Damien,
In respect of all this... it's mostly a matter of aesthetics. Massive
diebacks do generate massive adaptive radiations and tremendous novelty....
within the span of 10^7 years.
Thing is, a species like H. sapiens has lived on the order of 10^5 years,
and has no real biological future. So we really can't appreciate the deeper
poetry of extinction.
cymm ( a hopeless futile conservationist & collector of genes)
-----Original Message-----
From: Damien Broderick <d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au>
To: extropians@extropy.org <extropians@extropy.org>
Date: Thursday, September 14, 2000 2:54 AM
Subject: species extinction fair & foul
>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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