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According to https://naturalhistory.si.edu/education/teaching-resources/paleontology/extinction-over-time https://naturalhistory.si.edu/education/teaching-resou
by btilly 4y ago
According to https://naturalhistory.si.edu/education/teaching-resources/paleontology/extinction-over-time https://naturalhistory.si.edu/education/teaching-resources/p... the usual rate is around 1 species per million, each year.
With 8 million species we'd expect one every month or two. Estimates of the current rate are many orders of magnitude higher.
- edgyquant 4y agoThat is so ridiculous. What is the “usual” rate and how would we even justify such a thing. People are so caught up in environmentalism they don’t realize how anti-nature and laughably ignorant of scientific reason they end up being.
- btilly 4y agoTo quote from the article that I linked, "Judging from the fossil record, the baseline extinction rate is about one species per every one million species per year." And THAT we can calculate from finding species in the fossil record, and seeing how long we go from the species appearing to disappearing. On average this is about a million years, and it fits on an exponential curve. (Some species are around several million years, others just a few hundred thousand. It averages out.) Which is consistent with a given species randomly having about a one in a million chance of going extinct in any given year. Which then becomes an estimate of the usual extinction rate. Like all attempts to analyze historical data, there are a number of potential flaws in the chain of reasoning. But this train of logic certainly is not anti-nature or laughably ignorant of scientific reason.