or even improve our life standarts.
People realized quite early, that we need to protect what is supporting us. That we can not just overexploit nature without consequences. So first steps into our modern understanding of nature conservation were taken by the economy. The concept of sustainability, a major concept in modern conservation efforts, was implemented by forestry in the early 17hundreds when people realized that wood would not just grow back in the same rate as it was taken out of the forests, and that something needed to be done to sustain the supply. There is a lot of annecdotes that tell a story about how very anthropocentric reasons ensured survival of a species in the end (e.g. the indian lions in the Gir-forest, first protected because a sovereign at that time showed interest in being able to hunt them in future).
Fact is, that we just start to understand some of the very complicated relationships species have within nature. Even if we do not have a direct interest (economical, functional, medical, recreation ..) in a certain species now, we have to consider, that this species might bear information we might need later on in our intelectual evolution or that its disapperance might trigger a chain reaction that we are not able to foresee now because we were not able to assess its full function in the food web.
While I believe that also intrinsic values should be good enough to protect a certain species, I know not everyone shares this opinion. I am therefore also convinced that this argumentation is in the end not good enough to activate nature conservation efforts, especially as soon as money and effort is involved. But I am also cocksure, that there are a lot of good anthropocentric reasons to be carefull with nature and try not to mess to much with what we got.
all the best
Aj