What is Causing This Current 6th Evolutionary Period of Massive Species Extinction Rate?
In recent years I have mulled over what Evolution is really about. It exists, is scientifically documented, but describing an event does not give the intent or purpose of the event. Most people, including myself, believe in a God of some sort, often in the sense that wherever there is a gift, there must be a gift giver. Ok, the universe and us exist and so God is the culprit behind it all. EXCEPT: Where did God come from? That’s it, we just don’t have the intelligence to understand how something came from nothing.
Humans do have considerable powers of rational thought so we mostly create a God in our own image, a God with Whom we can have a personal relationship, and a God who will answer our prayers IF we follow our inherited or marriage adopted religious scripture. Then we tack on heaven and hell and make a contest out of it. The neat thing about this contest is that God is always ready to forgive, which is nice since we can do a U turn, at any point, and God will welcome us to Heaven because he is a very forgiving God. Certainly a lot more forgiving than us since, when we ‘see the light’ on matters like abortion, gay marriage, who can be a priest and so on, on and on, we are ready to cut some throats if heathens do not have their religious beliefs in order. At the very least we will make their beliefs illegal and fine or jail them.
For a long time it seemed to me that ‘well, maybe some religion is the true religion with the real God and it is up to us to have the degree of faith needed to get that religion in line with our lives’. Heaven does sound like a good deal and hell is kind of scary. HOWEVER, we are not really so much in the dark on all this. Every major religion has prayer as part of it’s communication with God. Now if God answers his followers of the one true religion, then members of that religion will have smaller percentages of deaths from diseases, from being on the battlefield, have less poverty amongst them, have less fatal accidents, have fewer of their members being raped, or shot, and so on. There are no such statistics. God apparently is not listening to the prayers of these true believers. That’s kind of disconcerting.
On a common sense level, I gave up praying for personal stuff years ago. Now really, why would God help me in my personal life, and simply ignore the prayers of homeless refugees? Why would God let a little girl get raped and help me with a personal hurdle or problem? What kind of God are we worshipping? Believing as most people do, why do we never hear of screaming for help from God when an assault on us is happening and instead always hear about being safe by caring lethal weapons?
Be all this as it may, it is still God which created the laws which govern the evolutionary process. So what is this evolutionary process about? It has been around now for billions of years, and so it must have a purpose. After all it generated you and I. Just how many different species exist on our planet today? Scientists estimate there are about 8.7 million. Wow!!!!! How many of them are most of us familiar with? What are they around for anyway? God certainly isn’t listening to their prayers. The dumb bastards don’t even know how to pray. Here is a bigger wow!!!!!!!——99% of species that existed in evolutionary history are now extinct. Could this happen to our species? Are we going to be the first species to exist and be a permanent feature of the process from now on? That question, in my case, is certainly beyond my comprehensive ability.
What does seem evident, from the above, is that God’s interest is in the evolutionary process itself, not to perpetuate any particular favored species. Change is based on which of the millions of species can best adapt to environmental changes. We don’t even know what constitutes our total environment. Who knows what else exists in the Universe, and what long term effects will change the nature of our planet, let alone the whole Universe. What a revolting situation for us personally. We are one of 8.7 million species existing on our planet right now and 99% of species which existed over millions of years have become extinct. This makes it hard for us to feel overly important to the whole scheme of things. What then is the point of living? We know the answer since we are all naturally selfish beings. We want to achieve a contented life. No one can be completely contented, so we simply strive to be as contented as we can for as long as we can. That is about it.
With the above introduction we now take a look at what is causing the current species extinction rate to be 10,000 times faster than it was before humans existed. I mean wow, we are a destructive species!!!!!! If enough of you would have the common decency to non exist, the species extinction rate would maybe get back to normal. Human lifestyles result in endless activities which are harmful to other species. In the past 5 major evolutionary periods of mass extinction, climate change due to factors not related to any particular species were the cause of massive extinctions. You know, ice ages and that sort of thing. Our specie activities are the first such lifestyles which are bringing about climate change and mass destruction of habitats in which other species live. The locusts were nothing compared to us.
I tend to harp on this so much that just a small paragraph will suffice. Biology 101 makes it Nixonian perfectly clear that no species can escape the consequences of overpopulation. We can bicker over what level constitutes human overpopulation, but certainly everyone can agree that for the human population to double again, as it has in my lifetime, would be catastrophic. Look, there are too many people on earth right now for there to be enough food, energy sources, and natural resources to enable everyone to live the kind of lifestyle many of us now live. That answers the question as to whether our planet is over populated with humans right now.
Assuming that most everyone knows, in some, if only limited way, that overpopulation is disastrous for any species, it becomes rather depressing to realize that while we know, in theory, the consequences of overpopulation, we cannot emotionally commit to responsible reproduction as an absolute necessity for all nations on our planet. In some sort of broad sense, we are no longer a planet of individual independent nation states. Most everything is global now and this requires global cooperation to control population growth, protect our natural resources including other species, and provide livable wages across the planet to workers.
While we know that humans are the major threat to other species and our human activities the cause of the massive species extinction now going on, the second place culprit is less well known. “Ten thousand years after their ancestors invaded our Fertile Crescent settlements, cats—trailing our armies and sailing on our ships—have spread like dandelion fluff. They have populated every imaginable habitat, from Scottish heaths to African tropical forests to Australian deserts. There are now some 600 million of these felines worldwide, and some scientists put the total closer to a billion.The United States alone has nearly 100 million pet cats, a number that has apparently tripled in the last 40 years—and perhaps nearly as many strays.”
With all due respect to my good friend Sheebiejiebee, my house cat and once feral cat, her species is right up there with human species activities to drive many species closer to extinction. Cats are great hunters when given the opportunity and this includes domesticated cats, not just feral cats. All cats can hunt down over 1000 different species. For a start, cats like to hunt birds. In 2013, Smithsonian and other government scientists suggested that cats kill 1.4 billion to 3.7 billion birds per year. This is apart from the 6.9 billion to 20.7 billion mammals and millions of reptiles and amphibians cats kill per year.
In Australia, a government report implicated house cats in the fate of 92 extinct, threatened, and near threatened mammals in Australia. The Australian continent has the highest rate of mammal extinctions in the world. The popularity and affection for domestic cat pets is at an all time high. I reckon the feelings for cat pets follows along the line for children. People love their children and become apoplectic at any insinuation that there be any limit passed on how many children they can have (responsible reproduction to alleviate human overpopulations). People love their domestic cat pets and become apoplectic at any insinuation that these must be kept as indoor pets or be sterilized.
Many species, once domesticated by captivity, lose the ability to survive in the wild. Not cats. Like humans, cats have populated every imaginable habitat. Not only can they survive in almost any environmental habitat, but cats rank up there as one of the most unsurpassed breeders. A breeding pair of cats could produce 354,294 descendants in five years, if all survived. Once cats are entrenched in an ecosystem, they are almost impossible to dislodge. Bait poison rarely works as cats prefer to eat live animals. The cat defendants are not without their points. Why make cats the scapegoat for species extinction when in the absence of responsible human reproduction, this current massive species extinction period will continue? Some also argue that cats are a big plus in urban cities as they keep the rodent population down. Some rural farmers feel the same way about cats controlling rodents in their barns etc. An indoor cat’s avg life span is 12 years while an outdoor cat’s avg lifespan in less than 5 years.
Someone guessed that cows were in second place to humans as the greatest contributor of our current species extinction period. I think they were referring to the methane put into the atmosphere which contributes to climate change. While this is true, cows are not directly causing other species to become extinct like humans and cats.
In the broadest possible manner, if I were to put all the serious problems facing our planet, which I have mentioned in numerous musings, in one bag—well, the complexity of the entire situation would be far beyond the average voter, or probably any single human, to grasp enough to enable effective solutions to be achieved. This is what is scary. We humans are now over our head. We cannot mentally, or emotionally, handle all this coming down on our planet at this point in evolution. The evolutionary process (Mother Nature) will, I suppose, handle this like she has handled other dire situations in evolutionary history and over time, with stalls and reverses, come back stronger than ever with a new and improved universe. All the changes will happen independent of our own personal human planning. The most our input can affect is timing, not the kind of changes themselves. Whatever proves best to survive in a changing environment will survive. The rest perish. I always like to point out that if Lincoln had not organized the extinction of slavery in our country someone else would have in due time. If Eli Whitney hadn’t invented the cotton gin, someone else would have. Like it or not, we are pawns in the process, not major players as individuals. All my musifications mean nothing, albeit many already have figured that out—except me. Well, that’s not true since I do know that and it’s just a hobby. I feel more contented each day having, in my own mind, figured out something about this thing we experience called life. After all, the more mundane amusements have become just more of the same ole, same ole, same ole. The goal of everyone is to be more contented in life, albeit we all don’t go down the same paths to achieve personal contentment. What is for sure is that compulsive behaviors of most any sort do not lead to contentment. If we cannot learn to sense when enough is enough of just about anything, then contentment will elude us, be it money, power, control, sex, food, gambling, and so on.
Sheebiejiebee, my once feral cat, is lying on the desk looking at me with such peacefulness in her eyes. I am thinking how odd that her species and my species have become such threats to the welfare of our planet. The locusts have become extinct. Uh oh! Is this threatening to me? Hardly, every one of us will personally become extinct in due time. The order in which we personally become extinct is irrelevant. But being a gentleman (if you can pardon the exaggeration) I will let you go first. Death levels all. If I cannot be of major importance to the evolutionary process, then I suppose T.O. is right—‘fair is fair’. We all become the brotherhood of unimportance. Oddly enough, as I have found out with retirement, being unimportant can be a peaceful, mellow, contented mode of existence. Being busy as a bee, with all the stress, manipulations, competition, short term achievements, winning and losing, and so on—all this has it’s place but is rarely the end all objective of our lives. There is a lot to be said for getting up each day in reasonable health, and doing exactly what one feels like doing, independent of others—albeit never interfering with others, and wallowing in a mellow contented manner of living. Then we die. It is what it is.
