Extinction

What's the problem?

All over North America bats are being decimated by a fungus that infects their noses. It disturbs their hibernation and they wake too soon, before their are insects to eat, and starve.

Bee populations are plummetting.

What happens if bees or bats become extinct? I can't predict in detail but I think it would be a big deal. Big ecosystems are adapted to their presence and there would be huge shfts if they were absent.

But I can predict that there will be changes and the ecosystem will adapt.

Once, as I was riding my bike across Saskatchewan I visited a museum in Regina. I found out that at one time the whole region was covered by a sterile alkaline sea. There was no life. A major present day industry was mining the minerals left behind when the sea evaporated. Now the land was grassland teeming with life as far as the eye could see.

So we can take a long view and say that extinction doesn't really matter. After all, most of the life forms that ever existed are extinct. The world we live in now is the outcome of many mass extinction events.

Somehow that view sticks in the craw. I feel the preciousness of each life form on an emotional level. Each is unique and amazing.

There is a pragmatic reason to cherish all lifeforms called biodiversity. The idea is that each lifeform has a unique genome and some of those genes might turn out to be essential somehow in the future. We are into an age of genetic engineering. Who knows what gene will turn out to be essential for new medicines and vaccines?

That does get a bit ickky though; we should cherish all life so we can mine their genomes.

We are social animals who are completely dependent on the society we are embedded in. We need that society to be benign. We are all in trouble if society is not benign. The way society treats other lifeforms is a sign of whether society is benign or not.

What do you think?

Star I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life. I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it. Each week I write a short essay to set the topic. I show a selection of them here.

I've been thinking and reading about philosophy for a long time but I'm mostly self taught. That is I've had the good fortune to read what interests me rather than follow a course of study. That has it's limits of course but advantages. It doesn't cost as much and is fun too.

My interests are things like evolution and cognition and social issues and economics and science in general.