Cool essay about extinction
Browsing around the web this afternoon, killing time when I should be working on my Geotimes cartoon, I came across this essay on the New York Times website: "Musings inspired by a quagga"*, by Olivia Judson. Good stuff, although I do get tired of hearing that old "but the extinction that caused the death of the dinosaurs wasn't even the biggest" cliche. Inspired by a visit to the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, Judson explores the role of extinction in evolutionary processes. Worth a read.
*By the way, mark your calendars: August 12 is Quagga Day, so proclaimed by Ed Abbey. The one this year is the 125th anniversary of the death of the last quagga.
*By the way, mark your calendars: August 12 is Quagga Day, so proclaimed by Ed Abbey. The one this year is the 125th anniversary of the death of the last quagga.
2 Comments:
A couple of points about Olivia Judson's piece:
1. The quagga is not a species, but a subspecies.
2. It is not extinct.
3. The Harpy Eagle, named as endangered, is not endangered.
4. The story on extinction is not quite as grim as some would make it out to be.
For more, see >> http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2008/05/missing-story-on-quaggas-and-extinction.html
Hello Anonymous...
First off, I wish I could keep track of all the Anonymouses out there. Are you the same anonymous who posts about carbon dioxide not causing climate change? Or the Anonymous who post "spam medication sales cheap" ads? Or (more probably) a new Anonymous, particularly concerned with quaggas.
Your points:
1) Right... it's a subspecies. Did Judson say otherwise? Nope. She just called it "a kind of zebra." She didn't make this mistake, as your link implies, so she need not be corrected for it.
2) If it's not extinct, how come there aren't any more of them in the wild or in captive populations? Creating a new zebra with a similar looking pigmentation pattern doesn't mean you're acutally resurrected the quagga. How confident can we be that the newly-bred quagga-looking-zebra is in fact a total genetic facsimile of an actual quagga?
3) You're right about that one. Again, though, Judson was technically correct in her writing: she says that 'the sign in the museum says the Harpy Eagle is endangered,' which is different from her asserting that 'the Harpy eagle is endangered.'
4) It's pretty grim, though. Not as grim as some would make it out to be, but it's pretty doggone grim. There's a lot of change happening geologically-fast in our world, and changes to the level of biodiversity are paramount in my mind. I've met geologists who say that we're living through the Sixth Mass Extinction now. I'm not sure I totally buy that... yet. But certainly the decline in fish stocks (cod), large mammals (bison, mountain lions), amphibians, and many insects suggests something fundamental is changing on our planet.
Thanks for the feedbak and thanks for the link -- that's a good review of some other relevant data that Judson didn't include. She is however only 'musing,' and that frees her essay to be more reflective, and less comprehensive. I don't resent her essay for this. It's musing, and not a peer-reviewed scientific article. Does she have a journalistic responsibility to be accurate? Absolutely. Does she have compositional license to write the way she pleases. Yep, that too.
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