23 ms·

We're watching a second family of mammals adapt and speciate a bunch of new winners in this domain of man, in in our own homes! Even the human mass extinction

We're watching a second family of mammals adapt and speciate a bunch of new winners in this domain of man, in in our own homes! Even the human mass extinction has given life time to adapt, by way of crops, farm animals, pets, etc. We've even helped make sure that hundreds or thousands of species across many different kinds of life are 100% going to survive along with us if it's remotely in our power. There are likely hundreds or thousands of other species like raccoons, pigeons, rats, jellyfish, various kinds of insects, etc that are going to thrive in our cities and continue to coevolve as parasites. I'm not entirely convinced a human caused mass extinction is really all that much worse than other kinds, because we provide some guaranteed survival routes to animals that can coevolve with us, and be useful in some way.

bane 12y ago
I always think it's useful to think of species, like humans, less as an individual organism, and more of a menagerie. The human menagerie stretches from gut bacteria all the way to elephants, with homo sapiens lodges somewhere in the middle of the bunch.
frandroid 12y ago
We're approaching an ecological collapse that will wipe us out, too.
- baddox 12y ago
  What data suggests that? The data I've seen (and I'll admit I have no relevant expertise and therefore little more than intuition on what sources to trust) seems to suggest that climate change will likely impose costs on humanity in the tens of billions, but that those costs are probably quite low in the grand scheme of things. I certainly haven't seen any data to suggest a credible threat of significant human population decline, much less human extinction.
  - pyre 12y ago
    If the infrastructure that we have collapses there will be mass starvation. Probably more so in 1st world countries than in places where people are basically hand-to-mouth.
    - baddox 12y ago
      Why would the infrastructure collapse?
- NotAtWork 12y ago
  What, specifically, do you think is going to collapse in the ecosystem that not just kills billions of humans, but actually poses an existential threat to humanity? To be an existential threat, there have to be less than 5 million humans left (in my mind, at least, and this is probably a really high figure to be 'existential'). This means whatever you propose has to be at least 99.9% deadly. To put that in perspective, that's three viruses each as deadly as ebola at its worst (~90% deadly) striking humanity one after the other. /That/ would leave ~5-10 million humans alive. So I'm actually sincerely curious: what do you think is going to happen that will wipe out all of humanity?
  - grondilu 12y ago
    5 millions is fairly conservative, considering our species may have already experienced a bottleneck of less than 100,000 individuals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck#Humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck#Humans
    - NotAtWork 12y ago
      My number is high partly to account for humans being more spread out. A lot of our bottle necks occurred at times before we really spread out all over the place.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - schiffern 12y ago
    >So I'm actually sincerely curious: what do you think is going to happen that will wipe out all of humanity? One possibility: global warming, war, and desperate overexpansion of agriculture causing complete terrestrial desertification.
    - NotAtWork 12y ago
jerf 12y ago
In the next 200-300 years, I consider it highly likely that either A: humankind's population will shrink enough to satisfy all but the wildest econaut's dreams or B: biodiversity will incomprehensibly explode as we start tinkering with genes directly. We may fancy ourselves masters of the process and ecologists may decry it as being "unnatural", but in the end it really won't be. Evolution will be as functional as ever, even if the link between genes and reproduction becomes more complicated. Indeed if anything it threatens to become far too functional for our likings. In the grand scheme of things, the idea that setting aside "half the planet" will somehow fix, well, anything is really quite a parochial viewpoint. We either won't need to because biodiversity will be getting along just fine, or we'll be setting aside a great deal more than "half"....
efuquen 12y ago
I've never heard this apologetic argument for mass extinction, it's somewhat disheartening. Do you think domesticated animals and scavengers are going to make up for the lost in biodiversity and ecological damage? Basically whatever can survive in our concrete jungles and farms will be alright, screw the rest? The other parts of this earth play an essential role in maintaining ecological balance on this planet, and a world with just farms and cities and the animals that can survive within is not going to bode well for us or any other species. Hopefully that's a good enough argument if you still don't think that mass extinction and habitat lose isn't a negative outcome in and of itself.
- NotAtWork 12y ago
  > a world with just farms and cities and the animals that can survive within is not going to bode well for us or any other species In what way? The main threat is disease if we shift to being large aggregations of essentially the same animals. We've run in to this problem before, with bananas as a particular case. However, we already know the solution to that. The answer is that you preserve several cultivars of the species, and intermingle them. We already see this kind of behavior with pets, gardens, zoos, etc. I fail to see why you think we're likely to end up with anything but more of the same kinds of pruning-but-not-completely-destroying-families behavior. I'm also failing to see why you think we need thousands of kinds of lizards that are all basically the same, rather than a few hundred, and why such a bottle neck is either unnatural (hint: we've hit smaller choke points before) or why it would be particularly dangerous. Ed: A key word.
  - schiffern 12y ago
    >In what way? Because we are all completely dependent on ecosystem services provided by those species, such as erosion control (without which your country erodes away to desert), rainwater buffering (without which you experience catastrophic flooding), and transpiration (without which you lose almost all inland rainfall[1]). Loss of individual species is just the symptom. The real problem—and what this article discusses—is wholesale destruction of wilderness. Don't imagine that just a handful of species can provide these services either. Since ecosystems are complex adaptive systems, a particular species' role is almost always subtle and interconnected. See: the services provided by wolves in Yellowstone, which were never fully understood until they were removed and then re-introduced[2]. So why is wilderness important? Fundamentally, wilderness is arranged (and so, it functions) in completely different ways than human-tended landscapes. Now it's obvious that a suburb is different from a forest, but what's less obvious is that the way wilderness works is much more efficient. It's not dependent on a constant stream of material extracted from "somewhere else", but on average it produces far more economic value when ecosystem services are accurately accounted for. Surprise, surprise: economics seems to suggest that those living on a spaceship shouldn't take a sledgehammer to the life support system… (of course, the ultimate trick would be to design human landscapes that also function like wilderness ecosystems) [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v496/n7445/abs/nature11983.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v496/n7445/abs/nature11... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q

bane 12y ago

I always think it's useful to think of species, like humans, less as an individual organism, and more of a menagerie. The human menagerie stretches from gut bacteria all the way to elephants, with homo sapiens lodges somewhere in the middle of the bunch.

frandroid 12y ago

We're approaching an ecological collapse that will wipe us out, too.

baddox 12y ago
What data suggests that? The data I've seen (and I'll admit I have no relevant expertise and therefore little more than intuition on what sources to trust) seems to suggest that climate change will likely impose costs on humanity in the tens of billions, but that those costs are probably quite low in the grand scheme of things. I certainly haven't seen any data to suggest a credible threat of significant human population decline, much less human extinction.
- pyre 12y ago
  If the infrastructure that we have collapses there will be mass starvation. Probably more so in 1st world countries than in places where people are basically hand-to-mouth.
  - baddox 12y ago
    Why would the infrastructure collapse?
NotAtWork 12y ago
What, specifically, do you think is going to collapse in the ecosystem that not just kills billions of humans, but actually poses an existential threat to humanity? To be an existential threat, there have to be less than 5 million humans left (in my mind, at least, and this is probably a really high figure to be 'existential'). This means whatever you propose has to be at least 99.9% deadly. To put that in perspective, that's three viruses each as deadly as ebola at its worst (~90% deadly) striking humanity one after the other. /That/ would leave ~5-10 million humans alive. So I'm actually sincerely curious: what do you think is going to happen that will wipe out all of humanity?
- grondilu 12y ago
  5 millions is fairly conservative, considering our species may have already experienced a bottleneck of less than 100,000 individuals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck#Humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck#Humans
  - NotAtWork 12y ago
    My number is high partly to account for humans being more spread out. A lot of our bottle necks occurred at times before we really spread out all over the place.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- schiffern 12y ago
  >So I'm actually sincerely curious: what do you think is going to happen that will wipe out all of humanity? One possibility: global warming, war, and desperate overexpansion of agriculture causing complete terrestrial desertification.
  - NotAtWork 12y ago

jerf 12y ago

In the next 200-300 years, I consider it highly likely that either A: humankind's population will shrink enough to satisfy all but the wildest econaut's dreams or B: biodiversity will incomprehensibly explode as we start tinkering with genes directly. We may fancy ourselves masters of the process and ecologists may decry it as being "unnatural", but in the end it really won't be. Evolution will be as functional as ever, even if the link between genes and reproduction becomes more complicated. Indeed if anything it threatens to become far too functional for our likings. In the grand scheme of things, the idea that setting aside "half the planet" will somehow fix, well, anything is really quite a parochial viewpoint. We either won't need to because biodiversity will be getting along just fine, or we'll be setting aside a great deal more than "half"....

efuquen 12y ago

I've never heard this apologetic argument for mass extinction, it's somewhat disheartening. Do you think domesticated animals and scavengers are going to make up for the lost in biodiversity and ecological damage? Basically whatever can survive in our concrete jungles and farms will be alright, screw the rest? The other parts of this earth play an essential role in maintaining ecological balance on this planet, and a world with just farms and cities and the animals that can survive within is not going to bode well for us or any other species. Hopefully that's a good enough argument if you still don't think that mass extinction and habitat lose isn't a negative outcome in and of itself.

NotAtWork 12y ago
> a world with just farms and cities and the animals that can survive within is not going to bode well for us or any other species In what way? The main threat is disease if we shift to being large aggregations of essentially the same animals. We've run in to this problem before, with bananas as a particular case. However, we already know the solution to that. The answer is that you preserve several cultivars of the species, and intermingle them. We already see this kind of behavior with pets, gardens, zoos, etc. I fail to see why you think we're likely to end up with anything but more of the same kinds of pruning-but-not-completely-destroying-families behavior. I'm also failing to see why you think we need thousands of kinds of lizards that are all basically the same, rather than a few hundred, and why such a bottle neck is either unnatural (hint: we've hit smaller choke points before) or why it would be particularly dangerous. Ed: A key word.
- schiffern 12y ago
  >In what way? Because we are all completely dependent on ecosystem services provided by those species, such as erosion control (without which your country erodes away to desert), rainwater buffering (without which you experience catastrophic flooding), and transpiration (without which you lose almost all inland rainfall[1]). Loss of individual species is just the symptom. The real problem—and what this article discusses—is wholesale destruction of wilderness. Don't imagine that just a handful of species can provide these services either. Since ecosystems are complex adaptive systems, a particular species' role is almost always subtle and interconnected. See: the services provided by wolves in Yellowstone, which were never fully understood until they were removed and then re-introduced[2]. So why is wilderness important? Fundamentally, wilderness is arranged (and so, it functions) in completely different ways than human-tended landscapes. Now it's obvious that a suburb is different from a forest, but what's less obvious is that the way wilderness works is much more efficient. It's not dependent on a constant stream of material extracted from "somewhere else", but on average it produces far more economic value when ecosystem services are accurately accounted for. Surprise, surprise: economics seems to suggest that those living on a spaceship shouldn't take a sledgehammer to the life support system… (of course, the ultimate trick would be to design human landscapes that also function like wilderness ecosystems) [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v496/n7445/abs/nature11983.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v496/n7445/abs/nature11... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q