Yesterday evening, I attended a discussion group at the home of Libertarian International president Christian Michel. Christian likes to invite intelligent people with a cross-section of views to these events, and although this occasionally leads to heated argument, the conversation usually remains relatively polite.
Last night, the subject of biodiversity came up, and someone made a comment about how human activity is causing every increasing extinction of species. I decided to be Devil’s Advocate to a small extent and I asked a simple question.
“Can you name any large animal that has become extinct recently?”
Nobody else in the room could successfully answer the question. One or two animals that became extinct between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries were mentioned, as were a number of endangered but not extinct species. After they failed to provide any such animals, I mentioned one myself (the Yangtze Dolphin). For what its worth, one can find quite a few large animals that went extinct between about 1800 and 1960 due to human activity. There have been very few since 1960, however. There may be issues with how long it takes for an extinction to be officially declared, or it may be that conservation efforts are working. Or both. But it is far from incontrovertibly clear that extinctions are occurring at an unprecedented rate. There is a lot of uncertainty.
However, I was assured that there is clear evidence of extinction if I looked it up, and some such, and I was assured that it is smaller animals that are mostly becoming extinct and this is what matters. (On the other hand, if this is so, why do the tigers and other large animals get all the publicity?)
After playing the game slightly longer (“Okay, name any species of insect that has become extinct due to human activity, ever”) I backed off. However, as I was doing this, somebody made a curious comment, which was this:
“Michael, you can’t make claims like this without providing evidence”.
This was curious, as I had not made any claims. I had simply asked somebody else for evidence for what they were saying. We have been here before, oddly enough.
However, the question is a very effective one. Many people have accepted the idea that species of animal are going extinct at an alarming rate, without knowing any actual examples. Most people can at least sense the contradiction if you point it out.
It’s based on mathematical models. Can’t be arsed to look this up now, but there is a general ecological theory that biodiversity is proportional to the square of area; the number of species in a given area is proportional to its square.
So by measuring “habitat loss”; that is area reduction, you can calculate the number of species lost which will be proportional to the square of the area reduction. The models are now complicated by numerous extra factors, but that is the basic principle. It has little to do with actual metrics of actual species disappearing.
One obvious problem (if we accept the formula to be true, for the sake of argument) is that the formula describes how many species will evolve in a given area but says nothing about what area is necessary to sustain a given number of species once they have already evolved, but the distinction is either deliberately ignored or not understood by ecologists; it may be the latter since most ecologists have a poor grasp of science and math. Take your pick.
Anyway, by using that square law you can destroy thousands of virtual species with a back of a fag packet calculation; a press release is then very easy to write and send to Louise Gray at the Telegraph.
What is also generally missed is that extinction is a natural phenomenon, and that far more terrestrial species are extinct than are now extant. (In his book “The Black Swan” Taleb cites that number as 99.5%, but I can’t attest to his accuracy.) Most of those extinctions occurred long before humans began “despoiling” the environment. So another useful question to ask those pontificating about species extinction is “So what?”.
Not a scientist by any means, but it seems to me just by thinking about it a bit that evolution requires massive rates of extinction. Since there is no grand designer, change is random. Which means that the vast majority of species would be unfit and would go extinct. Only the fit survive, and mutation would not lead to more fitness in the vast majority of cases.
One other factor is that, in one sense, all species are equal but some species are more equal than others. Insects speciate at a very high rate. There are some species of fly in the tropics that only live on a few specific trees, for instance. The “natural” turnover rate of such species must be enormous, orders of magnitude higher than for, say, large mammals. They differ only in a gene or two from a species a few hundred meters away, they come and they go and nobody ever knew they were there unless they go looking for them and cataloguing them.
The ecologist faith of course is that every
spermspecies is sacred, every species is good, but the reality is that most of these species are entirely irrelevant. There must have been millions of these species over the ages. But you can prove a “mass extinction” by showing that half a dozen micro-species of picture wing flies went extinct last year and imply that this is part of a grand disaster.Far from losing them, they appear to be finding more and more new ones. And banging the word endangered on them, together with a preservation order.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/3308277/New-species-found-in-Vietnams-Green-Corridor.html
One other factor is that, in one sense, all species are equal but some species are more equal than others. Insects speciate at a very high rate. There are some species of fly in the tropics that only live on a few specific trees, for instance. The “natural” turnover rate of such species must be enormous, orders of magnitude higher than for, say, large mammals. They differ only in a [coding element] or two from a species a few hundred meters away, they come and they go and nobody ever knew they were there unless they go looking for them and cataloguing them.
The ecologist faith of course is that every < species is sacred, every species is good, but the reality is that most of these species are entirely irrelevant. There must have been millions of these species over the ages. But you can prove a "mass extinction" by showing that half a dozen micro-species of picture wing flies went extinct last year and imply that this is part of a grand disaster.
Perhaps an interesting question to have asked is this one: “You claim that species are going extinct at an alarming rate, but do you know how many new species are evolving to replace them, or are you only looking at one side of the coin?”
That should put the cat amongst the pigeons, though not, for obvious reasons, amongst the passenger pigeons.
species is sacred, every species is good, but the reality is that most of these species are entirely irrelevant. There must have been millions of these species over the ages. But you can prove a “mass extinction” by showing that half a dozen micro-species of picture wing flies went extinct last year and imply that this is part of a grand disaster.
(messed up the post getting it past the guardian bot)
Oh, yes, just one follow up: I hear that, due to us viral humans bed bugs are thriving and diversifying. Disturbing but true.
The only animal charity I support is the Vancouver Island Marmot foundation. Marmots are common enough on the North American mainland but the Vancouver Island version is a distinct sub species. This charity does not support AGW unlike the WWF which I stopped supporting when they got on the AGW bandwagon with pictures of polar bears becoming extinct.
The marmots are recovering.
Also, I have heard of several species that were declared extinct only to have a population found later on.
At this point, I see that the diversity of life on the planet earth is quite high if the function is to keep everything getting fed, pollenated, and broken back down into nutrients after death.
Also, there appears to be enough ozone where it matters, enough topsoil where it matters, and we are not being dissolved by acid rain. Now if we could just completely turn back the most successful incarnation of Religio-Science, AGW, we have accomplished something.
A lot of this nonsense is based on the ‘Delicate Balance of Nature’ fallacy which most of us imbibed with the soothing tones of David Attenborough, (the humanity hater), as we drifted off to sleep on our sofas.
Nature is anything but delicate and, as stated above, extinction is a very big part of it’s actual robustness. Similarly, the shifting balance of natural forces, as climate changes, volcanoes erupt, continents move and new species emerge, is what gives terrestrial life the robustness necessary to survive, (in one form or another), anything the Universe can throw at it.
Man is likely ‘causing’ lots of extinctions but so does every other species. Even the poor Baiji, as it evolved into a smaller, greyer dolphin, blind so it could devote more of it’s brain to it’s sonar – thus making it a better predator – likely extinguished another top predator on it’s rise to power over the Yangtse river delta. Then we came along and displaced it. There you go. Stuff happens.
The only living thing on this planet – and anywhere in the Universe as far as we know up to now – that gives a stuff about the survival or not of the polar bear is humanity, and if the threatened species want a shot at survival they better cozy up to us and we might give them a lift on our cosmic lifeboat when we finally leg it out of here before old sol goes all red giant on us.
I’ve encountered that kind of situation before, too. I was once in a heated discussion with a group of people about a politically-charged subject, in which I had only challenged statements other people made, without making a single statement myself. After a while of this, someone said to me, “I don’t want to live in the kind of world you’re describing,” though I had not yet described anything. I’ve been fascinated ever since by that experience.
What seems to happen is that when you challenge a person’s point of view they make assumptions about what your point of view must be. That’s only natural up to a point, and I’m sure I do the same thing. But I suspect there are also certain processes at work that exacerbate the problem when it comes to politically-charged issues. One would be political parties, who like to model the world as tidy collections of right-thinking and wrong-thinking ideas. Another would be news media, which also like simplistic categories. And I suppose both those things are reflections of an inherent human tendency toward us-versus-them thinking.
I also worry that it’s part of what seems like a trend to me (though it may not be a trend so much as a growing awareness on my part of something that’s been there all along). It’s a trend toward ad hominem argument disguised as either identity politics or pseudo-psychological analysis. More and more I find that when I do advance a point of view it’s explained away by who I am — either as part of some social group or as having some particular personality trait. This is a very convenient form of argumentation in that it allows the person making it to avoid addressing the actual point of view that has been advanced.
Perhaps I’m ranting.
Further to tranio’s note, they notice things:
http://designkultur.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/vancouver-island-marmot.jpg
http://www.marmots.org/facts.htm
Cheers
What Michael said sounded vaguely familiar, and then what Tedd said nailed it. This is a common debating problem to be prepared for.
Dinosaurs went botty side up in their millions, and it was all our fault!
Another trend I have noticed develop over the last 5 years or so is Left-leaning commentators questioning whether their right-wing target of choice really believes the stuff they say.
I havent really seen the Right resort to this sort of attack.
My initial thought is, ‘who cares? What about the merit of their argument?,’ but that lets the Lefty set the tone for the topic. My second thought is that the Left tends to consist of (in their view) Believers and non-Believers, and non-Believers must be cast out (just ask David Horowitz how that feels.)
The Right is not immune to a Faith requirement, but, I have noticed this particular manifestation of it only from the Left.
Serves you right, Michael, for bring up facts in an argument with Greens. Like most Watermelons (and Lefties), their actual basis for argument is a mile wide and an inch deep, and seldom survives the first or second question in a debate.
The thing is, I didn’t bring up any facts. I just suggested that they might. And they weren’t particularly overt Greens, just people who had accepted conventional wisdom without actually thinking about it.
Virtually everyone is a Green these days to some degree. The general ideals of greenism, like “recycling is a Good Thing” are now imbedded deep in our culture. I don’t think I know anybody IRL who, like me, rejects all of environmentalism without reserve. Most people are, at best, sceptical about parts of it, or think sometimes it goes too far, etc. But just about everybody has something; they approve of recycling, or windfarms, or of animal rights protections, or want to save the hedgerows or protect the Green Belt or end dependence on fossil fuels or promote local food or ban food additives or something.
“We are all Greensians now.”
-Richard Nixon.
Well, I’m with you, Ian. I can’t think of anything about the “green movement” which I support. It’s a giant fraud, a scheme to seize more power.
Concepts are given an emotional charge and anything that gets close to triggering that charge evokes a spontaneous sensation in the recipient of the stimulus of: “Heresy! Treason! Heresy! Treason!”.
This response is bred into the species in schools, colleges and universities with MSM cementing and verifying the perception.
Other than being lynched there is nothing too much to fear.
Further to my comment about ad hominem arguments, here’s an excellent example — an entire article dedicated to explaining away the ideas of someone without ever once seeking to examine the ideas themselves. Amazing.