https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?action=history&feed=atom&title=Extinction%2FIntroductionExtinction/Introduction - Revision history2026-05-16T02:50:25ZRevision history for this page on the wikiMediaWiki 1.41.0https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Extinction/Introduction&diff=5211&oldid=prevInvestigarte at 17:59, 3 October 20122012-10-03T17:59:00Z<p></p>
<a href="https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Extinction/Introduction&diff=5211&oldid=4409">Show changes</a>Investigartehttps://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Extinction/Introduction&diff=4409&oldid=prevJoanna at 20:53, 26 February 20122012-02-26T20:53:36Z<p></p>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Currier, N. (2012) [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-currier/methane-in-the-twilight-z_1_b_1207619.html<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">] </del>‘Methane in the Twilight Zone (Second Episode).’ ''Huffington Post'' January 17.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Currier, N. (2012) [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-currier/methane-in-the-twilight-z_1_b_1207619.html ‘Methane in the Twilight Zone (Second Episode).’<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">] </ins>''Huffington Post'' January 17.</div></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Crutzen, P. & Schwargel, C. (2011) [http://e360.yale.edu/feature/living_in_the_anthropocene_toward_a_new_global_ethos/2363/ ‘Living in the Anthropocene: Toward a New Global Ethos.’] ''Environment'' 360 </div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Crutzen, P. & Schwargel, C. (2011) [http://e360.yale.edu/feature/living_in_the_anthropocene_toward_a_new_global_ethos/2363/ ‘Living in the Anthropocene: Toward a New Global Ethos.’] ''Environment'' 360 </div></td></tr>
</table>Joannahttps://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Extinction/Introduction&diff=4407&oldid=prevJoanna at 20:51, 26 February 20122012-02-26T20:51:11Z<p></p>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Extinctions may have many triggers – the striking of the earth by an asteroid, volcanic activity, human disturbance – but one possibility is that various triggers lead to extinction because of one crucial factor: the enzyme urease. Whatever the trigger for extinctions there may be a unifying ‘kill-mechanism’, and the anticipated Anthropocene extinction would be no exception. We can define extinction as any reduction of biodiversity. The disappearance of species can be considered part of the ‘natural’ rhythm of life and evolution, unless there is a reduction of diversity in a geologically insignificant time period. That is, all things are finite and pass away, but what causes a relatively sudden drop in the range and system of species? If we accept the once controversial notion that the end-Cretaceous extinction event was cause by bolide impact (Alvarez, 1980), or entertain other possibilities such as massive volcanic eruptions, these remain ‘triggers’, but how is it that our planet has gone through five major extinctions, and will anything allow us to think about a sixth? What is the ‘kill mechanism’? If the last great extinction was caused by a bolide impact, how did this lead to mass extinction, and would this illuminate anything with regard to the future Anthropocene or sixth extinction? Despite diversity of life processes, urease protein sequences are similar across species. Urease allows organisms to access nitrogen for cell growth; it facilitates the biomineralisation of calcium carbonate by invertebrates and plays crucial roles in the ongoing syntheses of life. If urease is disrupted – by pH disturbance from ocean acidity – then ‘dead zones’ will result. Various external triggers (such as postulated bolide impacts or volcanic action) can create ph ocean disturbance, in turn leading to such enzymatic dead zones. Marine extinctions would result if species were not able to form shells or skeletons because of impeded mineralization. Species that did not rely on biomineralisation would survive; and species that were not so close to the ocean surface would also be likely to survive. It is not only in marine species that urease would explain why some species survive rather than others; if urease is essential for modes of plant production using seeds, then ferns (reproducing via spores) would survive. The fact that amniota – including mammals – do not require urease explains their survival after the last extinction event. Dinosaurs would have suffered because eggs would have had thinner breaking shells as a consequence of disturbed urease, or thicker shells causing suffocation. But the real significance lies in the possibility of the next extinction event: increased CO2 emissions – possibly as early as 2050 – tied to warmer temperatures and ocean ph disturbance would create a collapse of ocean productivity, leading in turn to further warming. A single enzyme, at the smallest of thresholds, tied to the past extinction events and our own mammalian emergence, may well be the ‘kill mechanism’ of the Anthropocene era. </div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Extinctions may have many triggers – the striking of the earth by an asteroid, volcanic activity, human disturbance – but one possibility is that various triggers lead to extinction because of one crucial factor: the enzyme urease. Whatever the trigger for extinctions there may be a unifying ‘kill-mechanism’, and the anticipated Anthropocene extinction would be no exception. We can define extinction as any reduction of biodiversity. The disappearance of species can be considered part of the ‘natural’ rhythm of life and evolution, unless there is a reduction of diversity in a geologically insignificant time period. That is, all things are finite and pass away, but what causes a relatively sudden drop in the range and system of species? If we accept the once controversial notion that the end-Cretaceous extinction event was cause by bolide impact (Alvarez, 1980), or entertain other possibilities such as massive volcanic eruptions, these remain ‘triggers’, but how is it that our planet has gone through five major extinctions, and will anything allow us to think about a sixth? What is the ‘kill mechanism’? If the last great extinction was caused by a bolide impact, how did this lead to mass extinction, and would this illuminate anything with regard to the future Anthropocene or sixth extinction? Despite diversity of life processes, urease protein sequences are similar across species. Urease allows organisms to access nitrogen for cell growth; it facilitates the biomineralisation of calcium carbonate by invertebrates and plays crucial roles in the ongoing syntheses of life. If urease is disrupted – by pH disturbance from ocean acidity – then ‘dead zones’ will result. Various external triggers (such as postulated bolide impacts or volcanic action) can create ph ocean disturbance, in turn leading to such enzymatic dead zones. Marine extinctions would result if species were not able to form shells or skeletons because of impeded mineralization. Species that did not rely on biomineralisation would survive; and species that were not so close to the ocean surface would also be likely to survive. It is not only in marine species that urease would explain why some species survive rather than others; if urease is essential for modes of plant production using seeds, then ferns (reproducing via spores) would survive. The fact that amniota – including mammals – do not require urease explains their survival after the last extinction event. Dinosaurs would have suffered because eggs would have had thinner breaking shells as a consequence of disturbed urease, or thicker shells causing suffocation. But the real significance lies in the possibility of the next extinction event: increased CO2 emissions – possibly as early as 2050 – tied to warmer temperatures and ocean ph disturbance would create a collapse of ocean productivity, leading in turn to further warming. A single enzyme, at the smallest of thresholds, tied to the past extinction events and our own mammalian emergence, may well be the ‘kill mechanism’ of the Anthropocene era. </div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>== '''Comprehending Extinction''' ==</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>== '''Comprehending Extinction''' ==</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>; Robert<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">. </del>M. May: [http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1537/41.full Ecological Science and Tomorrow’s World] </div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>; Robert M. May: [http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1537/41.full Ecological Science and Tomorrow’s World] </div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>; Stephen Jay Gould: [http://brembs.net/gould.html The Evolution of Life on Earth]</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>; Stephen Jay Gould: [http://brembs.net/gould.html The Evolution of Life on Earth]</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>; Valentí Rull: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2775185/ Beyond Us: Is a World Without Humans Possible?]</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>; Valentí Rull: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2775185/ Beyond Us: Is a World Without Humans Possible?]</div></td></tr>
</table>Joannahttps://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Extinction/Introduction&diff=4406&oldid=prevJoanna at 20:34, 26 February 20122012-02-26T20:34:15Z<p></p>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Extinction Back to the book] <br> </div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Extinction Back to the book] <br> </div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>= Claire Colebrook<br> '''Introduction: Extinction. Framing the End of the Species''' =</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>= Claire Colebrook <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">/</ins><br> '''Introduction: Extinction. Framing the End of the Species''' =</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><br></div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><br></div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>== '''Introduction''' ==</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>== '''Introduction''' ==</div></td></tr>
</table>Joannahttps://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Extinction/Introduction&diff=4404&oldid=prevJoanna at 20:11, 26 February 20122012-02-26T20:11:36Z<p></p>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><br>Never mind that Darwinism would require a commitment to forces of random mutation that would not necessarily lead to ‘survival, re- production, kinship (inclusive fitness), basic social dynamics, and the reproductive cycle that gives shape to human life and organizes the most intimate relations of family’; never mind that science after Darwin has emphasized processes that go beyond human survival, the family and the organism (including molecular evolution and sexual selection); and never mind that Foucault’s entire oeuvre was critical of interests as the focus of politics (precisely because of discursive and material forces that could not be reduced to intent or surviving life). What requires response in this summation of what ‘qualifies’ as Darwinism is this seeming concession of science to the unique nature of ‘imaginative quality.’ It is as though science provides function and interests, while literary form then breaths life into these purposed by bestowing some special aesthetic sheen. Science yields facts while the humanities trade in the effects and packaging of those facts: what this approach does not allow is any sense of positive feedback. Perhaps more complex narrative modes and understandings of temporality allow for different modes of inquiry, and perhaps scientific inquiry of those broader temporalities opens new structures of literary form that cannot be reduced to ‘imaginative quality.’ The humanities have increasingly responded to Darwinian evolution in a humanizing manner that has reached crisis point today: either it was deemed that the creativity of human life yielded a specific and irreducible wonder of cultural evolution – so that some exception might be made for humans within life – or, as is more common today, evolution is used as a figure to explain morality, politics, language, art and technology, all as conducive to the furtherance of the human organism. And yet other signs exist, beyond all the domesticating uses of Darwin, of deep formal ruptures, of which Darwinism was but one expression.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><br>Never mind that Darwinism would require a commitment to forces of random mutation that would not necessarily lead to ‘survival, re- production, kinship (inclusive fitness), basic social dynamics, and the reproductive cycle that gives shape to human life and organizes the most intimate relations of family’; never mind that science after Darwin has emphasized processes that go beyond human survival, the family and the organism (including molecular evolution and sexual selection); and never mind that Foucault’s entire oeuvre was critical of interests as the focus of politics (precisely because of discursive and material forces that could not be reduced to intent or surviving life). What requires response in this summation of what ‘qualifies’ as Darwinism is this seeming concession of science to the unique nature of ‘imaginative quality.’ It is as though science provides function and interests, while literary form then breaths life into these purposed by bestowing some special aesthetic sheen. Science yields facts while the humanities trade in the effects and packaging of those facts: what this approach does not allow is any sense of positive feedback. Perhaps more complex narrative modes and understandings of temporality allow for different modes of inquiry, and perhaps scientific inquiry of those broader temporalities opens new structures of literary form that cannot be reduced to ‘imaginative quality.’ The humanities have increasingly responded to Darwinian evolution in a humanizing manner that has reached crisis point today: either it was deemed that the creativity of human life yielded a specific and irreducible wonder of cultural evolution – so that some exception might be made for humans within life – or, as is more common today, evolution is used as a figure to explain morality, politics, language, art and technology, all as conducive to the furtherance of the human organism. And yet other signs exist, beyond all the domesticating uses of Darwin, of deep formal ruptures, of which Darwinism was but one expression.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><br><br> </div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><br><br> </div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Not only did imaginative horizons and forms transform to include deeper times and histories beyond those of human agency, so that it became possible to see language, culture and history as possessing a force beyond purpose and intent; new styles of question were posed. Darwin’s vision of human emergence was not a fact absorbed by human time but opened a new figure of time. On the one hand Darwinism enabled science to expand a theological humanism – with life now becoming a wondrous panorama generating complexity and grandeur beyond the limits of ‘man’; on the other hand, a new mode of viewing life and time was required that would no longer privilege the contingent point of view of the human (Indeed, as Nick Bostrom’s work (following Carter and Leslie) on the ‘doomsday’ version of the anthropic principle indicates, a calculation of the probability of any single human point of view would suggest that if there is a species with a distinct temporal phase then I must conclude that it is more likely that I would exist at the point of that phase when humans are the most numerous (Bostrom 2001).) It follows then that for any calculating human observer the chances are that I exist at the end of time and that it is illogical to assume that life will necessarily extend beyond me, infinitely in grand panorama of creation<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">. ''If </del>any individual point of view is, statistically, more probably located at the end of time (when there would be the greatest number of humans).<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">'' </del> The same anthropic principle that would lead me to conclude, statistically, that I am placed at the final point of history when humans are most numerous has another, positive, articulation. Given that I exist in a complex universe of living forms with human evolution, cultural and technological development continuing and proliferating, does it make sense to assume that complex life is highly improbable or do I imagine so many possible and different worlds that ultimately my complex existence would be close to inevitable? Statistically, from my own point of view and focusing on probability, the same anthropic reasoning that would make it rational to expect that I’m in the last phases of human evolution would also prompt me to infer that human life cannot be that improbable, given that it actually exists, and so it’s more likely that there are very many worlds that would, eventually, have produced something like complex life. What such anthropic reasoning suggests is that the human point of view, at least statistically, is at once always oriented towards doomsday and always more likely to be located in a vast panorama of possibilities, of which its own actuality would be but one form. In terms of evolution, we can move from the calculation of probabilities from the human point of view to the inhuman point of view of deep time: here, too, the existence of the human species in time appears as fleeting, exceptional and as a fragment of an inhuman spectrum of possibilities.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Not only did imaginative horizons and forms transform to include deeper times and histories beyond those of human agency, so that it became possible to see language, culture and history as possessing a force beyond purpose and intent; new styles of question were posed. Darwin’s vision of human emergence was not a fact absorbed by human time but opened a new figure of time. On the one hand Darwinism enabled science to expand a theological humanism – with life now becoming a wondrous panorama generating complexity and grandeur beyond the limits of ‘man’; on the other hand, a new mode of viewing life and time was required that would no longer privilege the contingent point of view of the human (Indeed, as Nick Bostrom’s work (following Carter and Leslie) on the ‘doomsday’ version of the anthropic principle indicates, a calculation of the probability of any single human point of view would suggest that if there is a species with a distinct temporal phase then I must conclude that it is more likely that I would exist at the point of that phase when humans are the most numerous (Bostrom 2001).) It follows then that for any calculating human observer the chances are that I exist at the end of time and that it is illogical to assume that life will necessarily extend beyond me, infinitely in grand panorama of creation<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">, if </ins>any individual point of view is, statistically, more probably located at the end of time (when there would be the greatest number of humans). The same anthropic principle that would lead me to conclude, statistically, that I am placed at the final point of history when humans are most numerous has another, positive, articulation. Given that I exist in a complex universe of living forms with human evolution, cultural and technological development continuing and proliferating, does it make sense to assume that complex life is highly improbable or do I imagine so many possible and different worlds that ultimately my complex existence would be close to inevitable? Statistically, from my own point of view and focusing on probability, the same anthropic reasoning that would make it rational to expect that I’m in the last phases of human evolution would also prompt me to infer that human life cannot be that improbable, given that it actually exists, and so it’s more likely that there are very many worlds that would, eventually, have produced something like complex life. What such anthropic reasoning suggests is that the human point of view, at least statistically, is at once always oriented towards doomsday and always more likely to be located in a vast panorama of possibilities, of which its own actuality would be but one form. In terms of evolution, we can move from the calculation of probabilities from the human point of view to the inhuman point of view of deep time: here, too, the existence of the human species in time appears as fleeting, exceptional and as a fragment of an inhuman spectrum of possibilities.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><br><br></div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><br><br></div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>The concept or figure of evolution has two sides: evolution has been thoroughly humanized, allowing ‘man’ to see all his technical extensions (from writing to morality) as adaptive extensions of his organic and self-serving life; but a broader view of evolution allows a temporality of extinction in which no life-form can be considered normative, necessary or particularly worthy. This ‘double vision’ (in which life at once seems to open its temporal horizon for human viewing and yet also extends beyond human comprehension) cannot be isolated as they way in which a certain individual (Darwin) or a certain science pictured the future: with the thought of a time from which the human species emerged, for something altered more generally in the modes and possibilities of knowledge. Just as extinction events occur both as single catastrophes and as pulses (Benton), so thought events occur as shifts in the very relation between thinking and what is thought, and in additional ruptures. Darwinism was a thought event that placed humanity within time, but the pulse of extinction awareness that is coming to the fore in the twenty-first century adds the sense of an ending to the broader awareness of the historical emergence of the human species.</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>The concept or figure of evolution has two sides: evolution has been thoroughly humanized, allowing ‘man’ to see all his technical extensions (from writing to morality) as adaptive extensions of his organic and self-serving life; but a broader view of evolution allows a temporality of extinction in which no life-form can be considered normative, necessary or particularly worthy. This ‘double vision’ (in which life at once seems to open its temporal horizon for human viewing and yet also extends beyond human comprehension) cannot be isolated as they way in which a certain individual (Darwin) or a certain science pictured the future: with the thought of a time from which the human species emerged, for something altered more generally in the modes and possibilities of knowledge. Just as extinction events occur both as single catastrophes and as pulses (Benton), so thought events occur as shifts in the very relation between thinking and what is thought, and in additional ruptures. Darwinism was a thought event that placed humanity within time, but the pulse of extinction awareness that is coming to the fore in the twenty-first century adds the sense of an ending to the broader awareness of the historical emergence of the human species.</div></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>; Robert. M. May: [http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1537/41.full Ecological Science and Tomorrow’s World] </div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>; Robert. M. May: [http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1537/41.full Ecological Science and Tomorrow’s World] </div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>; Stephen Jay Gould: [http://brembs.net/gould.html The Evolution of Life on Earth]</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>; Stephen Jay Gould: [http://brembs.net/gould.html The Evolution of Life on Earth]</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>; <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Valenti </del>Rull: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2775185/ Beyond Us: Is a World Without Humans Possible?]</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>; <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Valentí </ins>Rull: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2775185/ Beyond Us: Is a World Without Humans Possible?]</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>; Sarda Sahney and Michael J. Benton: [http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/275/1636/759.full Recovery from the Most Profound Mass Extinction of All Time]</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>; Sarda Sahney and Michael J. Benton: [http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/275/1636/759.full Recovery from the Most Profound Mass Extinction of All Time]</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>; Jessica H. Whiteside ''et al''.: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2872409/pdf/pnas.1001706107.pdf?tool=pmcentrez Compound-specific Carbon Isotopes from Earth’s Largest Flood Basalt Eruptions Directly Linked to the end-Triassic Mass Extinction]</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>; Jessica H. Whiteside ''et al''.: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2872409/pdf/pnas.1001706107.pdf?tool=pmcentrez Compound-specific Carbon Isotopes from Earth’s Largest Flood Basalt Eruptions Directly Linked to the end-Triassic Mass Extinction]</div></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><br<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">.</del><br></div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><br<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">></ins><br></div></td></tr>
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</table>Joannahttps://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Extinction/Introduction&diff=4401&oldid=prevJoanna at 20:03, 26 February 20122012-02-26T20:03:25Z<p></p>
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<td colspan="2" style="background-color: #fff; color: #202122; text-align: center;">Revision as of 20:03, 26 February 2012</td>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><br></div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><br></div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>== '''Introduction''' ==</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>== '''Introduction''' ==</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Scientific events have their own consistency and it is often a mistake for humanities scholars to reduce such complexities to ‘worldviews’ or the history of ideas. To pass from quantum uncertainty to postmodern literary styles reduces the disciplinary specificity of scientific discovery and functions, and risks presenting literature and culture as reflections or contexts for scientific facts. Yet it is also the case that certain scientific do not <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">events </del>occur as facts within history but rather open up a new experience and possibility of history, and a new way in which the very relation between history and science might be considered. When Darwin posited that the human species had a beginning within the history of life this was not only a fact about ‘our’ history<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">, </del>it also opened up formal problems for the imagination: how could our understanding of the human and the humanities proceed with a sense of the processes of life beyond human time? History is no longer a human narrative, and human narratives themselves seem to incorporate forces that are no longer human – from Thomas Hardy’s cosmic irony to modernism’s sense of atavism and the genesis of human life from hearts of darkness. Genuine scientific events provide a richness for aesthetic practice (especially if we consider how the possibility of a world without humans has opened up new genres of post-apocalyptic film and literature, and if we note Victorian poetry’s capacity to approach something like sound itself that would intone beyond human meaning). But events are two-sided and allow as much for humanizing re-inscription as they do for disturbances of our already-ordered modes of comprehension.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Scientific events have their own consistency and it is often a mistake for humanities scholars to reduce such complexities to ‘worldviews’ or the history of ideas. To pass from quantum uncertainty to postmodern literary styles reduces the disciplinary specificity of scientific discovery and functions, and risks presenting literature and culture as reflections or contexts for scientific facts. Yet it is also the case that certain scientific <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">events </ins>do not occur as facts within history but rather open up a new experience and possibility of history, and a new way in which the very relation between history and science might be considered. When Darwin posited that the human species had a beginning within the history of life<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">, </ins>this was not only a fact about ‘our’ history<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">; </ins>it also opened up formal problems for the imagination: how could our understanding of the human and the humanities proceed with a sense of the processes of life beyond human time? History is no longer a human narrative, and human narratives themselves seem to incorporate forces that are no longer human – from Thomas Hardy’s cosmic irony to modernism’s sense of atavism and the genesis of human life from hearts of darkness. Genuine scientific events provide a richness for aesthetic practice (especially if we consider how the possibility of a world without humans has opened up new genres of post-apocalyptic film and literature, and if we note Victorian poetry’s capacity to approach something like sound itself that would intone beyond human meaning). But events are two-sided and allow as much for humanizing re-inscription as they do for disturbances of our already-ordered modes of comprehension.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><br><br> </div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><br><br> </div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>The concept of evolution and the temporality it brings in train opens new horizons for knowledge – not just new facts but also ways of approaching the world of facts. If evolution is a concept, it is so in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense: it is both a function (or a way of thinking about processes of the world from an inhuman point of view) and a concept that reorients the entire terrain of thinking, requiring us to have new figures of the human, new figures of life, new relations among life and perception, and even new understandings of what would count as thinking (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994). The conceptual possibilities of evolution are dampened if they are folded around the human point of view. If we see life as functional, oriented towards our types of complexity and order, and inevitably leading towards the types of complexity exemplified by humans, then we miss the decentering randomness and rogue temporalities of evolutionary processes. It is perhaps too easy to look back on social Darwinism and think that we are now so much more sophisticated in our assimilation of Darwinian time into human time. But I would suggest that this is not so, and that the uses of Darwin today – especially in what has come to be known as ‘literary Darwinism’ – actually have the effect of reducing the force not only of Darwinism but of another temporal event, extinction: not only have we humanized the emergence of humans from deep time (by regarding evolution as being oriented towards adaptation), but we have also domesticated the sense of the human end. I would refer to this as a reaction formation: precisely as the multiple threats to our species intensify, we affirm various modes of ‘post-humanism’ that deny the specific scars human beings have inscribed on the planet (as though we could simply abandon the destructiveness of our species and become one with a connected, ecological and creative world). Maturana and Varela’s theories of embodied cognition are gaining increasing currency, positing that there is no such thing as mind that is not already embodied and emergent from the world (even though all the evidence of anthropogenic destructions suggests that we have successfully closed ourselves off from all sense of connectedness. Perhaps the most astounding modes of this reaction take the form of seeming incorporations of Darwinism: cognitive archaeology, to name but one example, will assert that human formations as abstract as modernist art have their origin in the organism’s functional capacity to organize perceptions for the sake of survival. The essays on extinction in this volume – essays that evidence an increasingly destructive, world-disturbing and distinctly human force, along with a complexity that precludes any simple narrative or single causality – suggest that however the human species has evolved, there can be no question that function, survival and fitness tell only part of the story of life processes. Claims such as the following are typical of what has come to be known as ‘literary Darwinism’:<br><br></div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>The concept of evolution and the temporality it brings in train opens new horizons for knowledge – not just new facts but also ways of approaching the world of facts. If evolution is a concept, it is so in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense: it is both a function (or a way of thinking about processes of the world from an inhuman point of view) and a concept that reorients the entire terrain of thinking, requiring us to have new figures of the human, new figures of life, new relations among life and perception, and even new understandings of what would count as thinking (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994). The conceptual possibilities of evolution are dampened if they are folded around the human point of view. If we see life as functional, oriented towards our types of complexity and order, and inevitably leading towards the types of complexity exemplified by humans, then we miss the decentering randomness and rogue temporalities of evolutionary processes. It is perhaps too easy to look back on social Darwinism and think that we are now so much more sophisticated in our assimilation of Darwinian time into human time. But I would suggest that this is not so, and that the uses of Darwin today – especially in what has come to be known as ‘literary Darwinism’ – actually have the effect of reducing the force not only of Darwinism but of another temporal event, extinction: not only have we humanized the emergence of humans from deep time (by regarding evolution as being oriented towards adaptation), but we have also domesticated the sense of the human end. I would refer to this as a reaction formation: precisely as the multiple threats to our species intensify, we affirm various modes of ‘post-humanism’ that deny the specific scars human beings have inscribed on the planet (as though we could simply abandon the destructiveness of our species and become one with a connected, ecological and creative world). Maturana and Varela’s theories of embodied cognition are gaining increasing currency, positing that there is no such thing as mind that is not already embodied and emergent from the world (even though all the evidence of anthropogenic destructions suggests that we have successfully closed ourselves off from all sense of connectedness. Perhaps the most astounding modes of this reaction take the form of seeming incorporations of Darwinism: cognitive archaeology, to name but one example, will assert that human formations as abstract as modernist art have their origin in the organism’s functional capacity to organize perceptions for the sake of survival. The essays on extinction in this volume – essays that evidence an increasingly destructive, world-disturbing and distinctly human force, along with a complexity that precludes any simple narrative or single causality – suggest that however the human species has evolved, there can be no question that function, survival and fitness tell only part of the story of life processes. Claims such as the following are typical of what has come to be known as ‘literary Darwinism’:<br><br></div></td></tr>
</table>Joannahttps://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Extinction/Introduction&diff=4400&oldid=prevJoanna at 19:55, 26 February 20122012-02-26T19:55:34Z<p></p>
<a href="https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Extinction/Introduction&diff=4400&oldid=4396">Show changes</a>Joannahttps://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Extinction/Introduction&diff=4396&oldid=prevJoanna at 20:46, 20 February 20122012-02-20T20:46:21Z<p></p>
<a href="https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Extinction/Introduction&diff=4396&oldid=4395">Show changes</a>Joannahttps://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Extinction/Introduction&diff=4395&oldid=prevJoanna at 20:21, 20 February 20122012-02-20T20:21:41Z<p></p>
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<td colspan="2" style="background-color: #fff; color: #202122; text-align: center;">← Older revision</td>
<td colspan="2" style="background-color: #fff; color: #202122; text-align: center;">Revision as of 20:21, 20 February 2012</td>
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<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>; Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams and Will Steffen: [http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es903118j The New World of the Anthropocene]</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>; Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams and Will Steffen: [http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es903118j The New World of the Anthropocene]</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><br></div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><br></div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Even though environmental efforts to check carbon emissions have been central to pressures on policy makers, and even though carbon is only one <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">factor </del>among many complex factors – with the focus on carbon perhaps allowing for other life-threatening factors to intensify unabated – carbon itself cannot be reckoned as an extensive quantity. It is not simply the case that increased carbon emissions will add, incrementally, to some overall warming of the planet. Rather, even carbon as an isolated factor operates intensively: each increase of emission alters the very way in which emissions change the environment. That is to say, what counts as the environment, or the specific system of exchanges that constitutes ‘our’ milieu, is itself altering. We cannot, then, simply come up with a number that would be the ideal point at which carbon emissions would be capped, nor calculate the temperature elevation that would be the limit beyond which environmental management would be achievable. As Will Steffen demonstrates, the emission of carbon will have complex and non-linear intensive effects: if there is an elevation in temperature then this will have an effect on soil respiration and lead to the release of more carbon; further, carbon emissions are perhaps better <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">thought of less </del>as steady incremental rises than as ‘pulses’, with increased temperatures increasing the incidence of wildfires and pest outbreaks, damaging ecosystems and destroying their capacity to act as sinks for atmospheric CO2. Nor is carbon a simple evil or harm to the environment; black carbon that is stored in soils acts as a sink for emissions, but temperature rises will lead to melting permafrosts and the loss of peatlands, resulting in the release of CO2 and CH4. Carbon is not an isolated element but a cyclic quality that acts in relation to other quantities, producing specific relations. </div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Even though environmental efforts to check carbon emissions have been central to pressures <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">exerted </ins>on policy makers, and even though carbon is only one among many complex factors – with the focus on carbon perhaps allowing for other life-threatening factors to intensify unabated – carbon itself cannot be reckoned as an extensive quantity. It is not simply the case that increased carbon emissions will add, incrementally, to some overall warming of the planet. Rather, even carbon as an isolated factor operates intensively: each increase of emission alters the very way in which emissions change the environment. That is to say, what counts as the environment, or the specific system of exchanges that constitutes ‘our’ milieu, is itself altering. We cannot, then, simply come up with a number that would be the ideal point at which carbon emissions would be capped, nor calculate the temperature elevation that would be the limit beyond which environmental management would be achievable. As Will Steffen demonstrates, the emission of carbon will have complex and non-linear intensive effects: if there is an elevation in temperature then this will have an effect on soil respiration and lead to the release of more carbon; further, carbon emissions are perhaps better <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">understood not so much </ins>as steady incremental rises than as ‘pulses’, with increased temperatures increasing the incidence of wildfires and pest outbreaks, damaging ecosystems and destroying their capacity to act as sinks for atmospheric CO2. Nor is carbon a simple evil or harm to the environment; black carbon that is stored in soils acts as a sink for emissions, but temperature rises will lead to melting permafrosts and the loss of peatlands, resulting in the release of CO2 and CH4. Carbon is not an isolated element but a cyclic quality that acts in relation to other quantities, producing specific relations.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Disturbance in temperature is but one outcome of increased carbon emissions, but once temperature is disturbed, or once ocean acidity rises because of the formation of carbonic acid, then oceans also lose their capacity to act as sinks. Considering just one element <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">–carbon </del>– in this cyclic and intensive manner increases the justification for thinking of our era as a geological epoch. For it is not simply the case that ‘man’ will exist as one species among others, having his day in his environment, perhaps destroying a few species along the way. Man will not only become extinct and cause species extinctions, his mode of species existence will have environmental and geological effects. Carbon emissions, to name just one factor, do not simply damage or deplete ecosystems<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">, </del>they alter the temporality, volatility and relations of ecosystems – so much so that it makes sense to think of something like the Anthropocene era as a geological phenomenon.</div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"><br><br> </ins> </div></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-deleted"></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Disturbance in temperature is but one outcome of increased carbon emissions, but once temperature is disturbed, or once ocean acidity rises because of the formation of carbonic acid, then oceans also lose their capacity to act as sinks. Considering just one element <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">– carbon </ins>– in this cyclic and intensive manner increases the justification for thinking of our era as a geological epoch. For it is not simply the case that ‘man’ will exist as one species among others, having his day in his environment, perhaps destroying a few species along the way. Man will not only become extinct and cause species extinctions, his mode of species existence will <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">also </ins>have environmental and geological effects. Carbon emissions, to name just one factor, do not simply damage or deplete ecosystems<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">; </ins>they alter the temporality, volatility and relations of ecosystems – so much so that it makes sense to think of something like the Anthropocene era as a geological phenomenon.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>== '''Time and Discipline''' ==</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>== '''Time and Discipline''' ==</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>; K. J. Willis: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2311423/?tool=pubmed How Can a Knowledge of the Past Help to Conserve the Future? Biodiversity Conservation and the Relevance of Long-term Ecological Studies]</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>; K. J. Willis: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2311423/?tool=pubmed How Can a Knowledge of the Past Help to Conserve the Future? Biodiversity Conservation and the Relevance of Long-term Ecological Studies]</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>; Valentí Rull: [http://www.benthamscience.com/open/toecolj/articles/V003/S10001TOECOLJ/1TOECOLJ.pdf Ecology and Palaeoecology: Two Approaches, One Objective]</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>; Valentí Rull: [http://www.benthamscience.com/open/toecolj/articles/V003/S10001TOECOLJ/1TOECOLJ.pdf Ecology and Palaeoecology: Two Approaches, One Objective]</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><br></div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><br></div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>There is no shortage of climate change research networks and centres, and very little doubt that the problems faced by the human species and its relation to the future <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">requires </del>complex interdisciplinary thinking. But is it the case that the future (and our species’ already grave impact on its own sustainability) can really be approached by connecting or joining disciplines? Do we not have to question the very mode and limit of discipline? A discipline is at once enabling – we can only have manageable knowledge practices by focusing on a field with certain methods and conventions – but those very enabling procedures will also limit what and how we know. Nowhere is this more evident than in the relation the human animal bears to imagining its own future. Most of the disciplines that make up climate change science take place within human <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">timeframes </del>of reference, with one of the key temporal markers for modeling and decision making being the threshold of the industrial revolution. Because this is the point in our brief history when impact became significant and <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">measureable </del>it makes sense that we would chart alterations from that historical point<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">, </del>and model the future according to rates of change from the industrial revolution onwards. But this raises several problems that can be brought to light, both by considering inhuman time frames (in order to assess how we might think of acting in the wake of humans) and inhuman modes of life, especially bacterial life which, as Stephen Jay Gould and others have demonstrated, should lead us to downgrade the centrality we grant to humans and mammals in our ‘iconography of <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">life</del>.<del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">’ </del> </div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>There is no shortage of climate change research networks and centres, and very little doubt that the problems faced by the human species and its relation to the future <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">require </ins>complex interdisciplinary thinking. But is it the case that the future (and our species’ already grave impact on its own sustainability) can really be approached by connecting or joining disciplines? Do we not have to question the very mode and limit of discipline? A discipline is at once enabling – we can only have manageable knowledge practices by focusing on a field with certain methods and conventions – but those very enabling procedures will also limit what and how we know. Nowhere is this more evident than in the relation the human animal bears to imagining its own future. Most of the disciplines that make up climate change science take place within human <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">time frames </ins>of reference, with one of the key temporal markers for modeling and decision making being the threshold of the industrial revolution. Because this is the point in our brief history when impact became significant and <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">measurable, </ins>it makes sense that we would chart alterations from that historical point and model the future according to rates of change from the industrial revolution onwards. But this raises several problems that can be brought to light, both by considering inhuman time frames (in order to assess how we might think of acting in the wake of humans) and inhuman modes of life, especially bacterial life which, as Stephen Jay Gould and others have demonstrated, should lead us to downgrade the centrality we grant to humans and mammals in our ‘iconography of <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">life’</ins>.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="−"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #ffe49c; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Climate change disciplines are predominantly oriented both to human dimensions of time, precisely because anthropology, economics, politics and sociology are social or human sciences, and to human notions of scale because both social and hard sciences have to work with policy makers, who in turn deal with very short-term future times spans (often of election cycles) and alarmingly short historical vistas (usually fifty years). According to the case made for considering the paleo-ecological record, an understanding of deep time reconfigures the way in which we approach the temporality and risks of the present, especially species extinction. We can begin by comparing current rates of species extinctions with previous (non-anthropogenic) mass extinctions, and add weight not only to the notion that we are experiencing a sixth mass extinction event, but also to the notion of this current extinction wave as being an aspect of the Anthropocene epoch, where after man’s non-existence he will have left a signature that will be discernible in the fossil record. But a consideration of broader time frames illuminates not just that there are extinction events, but just what extinctions are imminent. A short time frame might lead us to focus on species with small populations, or species that are experiencing natural fluctuations as part of a very long cycle. Fossil records give some sense of natural variability and even information on the natural limits of species’ evolutionary life. Real decline that lies outwith a <del style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">species’s </del>natural temporal range would then be cause for concern and would alter the ways in which the ‘red list’ of endangered species would be calculated. </div></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"><br><br> </ins> </div></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-deleted"></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Climate change disciplines are predominantly oriented both to human dimensions of time, precisely because anthropology, economics, politics and sociology are social or human sciences, and to human notions of scale<ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">, </ins>because both social and hard sciences have to work with policy makers, who in turn deal with very short-term future times spans (often of election cycles) and alarmingly short historical vistas (usually fifty years). According to the case made for considering the paleo-ecological record, an understanding of deep time reconfigures the way in which we approach the temporality and risks of the present, especially species extinction. We can begin by comparing current rates of species extinctions with previous (non-anthropogenic) mass extinctions, and add weight not only to the notion that we are experiencing a sixth mass extinction event, but also to the notion of this current extinction wave as being an aspect of the Anthropocene epoch, where after man’s non-existence he will have left a signature that will be discernible in the fossil record. But a consideration of broader time frames illuminates not just that there are extinction events, but just what extinctions are imminent. A short time frame might lead us to focus on species with small populations, or species that are experiencing natural fluctuations as part of a very long cycle. Fossil records give some sense of natural variability and even information on the natural limits of species’ evolutionary life. Real decline that lies outwith a <ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">species’ </ins>natural temporal range would then be cause for concern and would alter the ways in which the ‘red list’ of endangered species would be calculated.</div></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" class="diff-side-deleted"></td><td class="diff-marker" data-marker="+"></td><td style="color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #a3d3ff; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><ins style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"><br><br> </ins></div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Knowledge or conjecture regarding ‘natural’ extinction timelines raises the problem of the human counterfactual: should conservation efforts be geared towards saving species that would have a much longer historical span were humans not in existence, or would awareness of the deep impact humans have already had on ecosystems not oblige us to think of conservation as oriented to a planet that is irreversibly humanized, already tipped into an Anthropocene epoch? Fossil records not only allow us to read timelines of species beyond human existence, they can also indicate that what we tend to think of as natural is already reliant on ‘human disturbance.’ Some ecosystems have developed as a result of anthropogenic changes, so that conservation cannot simply be a matter of restoring nature to some imaginary pre-industrial origin. Temporal records beyond human history also bring biodiversity decisions into sharper focus; it is not simply a question of saving threatened species, but of placing the numbers of what remains in relation to cycles of disturbance and proliferation. The ‘synanthropic history thesis’ uses records of previous anthropogenic impact to indicate which species will survive in the Anthropocene future, with it no longer being a question of simply opposing native and exotic species – for what counts as native or natural has already evolved in human-altered systems. What counts as a species; what counts as a species’ natural range, and is ‘natural’ to be defined according to Holocene, pre-human or Anthropocene times and strata? Paleo-ecological records not only enable a more nuanced approach to the present; they can render future modeling exercises more precise by examining how the planet and its species have responded to previous epochs of (non-anthropogenic) climate change. Further, if it is the case that policy decisions will need to think about what species are threatened with extinction, and how such extinctions will impact upon future biodiversity, then running prediction models in reverse, and seeing how accurately they pan out with previous extinction events enables a far more focused sense of future threats. Records from the past can be used to test models, both through backward prediction and running models in reverse. But the broader question posed by paleo-ecological inquiry opens up a new mode of future ethics: what is a species, or a ‘natural range’? As we look further into the past we can recognize not only waves of extinction, and the normality of extinction, but also the various ways in which extinction opens a niche for another ecology. Even if we accept that biodiversity is a prima facie good (which might only be possible with some neo-theological commitment to the ongoing proliferation of life), it becomes evident that a species is a temporally finite phenomenon, with a ‘natural range’ that may be shortened by human disturbance. If ecosystems have evolved with human disturbance then natural range considerations may have to adopt quite different norms of ‘nature’ (including extinction, disturbance and encroachment.) </div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>Knowledge or conjecture regarding ‘natural’ extinction timelines raises the problem of the human counterfactual: should conservation efforts be geared towards saving species that would have a much longer historical span were humans not in existence, or would awareness of the deep impact humans have already had on ecosystems not oblige us to think of conservation as oriented to a planet that is irreversibly humanized, already tipped into an Anthropocene epoch? Fossil records not only allow us to read timelines of species beyond human existence, they can also indicate that what we tend to think of as natural is already reliant on ‘human disturbance.’ Some ecosystems have developed as a result of anthropogenic changes, so that conservation cannot simply be a matter of restoring nature to some imaginary pre-industrial origin. Temporal records beyond human history also bring biodiversity decisions into sharper focus; it is not simply a question of saving threatened species, but of placing the numbers of what remains in relation to cycles of disturbance and proliferation. The ‘synanthropic history thesis’ uses records of previous anthropogenic impact to indicate which species will survive in the Anthropocene future, with it no longer being a question of simply opposing native and exotic species – for what counts as native or natural has already evolved in human-altered systems. What counts as a species; what counts as a species’ natural range, and is ‘natural’ to be defined according to Holocene, pre-human or Anthropocene times and strata? Paleo-ecological records not only enable a more nuanced approach to the present; they can render future modeling exercises more precise by examining how the planet and its species have responded to previous epochs of (non-anthropogenic) climate change. Further, if it is the case that policy decisions will need to think about what species are threatened with extinction, and how such extinctions will impact upon future biodiversity, then running prediction models in reverse, and seeing how accurately they pan out with previous extinction events enables a far more focused sense of future threats. Records from the past can be used to test models, both through backward prediction and running models in reverse. But the broader question posed by paleo-ecological inquiry opens up a new mode of future ethics: what is a species, or a ‘natural range’? As we look further into the past we can recognize not only waves of extinction, and the normality of extinction, but also the various ways in which extinction opens a niche for another ecology. Even if we accept that biodiversity is a prima facie good (which might only be possible with some neo-theological commitment to the ongoing proliferation of life), it becomes evident that a species is a temporally finite phenomenon, with a ‘natural range’ that may be shortened by human disturbance. If ecosystems have evolved with human disturbance then natural range considerations may have to adopt quite different norms of ‘nature’ (including extinction, disturbance and encroachment.) </div></td></tr>
<tr><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>== '''Ecosystems and Biodiversity''' ==</div></td><td class="diff-marker"></td><td style="background-color: #f8f9fa; color: #202122; font-size: 88%; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 4px; border-radius: 0.33em; border-color: #eaecf0; vertical-align: top; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div>== '''Ecosystems and Biodiversity''' ==</div></td></tr>
</table>Joannahttps://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Extinction/Introduction&diff=4394&oldid=prevJoanna at 20:13, 20 February 20122012-02-20T20:13:58Z<p></p>
<a href="https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Extinction/Introduction&diff=4394&oldid=4393">Show changes</a>Joanna