Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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In this episode, we go over all the big extinctions and what probably caused them, including the one we're most likely in right now, which is probably caused by humans. And if you pay attention, you can start to notice the little glimmers, the little beginnings of what would become my side podcast, The End of the World with Josh Clark.
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Chapter 2: What is extinction and why is it significant?
Was that the one? I think so. I mean, he was definitely on that one. Yeah. But that was the one also where I think... Yeah, he makes fun of people with saggy pants because it was so new. Right. Apparently Busta Rhymes wasn't down with it yet. Yeah. Which is pretty ironic because he got hardcore into that. That was Raw Raw Like a Dungeon Dragon, right? Right, right. It was pretty awesome.
It's a good song. Yeah. So Extinction is clearly what we're talking about today. And I guess we should probably give a shout out to some of the extra reading material. Yeah, man. We picked up on. There's a woman named Elizabeth Colbert or Colbert, depending on if you watch the Colbert Report. Yeah. She is basically a leading expert as far as journalists go on extinction.
She wrote a book called The Sixth Extinction. That's a good article. Yeah, and she wrote an article in The New Yorker. She's a New Yorker journalist. That was basically the predecessor to the book. You know how they do. They're like, oh, I need an extra 20 grand, so I'll just write a synopsis of the book I'm writing. And it's a good article, and we work from that.
There's another one from the New York Review of Books called They're Taking Over about the explosion of jellyfish. On How Stuff Works, there's one that I wrote years back called Will We Soon Be Extinct? And there's another HowStuffWorks one that we've done an episode on called Why is Biodiversity Important?
Yeah, and I found one in an io9 for animals that we thought were extinct but miraculously popped back up. Nice. Which is always a good story. Oh, yeah, it's a heartwarming story of triumph over adversity and coming back when everybody thought you were down. Yeah, some of them like... It's basically rocky. Hundreds of millions of years later even. Yeah. It's crazy. Like the silicant?
I think that's one of them. Is that the big fish? Mm-hmm. Yeah. They just caught that thing one day. Yeah. And said, hey, wait a minute. Yeah. This thing's extinct. It's supposed to be. Exactly. And we'll talk about how and why... things fall off, but things do fall off. And it seems that the whole thing is a very natural process, extinction is.
But for a very long time, I guess scientists believed that God created all of the animals on earth and and that his will was too perfect, his creation was too divine to even allow for extinction. So, because they were aware of the fossil record, they rationalized these huge bones of animals they didn't see anywhere as, we just haven't found them yet.
Well, yeah, and this was all the way up into the 19th century, and some really smart people like Thomas Jefferson thought, for instance, when he sent Lewis and Clark out west, that they might come across the Great Mastodon. He's like, it's bound to be out there somewhere, guys, so be careful. But there were some other smarter people. like George Cuvier in 1812, he was pretty ahead of his time.
In fact, in 1812, he was way ahead of his time because he published an essay called Revolutions on the Surface of the Globe. Yeah. And he kind of asserted that, no, things can go extinct. And he called them a species produce lost species. Right. And basically hypothesized that there have been cataclysmic events that have caused extinctions. Right. In so many words.
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Chapter 3: What are the historical perspectives on extinction?
And because of that, large animals started to go extinct because they like to eat the small animals. Exactly, which is the answer to the question, why is biodiversity important? Well, because ecosystems thrive and survive on a wide number of species that exist pretty much naturally in balance. Yeah. You know, a pretty good example of that stuff falling out of balance is the passenger pigeon.
You familiar? Yeah, they're trying to de-extinct that thing. Yeah, you want to talk about de-extinction? Yeah, well, de-extinction is exactly what it sounds like. It is sort of Jurassic Park-y. It is, in 2003, some scientists revived the Burkardo, Bukardo, And that's a Spanish mountain goat. And they did it just sort of like Jurassic Park from DNA that was frozen in time.
Unfortunately, although it did work initially, the DNA only survived a matter of minutes. But it did count as a de-extinction. I think there was a live birth that survived a few minutes, wasn't it? Yeah, the animal itself only survived a few minutes, though. Right. It was like, I should not be. That's true.
I mean, they basically said it's happening now and we have the capabilities and we may not be able to bring the woolly mammoth back, but we might be able to bring back something kind of close. Right. And that raises in this article that you sent just this moral question, like, should we be doing this? Just because we can, does that mean we should?
And so, like, if you bring back an animal that has been extinct for so long that its habitat is now gone. Yeah, where are they going to live? Exactly. Where are you going to put it? A zoo? That doesn't seem like a good reason to bring an animal back so we could put it in a zoo.
Yeah, and just like maybe this is my opinion here, which we don't do a lot of, but it seems like concentrating on the problems we face now with the extinction rates is something that we should concentrate on, not bringing back the woolly mammoth. Right, and that also kind of dovetails with the point that
If we have this ability and routinely exercise it, we may be less inclined to protect the stuff we have now. If it's important enough, we'll just genetically re-engineer it and bring it back later. Yeah, I think in the CNN article, they liken it to just thinking we have an undo button on the world. Control-Z. Yeah, no good. No.
And it's funny because the author doesn't realize that Control-Z works outside of Microsoft Word, too. I'm not sure. He specifically mentioned Control-Z and Microsoft Word. Oh. Word, specifically? Microsoft Word, he said it. Yeah, that's a little weird. He could be a shill, and he was just working it in. Maybe. You know? Well, on Macs, though, it's not Control.
Maybe he just meant Microsoft and awkwardly put in Word. Maybe. Or maybe that's the only program he knows. How do I work this? So you were saying that they're trying to bring back the passenger pigeon, right? Yeah. So the passenger pigeon is this really neat example of what happens when you have a lack of biodiversity. Yeah.
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