Matt Kielty

Extinction, bad genes or bad luck?

To Rao, the answer was, it's both.

Like, you can't discount fitness.

But when it comes to extinction, there's so much other stuff happening.

The climate is changing or an asteroid hits Earth, sea levels can rise and fall drastically.

Like, all that stuff is outside of your control.

You could sort of die at any moment.

So he sort of charts this middle ground view, which is probably how Gould saw it too.

But then you have Tom Schaaf, the guy who started the whole project, and he just goes full randomness.

I mean, the impression that I get was like, pretty much from the word go, he was like, randomness is the order of things.

Schopf developed this idea called species as particles.

Species as particles in space and time.

He believed that if extinction is truly random, then as a whole, species are sort of indistinct.

Like they have no real differences between one another.

That there are no like better or worse.

The way he puts it, there's no inferior or superior beings.

There's just ones that survive and ones that don't.

Schaaf began writing a book trying to flesh out this theory.

But in 1984, at the age of 44, he was in Texas doing fieldwork with students and he died suddenly of a heart attack.

While reporting this story, we talked to some paleontologists and we're like, well, like, who, like, do we know?