I know what you’re thinking: What’s so great about extinction? Shouldn’t we try to stop animals from dying, simply because we value life?
Well, if you weren’t thinking that already, here’s your chance! This opinion piece that ran in the Washington Post last week offers a glimpse of the world from the vantage point of a young biology professor who greets the death of all earth’s creatures with a warm embrace.
R. Alexander Pyron, an associate biology professor at George Washington University, supports extinction as a kind of harbinger of evolution. Presumably, extinction would make studying biology a little difficult, but I’m not here to judge someone who would likely call my fifth grade teacher who taught an entire section on whales an “extinction fearmonger.”
According to Pyron, every 50 million years or so, Earth undergoes a mass extinction, where almost all species are killed off entirely. It’s par for the course as far as life on the planet goes. Some scientists think we’re going through one of those extinction periods now, however the deaths aren’t attributed to a natural cause, but to human activity.
Scientists, nature lovers and even Pope Francis have generally viewed extinction as, you know, a bad (and completely preventable) thing, but Pyron is standing up for the Montgomery Burnses of the world by saying, hey, maybe it isn’t? (Pyron also strangely advocates for invasive species, the creatures or plants that hitch a ride to a new environment, which they disrupt, i.e. unleash chaos, in ways that biologists, again, have typically viewed as Not Great.)
But extinction is the mother of evolution, Pyron writes, and conservation is unnecessary and not supported by science. Causing an animal’s extinction isn’t unethical or immoral, it won’t affect us, and if it does, we’ll figure out a way to adapt. He goes on to say: “Conserving a species we have helped to kill off, but on which we are not directly dependent, serves to discharge our own guilt, but little else.”
That is some dark shit, Pyron.
He also makes it clear that the problems of dying animals don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, a world that “is no better or worse for the absence of saber-toothed tigers and dodo birds and our Neanderthal cousins, who died off as Homo sapiens evolved.”
Aside from all the obvious implications of being comfortable with mass extinctions, part of what I find unsettling about this is the direction it could take. Charles Darwin’s discoveries inadvertently paved the way for social Darwinism, a system of thought that applied the theory of evolution and natural selection to people, leading to all sorts of vile justifications for racism and class inequality.
It seems absurd to put into words, but lots of absurd things have happened during the last year. Given the apparent rise of white nationalism via the alt-right, advocating for extinction in the name of evolution, while dangerous to begin with, would be even more corrosive in the wrong hands. As it is, pseudo-intellectual neo-Nazis are perverting philosophy, sociology and other theory to suit their gains, and I think it’s important to be wary of how they may or could bend many schools of thought to their will.
And a quick fact check: Although he acknowledged some risks of climate change and rising sea levels, Pyron also wrote as an aside that we’re experiencing all-time lows for both temperature and sea level. This isn’t true. That assertion reminded me for some reason of this Weather Channel response to a Breitbart story last year claiming land temperatures are down, so climate change isn’t happening (it is).
This climate report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says July was the 391st consecutive month that had a global temperature above the average temperature during the 20th century. The report adds that 9 out of 10 of the hottest Julys happened since 2005.
As far as sea level goes, check out this sea level trend map from NOAA.
You can see most of the arrows that represent sea level change are going up, not down.
One last thing: If we are really supporting extinction now, I’d like to nominate any of these nightmare-inducing deep-sea creatures.
Contact Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.