Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene PDF Free Download
1 / 368/368
100%
Copyright 2020. University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.
EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via
AN: 2334656 ; David Sepkoski.; Catastrophic Thinking : Extinction and the Value of Diversity From Darwin to the Anthropocene
Account: ns335141
CATASTROPHIC THINKING
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
science · culture
A seies edited by Adian Johns
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
CATASTROPHIC
THINKING
Extinction and the Value o Diversity
from Darwin to the Anthropocene
David Sepkoski
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO AND LONDON
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
e University o Chicago Press, Chicago
e University o Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© by e University o Chicago
All ights reseved. No part o this book may be used or reproduced in
any manner whatsoever without witten pemission, except in the case
o bie quotations in citical articles and reviews. For more infomation,
contact the University o Chicago Press, E. th St., Chicago, IL .
Published
Pinted in the United States o Ameica
ISBN- : - - - - (cloth)
ISBN- : - - - - (e- book)
DOI: https:// doi .org / . /chicago / . .
Published with support o the Susan E. Abrams Fund
Libray o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sepkoski, David, – author.
Title: Catastrophic thinking : extinction and the value o diversity / David Sepkoski.
Other titles: Science.culture.
Desciption: Chicago : University o Chicago Press, . | Seies:
Science culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identiers: LCCN | ISBN (cloth) |
ISBN (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Extinction (Biology) | Biodiversity.
Classication: LCC QH .S | DDC .—dc
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/
is paper meets the requirements o ANSI/NISO Z.–
(Pemanence o Paper).
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
In Memoy o David M. Raup (–)
For Sid and Ella, with apologies for the world we’ve le you
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
CONTENTS
Introduction: Why Extinction Matters1
1e Meaning o Extinction: Catastrophe,
Equilibium, and Diversity17
2Extinction in a Victoian Key47
3Catastrophe and Modenity83
4Extinction in the Shadow o the Bomb127
5e Asteroid and the Dinosaur169
6A Sixth Extinction? e Making o a Biodiversity Cisis229
Epilogue: Extinction in the Anthropocene295
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
INTRODUCTION:
WHY EXTINCTION MATTERS
I you were a dinosaur unlucky enough to be living in the region that
is now the Yucatán Peninsula one fateful day million years ago, you
would have been startled by a blinding ash o light across the entire
sky. An instant later, life on earth was changed forever. e ash o light
was caused by a meteoite (or a comet) the size o Mount Everest—
some ten to fourteen kilometers in diameter ( tons)—enteing the
earth’s atmosphere travelling between thirty and seventy kilometers per
second. e ash was caused as the intense speed and pressure o the
asteroid heated the atmosphere undeneath it to temperatures four to
ve times hotter than the sun. e impact itsel was almost unimagin-
ably devastating: the energy released was equivalent to one hundred
million megatons o TNT, or roughly ten thousand times the combined
destuctiveness o the entire nuclear arsenal at the height o the Cold
War. e rst eect was to buy a crater almost forty kilometers deep
into the earth’s cust, simultaneously ejecting some one hundred cubic
kilometers o earth into the atmosphere in a twenty- thousand- degree
reball that reached into space. All living things within several hundred
kilometers were simply vapoized. Earthquakes o magnitude or
ippled outward from the impact, violently buckling the earth’s cust
hundreds o meters into the air. is seismic activity tiggered a massive
tsunami, perhaps a kilometer high, that swept across the Gul o Mexico
and stuck the coastline with enough force to travel twenty kilometers
inland.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
2 INTRODUCTION
But this was only the beginning. As the mateial ejected from the
impact reentered the atmosphere, it fell in a ey rain across the globe,
tiggeing wildres that engulfed entire continents. e combined soot
and dust in the atmosphere blocked out the sun for several months, en-
veloping the earth in near- total darkness. Photosynthesis stopped com-
pletely. When the rains nally came to wash away the soot, they caried
deadly nitic acid fomed when the superheated atmosphere bonded
nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen molecules. Even aer the skies cleared,
the enomous amounts o CO released when the asteroid impacted the
limestone layer in the earth’s cust remained in the atmosphere, caus-
ing a massive greenhouse eect that lasted for thousands o years. e
aemath o this event saw the total extinction o some percent o all
living species on earth—including, o course, the dinosaurs.
is scenaio is part o a hypothesis advanced by a team o scientists
led by the father- and- son duo o Luis and Walter Alvarez in . It was
based on their investigations o an anomalous layer o iidium, an ele-
ment not commonly found on earth, at the bounday o the Cretaceous
and Tertiay peiods, roughly million years ago. It set o a ury o
scientic activity that ganered intenational media attention for a de-
cade, and fundamentally changed the way we understand the nature
o extinction. Other spectacular claims followed: a team o paleontolo-
gists announced that the K- T extinction (K, the symbol for Cretaceous,
refers to the characteistic chalk—Kreide in Geman—found in many
deposits) was only one o at least ve major extinction events duing the
past million years, and not even the biggest one at that. To this they
added the startling conclusion that these extinction events appeared to
be spaced regularly in time, occuring evey million years. A group
o geophysicists and astronomers contibuted to this nding by hy-
pothesizing the existence o a mysteious companion star, which they
dubbed “Nemesis,” that traveled in an eccentic orbit around the solar
system, peiodically disturbing comets and raining death on the earth.
ese sensational claims ganered enomous public attention, no
doubt in part because they proposed a solution to the long- standing
mystey o the demise o the dinosaurs. But the extinction hypotheses
also tapped into a broad public awareness—and paranoia—about im-
pending nuclear apocalypse that was fed by movies like On the Beach,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
WHY EXTINCTION MATTERS 3
e Day Aer, reads, and Testament, which realistically depicted not
only the horror o nuclear Amageddon but also the chilling prospect o
the “nuclear winter” that would follow. It is no accident, in other words,
that the public was fascinated with scientic hypotheses about dooms-
day scenaios from the past at a time when many believed humanity was
on the edge o its own nuclear self- immolation.
At the same time, duing the mid- s, another major scientic
movement was gatheing momentum and would come, in the next de-
cades, to gip our attention even more strongly. is was the burgeoning
awareness that the earth faced an impending “biodiversity cisis.” Since
the s, a number o scientists had been giving voice to an increas-
ing sense o alam about the rapid depletion o worldwide ecosystems
and the potentially pemanent loss o many species and habitats. While
a long histoy o consevation eorts in ecology and biology certainly
contibuted to this awareness, there was something genuinely new in
the way this public discussion focused not just on protecting one or a
few individual species or habitats, but rather on preseving the entire
diverse global ecosystem itself. In this sense, biological diversity was
identied as an inherent property o healthy ecosystems, and as a value
in itself.
Another novel feature o the emerging biodiversity movement was
the specter o catastrophic mass extinction. is was precisely what
paleontologists and geologists had become interested in as a diving
force in histoical ecological change, and it came to haunt news reports,
documentaies, scientic articles, and popular books championing bio-
diversity. Mass extinction was an idea that had long been associated
with the “catastrophism” o nineteenth- centuy scientists like Georges
Cuvier, who had argued that the earth’s histoy has been shaped by pei
-
odic drastic “revolutions” that have altered both the physical and the
biological makeup o the globe. But for sober Victoian naturalists like
Charles Dawin and the geologist Charles Lyell, to whom this sounded
a bit too much like biblical geology, a picture o geological histoy in
which changes took place vey slowly and gradually made much more
sense. So, for the next centuy or so, geologists and paleontologists were
careful to avoid the subject o catastrophic mass extinctions—meaning
that the Alvarez hypothesis and other paleontological investigations o
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
4 INTRODUCTION
extinction represented a fairly radical “new catastrophism” movement
that had been gaining populaity since the late s. e language o
the new catastrophism was evident in the biodiversity rhetoic ight
from the start. For example, the ecologist Noman Myers’s inuential
book e Sinking Ark characteized current rates o species extinc-
tion as being potentially more disastrous than the event that killed the
dinosaurs, and waned that it was “happening within the twinkling o
an evolutionay eye” (Myers , ix).
Consciousness- raising among scientists about threats to biological
diversity reached a citical mass in , when the entomologist and
ecologist E. O. Wilson teamed up with the botanist Walter G. Rosen
to host a “National Foum on BioDiversity” in Washington, DC. is
event, cosponsored by the National Academy o Sciences and the
Smithsonian Institution, was the rst major interdisciplinay confer-
ence on the biological diversity cisis, and brought together major g-
ures in biology, ecology, paleontology, economics, and public policy. It
ganered a signicant amount o media attention—in both the scientic
and the popular press—and is widely credited with launching biodiver-
sity presevation as an organized movement.
From the vey beginning, extinction was central to the way the orga-
nizers perceived the “cisis.” As Wilson put it in the introduction to the
companion volume to the conference, “e current reduction o diver-
sity seems destined to approach that o the great natural catastrophes at
the end o the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras—in other words, the most
extreme in the past million years.” Wilson’s contibution—like
many o his later witings on the subject—made frequent references to
paleontological studies o mass extinctions, which he used to establish
parameters to distinguish between “nomal” and “extraordinay” levels
o extinction. is strategy has been picked up in nearly all subsequent
discussions o biodiversity, so much so that the current cisis is oen
referred to as the “Sixth Mass Extinction,” in reference to the ve major
mass extinctions identied by paleontologists in the geological past.
is Sixth Extinction concept has achieved wide cultural currency, in
part because o the success o the Pulitzer Pize– winning book
by Elizabeth Kolbert e Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. It has
also inuenced a broad array o current discussions about the impact o
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
WHY EXTINCTION MATTERS 5
anthropogenic climate change and associated environmental cises for
the future o human society associated with the so- called “Anthropo-
cene” concept. Debates about the future o humanity itself, then, are
closely tied to understandings o mass extinctions and environmental
catastrophes in the deep histoy o the earth.
e problem this book addresses is how the development o scien-
tic and cultural understandings o extinction over the past two hun-
dred years have inuenced—and been shaped by—the way Westen
culture has understood the health and stability o its current society
and its prospects for the future. One o the central components in these
discussions has been the way Westeners have (or have not) valued and
appreciated diversity. Diversity is now widely regarded as an essen-
tial biological and cultural resource, and it has become closely tied to
the sense o fragility impeiling both the natural and social worlds—so
much so that, duing the s and the s, the United Nations pro-
duced resolutions calling for the protection o both biological and cul-
tural diversity as essential human “resources.” is investment o diver-
sity with the language o resource and endangement, however, only
emerged as part o a long histoical development whose histoy this
book will narrate. Ultimately, it was because o a set o specic, con-
tingent, and fairly recent histoical circumstances that we leaned to
“think catastrophically” about the threats facing both our natural world
and our human future.
e central argument o this book is that the way we understand the
relationship between humans and the rest o the natural world—and
how we conceive o ecological relationships, geological processes, and
evolutionay dynamics—shapes the kind o futures we can imagine for
our species. It infoms the kinds o scientic questions we ask, the po-
litical and technological ambitions we pursue, our anxieties about the
present and the future, and the basic values that guide our interactions
with one another and with the organisms with whom we share the
planet. e word “imagination” is an important concept in this book.
As the legal scholar and cultural obsever Jedidiah Purdy has recently
put it in his excellent book Aer Nature, “What we become conscious
of, how we see it, and what we believe it means—and eveything we
leave out—are keys to imagining the world. . . . Imagination also en-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
6 INTRODUCTION
ables us to do things together politically: a new way o seeing the world
can be a way o valuing it—a map o things worth saving, or o a future
worth creating” (Purdy , ). e complex web o values and beliefs
associated with extinction at any given histoical peiod foms what I
will call, to use an academic tem o art, an extinction “imaginay.” e
way we understand extinction—the extinction imaginay o any given
time—is ultimately tied to the way we conceive o the basic stability and
secuity o the continued existence o our own species.
Extinction imaginaies are co- constucted both by contemporay
scientic theoies about extinction and by broader cultural attitudes
and values about social progress, technological innovation, ethical re-
sponsibilities towards nature and our fellow humans, and the nature o
histoy itself. Scientic understanding o extinction has changed quite
dramatically over the past two hundred years, as have these other as-
pects o Westen cultural belief, and it is my adamant position that these
changes have been linked and are mutually reinforcing. Histoians have
long since given up, for the most part, debating whether science is a
product o human culture; that scientists and the science they produce
are conditioned by, and in tun contibute to, wider social, political,
and cultural values and beliefs will be treated as a basic assumption o
this book. For any reader with doubts on this score, this book will also
amply document that this is the case. But my larger argument is that the
extinction imaginay, as a particular example o the co- constuction o
scientic and cultural values, has shaped how we understand ourselves,
our histoy, and our future in vey specic and important ways.
I rst became interested in the histoy o extinction nearly twenty
years ago, and I eventually wrote a long book documenting the histoy
o paleontological approaches to studying the pattens o life’s histoy,
including the study o diversication and extinction over hundreds o
millions o years. But my broader interest in extinction goes back much
further. My father, Jack Sepkoski (g. .), was a paleontologist who
was centrally involved in a “renaissance” o extinction research duing
the s and s (he died in at the age o y, while I was still in
graduate school). Growing up with him, I was fascinated by the strange
creatures and landscapes o the distant past that he would descibe to
me, and was haunted by the notion that the magnicent and fearsome
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
0.1 e author’s father, J. John “Jack” Sepkoski Jr., examining the Cretaceous-
Tertiay bounday in an outcropping outside Los Alamos, New Mexico, in . Photo-
graph by Karl Orth. Personal collection o the author.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
8 INTRODUCTION
dinosaurs could have been wiped out in one terible, catastrophic in-
stant. As a child o the late s and s, I found that this resonated
deeply with my own anxieties about the fate o our own species, and I still
vividly remember sitting with my parents watching the ABC television
movie e Day Aer, which dramatically and realistically depicted the
aemath o a nuclear war. I would frequently expeience nightmares
in which I was awakened by a ash o light and looked out my bedroom
window to see a mushroom cloud silently ising from downtown Chi-
cago—which somehow, in my mind, connected to the new stoy about
the fate o the dinosaurs about which my father was suddenly being
inteviewed for magazine articles and science documentaies. It didn’t
occur to me at the time to wonder whether there was any connection
between the way scientists like my father understood mass extinction,
and the pevasive anxiety we all felt about nuclear war. But many years
later, having witten widely about the scientic basis for these theoies,
I came to be convinced that it was no accident that catastrophic mass
extinction became an object o scientic study and popular fascination
at precisely the moment when we imagined a similar fate for ourselves.
is is for me, then, a vey personal histoy—but it is also personal for
all o us, in that it deals intimately not just with how we understand the
global past, but also with our vey personal hopes and anxieties about
the future.
is relationship is exemplied in, o all things, a newspaper
column whose author, Ellen Goodman, asked “whether evey era gets
the dinosaur stoy it deseves.” She explained that the dinosaurs o her
s childhood “were big, but their brains were small. e dinosaurs
couldn’t adapt. Slowly they died out while humans, the adaptable,
thinking species, prospered.” Now, however, we have leaned that the
dinosaurs were merely “the victim o a climatic disaster, a cosmic acci-
dent,” and that mass extinction has been a regular feature o the histoy
o life. What, Goodman mused, does this tell us about our science and
ourselves? She continued, “e scientists o the th centuy—a time
full o belie in progress—saw evolution as part o the planet’s plan o
self- improvement. e ugged individualists o that centuy blamed the
victims for their own failure. ose who lived in a competitive economy
valued the ‘natural competition o species.’ e best man won.” But
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
WHY EXTINCTION MATTERS 9
“surely we are now more sensitive to cosmic catastrophe, to accident.
Surely we are more conscious o the shared fate o the whole species.”
Goodman concluded,
Today the astronauts travel into space and report back that they see no
national borders. Environmentalists remind us that the acid from one na-
tion’s chimneys rains down on another. Most signicantly, another group
o scientists wans us that a nuclear war between two great powers would
bing a universal and winty death. . . . In that sense, the latest dinosaur
theoy ts us uncomfortably well. “Our” dinosaurs died together in some
meteoic winter, the victims o a global catastrophe. As humans, we fear
a similar shared fate. e dierence is that their world was hit by a giant
asteroid while we—the large- brained, adaptable creatures who inheited
the earth—may produce our own extinction” (Goodman ).
I think Goodman is exactly ight: the stoies a society tells itsel
about the fates o extinct prehistoic creatures have as much to do with
that society’s beliefs and values about the natural and social worlds o
the present as they do with the past. Duing the nineteenth centuy, at a
time when naturalists understood nature to be an essentially endlessly
renewable resource, extinction was understood to be nature’s way o
strengthening and improving itsel by weeding out the unt, and com-
petition was celebrated as the source o natural progress. For the Victo-
ians and their immediate descendants, dinosaurs were emblematic o
the fate o all those who are unable to keep pace with a changing world,
and who must therefore stand aside for those who could. e view o
extinction held by Dawin and other nineteenth- centuy naturalists was
that extinction is () slow and gradual, () reciprocally balanced by the
replenishment o new species, and () in some sense progressive. at
is, by reecting the “fair” outcome o natural competition, it contib-
utes to the robustness o living ecosystems by weeding out “unt” indi-
viduals or species.
Viewed from this perspective, diversity is an inherent and self-
renewing property o the “economy o nature,” and thus requires no
special protection or independent valuation. As I will demonstrate in
this book, this particular concept o extinction was central to a cultural
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
10 INTRODUCTION
and political ideology—especially in Bitain and the United States—
that supported impeialism and downplayed the value o protecting
species and peoples from threat o extinction. e cux o the matter is
that, in Victoian society and beyond, extinction was considered both
an inevitable and a progressive process, whether applied to humans or
to “lower” organisms. is view came from biology, but it is insepa-
rable from a broader set o cultural and political attitudes about race
and social progress. It certainly did not promote the active protection o
threatened peoples or organisms, nor did it celebrate intinsic biologi-
cal or cultural dierence the way our society does today. “Diversity” was
not an independent value at that time in biology or culture, because it
had not been identied as something necessay for biological or cultural
stability. I anything, extinction was seen as a positive good: by remov-
ing the unt, it acted for the bettement o species or “races.” ere was
no sense that when species or cultures disappeared, some valuable re-
source was being lost; rather, through the law- abiding process o natu-
ral selection, Nature was constantly improving her stock.
We now live in a society where cultural and biological diversity are
considered to be precious resources, and where threats to those re-
sources are perceived from all directions. We fundamentally value di-
versity, as an inherent nomative good, in a way that previous West-
en societies did not. is is partially due to the emergence in the
mid- twentieth centuy o a new understanding o extinction in which
() extinction is seen as a potentially catastrophic and irreversible pro-
cess, () extinction is characteized explicitly in tems o its eect on
diversity, and () suvival is no longer conceptualized as a “fair game”
in which extinction penalizes only those individuals and species who
“deseve” it. e transfomation from the Victoian attitude to the one
broadly held today was a complex, drawn- out process. ese ideas de-
veloped rst in a scientic context o ecology and paleontology, but
have ramied outward to perceptions o cultural and linguistic diver-
sity, and have become central to cultural valuations o diversity itself.
ere is obviously an important sense in which scientists have them-
selves been inuenced by changing cultural noms (paleontologists
were, aer all, just as fightened by the specter o nuclear war as were
the rest o us), and this book shows that the new understanding o ex-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
WHY EXTINCTION MATTERS 11
tinction was made more acceptable by a cultural and political context in
which nuclear proliferation and environmental catastrophe were loom-
ing specters.
wo central scientic features o this transfomation were the devel-
opment o a new ecological understanding o what “balance” meant in
nature, which began to take shape in the s and ’s, and the emer-
gence o what has been called the “new catastrophism” in paleontology
duing the s and ’s. In the late nineteenth centuy, biologists gen-
erally regarded extinction to be a problem that was “solved.” One can
see just how much this view had changed years later in the com-
ment o David Raup, one o the most prominent extinction theoists
in paleontology, in a letter to a colleague: “I am becoming more and
more convinced that the key gap in our thinking for the last years
is the nature o extinction” (Raup to Schopf, Januay , ). What
Raup meant was that paleontology—and biology more generally—had
no adequate theoy for the causes and consequences o extinction. Here
Raup laid the blame directly at Dawin’s doorstep: by focusing exclu-
sively on natural selection and competitive replacement as the cause o
extinction, Dawin’s view eectively presented a tautology with little
explanatoy value, where “the only evidence we have for the infeioity
o victims o extinction is the fact o their extinction” (Raup , ).
Whereas Dawin himsel believed that levels o biological diver-
sity remained constant over the histoy o life, what paleontologists
who have since studied the fossil record found was a complex patten
o steep ises and shap plummets in levels o diversity over the past
million years. rough work caried out by Raup and other pale-
ontologists duing the s and s, it became apparent that major
catastrophic mass extinctions had played a key role in perturbing the
histoy o life many times. ese mass extinctions were episodes that
typically lasted no more than a few million years, but where anywhere
from to percent o all existing species died out. In , Raup
and my father (who were colleagues at the University o Chicago) ar
-
gued that, remarkably, these mass extinctions appear to follow a regular
peiodicity, occuring roughly evey million years. e major evolu-
tionay intepretation this suggested was that these events could not
be explained as the product o natural selection alone; they were cata-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
12 INTRODUCTION
strophic episodes that eectively “reshued the deck” for evolution,
wiping out long- standing groups (like the dinosaurs), and usheing new
ones (such as the mammals) to evolutionay prominence. I the signi-
cance o these mass extinctions was to be credited, this presented an en-
tirely new view o extinction: while nomal or “background” extinctions
probably occurred as slowly and constantly as Dawin had held, a sig-
nicant mechanism in the histoy o life and diversication was events
that appeared to follow no Dawinian ules o selectivity, in which en-
tire taxonomic groups disappeared through no “fault” o their own. A
central message o this new intepretation was that life on earth has
been much more dynamic—and its continuation more tenuous—than
anyone previously had imagined. e Raup- Sepkoski extinction work
happened to coincide with the Alvarez team’s discovey o evidence
that the dinosaurs peished in a ey cataclysm. e impact evidence
was potentially the kind o nonselective tigger implied by the Raup-
Sepkoski work, and it appeared to revise the earlier Dawinian logic
o extinction in dramatic ways. Raup has most succinctly reduced the
problem to a question o whether extinction is caused by “bad genes or
bad luck”—or, as he has put it, whether “the evolution o life [is] a fair
game, as the suvival- of- the- ttest doctine so strongly implies” (Raup
). One upshot o this extinction work was the creation o a cottage
industy in paleontological studies o mass extinction, and the legitima-
tion o a new catastrophism. Another was that extinction was essentially
redened in tems o diversity: mass extinctions are recognized in the
fossil record, explicitly, as those peiods when diversity drops signi-
cantly in a short amount o time.
ese ndings created a sensation in the scientic community and
the popular media, and for a short time paleontologists and geologists
like Alvarez, Raup, and Sepkoski became minor media stars. Major
magazines and newspapers, from Time and Newsweek to the Ne w Yo r k
Times and the Washington Post, gave the new impact- extinction theo-
ies front- page billing—and I vividly remember being both excited and
nonplussed to see my own father, along with his colleagues whom I
had known from casual backyard cookouts or boing academic parties,
suddenly appeaing in the national media. In ctional accounts, from
science ction novels to major Hollywood lms, comet or asteroid im-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
WHY EXTINCTION MATTERS 13
pacts joined the more familiar theme o nuclear Amageddon as popu-
lar disaster scenaios, and “post- apocalyptic” became a pop- cultural
buzzword. It is not dicult to understand why scientic theoies about
extinction would have caused such a stir: the dinosaurs have always
been the most chaismatic and popular prehistoic creatures, and their
demise had remained an enigma for more than a centuy.
Another factor was the era o Cold War anxieties o nuclear annihila-
tion and environmental catastrophe. I the dinosaurs could go, the idea
went, then so could we humans. In fact, the model o “nuclear winter”
that fightened the public duing the mid- s was actually developed
from climate models produced to estimate the atmospheic eects o
the massive asteroid that likely stuck million years ago, thus making
the juxtaposition o the fates o humanity and the dinosaurs more than
merely metaphoical. It was at the height o the scientic and public
interest in mass extinctions that in the biodiversity movement for-
mally began. ere were certainly earlier contibuting factors: a long
histoy o consevation eorts focused on preseving individual endan-
gered species, for example. But there was something genuinely new
about how the major proponents o biodiversity, people like Wilson and
Noman Myers, mobilized interest in protecting not one or a few indi-
vidual species or habitats, but the entire diverse global ecosystem itself.
Biodiversity, in other words, helped make diversity a nomative value.
e reasons for this are many and complex, but I will point to a few.
In the rst instance, ecologists began duing the mid- twentieth centuy
to better appreciate the fragility and interconnectedness o ecosystems.
One couldn’t focus on just the big, “chaismatic” vertebrates and expect
success; the insects and even microbes mattered, too, i one wanted
to maintain healthy habitats. Second, a transition took place to a less
romantic and more utilitaian environmentalist ethos than the one that
had existed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuies. Con-
sevation arguments increasingly tended to promote the economic,
biomedical, and even ethical reasons for preseving all life, rather than
those related to aesthetics and recreation. e biodiversity movement
would follow this trend. ird, and quite simply, the pace o human de-
pletion o the natural environment got a lot faster. Rain forest destuc-
tion, environmental pollution, sprawl, and a host o other problems had
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
14 INTRODUCTION
been accelerating since the demographic expansion o Westen soci-
eties in the s, making their consequences more and more appar-
ent. Fourth, arguments began more frequently to be focused, from the
s and onward, on the danger o unforeseen consequences. While
the utilitaian value o most species was unknown, the rapid pace o dis-
covey in the phamaceutical and other industies suggested that pre-
viously unknown or humble organisms might have great worth. Like-
wise, as the laws o ecological relationships were better understood, it
occurred to many that irreparable ham might be done to fragile eco-
systems before it was even realized. Diversity itself, in other words, be-
came conceptualized as a vital resource.
Finally, biologists interested in consevation eorts became aware
o the new science o extinction and its consequences, which gave them
both a sense o the scope o the current cisis, and tools and data with
which to predict its consequences. As Wilson put it in e Diversity o
Life, “e laws o biological diversity are witten in the equations o spe-
ciation and extinction” (Wilson ). Paleontological studies o mass
extinction gave biodiversity proponents a set o arguments about the
potential consequences—both for ecological recovey and in evolution-
ay tems—o allowing a “sixth extinction” to proceed unchecked. And
extinction studies have helped silence the appeals to nature’s ability to
endlessly renew itsel that characteized an earlier era o thinking. e
fact that mass extinctions can and do occur, and that they have dramatic
short and long- tem consequences for diversity, has contibuted a much
greater sense o impending danger than was present in earlier conser-
vation rhetoic. Extinction is no longer just something that we discuss
when we are talking about the distant past, or about other species; it
may be taking place now, and it may ultimately impact human beings.
Extinction has become personal.
Duing the s and s the biodiversity movement brought
about a new way o seeing and valuing natural diversity that embodied
not only scientists’ intepretations o empiical evidence, but also their
“political, emotional, aesthetic, ethical, and spiitual feelings” (Takacs
). In other words, biological diversity came to be seen by scientists,
policymakers, and the general public not just as important for ecologi-
cal suvival or medical and economic development, but as something
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
WHY EXTINCTION MATTERS 15
“good” in itself. is shi occurred as many Westen societies began to
identify other kinds o diversity—cultural or linguistic, for example—as
an inherent nomative good. One o the clearest examples o the overlap
between valuations o biological and cultural diversity is in the rheto-
ic used by the United Nations and UNESCO over the years to pro-
mote these ideals. A few years aer the initial biodiversity conference
was held in Washington, representatives from nations took part in
an “Earth Summit” held in Rio de Janeiro. e result was the United
Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, which explicitly called at-
tention to “the intinsic value o biological diversity” (United Nations
). A decade later, UNESCO produced the Universal Declaration on
Cultural Diversity, which framed cultural diversity in the same language
o “resource” in which biological diversity was being presented: “e
Declaration aims both to preseve cultural diversity as a living, and thus
renewable treasure that must not be perceived as being unchanging but
as a process guaranteeing the suvival o humanity” (UNESCO ).
e declaration went on to make the analogy between both foms o
diversity explicit, stating in its article that, “as a source o exchange,
innovation and creativity, cultural diversity is as necessay for human-
kind as biodiversity is for nature.”
is sense that cultural and biological diversity are not merely simi-
lar but actually manifestations o the same phenomenon can be seen in
the emergence o a new tem, “biocultural diversity,” at around the same
time. is conation o biological and cultural diversity is nowhere more
evident than in a UNESCO booklet published in titled Sharing a
World o Dierence: e Earth’s Linguistic, Cultural, and Biological Di-
versity. is document denes biocultural diversity as “interlinkages be-
tween linguistic, cultural, and biological diversity,” and asserts that “the
diversity o life on Earth is fomed not only by the vaiety o plant and
animal species and ecosystems found in nature (biodiversity), but also
by the vaiety o cultures and languages in human society (cultural and
linguistic diversity)” (Skutnabb- Kangas, Ma, and Hamon ). is
cultural diversity can be thought o “as the totality o the ‘cultural and
linguistic ichness’ present within the human species,” a quantity analo-
gous to species and genetic ichness in biology, and the world’s six to
seven thousand languages are “the total ‘pool o ideas’” represented in
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
16 INTRODUCTION
human culture, all o which are threatened by a “linguistic and cultural
extinction cisis” (Skutnabb- Kangas, Ma, and Hamon ). But the
conclusion the booklet reaches goes beyond mere analogical relation-
ship: “Biological diversity and linguistic diversity are not separate as-
pects o the diversity o life, but rather intimately related, and indeed,
mutually supporting ones,” and “the extinction cises that are aect-
ing these manifestations o the diversity o life may be converging also”
(Skutnabb- Kangas, Ma, and Hamon ). e central message is
that, like biological diversity, cultural diversity is a resource for ensur-
ing a healthy cultural “ecosystem” that, i lost, will be lost forever.
e rhetoic o diversity is certainly still contested; just ask any poli-
tician involved in legislation surrounding development o natural re-
sources, or glance at the literature about linguistic or cultural diversity
in public schools. e political le has become heavily invested in a par-
ticular fomulation o the nomative value o biological and cultural di-
versity, as have many politically consevative obsevers in opposing it as
an example o “political correctness.” Religious beliefs have also played
a prominent role in valuations o diversity over the past two centuies,
providing arguments for responsible stewardship as well as justication
for exploitation (as evidenced, for example, by current religious convic-
tion that the climate is in the hands o higher powers, a view recently ex-
pressed by Senator James Inhofe, who declared it outrageous to assume
that humans could change what God had ordained).
As a society we do value diversity in many ways quite dierently
than did nineteenth- centuy Europeans and Ameicans, but we also
stuggle with what diversity is and what it means. While I do not claim
that this book will denitively explain how the complex politics sur-
rounding diversity have evolved, I do suggest that this broader exami-
nation o the way biological and cultural values surrounding extinction
have developed over the past years will shed light on some o the
reasons why issues o diversity remain so contested. To want to preseve
something, we must rst perceive that it is threatened, and the emer-
gence o a new—and personal—view o extinction has been central in
underlining what kinds o threats we as a culture face.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
1
THE MEANING OF EXTINCTION:
CATASTROPHE, EQUILIBRIUM,
AND DIVERSITY
Extinction exerts a powerful cultural fascination today. e extinction
o particular species or groups o animals is oen vested with romantic,
tragic, and moral shading. We sometimes see the demise o the dino-
saurs, for example, as an object lesson for our own hubistic species, or
the helpless dodo as a symbol o the fragile innocence o nature, or the
Ameican bison as a reminder o the destuctive potential o human ex-
pansion. But no matter how much we may regret or moun the loss o
particular species, we now know that extinction is a nomal feature o
the histoy o life, and part o the regular course o nature. Despite the
centrality that extinction now has in our perceptions o nature, the rec-
ognition that extinction is a ubiquitous, even commonplace phenome-
non represents a profound shi in scientic and cultural awareness o
the tenuousness o life and the balance o nature that has taken place
over the past two hundred years. In the late eighteenth centuy, for ex-
ample, many naturalists doubted whether a species could ever become
extinct at all, and when considered, extinction was treated as a rare
phenomenon that took place only under dramatic, exceptional circum-
stances. Even when, by the mid- nineteenth centuy, scientists began to
accept extinction as a more general feature o the histoy o life, it was
widely held that nature maintained a constant equilibium, where the
loss o any one species would always be equally balanced by the appear-
ance o a new one somewhere else.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
18 CHAPTER ONE
e notion that nature is a self- regulating machine is one o the
oldest ideas in Westen philosophy. e notion o plentitude—that “all
that can be imagined must be”—goes back at least as far as Plato and
Aistotle, and with it the conception that nature persists in a maximum
state o diversity, with no new living foms ever being created or lost.
e concept o balance as the opposition o forces or elements was also
a common theme, from the pre- Socratic philosophers through Ais-
totle, and Epicurean and Stoic authors also considered nature’s stable
balance to be an inherent feature o the world. In the Chistian era, au-
thors like Augustine o Hippo combined this essentially neo- Platonic
idea with notions o divine benecence, arguing that just as God had
created evey living thing required in a perfect world, neither would
he suer any class o organism to be created or destroyed. Later Chis-
tian authors such as omas Aquinas modied this view somewhat to
preseve the freedom o God to act and to allow for the possibility o
change, arguing, for example, that it was conceivable that God, in his
innite wisdom, might choose to add a species o organism or angel to
make the universe even “more perfect,” despite the apparent contradic-
tion this might imply. However, the basic pinciple was that nature is
preseved in a state o perfection, and that when change does take place
it is precisely balanced so as to maintain that state.
is idea persisted, more or less unaltered, into the beginnings o
what histoians consider the moden era o biology. A vaiety o au-
thors in the seventeenth centuy discussed how the benevolent hand o
God ensures that, despite the constant change obseved in the organic
world—incessant generation and coruption—a well- ordered and
stable natural economy will obtain. is theme reached its early mod-
en apex in the tradition o “physico- theology,” a religious and scien-
tic philosophy popular especially in England and exemplied by works
by authors including the physician Walter Charleton, the expeimental
naturalist Robert Boyle, and the pioneeing botanist and taxonomist
John Ray. e central assumption o physico- theology was that God’s
actions, being rational, can be obseved and understood using the tools
o natural philosophy, and furthemore that God plays an active role
in maintaining his orderly creation. is was no remote watchmaker
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE MEANING OF EXTINCTION 19
God: for Ray and others, God had an intimate concen with ensuing
that nature was in a constant state o perfection, and to that end had
designed each organism to play a role in a balanced natural economy.
Ray explored these ideas in theoretical treatises like e Wisdom o God
Manifested in the Works o Creation; but he also devoted his life to the
study and cataloging o organisms, particularly plants, and was one o
the great pre- Linnaean systematizers o the natural world.
roughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuies, Euro-
pean witings about the economy o nature maintained these explicitly
Chistian providential overtones. In the great taxonomist Carolus
Linnaeus published an inuential essay titled e Oeconomy o Nature,
where he argued, “By the Oeconomy o Nature are understood the all-
wise disposition o the Creator in relation to natural things, by which
they are tted to produce general ends, and reciprocal uses” (Linnaeus
, ). Linnaeus was a deeply committed Lutheran for whom the
study o nature was explicitly an exploration and celebration o the mag-
nicence o God’s creation. In this treatise Linnaeus dealt with a poten-
tial conict: On the one hand, as a devout Chistian he mly believed
that the perfection o creation meant that evey conceivable natural
place was lled. On the other, as a naturalist he was well aware that
violence and death were inescapable. His solution was to conceive o
the inevitable stuggle among organisms as essential to nature’s divinely
ordained economy: “In order therefore to pepetuate the established
course o nature in a continued seies, the divine wisdom has thought
t, that all living things should contibute and lend a helping hand to
preseve evey species; and lastly, that the death and destuction o any
one thing should always be subsevient to the restitution o another”
(Linnaeus , ). Importantly, while the destuction or death o any
particular individual would have no net eect on the balance o nature,
Linnaeus denied that God would ever suer the extinction o an entire
species. However, as we will see, this conception o the economy o na-
ture would remain inuential even aer extinction was recognized as
a genuine natural phenomenon. Furthemore, even when, by the mid-
nineteenth centuy, most naturalists had abandoned explicitly religious
justications, ideas that ultimately stem from this Chistian providen-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
20 CHAPTER ONE
tialist worldview continued to exert a strong inuence. God may have
ultimately been excluded from the system, but the notion that nature is
a perfectly ordered machine was an idea much more dicult to let go of.
Because o this providential theology, the existence o stuggle, pain,
and death in nature was frequently a dicult topic for Enlightenment-
era naturalists. It is sometimes assumed that for this reason, pior to
the nineteenth centuy, virtually no naturalists accepted the reality o
extinction. Even in the later eighteenth centuy, some naturalists de-
nied the possibility o extinction on eectively providential theological
grounds. One o the most famous examples o such extinction denial is
omas Jeerson’s Notes on the State o Virginia, in which Jeerson con-
sidered the recent discovey o the fossil mastodon—or the “Ameican
incognitum,” as it was sometimes called—a challenge to the stability o
nature’s economy. e problem, o course, was that this fossil appeared
to represent an animal that had no living representatives. But Jeer-
son argued, as did some o his contemporaies, that living members o
groups o apparently extinct animals like the incognitum simply had not
been discovered yet. e North Ameican continent was an enomous
place, aer all. For this reason, Jeerson included the “mammoth” in his
list o extant North Ameican species in Notes on the State o Virginia,
and justied this decision by explaining, “Such is the economy o na-
ture, that no instance can be produced, o her having pemitted any one
race o her animals to become extinct; o her having fomed any link in
her great work so weak as to be broken” (Jeerson , ).
In adopting this stance, Jeerson was in good company. Earlier in
the centuy, the great savant Wilhelm Gottfied von Leibniz had also
denied the possibility o extinction, and closer contemporaies, like
the French naturalist Louis Jean Maie Daubenton, advanced anatomi-
cal arguments that the incognitum was within the nomal vaiation o
living pachydems. However, despite entrenched cultural objections to
the notion, a number o late- eighteenth- centuy naturalists did in fact
regard extinction as a viable explanation for many o the fossil discover-
ies that were being unearthed in Europe and North Ameica with in-
creasing frequency. In fact, as the eminent histoian o geology Martin
Rudwick has convincingly demonstrated, by the end o the eighteenth
centuy the central intellectual question surrounding extinction was not
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE MEANING OF EXTINCTION 21
whether it had ever occurred, but rather how and with what frequency
it had taken place, and how it was to be understood within broader
emerging understandings o the histoicity o the earth.
Extinction and Catastrophe
e disciplinay locus for many o the most important debates about
extinction over the last two centuies has been paleontology, since fossil
specimens have provided the most obvious testimony to the vast num-
bers o organisms that have become extinct over the histoy o life. As
this book will show, paleontologists have also made many o the most
important theoretical contibutions to the study o extinction, since ex-
tinction dynamics and pattens are oen only intepretable at a reso-
lution o tens or hundreds o millions o years. At the beginning o the
nineteenth centuy, however, paleontology was in its infancy as a pro-
fessional scientic discipline, and the intepretation o fossils was com-
plicated by uncertainties as basic as the approximate age o the earth
and the nature o histoical geological processes. Early discussions o
extinction, then, were bound up in broader debates about the earth’s
past and the tempo and mode o geological change. ese uncertainties
about the earth’s geological past were compounded by equally vexing
biological questions related to the possibility and nature o organic de-
velopment, the xity o species, the taxonomic organization o organ-
isms, and the intepretation o what we would now call ecological re-
lationships. It would take at least another centuy before most o these
geological and biological problems were settled, but they contibuted
to a lively debate throughout the nineteenth centuy that occupied
naturalists and “savants” across Europe.
One o the central problems in what Rudwick has called the “dis-
covey o geohistoy” centered on whether the earth’s histoy has been
characteized by a steady, gradual unfolding o geological processes, or
has rather been “punctuated” by episodes o sudden and drastic change.
e seventeenth- centuy natural philosopher Nicolas Steno is oen
credited with the discovey that the layers o the earth have not always
existed in their current state and arrangement, and with the realization
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
22 CHAPTER ONE
that the study o existing strata could unravel a histoy o the earth’s
past. Subsequent authors, such as the Scottish geologist James Hutton,
the French naturalists Georges Cuvier and Alexandre Brongniart, and
the English suveyor William Smith, expanded these pinciples as the
basis for the moden science o stratigraphy, which by the s allowed
naturalists to map the order and locations o strata and to constuct an
approximate, relative geological timescale. Importantly, as Steno was
among the rst to recognize, characteistic fossils in each stratum could
be used as a key to distinguish layers from one another.
By the late eighteenth centuy, Hutton and others recognized that
profound geological changes had taken place in the earth’s past: moun-
tains had thust themselves through the earth’s cust, continents had
been lied up and subsided into the sea, volcanoes had deposited mas-
sive amounts o molten rock, and layers o the earth’s cust had become
twisted and bent far out o their oiginal positions. Depending on the
pace o their operation, changes like these could have had a profound
impact on living creatures; but there were major disagreements over
how, and how quickly, the geological processes that shaped the strata
acted. Hutton favored a model o geologic change in which these pro-
cesses happened vey slowly, over nearly unimaginable amounts o
time—a model now commonly referred to as “unifomitaianism.” In
many ways, Hutton was committed to this unifomitaian model be-
cause he felt it reected the kind o stately deployment o natural laws
best exemplied in a Newtonian, deistic worldview. e basic argument
is that ordinay geological processes o the type obsevable around us
today could, given enough time, produce drastic cumulative stuctural
changes. anks to the inuence o the great nineteenth- centuy Scot-
tish geologist Charles Lyell, who will be discussed below, this pinciple
o unifomitaianism has become a central pillar o moden geology.
But other late- eighteenth- centuy obsevers, such as the French
naturalist François- Xavier Burtin and the Geman polymath Johann
Fiedich Blumenbach, developed a model in which the earth’s histoy
had been marked by drastic, catastrophic “revolutions” that produced
sudden geological and organic change. e idea that catastrophic events
have taken place in the past was not new: since the seventeenth centuy,
physico- theologists like Ray, omas Bunet, and William Whiston had
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE MEANING OF EXTINCTION 23
attempted to explain sciptural events like the Noachian ood using
naturalistic processes. But authors such as Burtin explicitly framed
these revolutions in a nonsciptural context, and attempted to develop
a naturalistic account in which they were part o the regular course o
nature. As Burtin put it in in his essay “Révolutions generals,” “e
surface o the globe is but a seies o documents that demonstrate a
seies o revolutions on this planet” (Burtin , ). Signicantly,
Burtin and Blumenbach argued that these geological revolutions had
been accompanied by massive extinctions in which whole oras and
faunas were wiped out but were ultimately replaced, in some mystei-
ous process, by new ones.
While some, like Jeerson, continued to deny the reality o extinc-
tion, for most naturalists at the tun o the nineteenth centuy the real
debate concened whether extinction was in a Huttonian sense a uni-
fom and gradual process, happening only slowly or rarely, or rather a
matter o catastrophic mass extemination. is debate obviously im-
plicated basic ideas about the balance o nature and the dynamics o
change. Given the available evidence, it seemed equally possible to de-
scibe geohistoy either in tems o a balanced equilibium o processes
that evened out to produce a “steady state,” or altenatively as a record
o disequilibium and catastrophe. ese debates also invoked dieing
theological commitments; the balanced equilibium o unifomitaian-
ism sat more comfortably with those naturalists who subscibed to a
deistic theology in which God acted on the universe through invai-
ant natural laws, and literal intepretation o sciptural events was es-
chewed. “Catastrophism,” on the other hand, oen—but not always, as
we will see—found favor with scientists who sought to explain particu-
lar histoical events descibed in scipture, such as the Noachian ood,
that appeared to require special explanations. is was certainly the
case with some Bitish catastrophists, including vey prominently the
Bitish geologists Robert Jameson and William Buckland. e immedi-
ate context for these arguments was the intepretation o fossils and
geological processes, but the broader stakes invoked stikingly dier-
ent understandings o the tempo o histoical change and the regulaity
o natural processes. e extinction imaginay o the early nineteenth
centuy, then, hinged precisely on how the newly discovered empiical
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
24 CHAPTER ONE
evidence o geology supported or impinged upon this set o broader
theological and cultural beliefs.
e resolution o this debate hinged on fossils. Absent any abso-
lute dating techniques (radiometic dating would not be available until
the early twentieth centuy), the fossil record gave the best available
evidence about the suddenness, magnitude, and generality o geologic
change. I it could be detemined that many fossil species had become
extinct in a coordinated fashion at one or more points in the geological
record, then this might lend support to theoies proposing sudden revo-
lutionay change. If, on the other hand, evidence o piecemeal extinc-
tion or even transmutation (evolution) predominated, then the more
gradual unifomitaian model would seem to be favored.
e most important early- nineteenth centuy gure in this debate—
and one o the most important nineteenth- centuy theoists about ex-
tinction—was Georges Cuvier. Bon in to a bourgeois Protestant
family in a French- speaking region o Gemany which later became part
o France, Cuvier combined early training in zoology with an interest
in fossils and was appointed, while still only in his mid- twenties, to the
newly established Musée national d’histoire naturelle in Pais, where he
spent his entire career, eventually holding a professorship and a peerage
in recognition o his stature. He was regarded duing his lifetime as per-
haps the most inuential naturalist in France, i not Europe, and is rec-
ognized as having helped establish the study o comparative anatomy
as an important scientic eld. His anatomical reconstuctions o fos-
sil vertebrates, oen based on only a few bones, are still considered
billiant, and he produced a broad theoretical revision o the Linnaean
taxonomic system that was extremely inuential in its day.
But Cuvier will always be most widely remembered—fairly or un-
fairly—for promoting a theoy o earth’s histoy in which the geology,
ora, and fauna o the globe have peiodically been radically altered by
a seies o catastrophic “revolutions.” is theoy was presented in a
lengthy introduction (“Discours préliminaire”) to his mammoth work
on fossil vertebrates Ossemens Fossiles (), and subsequently revised
and published on its own as Discours sur les révolutions de la surface du
globe in . It was also published in unauthoized and modied En-
glish translation in by the Scottish geologist Robert Jameson as
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE MEANING OF EXTINCTION 25
Essay on the eory o the Earth, where it was read by many o the most
prominent Bitish naturalists o the time. Jameson’s translation altered
some aspects o the theoy to give the distorted impression that Cuvier’s
work was an attempt to accommodate geology to scipture, which it
was not; and it also mischaracteized some o Cuvier’s views about the
regulaity o natural processes. In large part on the basis o Jameson’s
translation, Cuvier is now oen remembered—and denigrated—as the
father o a speculative and religiously motivated “catastrophism,” which
was vanquished by the proper, rational “unifomitaianism” o Charles
Lyell. ough oen repeated in textbooks and histoical accounts, this
characteization is a drastic oversimplication o a much more complex
and interesting histoy.
Cuvier was undoubtedly one o the most important early propo-
nents o biological extinction, and his views—presented in his own and
other popular accounts and lectures—helped legitimize extinction not
just among fellow naturalists, but to a wider educated public in Europe
and North Ameica. His billiant reconstuctions and intepretations o
large fossil vertebrates—such as the mastodon or “Ameican incogni-
tum”—helped denitively establish that these were extinct creatures
with no close living relatives. It was in the course o his studies o these
large extinct vertebrates that Cuvier’s more general theoy o earth’s
histoy took shape; one fact that had prevented authors such as Jeer-
son from accepting extinction was the apparent well- adaptedness and
robustness o the specimens being discovered. What, they wondered,
could have caused the majestic mammoth, which appeared ideally
suited for the Ameican plains, to have died o? is troubled Cuvier
as well; and as more large fossil vertebrate types were discovered, it
led him towards the conclusion that only some kind o signicant and
widespread environmental catastrophe could have done the job.
It also encouraged Cuvier to pay close attention to dierences in
the strata in which fossil specimens were found. is ultimately led
him back to the much earlier fossil invertebrates found in the geologi-
cal strata around Pais, to which he gave a comprehensive suvey with
his colleague Alexandre Brongniart in the s (g. .). Cuvier’s con-
clusion was that a preponderance o evidence—the apparent adapted-
ness o fossil foms, the signicant changes in geology at stratigraphic
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
1.1 A classical stratigraphic visualization o ideal cross- sections o the earth’s
layers. From Georges Cuvier and Alexandre Brongniart, Description géologique des envi-
rons de Paris (Pais, ).
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE MEANING OF EXTINCTION 27
boundaies, and the sheer number o extinct taxa discovered—argued
that
life on earth has oen been disturbed by terible events: calamities which
initially perhaps shook the entire cust o the earth to a great depth, but
which have since become steadily less deep and less general. Living or-
ganisms without number have been the victims o these catastrophes.
Some were destroyed by deluges, others were le dy when the seabed
was suddenly raised; their races are even nished forever, and all they
leave in the world is some debis that is hardly recognizable to the natu-
ralist (Cuvier ).
However, it is important to stress that Cuvier did not associate these
revolutions with supenatural or sciptural events, nor did he neces-
saily believe that they required mechanisms outside o the ordinay
un o geological processes. In this sense, his view challenges a sim-
plistic dichotomy between deist unifomitaians and literalist catastro-
phists. For instance, he believed that the most recent revolution that
wiped out the mastodon and other large vertebrates was most likely
the result o an enomous tsunami, and he cited geological evidence for
what he intepreted as the eects o a massive ood in the layers where
the fossils were found. Admittedly, there is no precedent for a poten-
tially continent- wide ood in recorded human histoy, but Cuvier was
among many contemporay naturalists on whom the realization was
dawning that human histoy was but a tiny sliver o the overall histoy
o the earth. What made Cuvier’s ideas potentially objectionable to con-
temporay naturalists o a more “unifomitaian” persuasion was not
the kind, but rather the magnitude o the events required to produce
widespread, even global, mass extinction. But Cuvier was hardly alone
in speculating about catastrophic mass extinctions. His compatiot Élie
de Beaumont promoted an account o peiodic revolutionay catas-
trophe caused by “mega earthquakes,” and in England William Buck-
land supported a “diluvial” theoy o mass extinctions, to give just two
prominent examples.
It is important to point out here that the tem “catastrophism” has
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
28 CHAPTER ONE
always been a remarkably exible and imprecise tem. Some eigh-
teenth- and early- nineteenth- centuy geohistoical theoies proposed
some kind o extraordinay, perhaps unprecedented mechanism—
a “catastrophe”—as the tigger for major transfomations o the earth
and its inhabitants. As we have seen, Cuvier’s theoy only partially ts
this desciption, because though his proposed mechanisms were indeed
dramatic, they were extrapolated from known natural phenomena—
unlike, for example, William Whiston’s early- eighteenth- centuy hy-
pothesis that a passing comet’s tail deposited the waters documented
in the ood stoy in Genesis. Another way catastrophism might be
constued is by postulating that “revolutions” o some kind have taken
place either singularly or with some peiodicity in the earth’s past. But
while today we associate the tem with a sudden, violent upheaval, in
the contemporay context a “revolution” could be applied to any sig-
nicant change, whether or not that change was sudden or violent. In-
deed, Burtin, Jean- André de Luc, Constant Prévost, Brongniart, Cuvier,
and even Lyell in his early witings all acknowledged that “revolutions”
could be gradual as well as sudden aairs, and need not in fact be “cata-
strophic” at all. Catastrophism has oen been taken to imply that geo-
logical peiods have been separated by fairly distinct environmental or
faunal changes. But a simple empiical fact apparent to any geologist
involved in the reconstuction o stratigraphy is that individual strata
can be identied precisely because they contain obvious and signicant
dierences in geological and faunal composition. Indeed, stratigraphy
itsel is founded upon obsevations o shap breaks in the type o rock
and the kinds o fossils found from one layer to the next, which are
used to dene geological peiods themselves. e distinctness o geo-
logical strata is a generally agreed- upon fact that is, in pinciple, agnos-
tic toward a broader theoretical intepretation o what those dierences
mean. In both contemporay and histoical (retrospective) accounts,
catastrophism was oen associated with a young- earth biblical chro-
nology, giving it for naturalists o Dawin’s generation and beyond more
than a whi o the supenatural. While it is tue that some, like Buck-
land, associated geological catastrophes with the Noachian ood, this
was actually a minoity position, and it in no way reected Cuvier’s in-
tepretation, which was thoroughly naturalistic.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE MEANING OF EXTINCTION 29
Finally, catastrophism is oen associated with some theoy o mass
extinction—the idea that a large number o species died out in a co-
ordinated fashion within a relatively short peiod o time, or were extin-
guished because o some individual event. But again, mass extinctions
do not require sudden or violent causes. In the s, Prévost inter-
preted the succession o Tertiay environments and organisms around
Pais that Cuvier and Brongniart had descibed as a much more grad-
ual process than Cuvier had proposed. Likewise, Cuvier’s sometime
collaborator Brongniart hypothesized that extinctions were caused by
temperature changes as the earth slowly cooled over time. And other
naturalists, like John Fleming, were beginning to suspect that even
mass extinctions need not be all- or- nothing aairs. In some cases,
groups o species in a fairly limited geographical region might indeed
have become extinct at roughly the same time; but i extinction is a
pevasive phenomenon, then sudden worldwide events are not re-
quired to explain even the apparently dramatic faunal tunover exhib-
ited in the fossil record.
e point here is that the tem “catastrophism” since its vey rst
application in the debates o the s, has been something o a straw
man. It is extraordinaily exible, and at the same time remarkably im-
precise—it could be applied either to nearly eveybody or to nobody
at all. Like many straw men, however, it is tremendously important
for what it says about the attitudes o those who deployed it—in this
case, almost exclusively as an epithet by supporters o Lyell’s “unifor-
mitaian” geological theoy and their intellectual descendants—and for
how it has inuenced and oen constrained scientic discussion over
the past two centuies. It is also useful, for heuistic puposes, to use
the tems “catastrophist” and “unifomitaian” when descibing de-
bates and battle lines as they were understood at the time. I am certainly
not claiming that there were no substantive disagreements about the
causes, magnitude, or consequences o extinction among the scientists
I am discussing. Rather, my point is that these tems—“catastrophism”
and “unifomitaianism”—are actors’ categoies that invoke those enor-
mously signicant disagreements which are the subject o this book,
and that their complex scientic and cultural histoy cannot be reduced
to the binay opposition o labels.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
30 CHAPTER ONE
Extinction and Internalism in the
Early Nineteenth Century
Even i the catastrophist/unifomitaian dichotomy is not the most illu-
minating perspective with which to intepret this histoy, there were
nonetheless other legitimate bariers to consensus about the nature o
extinction duing the rst hal o the nineteenth centuy and beyond. I
would argue that a far more important distinction in the histoy o ideas
about extinction relates to whether the causes o extinction were under-
stood to be extrinsic—that is, caused by some environmental change or
other factor operating on populations o organisms—or rather intrin-
sic—in other words, caused by factors intenal to the organisms them-
selves or to the dynamics o their populations. is dichotomy maps
approximately, though not universally, to beliefs about the possible
magnitude o extinctions. A theoy that posits mega- tsunamis peiodi-
cally sweeping across continents and wiping out hundreds o species
in an instant is a theoy o mass extinction tiggered by extinsic forces.
A theoy that extinction results from the “racial senility” o individual
species (which we will see an example o shortly) is a theoy o piece-
meal, intinsic extinction. ere are certainly many examples o theo-
ies that are somewhat less neatly categoizable in this way: for ex-
ample, Brongniart’s suggestion that slow climate change caused gradual
extinctions, or Fleming’s hypothesis that extinction o megafauna like
the mammoth was caused by human predation (hunting). Nonetheless,
one can broadly claim that that nearly all theoies o mass extinction hy-
pothesize extenal mechanisms while many, though not all, theoies o
gradual or piecemeal extinction tend to assume intenal causal factors.
e intenal/extenal dichotomy could also condition whether or
not a naturalist accepted extinction as a natural phenomenon at all.
Probably the most famous nineteenth- centuy example o this was
Jean- Baptiste Lamarck’s position. Lamarck, a contemporay colleague
o Cuvier at the Musée national d’histoire naturelle, is famous for having
presented the rst systematic theoy o organic transmutation or evo-
lution. is theoy was dierent from Dawin’s eventual theoy o de-
scent with modication by natural selection in two important respects.
In the rst place, Lamarck believed that characteistics acquired by an
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE MEANING OF EXTINCTION 31
organism duing its lifetime could be passed on to its osping; (for ex-
ample, a girae that craned its neck to reach leaves at the top branches
o trees might pass along a slightly longer neck to its osping. Although
Dawin himsel considered the inheitance o acquired characteistics
as a potential mechanism for transmitting some physical and behavioral
characteistics, this mechanism was mostly rejected in the eventual re-
ceived view o “Dawinism.” Secondly, and more important, Lamarck
believed that evolution—that is, the transmutation o one species into
another—took place along a preordained pathway o lesser to greater
complexity, and was guided by an internal mechanism, which he temed
“the power o life” and likened to the force o gravity or other “impon-
derable uids” like electicity or magnetism. While the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuies saw a number o similar “intenalist” evolu-
tionay hypotheses (such as orthogenesis, or directional evolution),
Dawin staunchly rejected all such directional or intenal mechanisms.
When in the early nineteenth centuy it became impossible to deny
that many fossil types had no analogous living representatives, really
only two altenative explanations presented themselves: either many
once- living species had become extinct, perhaps to be replaced some-
how by new and dierent ones, or else those species had changed over
time to become the species we see around us today. It is oen assumed
that evolution was widely rejected pior to Dawin because it was too
“radical” for the worldview o nineteenth- centuy naturalists. In fact,
pemanent extinction was a potentially far more radical altenative, im-
plying as it did that nature might not always maintain a stable equi-
libium. Lamarck certainly found this to be the case; for most o his
career he avoided any transmutationist thinking, and it was only when
confronted by the mounting evidence from fossils being accumulated
by people like Cuvier that he abuptly converted, in large part because
o his deep commitment to a balance o nature that he saw threatened
by the specter o pemanent extinction. Lamarck’s evolutionay theoy,
then, was explicitly motivated by notions o nature’s economy that
were vey similar to those expressed by Linnaeus y years earlier. e
mechanism that govened transmutation was, he stressed, an intinsic
and perhaps divinely inspired natural law: “Nature (or her Author) in
creating animals, foresaw all the possible kinds o environment in which
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
32 CHAPTER ONE
they would have to live, and endowed each species with a xed orga-
nisation and with a denite and invaiable shape, which compel each
species to live in the places and climates where we actually nd them,
and there to maintain the habits which we know in them” (Lamarck
).
Lamarck’s vision o nature is thus as a dynamic equilibium: envi-
ronments change vey slowly over time—this can be obseved even on
the scale o a single human lifetime—and nature has provided a natural
process that ensures that organisms remain adapted to their stations. To
Lamarck, pemanent extinction implied a failure o nature’s economy.
As he put it, the problem o extinction involved asking whether “the
means which nature adopted to assure the consevation o species or
races has been so inadequate that entire races have now been wiped out
or lost” (Lamarck ). While he granted that the deliberate extemi-
nation o species by humans was “a possibility,” he argued that most or-
ganisms—especially those that lived in the seas—“are protected against
the destuction o their species at the hand o man.” Since most ap-
parently extinct species in the fossil record are maine bivalves, human
agency cannot be blamed for their disappearance, thus leaving only two
possibilities: either they do have living representatives that simply have
not yet been discovered, or else those earlier foms have transmuted
into something dierent. e supising fact, Lamarck argued, is not
that we nd so few fossils with living analogs, but rather that, given the
ubiquitous action o transmutation, we nd any with living represen-
tatives.
Lamarck then went on to complain that those “naturalists who have
not perceived the changes which most animals expeience with the pas-
sage o time . . . have assumed that a universal catastrophe took place
with respect to the terrestial globe and destroyed a large number o the
species then in existence.” While he granted that natural phenomena
like earthquakes and oods could cause localized disorder, he denied
the need to invoke catastrophic agents, and expressed his “pity that this
convenient method o dealing with one’s embarrassment when one
wants to explain the operations o nature whose causes one been un-
able to grasp [sic] has no foundation except in the imagination which
created it” (Lamarck ). Ultimately, then, Lamarck considered mass
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE MEANING OF EXTINCTION 33
extinction not only unnecessay but even oensive to the dignity o na-
ture. As he concluded,
I one considers, on the one hand, that in eveything which nature bings
about, she makes nothing abuptly and eveywhere works slowly and by
successive degrees and, on the other hand, that the particular or local
causes o disorders, revolutions, displacements, and so on, can provide
reasons for eveything which we obseve on the surface o the earth and
are nonetheless subject to nature’s laws and her general progress, one will
recognize that it is not at all necessay to assume that a universal catas-
trophe came to knock over eveything and destroy a large part o the vey
operations o nature (Lamarck ).
In regard to the power o life, we might say that Lamarck’s intenal-
ism was so extreme that it led him to deny the possibility o extinction
at all; but there were other ways that extinction could be made compat-
ible with an intenalist philosophy o biology. One o the most inuen-
tial though now largely forgotten early theoists o extinction was the
Italian naturalist Giambattista Brocchi, whose treatise Subapen-
nine Fossil Conchology was read and admired by geologists throughout
Europe, including Lyell and eventually Dawin. e work itsel was a
suvey o fossil mollusks found in Italian deposits dating from what con-
temporay geologists referred to as the Tertiay peiod, or the “third
age” o earth’s histoy. While we now date those rocks to between .
and million years old, the inuential eighteenth- centuy geochro-
nology o Giovanni Arduino located the Tertiay as contemporaneous
with the Noachian ood and other events o Genesis. However, by the
early nineteenth centuy many naturalists believed that Tertiay strata
were far older, perhaps having been deposited tens o thousands o
years before the earliest recorded human histoy. Because these de-
posits, which were understood to hold the earliest record o life on
earth, had great signicance for the broader reconstuction o geohis-
toy, the establishment o a relative dating and stratigraphy for the Ter-
tiay was an important geological problem at this time, and Brocchi re-
garded his work as “a seies o documents that shed light on the ancient
histoy o the globe” (Brocchi ).
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
34 CHAPTER ONE
Growing up in the foothills o the northen Italian Alps, Brocchi
took an interest in fossils from an early age, and by the time he began
seious study o geology in his early thirties he was well aware o wider
European debates about the extinction o species. His own fossil col-
lection and research was leading him to the same general conclusions
that Cuvier and others were reaching at the same time: that many o
the fossils being discovered appeared to have no living analogs. How-
ever, whereas Cuvier explained the problem with a theoy o cata-
strophic mass extinction, and Lamarck with transmutation, Brocchi
adopted a solution that was for its time vey unconventional. Noting
that many fossil deposits contain a mixture o apparently extinct and
extant species, Brocchi began developing the idea that species become
extinct in a piecemeal fashion, not because o catastrophes or extenal
mechanisms, but rather because species, like individuals, have natural
“life spans.” As early as his Mineralogical Treatise, Brocchi argued
that it is “a constant and general law o Nature” that “species die just like
individuals do,” because o “the lack o reproductive force and the in-
ability to develop” (Brocchi ).
is was, to say the least, a rather unorthodox position for a natu-
ralist to take in the early nineteenth centuy. Brocchi was proposing, in
eect, that species have “births” and “deaths” just as individual organ-
isms do, and that the cause was entirely natural, produced by “a grad-
ual and constant law” o nature (Brocchi ). is was an explana-
tion that rejected sciptural geological accounts (such as Buckland’s)
that were still popular, and which also obviated the need for great cata-
strophic revolutions to explain anomalous fossil organisms. It should be
emphasized that, while Brocchi had no clear mechanistic account o the
nature o the force that created species or detemined their longevity,
his position was guided by empiical considerations: pace Cuvier, he
simply did not see evidence that species had become extinct en masse
as the result o a single event. But it is also clear that in many ways Broc-
chi’s position was inuenced by a consevative sensibility towards the
economy o nature. While geological evidence would not allow him to
conclude that nature conseved each species etenally, he was none-
theless committed to a view o nature as a balanced, i dynamic, equi-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE MEANING OF EXTINCTION 35
libium. For Brocchi, change was just as “natural” as pemanence, so he
argued:
Why don’t we thus admit that species die like individuals, and that like
them they have a xed and detemined peiod for their existence? is
should not seem awkward, i we think that nothing is in a state o pema-
nence on our globe, and that Nature is maintained actively with a per-
petual circle and a perennial cycle o changes (Brocchi ).
In tems o its consequence for traditional ideas about the balance
o nature, this stance is actually signicantly less radical than Cuvier’s,
which proposed a directional, nonequilibium model o geohistoy in
which sudden transfomations peiodically take place that radically
alter the earth and its inhabitants. Cuvier’s view could be intepreted to
deny both the benecence o a divine creator and a Newtonian clock-
work regulaity to nature’s operations. In contrast, in Brocchi’s theoy
change is conseved: as one species dies, another is bon to take its
place, and the “cycle” continues. Brocchi also emphasized that this pro-
cess takes place vey slowly, since “by imperceptible grades species
come to their annihilation”; and he noted that many species appear to
have persisted for vey long peiods o time. Nor did Brocchi’s intenal-
ist theoy imply transmutation or evolution; one o his central obseva-
tions was that species that persist for long peiods o time do not appear
to change. It did require a perhaps uncomfortable acknowledgment o
the prevalence o death and destuction in nature, implying that “Na-
ture in some way more likely pleases hersel in degrading and destroy-
ing her works, than in perfecting them and extending their conseva-
tion.” But Linnaeus had already shown that death could be conceived as
an essential part o nature’s economy, and Brocchi’s theoy was far less
violent and arbitray than Cuvier’s, imagining extinction as the rather
peaceful conclusion to the natural life span o a species, rather than the
terifying result o a horic catastrophe.
Brocchi’s theoy then was in many ways a vey clever and some-
what radical way o accounting for ovewhelming evidence that extinc-
tion was a natural and even common phenomenon, while maintaining
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
36 CHAPTER ONE
older cheished beliefs about the economy o nature and the regulaity
o natural laws. Although it did not achieve a great deal o notoiety, it
was quietly inuential. Ultimately, naturalists like Lyell and Dawin em-
phasized the role o the environment much more than intinsic factors
in the extinction and development or evolution o individual organisms
and species. But both authors found occasion to refer favorably to Broc-
chi, and Brocchi’s theoy is an important link in a lineage o naturalistic
thought that understood extinction as a gradual and inevitable process
that contibuted to a balanced economy o nature. And as we will see in
later chapters o this book, Brocchi’s analogy—the notion that species
could be conceived in many evolutionay and ecological respects as
individuals—had an important resurgence duing the s and s,
in the context o debates surrounding the intepretation o pattens o
diversication and mass extinction.
Extinction, Uniformity, and the
Balance of Nature: Charles Lyell
We see many o the currents o the contemporay debate surrounding
extinction—intinsic versus extinsic causes, piecemeal versus mass ex-
tinction, gradual versus sudden operation, balance versus disequilib-
ium—come together in a powerful and inuential intepretation in
the work o the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell. Lyell, who trained as
a barister but spent his career advancing the theoretical development
and professionalization o geology, is by general acknowledgement one
o the central gures in the histoy o nineteenth- centuy Bitish sci-
ence. His ideas had a deep inuence on Dawin, and the two naturalists
became close fiends and correspondents, exchanging hundreds o let-
ters over several decades between the s and the s. Even more
broadly, Lyell’s ideas about natural change and balance profoundly
inuenced scientic understanding o the nature o geological and
organic change by viewing these processes as components o a linked,
natural equilibium. Lyell’s view o extinction ultimately hinged on the
dynamic relationship between organisms and their slowly changing en-
vironments, a notion which took on even greater resonance—as we will
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE MEANING OF EXTINCTION 37
explore in the next chapter—in the context o Dawin’s emerging evo-
lutionay ideas. Finally, by explicitly linking extinction with processes
and pattens in the histoy o life’s diversity, Lyell helped install extinc-
tion as a central component in scientic intepretations o the pattens
and processes that have shaped the diversity o life on earth.
In many accounts o the histoy o scientic attitudes towards ex-
tinction, Lyell is presented and oen celebrated as the man who de-
nitively put paid to Cuvier’s “catastrophist” theoy o revolutionay
mass extinction. While this version o histoy has achieved a kind o
mythological status through constant repetition in geology and paleon-
tology textbooks, it was also in many ways a caicature o Lyell’s own
devising, given that Lyell himsel was largely responsible for promoting
the distinction between unifomitaianism and catastrophism in his
own witings. While it is tue that Lyell was shaply citical o Cuvier
in his monumental Principles o Geology (–), the reality is some-
what more complex. As a young man looking to make a name for him-
sel in Bitish scientic circles, Lyell was a frequent contibutor to the
Toy magazine Quarterly Review, which gave him an inuential voice
among an elite readership. One essay in particular—an review o
an annual volume o the Transactions o the Geological Society—dealt
directly with the problem o extinction. Here Lyell cited, “among facts
and conclusions now universally conceded,” the conclusion that geo-
logical strata “have been subject, at dierent, and oen distant, epochs,
to violent convulsions” (Lyell , ). is essay was generally quite
favorable toward Cuvier’s intepretations o extinction, supporting the
French naturalist’s conclusion that many fossil species are genuinely
extinct, as opposed to having undiscovered living representatives, and
that those animals belonged to “an earlier epoch . . . peopled with a race
o terrestial quadupeds o an entirely dierent desciption; a race, o
which most o the genera and all the species known to us in fossil re-
mains have since been annihilated” (Lyell , ).
As for the causes o this “annihilation,” Lyell freely speculated that
oods or earthquakes could have been the culpit, and he even ac-
knowledged that Cuvier’s opinion that obsevable phenomena were not
sucient to explain these extinctions was “entitled without doubt to the
more respect.” However, Lyell also cautioned that it was “premature
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
38 CHAPTER ONE
to assume that existing agents could not, in the lapse o ages, produce
such eects as fall pincipally under the examination o the geologist,”
noting that while there were “proofs o occasional convulsions . . . there
are also proofs o intevening peiods o order and tranquility” (Lyell
, ). On balance, though, this essay is hardly the stinging rejec-
tion o Cuvier’s revolutionay intepretation o earth’s histoy that one
might expect from the great “unifomitaian.” Lyell seems to have been
endorsing a view in which sudden “catastrophic” change was at least
partially responsible for past extinctions, testimony for which he found
in “the frequent unconfomability o strata [which] clearly shows that
disturbances have taken place at many and at dierent peiods.”
At the same time, Lyell appears to have been concened with inter-
preting geological evidence in a framework that was at least broadly
confomable with an orderly and perhaps divinely inspired natural
economy. He may well have been inspired in his particular fomulation
o economy by the political economies o witers like Adam Smith, a
fellow Scot with a deistic leaning similar to Lyell’s own. Lyell was stuck
just as much by the appearance o new foms in the fossil record as by
the disappearance o older ones, even though the mechanism by which
new species are created remained mysteious. Noting that “successive
races o distinct plants and animals have inhabited the earth,” he argued
that this was “a phenomenon perhaps not more unaccountable than one
with which we are familiar, that successive generations o living species
peish, some aer a bie existence o a few hours, others aer a pro-
tracted life o many centuies” (Lyell , ). is analogy between
species and individual organisms would feature importantly in Lyell’s
later witings, and it was almost certainly inuenced by Brocchi, whose
ideas Lyell had encountered duing his own study o European Tertiay
fomations. Ultimately, though not developed much further in his
essay, this shows that even at a stage when he was unwilling to dismiss
Cuveian revolutions, Lyell was drawn towards a naturalistic causal
explanation for extinctions, one that did not rely on sudden catastro-
phes. In concluding his discussion o extinction, he argued that “sources
o apparent derangement in the system appear, when their operation
throughout a seies o ages is brought into one view, to have produced a
great preponderance o good; and to be govened by xed general laws,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE MEANING OF EXTINCTION 39
conducive, perhaps essential, to the presevation o the habitable state
o the globe” (Lyell , ).
is argument—that even the appearance o disorder or upheaval in
the geological record does not necessaily disturb the underlying ratio-
nal economy o nature—would be central to Lyell’s continued theo-
izing about extinction. While Lyell was certainly the most important
contemporay proponent o this view, it was not an unprecedented
idea. For example, witing in , the English physician and geolo-
gist James Parkinson (the rst identier o Parkinson’s disease) argued
that accepting the fact o extinction need not disturb the belie that
nature exists in a balance, since “that plan, which prevents the failure
o a genus, or species, from disturbing the general arrangement, and
oeconomy o the system, must manifest as great a display o wisdom
and power, as could any fancied chain o beings, in which the loss o a
single link would prove the destuction o the whole” (Parkinson ,
). In other words, Parkinson argued, nature could maintain an equi-
libium even in the face o the extinction o the occasional species, or
even genus, provided that the loss was made good with the creation o
a new species somewhere else, thus preseving the divine rationality o
“those laws, by which the regulation o the oeconomy o creation was
decreed.”
But, as Lyell’s views developed, he increasingly shied away from any
sense o directionality or irreversibility in the histoy o geologic and
organic change; and at the same time he became more committed to
slow, unifom physical processes as the source o that change. In part,
this was the result o his growing rsthand knowledge o European Ter-
tiay geological fomations, which he expeienced duing travels in the
late s. is expeience helped convince him that these geological
deposits testied to an era that was both vey ancient (much older than
the few thousand years assumed by proponents o sciptural geology)
and remarkably similar to our own in tems o environment and organ-
ismal diversity. In an attempt to establish a reliable relative chronology
o these fomations, Lyell collaborated with the French mollusk expert
Paul Deshayes on an exhaustive “census” o more than three thousand
Tertiay fossils, which he subjected to basic statistical analysis in order
to detemine the percentage o fossil organisms in each stratum that
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
40 CHAPTER ONE
had become extinct. While this general project—which Rudwick de-
scibes as an attempt to create a “fossil chronometer” for the entire fos-
sil record—was less successful than Lyell had hoped, it did provide him
with one cucial insight: Just as Brocchi had noted, the invertebrate fos-
sil record appeared to exhibit virtually no evidence o any catastrophic
sudden mass extinctions. Rather, fomations tended to contain a mix-
ture o extinct and extant foms, suggesting that extinctions happened
in piecemeal fashion, and that species generally appeared to persist for
vey long peiods o time, thus suggesting that extinction is a gradual
process. Furthemore, even extinct fossil mollusks do not appear to be
radically dierent from their living relatives, and there are no examples
o the radical dierences in fauna that Cuvier discovered in more recent
extinct Ameican vertebrate remains. is fact suggested to Lyell that
the environment o the distant past was quite similar to our own today,
further casting doubt on the notion o successive and radically dierent
global geological epochs. is view also shaply contrasted with more
traditionally theistic intepretations o earth’s histoy promoted by
contemporay English geologists like Buckland and Adam Sedgwick,
which tended to see the histoy o the globe as a succession o distinct
environments punctuated by great geological catastrophes.
ese obsevations contibuted to a vey dierent picture o extinc-
tion than Lyell had proposed in his essay, and this change is re-
ected in his magnum opus, Principles o Geology. Here Lyell developed
the view that the earth’s histoy was one o slow, cyclical environmental
change, requiing the gradual adaptation o organisms to these chang-
ing environmental circumstances. Where organisms were unable to
adapt—and Lyell allowed for limited organic modication, though not
genuine transmutation—populations were required to either migrate
to more hospitable locations or face inevitable extinction. Importantly,
this was a process that was constantly ongoing; environmental changes,
such as the ising and loweing o global sea levels or changes in tem-
perature, were not caused by catastrophes or geologic revolutions, but
were gradual, and their cumulative eects could only be detected on
the order o many thousands o years. Finally, environmental change—
and adaptation—was circumscibed by fairly limited boundaies, and
it uctuated back and forth along lengthy cycles. In this regard, Lyell’s
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE MEANING OF EXTINCTION 41
geology was “unifomitaian” in the same sense as that o James Hutton,
who had concluded that “we nd no vestige o a beginning, no pros-
pect o an end” to the histoy o the earth. Lyell’s key innovation, which
made his work so important for Dawin, was that he linked the histoy
o life to these processes o gradual geological change. In this way, the
earth and its inhabitants existed in a pepetual state o dynamic equilib-
ium. A change in environment necessitated a corresponding adaptive
response, but since environmental change was cyclical, there could be
no ultimate direction to life’s histoy.
Lyell treated the subject o extinction most directly in the second
o the three volumes o Principles, which was published in (and
was read avidly by Dawin, who was well into his ve- year voyage on
HMS Beagle). Here Brocchi remained an important inuence, and Lyell
explicitly endorsed the analogy between species and individual organ-
isms, witing that the Italian “does not appear to have been far wrong”
in his assertion that “the death . . . o a species might depend, like that
o individuals, on certain peculiaities o constitution conferred upon
them at their birth” (Lyell –, II). He also applauded Broc-
chi for rejecting catastrophic revolutions as the mechanism o extinc-
tion, and for instead “endeavor[ing] to imagine some regular and con-
stant law by which species might be made to disappear from the earth
gradually and in succession.” However, Lyell rejected Brocchi’s intin-
sic mechanism o natural species life spans in favor o an extenal, en-
vironmental (one might even anachronistically say “ecological”) expla-
nation: “I it can be shown that the stations [i.e., “niches”] can become
essentially modied by the inuence o known causes, it will follow
that species, as well as individuals, are mortal” (Lyell –, II).
Lyell also explicitly disavowed Cuvier’s grand model o geologic
change and resulting mass extinctions, although he did allow for pei-
ods o limited elevated extinction. “We are not about to advocate the
doctine o general catastrophes recuring at certain intevals,” he
wrote, nonetheless noting evidence o “important revolutions” that
were “attended to by the local annihilation o many species. . . . with-
out producing any extensive alterations in the habitable surface” (Lyell
–, II–). He stressed that these “revolutions” were none-
theless part o a balanced natural economy, and did “aord evidence
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
42 CHAPTER ONE
in favour o the unifomity o the system, unless, indeed, we are pre-
cluded from speaking o uniformity when we characteize a pinciple
o endless vaiation” (Lyell –, II). What this meant, in prac-
tice, was that i “we admit incessant uctuations in the physical geog-
raphy, we must, at the same time, concede the successive extinction o
terrestial and aquatic species to be part o the economy o our system”
(Lyell –, II). In other words, Lyell concluded that constant,
slow vaiation is itsel a kind o unifomity or equilibium, and that the
“Author o Nature” had “ordained that the uctuations o the animate
and inanimate creation should be in perfect hamony with each other”
(Lyell –, II: ).
For all o its appearance as a gradual and natural process, Lyell fre-
quently used violent teminology such as “war,” “stife,” “annihilation,”
and “destuction” to characteize this dynamic organic equilibium. Or-
ganisms are in constant competition with their changing environments,
and also with one another—as Lyell illustrated with a lengthy discus-
sion o the “continual stife” between plant species— contibuting to the
dynamic vision o Lyell’s model. Although change occurs vey slowly,
nature never stands still. In this view o nature, extinction is not just
common; it is, for some species, inevitable. Since “species are subject
to incessant vicissitudes . . . it will follow that the successive destuc-
tion o species must now be part o the regular and constant order o
Nature” (Lyell –, II). Here Lyell’s intepretation o extinction
touched directly on the balance o natural diversity, which he conceived
as a constant—though constantly uctuating—equilibium. ere are a
limited number o places or “stations” available for organisms to occupy,
and as one species vacates its place, another must come along to occupy
it. As he put it, “e addition o any new species, or the permanent nu-
meical increase o one previously established, must always be attended
either by the local extemination or the numeical decrease o some
other species” (Lyell –, II). I this is not quite “nature red in
tooth and claw,” it is nonetheless a vision o the natural order in which
competition plays a prominent role. At the same time, there is an over-
arching balance and hamony, since competition itself—and the inevi-
table death and extinction that follows from it—is a mechanism for pre-
seving a dynamic natural equilibium.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE MEANING OF EXTINCTION 43
It is also worth emphasizing how committed Lyell was to the notion
that balance requires a continual replacement o one species for another.
He was puposely elusive about whether the process o new creation re-
quired a divine hand or natural causes, but it was easy for many readers
to read some o the old providential natural theology into his system.
is position connected directly with one o his major geological ar-
guments: that geological processes had no directionality, and that for-
mations (and hence environments) found in one geological age would
inevitably retun as climate oscillated slowly between the boundaies
o the steady state. Infamously, this led Lyell to speculate that organic
histoy had no directionality, implying that even long- extinct creatures
might “retun” when environmental conditions were favorable. As he
wrote in volume o Principles,
We might expect, therefore, in the summer o the “great year” which
we are now consideing [i.e., the grand geological cycle o climate], that
there would be a great predominance o tree- fens and plants allied to
palms and arborescent grasses in the isles o the wide ocean. . . . en
might those genera o animals retun, o which the memoials are pre-
seved in the ancient rocks o our continents. e huge iguanodon might
reappear in the woods, and the ichthyosaur in the sea, while the ptero-
dactyle might it again through umbrageous groves o tree- fens (Lyell
–, II).
Needless to say, this comment occasioned no small supise and even
deision from Lyell’s contemporaies. Despite the fact that Lyell had
mentioned that it was possible that extinct higher taxa (i.e., genera)
might retun, and not specic species, his contemporay and geologi-
cal opponent Heny de la Beche mocked this passage with a cartoon
he reproduced for his fiends, in which Lyell appeared in the character
o “Professor Ichthyosauus,” lectuing to a group o sauians on the
topic o the past extinction o the human species (g. .). De la Beche’s
mockey aside, however, this incident reinforces the centrality o cycli-
cal change and replacement in Lyell’s vision o the economy o nature.
In presenting this view o nature, Lyell was not above drawing con-
clusions relevant to his own contemporay society. Lyell considered
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
44 CHAPTER ONE
humans as a potential agent o extinction, both in the distant past (as
perhaps the cause o the extinctions o the megafauna Cuvier had re-
constucted) and in more recent times, as in the famous examples o the
dodo and the moa. He never doubted that human beings could cause
the extinction o species, since “man is, in tuth, continually stiving to
diminish the natural diversity o the stations o animals and plants, in
evey county, and to reduce them all to a number tted for species o
economical use” (Lyell –, II–). He considered this to be
an inevitable result o European impeial expansion, and argued, “We
must at once be convinced, that the annihilation o species has already
1.2 A cartoon drawn by the English geologist Heny de la Beche depicting
Charles Lyell as “Professor Ichthyosauus,” lectuing a group o students about a fos-
sil human skull. e caption reads: “‘You will at once perceive,’ continued Professor
Ichthyosauus, ‘that the skull before us belonged to some o the lower order o animals;
the teeth are vey insignicant, the power o the jaws tiing, and altogether it seems
wonderful how the creature could have procured food.’” Lithograph by Sir Heny de la
Bèche (), aer his drawing. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE MEANING OF EXTINCTION 45
been eected, and will continue to go on hereaer, in certain regions, in
a still more rapid ratio, as the colonies o highly- civilized nations spread
themselves over unoccupied lands” (Lyell –, II). Yet he saw
this as little cause for regret, arguing that “i we wield the sword o ex-
temination as we advance, we have no reason to repine at the havoc
committed, nor to fancy, with the Scottish poet, that ‘we violate the
social union o nature.’” Why? Because extinction is part o the natu-
ral order o nature:
We have only to reect, that in thus obtaining possession o the earth by
conquest, and defending our acquisitions by force, we exercise no exclu-
sive prerogative. Evey species which has spread itsel from a small point
over a wide area, must, in like manner, have marked its progress, by the
diminution, or the entire extipation, o some other, and must maintain
its ground by a successful stuggle against the encroachments o other
plants and animals (Lyell –, II).
Furthemore, in language that would stike most moden readers as cal-
lous at the vey least, Lyell made it clear that this explanation applied
equally to the extinction o “races” o human beings: “A faint image o
the certain doom o a species less tted to stuggle with some new con-
dition in a region which it previously inhabited, and where it has to
contend with a more vigorous species, is presented by the extipation
o savage tibes o men by the advancing colony o some civilized na-
tion” (Lyell –, II). For this he oered no apology since, as he
was quick to note, he viewed this as the natural and inevitable course o
nature: “Few future events are more certain than the speedy extemina-
tion o the Indians o North Ameica and the savages o New Holland
in the course o a few centuies, when these tibes will be remembered
only in poety and tradition.”
ere is, therefore, little sense that Lyell was concened that ex-
tinction, whether caused by environmental change or by interspecies
competition, was a threat to the balance o nature. ere is certainly
no evidence that he believed that natural diversity needed to be pro-
tected, or that human beings should actively combat extinction. is
is not to say that he did not appreciate or value the diversity o living
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
46 CHAPTER ONE
things; he simply assumed that a diversity o life would be guaranteed
as an inevitable consequence o the equilibium o natural processes.
As we will see in the next chapter, Lyell’s vision o a dynamic but ulti-
mately balanced equilibium, in which extinction was the inevitable
consequence o change and competition, and where the economy o
nature was maintained by continual replacement, was largely adopted
by Dawin. It was, as I will argue, part o the scientic and cultural foun-
dation o the age in which both men lived, and central to the Victoian
extinction imaginay. Extrapolations o lessons about extinction from
the nonhuman biological world were frequently made to the context o
contemporay European society, and biology was oen used as justi
-
cation for political expansion. It is just as much the case that biologi-
cal ideas—about competition, and about the inevitability o failure and
extinction—were inuenced by existing social views. By the s, ex-
tinction had been naturalized; but it was also inexticably bound up in
cultural and political values about race, progress, and diversity. And by
virtue o the fact that these scientic ideas about extinction, diversity,
and the balance o nature—incoporated as they were into the founda-
tion both o Dawinism and the emerging science o ecology—became
so inuential, the Victoian context and the values they represented
continued to have inuence long aer they dropped from explicit view.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
2
EXTINCTION IN A VICTORIAN KEY
Duing the s, the Bitish Parliament convened a seies o heaings
to consider troubling reports that had begun to lter back from its colo-
nial outposts in South Afica and Australia about the relationship be-
tween Bitish colonists and the native inhabitants o those lands. While
a central objective o the impeial entepise was, o course, to simply
appropiate as much land and natural resources as possible, there were
practical and humanitaian factors to be considered as well. From a
cynical point o view, native peoples were vital to impeial expansion as
a cheap source o labor, meaning that they could not simply be extemi-
nated without consequence. And from a moral perspective, a signicant
element o the rhetoic surrounding empire was that impeialism was a
divinely sanctioned, and perhaps natural, imperative to bing “civiliza-
tion” to the benighted peoples o the globe.
Accordingly, in an parliamentay report produced from these
heaings, correspondence between Bitish Colonial Secretay George
Murray and George Arthur, lieutenant govenor o the penal colony at
Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), was entered as evidence o signicant
potential problems. In letters to his colonial representative, Murray ex-
pressed concens about reports o the “great decrease” that had recently
taken place in the local aboiginal population. Noting that it was “not
unreasonable to apprehend that the whole race o these people may, at
no distant peiod, become extinct,” Murray concluded that “it is impos-
sible not to contemplate such a result o our occupation o the island
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
48 CHAPTER TWO
as one vey dicult to be reconciled with feelings o humanity,” and
obseved that “the extinction o the Native race, could not fail to leave
an indelible stain upon the character o the Bitish Govenment” (Sir
George Murray to George Arthur, November , ). Similar qualms
were expressed in an report on conditions o native peoples in the
Cape o Good Hope, where a Mr. Collins decied the “indisciminate
massacre” o local populations by Dutch settlers—“e total extinc-
tion o the Bosjeman race [Bushmen] is actually stated to have been at
one time condently hoped for”—but reported that fortunately the re-
cent intevention o Bitish authoities had prevented this. In a separate
letter from the same report, a Mr. Moodie similarly applauded Bitish
intevention in Dutch massacres o the “Cares.” Although he insisted
that it was not his place to detemine “whether it is an inevitable pro-
vision o nature that the weaker must in one way or another melt away
before the stronger power,” Moodie nonetheless descibed “the suc-
cess o the attempt to depart from the usual course, and to preseve the
character and independence o the savage aer he has been pemitted
to become acquainted with the possessions o his improved neighbor”
(Bitish parliamentay papers , , ).
But a certain degree o fatalism was also present in many o these
parliamentay reports as well. In , a Select Committee on Aboigi-
nes was convened for heaings to detemine future policy with respect
to natives living in areas o Bitish colonization. e cooperation o the
Anglican church in this program was vital to the govenment’s political
objectives, since missionaies were on the front lines o the “civilizing
mission,” and church representatives held positions o authoity in most
major colonial centers. One o the witnesses before the committee was
the head ecclesiastical representative in New South Wales, Archdeacon
Broughton, who testied to the depressing nature o his expeiences
with the Aboigines he encountered. Part o his mission was to “civi-
lize” the natives, and Broughton reported that these eorts appeared
to be “hopeless”—not so much because the natives were unintelligent,
but rather because they were so “entirely abandoned” to “ignorance and
degradation” that the “expense” o the eort was not worthwhile. Ulti-
mately, he predicted that
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN A VICTORIAN KEY 49
wherever Europeans meet with them, they appear to wear out, and
gradually to decay; they diminish in numbers. . . . e tibe is gradually
reduced from its oiginal number to a much smaller number; it is a con-
tinual process o decay I should think, and it leads me to apprehend, that
within a vey limited peiod, those who are vey much in contact with
Europeans will be utterly extinct; I will not say exteminated, but they
will be extinct (Broughton , ).
In other words, Broughton argued, “decay” and extinction were the in-
evitable results o contact with European settlers. is occurred not, as
in the case o Dutch massacres, because o a deliberate program o ex-
temination, but rather as the natural outcome o cultural contact.
What these anecdotal reports demonstrate is the degree to which,
by the middle third o the nineteenth centuy, discussions o extinction
had become part o a broader political and cultural discourse in Bit-
ain and elsewhere. However, while discussions o extinction expanded
beyond the oiginal geological and paleontological contexts explored
in chapter o this book, political and cultural understandings o ex-
tinction at this time were not easily separable from contemporay de-
bates in elite scientic circles, but rather fomed a broader imaginay
that extended to political and popular discussions about race and em-
pire. From the s and s onward, it became more and more com-
mon, for example, to nd discussions o the “extinction” o “pimitive”
tibes encountered by Europeans in newspaper articles and parliamen-
tay reports as the Bitish and French expanded their impeial hold-
ings, and in the United States as westward expansion intensied conict
between settlers and Native Ameicans. At the same time, questions
about human race and social progress increasingly became implicated
in scientic arguments about biological extinction. In scientic con-
texts, ideas about extinction played a central role in the emerging disci-
plines o anthropology, ecology, geography, and sociology, as well as
in biology and paleontology. Lyell’s inuential intepretation o extinc-
tion as consistent with a balance o nature in dynamic equilibium gave
it a kind o positive moral valence: extinction was necessay, and even
good, for the maintenance o a stable economy o nature. e ip side
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
50 CHAPTER TWO
o this notion, o course, is that those species that became extinct were
somehow at fault since they had failed to adapt to their changing envi-
ronments, and that it was only just that they should make way for those
that could suvive. In a political context, the supposed inevitability o
extinction reinforced cultural attitudes about social progress that jus-
tied the spread o European civilization, even at the cost o assimila-
tion, subjugation, and even extemination o native peoples. Inevitably,
these scientic and cultural attitudes about extinction contibuted to
how diversity—and especially the diversity o non- European peoples
and cultures—was valued.
is view that extinction has an intinsic, progressive valence, im-
plicit in Lyell, was made much more explicit in Dawin’s evolutionay
theoy, which provided a mechanism—natural selection—that ex-
plained and naturalized suvival and failure. But Dawin also trans-
fomed Lyell by emphasizing the local instability o environments—
how the constant stuggle for existence made the toehold on suvival
o evey individual and species tenuous—while at the same time main-
taining that nature was an endlessly self- renewing source o new diver-
sity. In the Origin o Species, Dawin treated the relationship between
extinction and the emergence o new species as a kind o dynamic equi-
libium, and argued that the total number o living species remained
stable over time. However, whereas Lyell had adapted the pinciple
o equilibium to an essentially static chain o being, Dawin made it
central to his theoy o evolution, as a logical consequence o the cen-
tral mechanism o natural selection. “Balance,” for Dawin, meant that
while the actors may be constantly enteing and departing the stage,
broadly speaking the play remains the same. Extinction was central to
his particular concept o the economy o nature: I natural selection is
the pinciple that favors those individuals—and ultimately species—
best suited to suvival and reproduction, then extinction is simply the
fate o those who cannot successfully compete. Again and again in the
Origin Dawin reinforced this point, explaining that “it inevitably fol-
lows, that as new species in the course o time are fomed through natu-
ral selection, others will become rarer and rarer, and nally extinct,”
and that since a species is “maintained by having some advantage over
those with which it comes into competition . . . the consequent extinc-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN A VICTORIAN KEY 51
tion o less- favoured foms almost inevitably follows” (Dawin ,
, ). Because o the Malthusian pinciple o limited resources and
erce competition, natural selection is essentially a zero- sum game in
which the number o winners will always be balanced by an equal num-
ber o losers. Far from viewing it as mysteious or anathema, Dawin
conceived extinction as an essential process for keeping nature in a
healthy balance.
It is impossible to avoid reading discussions o extinction in Dawin
and other nineteenth- centuy authors in the broader context o Vic-
toian beliefs about competition, social progress, racial hierarchy, and
impeialism, and I will explore some o these connections in this chap-
ter. However, I do not want to argue that Dawin or other Victoian
scientists adopted their views about extinction because o prevailing so-
cial values, or vice versa. e tue picture is much more complicated
than that; cultural and biological understandings and valuations o ex-
tinction developed in tandem, each reinforcing the other in a complex
chicken- and- egg relationship. is is tue o the broader relationship
between scientic and cultural values as well. Duing the latter decades
o the nineteenth centuy, Dawin’s biological theoy was sometimes
rather cudely applied to social problems, and this phenomenon has
been labeled “social Dawinism.” But current histoical scholarship has
called the stability and reliability o that label into question, and I do not
nd social Dawinism to be a vey accurate or useful explanatoy cate-
goy. Attempts to reduce either the social to the biological or the bio-
logical to the social are doomed to failure; Dawin himsel drew heavily
on social and economic theoy when constucting his biological argu-
ments, and it might be just as reasonable to call him a “biological Mal-
thusian.” But the point is really that the reductive approach is not prot-
able. In the Victoian era, as today, scientists were part o their culture,
and culture was reected in science.
Race and Extinction before Darwin
Dawin’s view, as has been pointed out ever since , appears to en-
dorse a uthlessly competitive view o nature, and his view o extinction
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
52 CHAPTER TWO
seems to conceive o extinction as an inevitable and even progressive
force. Dawin’s and Lyell’s views about extinction were part o a much
larger nineteenth- centuy discourse related to Bitish and European
impeial expansion, and in particular to questions about the justica-
tion for exploiting and eradicating the native peoples, ora, and fauna
encountered duing colonization. Bitish, European, and Ameican ex-
pansion was oen undewitten by an explicit belie that it was justi-
able to subjugate and even exteminate so- called savage tibes because
such “races” were doomed anyway by the inexorable logic o biology.
is attitude also clearly implicates nineteenth- centuy European bio-
logical and anthropological theoies o race, which expeienced an ex-
plosion o interest duing the same peiod that biological ideas about
extinction were being developed. Dawin’s ideas certainly contibuted
to this broader discourse or imaginay, and Dawin himsel had much
to say about racial hierarchies, social progress, and human extinction.
But in many ways Victoian debates about race and extinction were in-
dependent o Dawin, and Dawin’s views and inuence were part o a
larger context that predated the publication o Origin o Species in .
What I will emphasize later in this chapter, however, is the way in which
Dawin transfomed many o these older tropes in the context o his
theoy o evolution via natural selection.
e histoy o European biological ideas about race is long and com-
plex, and this is not the place to ty to enter into it deeply. In the eigh-
teenth centuy, European theoists generally did not treat human bio-
logical dierence as a matter o innate physiology or heredity, instead
favoing “environmental” explanations for apparent dierences between
human groups. e human race was assumed to have descended from
an oiginal stock—oen from the literal Adam and Eve—and existing
“races” were groups o descendants that had been subject to greater
or lesser “degeneration,” depending on degrees o geographic isola-
tion and cultural factors. However, at the beginning o the nineteenth
centuy, new hereditaian or racialist ideas became popular in Europe,
thanks in part to the emergence o comparative anatomy, which pro-
vided “evidence” o supposedly innate physical dierences between
human groups. e most common physical markers o race were cranial
capacity and skull physiognomy, which were assumed to correlate di-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN A VICTORIAN KEY 53
rectly to intelligence. European biologists and anthropologists tied to
prove that this measure could be used to arrange the human races into
a hierarchy, with Australian aboiginals, Aficans, and other peoples na-
tive to teritoies under European impeial domination at the bottom,
and Europeans themselves unsupisingly at the vey top. e most ex-
treme versions o these arguments—exemplied, for example, in Josiah
Knox and Francis Gliddon’s e Races o Man ()—argued that indi-
vidual human races were actually distinct species, and that the “lower”
races were more closely related to apes than were the “higher” ones.
ese kinds o biological arguments could endorse all sorts o political
ones, including the justication for owning slaves.
ere was considerable scientic controversy surrounding this issue,
which is most oen characteized as the debate between “polygenists,”
those who believed in multiple species o humanity, and “monogenists,”
those who held that humans were a single species, and that individual
races were mere “vaieties.” Ultimately, Dawin—and Westen scien-
tic opinion—came down on the side o monogenesis, in part because
it was argued that an evolutionay framework allowed insucient time
for human beings to have dierentiated into separate species. Dawin
and many contemporaies also found fault with much o the puported
physical evidence for the polygenist position, and more broadly ob-
jected to characteizations o extreme innate mental and physical dif-
ferences between races, as well as to the political agendas they oen
seved, such as slavey. At the same time, however, even the more lib-
eral members o the scientic elite believed that there was justication
for ranking races or civilizations in some kind o hierarchy, even i it was
based on cultural rather than innate dierences.
One topic o frequent discussion both before and aer was
whether the “lower” races—again, judged either in hereditaian or cul-
tural tems—were “doomed” to inevitable extinction by the spread o
European impeialism. is question was oen asked explicitly to jus-
tify European expansion or to assuage guilty consciences about its con-
sequences, and it was a central theme in the Victoian extinction imagi-
nay. In France, for example, members o the Pais Geographical and
Ethnographical Societies provided racial justications for colonial ex-
pansion as early as the s, based on supposedly scientic study o cul-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
54 CHAPTER TWO
tural, though not always hereditaian, racial dierences. In their milder
foms, these arguments justied cultural assimilation o native peoples
as a humanitaian “civilizing” process that would benet both Euro-
peans and natives. However, ethnographers such as René- Pimevére
Lesson and Jules- Sébastien- César Dumont d’Uville argued that some
peoples—Australian and Polynesian aboiginals, for example—were
“uncivilizable” and therefore inevitably doomed by contact with Euro-
peans. While there might have been some passing regret, many geog-
raphers and ethnographers nonetheless had few scuples about urging
expansion, arguing that extinction was the “natural” course o things.
Many o the same arguments were put foward in Bitain around the
same time, as the excepts from the parliamentay reports with which
this chapter began show. Dawin himsel rst entertained these ideas
while aboard HMS Beagle duing the early s (well before his evo-
lutionay ideas were fully developed), remarking in his account o that
voyage that “wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue
the aboiginal” in the fom o disease, and obseving that “the vaieties
o man seem to act on each other in the same way as dierent species
o animals—the stronger always extipating the weaker” (Dawin ,
). Well before Dawin’s evolutionay ideas were published, how-
ever, James Cowles Pichard had witten an essay in the Edinburgh New
Philosophical Journal titled “On the Extinction o the Human Races,”
where he argued that human extinction occurs naturally when tibes
or races o people are placed in natural competition. Pichard, an Edin-
burgh physician, was a committed monogenist, and his stance toward
native peoples was progressive and humanitaian for its time. For ex-
ample, he lamented the “whole races [that] have become extinct duing
the few centuies which have elapsed since the moden system o colo-
nialization have commenced,” and urged his fellow scientists “to take
up seiously the consideration, whether any thing can be done eec-
tually to prevent the extemination o the aboiginal tibes” (Pichard
, , ). Nonetheless, his prognosis was fatalistic:
Wherever Europeans have settled, their arival has been the harbinger o
extemination to the native tibes. Whenever the simple pastoral tibes
come into relations with the more civilized agicultural nations, the al-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN A VICTORIAN KEY 55
lotted time o their destuction is at hand; and this seems to have been
the case from the time when the rst shepherd fell by the hand o the rst
tiller o the soil. . . . It may be calculated that these calamities . . . are to
be accelerated in their progress; and it may happen that, in the course o
another centuy, the aboiginal nations o most parts o the world will
have ceased entirely to exist (Pichard , ).
e most Pichard could oer as a solution was to urge that “i Chis-
tian nations think it not their duty to intepose and save the numerous
tibes o their own species from utter extemination, it is o the gravest
importance, in a philosophical point o view, to obtain much more ex-
tensive infomation than we now possess o their physical and moral
characters” (Pichard , –).
is attitude o regretful fatalism is little dierent from Arch-
deacon Broughton’s comments to Parliament about the aboigines o
New South Wales; and it is found in other published works o the same
time, such as Charles Hamilton Smith’s Natural History o the Human
Species (). Smith, a monogenist like Pichard, discussed the inevi-
tability o human extinction through competition as regrettable but in-
evitable, stating that while “it would be revolting to believe that the less
gied tibes were predestined to peish beneath the conqueing and
all- absorbing covetousness o European civilization, without an enor-
mous load o responsibility resting on the pepetrators,” nonetheless
“their fate appears to be sealed in many quarters, and seems, by a pre-
ordained law, to be an eect o more mysteious import than human
reason can grasp” (Smith , ). Smith’s essay also made use o the
same analogy between individuals and groups found in Brocchi and
Lyell, arguing that, “as it is with individual life, so families, tibes, and
nations, most likely even races, pass away.” He argued that this process
was inevitable and even natural, since “their tenure is only provisional,
until the typical fom appears, when they are extinguished, or found
to abandon all open teritoies not positively assigned them by nature,
to make room for those to whom they are genial” (Smith , ). In
this way, whatever humanitaian regret Hamilton expressed was bal-
anced by the fatalistic perception that extinction o “infeior” races was
both inevitable and “lawful.” In fact, for Smith the extinction o a par-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
56 CHAPTER TWO
ticular race was tantamount to proo o its infeioity; as he descibed
the plight o Native Ameicans, “e decay, amounting to prospective
extinction” was in fact “a further proo that they are not a typical [that
is, well- adapted] people,” since nontypical people were “alone liable to
annihilation, or to entire absoption” (Smith , ).
Smith’s neat tautology well represents typical European scientic
sentiment at the middle o the nineteenth centuy: whether regrettable
or not, the inevitable fate o non- European peoples in the face o Euro-
pean contact was complete cultural assimilation at best, and utter ex-
tinction at worst. Furthemore, this process was oen characteized
as a “law o nature,” assuaging potentially uneasy consciences and im-
plicitly endorsing the politics o impeialism. While it may well have
been the case that individual authors would have supported impeial
expansion in any event, I want to emphasize that these biological jus-
tications were not ad hoc. ey were based not only on the racialized
anthropology and ethnography o the day, but also on the leading theo-
ies o biological extinction—such as Lyell’s—on which they explic-
itly drew. Indeed, Lyell himsel and—as we will see shortly—Dawin,
contibuted directly to this discourse o racial extinction, which owed
naturally from their larger theoretical frameworks.
A nal important point is what these approaches to the problem o
extinction say about the value placed on diversity. Pichard’s lament and
Hamilton’s qualms seem to have little to do with regret over the dimin-
ishment o absolute human cultural diversity or vaiety. Aer all, either
man would have been quite satised with a “civilizing process” that in-
volved the complete cultural assimilation o native peoples. One might
call the outcome o this anticipated civilizing process a kind o “so ex-
tinction,” where the natives themselves may be physically spared from
extemination but their culture would vanish with little regret. Rather,
the dominant sentiment appears to have been pity, and at most a rather
selsh regard for the loss o cultural data that could help Europeans
constuct comprehensive anthropological or ethnographic theoies.
Cultural diversity as such was simply not valued.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN A VICTORIAN KEY 57
Darwin on Competition, Extinction,
and the Economy of Nature
While Dawin certainly did not begin the discourse about extinction,
competition, and the balance o nature that I have been discussing,
thanks to the signicance and notoiety o his evolutionay works his
theoy o descent with modication by natural selection became the
lens through which much o the subsequent debate was ltered. Dar-
win was well aware o earlier literature on both extinction and the econ-
omy o nature, which had a signicant inuence on his own thought. As
many histoians have demonstrated, the peiod between and
was a fomative time for him; this includes his voyage around the world
on HMS Beagle from to , the composition o his early note-
books recording his developing ideas about natural selection and trans-
mutation shortly aer his retun, and the draing o an initial sketch o
his theoy. While Dawin’s ideas were clearly inuenced by direct ex-
peience o the geology, ora, and fauna o South Ameica and Oceania
duing his travels, much o his time on the voyage was spent simply
reading; and from the lists and pivate notes he made, it is possible to
have a fairly clear idea o which books he read, and how they helped
shape his theoy.
It is fairly well documented that when Dawin rst set out on the
Beagle he was not committed to any theoy o transmutation. Expei-
ences such as his encounter with the fossil remains o large vertebrates
in South Ameica and with the nches and tortoises o the Galapagos
Islands had a profound inuence on his thinking about the vaiation,
change, and histoicity o organisms. But these direct expeiences were
also shaped by his reading—in particular, his reading o the rst two
volumes o Lyell’s Principles o Geology, which helped provide a frame-
work for what he was witnessing. From Lyell in particular he became
convinced that the earth was vey old, and that its geology was shaped
by gradual, dynamic processes that over time could raise or lower con-
tinents and build mountain ranges. To Dawin, this evidence o slow
geological change seemed at odds with the catastrophic revolutions
proposed by Cuvier, whom Dawin also read duing his tip. e pi-
vate notebooks Dawin kept duing the voyage demonstrate that he was
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
58 CHAPTER TWO
quite receptive to Lyell’s views about extinction, as expressed in vol-
ume o Principles o Geology. For example, in a short sketch witten
in , Dawin reected on the succession o fossil vertebrates he had
obseved in South Ameica:
With respect then to the death o species o Terrestial Mammalia in the
S. part o S. Ameica. I am strongly inclined to reject the action o any
sudden debacle.—Indeed the vey numbers o the remains render it to
me more probable that they are owing to a succession o deaths, aer the
ordinay course o nature.—As Mr Lyell (a) supposes Species may peish
as well as individuals; to the arguments he adduces. I hope the Cavia o
B. Blanca will be one more small instance, o at least a relation o certain
genera with certain disticts o the earth. is co- relation to my mind ren-
ders the gradual birth & death o species more probable (Dawin ).
is statement is a reference to Brocchi’s analogy between indi-
vidual and species life spans, which Dawin had leaned about through
Lyell. ere is some scholarly disagreement about the exact signicance
o this passage, but it is clear that on some level Dawin was endorsing
the analogy itself, i not Brocchi’s intenalist explanation for it. Never-
theless, Dawin went on to wite that “I gradual deaths the existence o
species is allowed, each according to its kind, we must suppose deaths
to follow one aer at dierent epochs, & then successive births must re-
people the globe or the number o its inhabitants has vaied exceeding
at dierent peiods.—A fact supposition in contradiction to the tness
wit which the Author o Nature has now established.” At this early stage
in his thinking, Dawin agreed with Lyell that the total diversity o life
at any given time should not change—this natural balance o nature is
established by “the Author o Nature.” In order to maintain an equi-
libium, species births must more- or- less exactly match their deaths,
and evidence for this is found in the succession o dierent foms o
large mammals in the geology o South Ameica. Dawin also accepted
that this process o extinction and replacement must have a natural
cause—as opposed, say, to divine intevention and special creation. He
was inclined to accept Lyell’s environmental explanation for species ex-
tinction, but this did not explain how the new foms appeared, or why
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN A VICTORIAN KEY 59
those foms oen seemed to be closely related to their extinct predeces-
sors. As some obsevers have argued, this was a watershed moment for
Dawin: he was now on the path to realizing that transmutation would
eectively answer the problem.
ese passages also show that, while composing his initial notes
aboard the Beagle, Dawin was committed to the idea that geologic
and organic change was marked by a natural balance or equilibium.
is balance was manifested in two ways: in the adaptedness o organ-
isms to their environments, where evey available “station” would be
lled by a creature adapted to suvive in it, and in the gradual replace-
ment o species as those environments slowly changed. When Dawin
retuned to England in , he began working through the evidence
he had gathered duing his voyage, and extinction became central to
these reections. In an enty marked Januay , he had remarked
in his Beagle notebook that “we are so profoundly ignorant concen-
ing the physiological relations, on which the life, and even health . . . o
any existing species depends, that we argue with still less safety about
either the life or death o any extinct kind.” While he speculated that
“simple relations” such as change in climate or predation may explain
“the succession o races,” he nonetheless concluded, “All that at present
can be said with certainty, is that, as with the individual, so with the
species, the hour o life has un its course, and is spent” (Dawin ,
–). Here Dawin recognized extinctions as a nomal feature o the
economy o nature, but was ambivalent about their causes or broader
signicance.
In the notebooks he kept between and , Dawin began to
home in on a more concrete explanation for this process o dynamic
replacement. In his early “Red Notebook” o – he remarked,
“ere is no more wonder in extinction o species than o individual.”
is was a vaiation on a statement he would make in many o his later
works: Extinction is a common and natural occurrence. A year later,
he descibed the “quantity o life” on earth as a uctuating balance, de-
pending upon the relationship between organisms and the dominant
environments they occupied, but remarked that “this perhaps on long
average equal” (Dawin, Notebook C , e). An important mo-
ment came in September o , when Dawin read the sixth edition
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
60 CHAPTER TWO
o omas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle o Population. As Dawin
would recall in his Autobiography, Malthus provided the inspiration for
natural selection: “Being well prepared to appreciate the stuggle for
existence which eveywhere goes on from long- continued obsevation
o the habits o animals and plants, it at once stuck me that under these
circumstances favourable vaiations would tend to be preseved, and
unfavourable ones to be destroyed. e result o this would be the for-
mation o new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theoy by which
to work” (Dawin , ). It may well be the case that Dawin drew
inspiration for natural selection from Malthus, but histoians have also
pointed out that he had already encountered sources—Lyell and De
Candole, in particular—on the importance o competition or “stuggle”
in nature, and some have questioned the continuity between Malthus’s
and Dawin’s views on the subject.
What is clear, though, is that Dawin’s reading o Malthus had
a claifying eect on his understanding o the role o competition in
maintaining the stability o what we would now call ecological relation-
ships. As Donald Worster argues in his comprehensive account o the
histoy o ecology, Nature’s Economy, it was “the single most important
event in the histoy o Anglo- Ameican ecological thought” (Worster
, ). Unlike many o his late- eighteenth- centuy contemporaies,
Malthus believed that an equilibium was maintained in nature through
erce competition for scarce resources, rather than as the product o a
hamonious, benecent plan. For Malthus, the economy o nature was
preseved by an imbalance between population and resources: “Neces-
sity, that impeious, all- pevading law o nature” ensured that only as
many individuals as could be supported were able to suvive. e in-
uence on Dawin’s thinking about the role o competition in the econ-
omy o nature was immediate: in a famous passage in his “Notebook D”
o , he wrote:
One may say there is a force like a hundred thousand wedges tying to
force into evey kind o adapted stucture into the gaps of in the
oeconomy o Nature, or rather foming gaps by thusting out weaker
ones. e nal cause o all this wedgings, must be to sort out proper
stucture & adapt it to change (Dawin Notebook D , e).
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN A VICTORIAN KEY 61
is passage is stiking because it introduces a “force” that dives ex-
tinction, something much more active and dramatic than what Lyell
had descibed as the gradual pressure o slow environmental change.
e force Dawin mentioned was simply competition but, ltered
through his reading o Malthus, he now saw it as something that ac-
tively maintained the economy o nature. But Dawin was also devel-
oping a conceptualization o “economy” that was less static than Mal-
thus’s or Lyell’s. Whereas Malthus had understood relationships to be
essentially xed, and Lyell saw change as a cyclical process that slowly
uctuated between xed boundaies, Dawin was opening the door to a
notion o “balance” that admitted dramatic and pemanent change (via
transmutation) and also acknowledged the instability and tenuousness
o local environments, while at a deeper level aming a commitment
to a view o nature as self- generating and self- renewing.
is stage also marked a much more condent treatment o extinc-
tion in Dawin’s witings. For example, in the rst edition o his Journal
o Researches, his record o his expeiences aboard HMS Beagle, pub-
lished in but composed earlier, Dawin recounted his obsevation
o evidence o extinct South Ameican vertebrates in the ambivalent
tems quoted above (the “Januay ” enty). However, in the second
edition o Journal o Researches, published in , his tone had changed
markedly. In the same section (“Januay ”), he now condently as-
serted, “Certainly, no fact in the long histoy o the world is so startling
as the wide and repeated extemination o its inhabitants. Neverthe-
less, i we consider the subject under another point o view, it will ap-
pear less peplexing” (Dawin , –). e point o view Dawin
was refering to was clearly the Malthusian dynamic o a “geometical”
rate o population increase, combined with a constant availability o
resources. All the earlier passages expressing ambivalence towards ex-
tinction’s causes had now been cut, and Dawin adopted the “Lyellian”
perspective that “an action going on, on evey side o us, and yet barely
appreciable, might surely be caried further, without exciting our ob-
sevation” (Dawin , ). Noting Lyell’s dictum that “raity is the
precursor to extinction,” he argued that extinction o a species ought
to excite no more wonder than the sickness and death o an individual
organism.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
62 CHAPTER TWO
is last argument was something Dawin had worked though in
two important handwitten “sketches” o his developing theoy, in
and respectively. In the sketch he explicitly adopted the Broc-
chian/Lyellian analogy between the individual and the species, witing,
“It accords with what we know o the law impressed on matter by the
Creator, that the creation and extinction o foms, like the birth and
death o individuals should be the eect o seconday laws means”
(Dawin ). In the sketch, he confronted the problem o ap-
parent mass extinctions, which he argued were artifacts o gaps in the
fossil record. While he acknowledged cases in which “extinction might
be locally sudden”—for example, aer a local ood—he maintained
that there were “no grounds whatever” to support Cuveian cycles o
catastrophes: “All [evidence] seem[s] to show that the extinction o the
several classes and renewal o species does not depend on general catas-
trophes, but on the particular relations o the several classes to the con-
ditions to which they are exposed” (Dawin ). e economy o na-
ture was such that extinctions would be generally compensated for by
the creation o an equal number o new species. In a number o places in
this later sketch, Dawin retuned to the analogy between the “births”
and “deaths” o individuals and species. Importantly, this “balance” was
conceived as the system’s overall tendency to maintain consistent levels
o diversity while expeiencing constant extinction and replacement.
is is generally the position that Dawin took in the rst edition
o Origin o Species, where extinction through competitive replacement
became enshined in his pinciple o natural selection. As he put it, “It
follows [from natural selection] that as each selected and favoured fom
increases in number, so will the less favoured foms decrease and be-
come rare. . . . It inevitably follows, that as new species in the course o
time are fomed through natural selection, others will become rarer and
rarer, and nally extinct” (Dawin , –). Dawin also made it
clear that this was a matter o natural law, following the inexorable logic
o natural selection: a species is “maintained by having some advantage
over those with which it comes into competition; and the consequent
extinction o less- favoured foms almost inevitably follows” (Dawin
, ). is would, o course, be a slow and gradual process. In the
Origin, as in his sketch, Dawin had no place for “the old notion
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN A VICTORIAN KEY 63
o all the inhabitants o the earth having been swept away at successive
peiods by catastrophes”; rather, “species and groups o species gradu-
ally disappear, one aer the other, rst from one spot, then from an-
other, and nally from the world” (Dawin , –).
Dawin’s views about extinction in the Origin also contibuted to
his position on the economy o nature, and on the value o a division
o labor among organisms that he temed “divergence.” He obseved:
Battle within battle must ever be recuring with vaying success; and yet
in the long- un the forces are so nicely balanced, that the face o nature
remains unifom for long peiods o time, though assuredly the merest
tie would oen give victoy to one organic being over another. Never-
theless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that
we mavel when we hear o the extinction o an organic being; and as we
do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or in-
vent laws on the duration o the foms o life! (Dawin , ).
However, despite being in constant motion, the net diversity o life is
not signicantly aected by the extinction o old and the creation o
new species. “Eveyone has heard that when an Ameican forest is cut
down,” he remarked elsewhere, “a vey dierent vegetation spings up;
but it has been obseved that the trees now growing on the ancient
Indian mounds, in the Southen United States, display the same beau-
tiful diversity and proportion o kinds as in the surrounding virgin for-
ests.” In other words, nature’s inherent fecundity ensures that there
will always be new foms standing by to replace the old ones, and that
those new species will suvive i they maintain a competitive advantage
with their environments. Diversity (or “divergence”) allows organisms
to “be better enabled to seize on many and widely diversied places in
the polity o nature, and so be enabled to increase in numbers” (Dar-
win , ).
Dawin expanded on these ideas in the sixth edition o Origin, pub-
lished in , where he explicitly argued that extinction and diver-
sication remain in hamonious, though dynamic, balance. While he
acknowledged that “there seems at rst sight no limit to the amount
o protable diversication o stucture, and therefore no limit to the
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
64 CHAPTER TWO
number o species which might be produced,” nonetheless “geology
shows us, that from the early part o the tertiay peiod the number o
species o shells, and that from the middle part o this same peiod the
number o mammals, has not greatly or at all increased” (Dawin ,
–). He concluded ultimately that “thus the appearance o new foms
and the disappearance o old foms, both those naturally and those arti-
cially produced, are bound together. . . . We know that species have
not gone on indenitely increasing, at least duing the later geological
epochs, so that, looking to later times, we may believe that the produc-
tion o new foms has caused the extinction o about the same number
o old foms” (Dawin , ).
Remarkably absent in any edition o the Origin is the sense that
Dawin viewed biological diversity in the way that scientists do today.
Diversity—or “biodiversity,” in the tem currently used—is an enor-
mously complicated and oen slippey concept, as a number o authors
have pointed out. raditionally, biological diversity is understood as
a measure o “species ichness”; that is, the absolute number o dier-
ent kinds o organisms in a particular environment. But that deni-
tion hardly does justice to the complex and nuanced way biodiversity
is understood in discussions o ecology, consevation biology, paleon-
tology, and other related contexts, to say nothing o political, economic,
and cultural discourse. Nor does it take account o the many poten-
tially problematic assumptions inherent in such a limited denition—
from vey basic taxonomic questions about how biological entities are
dened, to complex and culturally laden associations o diversity with
utilitaian, theological, and philosophical schemes o valuation. Ac-
cording to one recent denition, biological diversity is “the vaiety o
living organisms; the biological complexes in which they occur, and the
ways in which they interact with each other and the physical environ-
ment” (Groves et al. , ). Without wading too deeply into this
debate, these problems will be discussed more directly in chapter o
this book.
What is safe to say is that Dawin did not use the tem in a way
that reected even the basic denition o diversity as species ichness.
e word does appear as a noun (as opposed to adjectival foms like
“diverse” or “diversied”) some eighteen times in the text o the rst
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN A VICTORIAN KEY 65
edition o the Origin, but in evey case it is used merely as a synonym
for “vaiety.” For example, the word appears several times in the rst
chapter, “Vaiation under Domestication,” where Dawin discusses
the “diversity” o dierent breeds o pigeons, or owers in a garden, or
fuit in an orchard. Dawin also sometimes used the tem “diversity”
when discussing dierences in the mophology or stucture o limbs
and organs, as in “diversity in the shape o the pelvis o birds” (), or
“graduated diversity in the eyes o living custaceans” (), or “innite
diversity in stucture and function o the mouths o insects” (). For
Dawin, diversity was essentially a comparative tem, meant to indicate
an amount or degree o dierence between the features o organisms. It
does not convey a sense o ecological interdependence, nor is it usually
presented as a broader phenomenon that is threatened or in need o
presevation. In fact, in the two instances in the Origin where Dawin
invoked “diversity” in a somewhat broader sense, it was presented as an
example o how “beautiful” or “hamonious” the balance o nature is.
While “diversity” was not central in Dawin’s theoy, the tem “di-
vergence” was, as in “the pinciple o divergence,” which is the pinciple
by which natural selection favors a multiplicity o dierent adaptations
that allow organisms “to be better enabled to seize on many and widely
diversied places in the polity o nature, and so be enabled to increase
in numbers” (Dawin , ). is is what Dawin considered akin to
a division o labor: “e advantage o diversication o the inhabitants
o the same region is, in fact, the same as that o the physiological divi-
sion o labour in the organs o the same individual body” (Dawin ,
). But even this concept was problematic for Dawin. As Worster
argues, “Dawin never seemed able to focus on these implications o
the pinciple o divergence . . . for they complicated and even contra-
dicted the emphasis he placed on competitive replacement” (Worster
, ).
Indeed, Dawin barely seemed to consider the possibility that na-
ture could ever un out o mateial—diversity—with which to popu-
late its many “stations.” To the extent that he recognized something like
biological diversity in nature, he regarded it as an endlessly renewing
resource. is attitude reects the older notion o “plentitude” in na-
ture, associated with Linnaeus and other theologically inspired natural-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
66 CHAPTER TWO
ists, as well as Lyell’s intepretation o geological histoy as a dynamic
equilibium. What Dawin added was the regular cycle o extinction
and speciation, which made Dawin’s view o nature considerably more
transient than earlier conceptions o a static balance or economy. But
beneath this constant change is a fundamental underlying stability, pro-
vided thanks to nature’s capacity for endless self- generation o more
diversity. e issue, then, isn’t whether Dawin recognized or thought
natural vaiety was important—he certainly did—but whether he
thought diversity itsel could be diminished by extinction, and nature’s
stability could thus be threatened, which he did not. Competition and
replacement were, for Dawin, the engine that drove the progressive
improvement o the natural system and maintained the economy o na-
ture. Far from seeing diversity as something to be conseved, he viewed
it as essentially the fuel for that engine, the source o continued compe-
tition, selection, and extinction. e extinction o a species somewhere
always opens up the possibility o a new one somewhere else; this was
as much a “law” o nature as anything to be found in the Origin. e idea
that nature exists in a hamonious, unchanging balance may have been
upset, at the end o the eighteenth centuy, by authors such as Malthus
and Cuvier, who suggested that competition and the specter o extinc-
tion were an inherent part o the natural order. But Dawin’s message
was, essentially, that stuggle and even extinction were positive forces,
in the long view—thus soothing the anxieties o Victoians about their
own impact on the world. e world may be subject to constant change,
but faith in the ultimate constancy o nature was not shaken.
Extinction and Cultural Progress
Famously, Dawin said virtually nothing in the Origin about the impli-
cations o natural selection and evolution for humans, beyond the cyp-
tic statement that “In the distant future. . . . Light will be thrown on the
oigin o man and his histoy” (Dawin , ). As we have already
seen, however, other naturalists including Lyell had already extended
the study o extinction as a natural process to considerations o its sig-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN A VICTORIAN KEY 67
nicance for human culture and civilizations. e theme o “inevitable”
racial extinction was already a well established trope by the s, and
there is plenty o evidence that Dawin was well aware o the potential
implications for his own developing theoy. In obsevations o his ex-
peiences in New South Wales in Januay o , Dawin remarked in
his Journal o Researches:
Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboiginal.
We may look to the wide extent o the Ameicas, Polynesia, the Cape o
Good Hope, and Australia, and we shall nd the same result. Nor is it the
white man alone, that thus acts the destroyer; the Polynesian o Malay
extraction has in parts o the East Indian archipelago, thus diven be
-
fore him the dark- coloured native. e vaieties o man seem to act on
each other; in the same way as dierent species o animals—the stronger
always extipating the weaker (Dawin , ).
is shows that, as Dawin was developing his evolutionay ideas, he
was conscious o the analogies that could be drawn between extinction
in the human and nonhuman spheres. In a letter to Lyell in October
he obseved that naturalized European plants in South Ameica
“conquer the aboigines,” and he discussed a similar phenomenon
whereby the “most intellectual individuals o a species” might be favor-
ably selected: “I look at this process as now going on with the races o
man; the less intellectual races being exteminated” (Dawin , ).
When it came time to publish his extension o his theoy o evolu-
tion to human beings in Descent o Man (), Dawin took much the
same line. He accepted the extinction o human races as “histoically
known events,” and bluntly stated that “extinction follows chiey from
the competition o tibe with tibe, and race with race. . . . When civi-
lized nations come into contact with barbaians the stuggle is short, ex-
cept when a deadly climate gives its aid to the native race” (Dawin ,
–). While Dawin was certainly not shy about using tems such as
“barbaians” to descibe indigenous peoples, he drew back from explic-
itly endorsing or excusing violent extemination o native peoples as a
consequence o European impeial expansion. Nonetheless, his more
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
68 CHAPTER TWO
general statements on the subject made it clear that he felt natural com-
petition between races could have a generally “improving” eect on
the human species. He argued, for example, that while a “tibe” o “self-
ish and contentious people” might have a temporay advantage over
more peaceful ones, ultimately groups o people with higher “social and
moral qualities would tend slowly to advance and be diused through-
out the world” (Dawin , –). Dawin believed, perhaps rather
optimistically, that this process would take place chiey without blood-
shed, noting that “at the present day civilized nations are eveywhere
supplanting barbarous nations . . . and they succeed mainly, though not
exclusively, through their arts, which are the products o the intellect”
(Dawin , ).
In this regard, Dawin’s published views were anticipated by a de-
cade or more by authors who are generally considered part o the “Dar-
winist” camp—most prominently Alfred Russell Wallace and Herbert
Spencer. In , Wallace published an essay titled “e Oigin o
Human Races and the Antiquity o Man Deduced from the eoy o
Natural Selection,” which was based on an address he had given to the
Anthropological Society o London. e pimay pupose o Wallace’s
lecture was to argue for the applicability o natural selection to human
evolution, but in the process he gave considerable attention to extinc-
tion. Like Dawin, Wallace was optimistic that “tibes in which such
[rened] mental and moral qualities were predominant, would there-
fore have an advantage in the stuggle for existence over other tibes,”
from which it would inevitably follow that “the better and higher speci-
mens o our race would therefore increase and spread, the lower and
more butal would give way and successively die out” (Wallace ,
clxii– clxiv). is generally gives the impression that with humans, un-
like “lower” animals, competition would tend to be intellectual rather
than violent, and that “the power o natural selection . . . must ever lead
to the more perfect adaptation o man’s higher faculties to the condi-
tions o surrounding nature, and to the exigencies o the social state”
(Wallace , clxix).
At the same time, Wallace made no bones about whom he consid-
ered to be the “supeior” and “infeior” races, nor about what the inevi-
table result o European expansion would be:
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN A VICTORIAN KEY 69
It is the same great law o “the preservation o favored races in the strule
for life,” which leads to the inevitable extinction o all those low and men-
tally undeveloped populations with which Europeans come in contact.
e red Indian in North Ameica, and in Brazil; the Tasmanian, Austra-
lian and New Zealander in the southen hemisphere, die out, not from
any special cause, but from the inevitable eects o an unequal mental
and physical stuggle. e mental and moral, as well as the physical quali-
ties o the European are supeior . . . [and] enable him when in contact
with the savage man, to conquer in the stuggle for existence, and to in-
crease at his expense, just as the more favorable increase at the expense
o the less favorable vaieties in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, just
as the weeds o Europe overun North Ameica and Australia, extinguish-
ing native production by the inherent vigour o their organisation, and
by their greater capacity for existence and multiplication” (Wallace ,
clxiv–clxv).
What is especially stiking about this passage—aside from its rather
blithe attitude towards the extinction o human beings—is the im-
plied message about diversity. In Wallace’s view o social evolution, the
net result o “more perfect adaptation” is less rather than more diver-
sity. Wallace went on to argue that mental abilities would continue to
evolve “till the world is again inhabited by a single homogeneous race,
no individual o which will be infeior to the noblest specimens o exist-
ing humanity.” e end result, in Wallace’s view, would be a utopian
society with perfect freedom, universal altuism, and no need for laws,
govenments, or police; in short, as he put it, the earth will have been
converted “into as bight a paradise as ever haunted the dreams o seer
or poet” (Wallace , clxx). Dawin sent Wallace an enthusiastic let-
ter in response, which complimented the assertion o mental evolution
as the “great leading idea” o the essay, and commented, “e latter part
o the paper [e.g., the section on human competition, extinction, and
progress] I can designate only as grand & most eloquently done” (Dar-
win to Wallace, May ). In his reply, Wallace thanked Dawin
but also—famously—asserted, “As to the theoy o ‘Natural Selection’
itself, I shall always maintain it to be actually yours & your’s [sic] only”
(Wallace to Dawin, May ).
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
70 CHAPTER TWO
However, another source o inspiration for Wallace, which he ac-
knowledged with a footnote in his essay, was Herbert Spencer’s
Social Statics (). Indeed, Spencer had been witing about social
evolution for several years before the publication o Dawin’s Origin,
and his views about the role o competition among humans as a mecha-
nism for social progress anticipated Dawin’s own. It is worth noting,
however, that Spencer’s vision o evolution was markedly more pro-
gressionist than Dawin’s; Spencer unabashedly believed that in both
biology and society, evolution produced “better” outcomes. In Social
Statics and elsewhere, Spencer consistently maintained that competi-
tion among human groups or races was not only natural but good, even
though the consequences for the less successful were invaiably dire.
“Inconvenience, sueing, and death, are the penalties attached to na-
ture by ignorance,” he wrote in Social Statics, “as well as to incompe-
tence—and also the means o remedying these. . . . Partly by weeding
out those o lowest development, and partly by subjecting those who
remain to the never- ceasing discipline o expeience, nature secures the
growth o a race who shall both understand the conditions o excellence,
and be able to act up to them” (Spencer , ). While Spencer, like
Wallace, envisioned the resulting society as one in which less suer-
ing and inequality would exist, he nonetheless acknowledged—a little
too comfortably for even some o his contemporaies—that a certain
amount o unpleasantness would precede that state.
In an essay in the Westminster Review titled “A eoy o Popu-
lation, Deduced from the General Law o Animal Fertility,” Spencer
argued that “families and races” which tended to produce an “excess
o fertility” without an accompanying “greater mental activity”—he
singled out the Iish as a case in point—“are on the high road to extinc-
tion; and must necessaily be supplanted by those whom the pressure
does so stimulate” (Spencer , –). And in his e Study
o Sociology, he even more explicitly discussed the salutay eect o
competition between races—even to the point o violent warfare—in
raising the level o civilization:
Warfare among men, like warfare among animals, has had a large share in
raising their organizations to a higher stage. . . . In the rst place, it has had
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN A VICTORIAN KEY 71
the eect o continually extipating races which, for some reason or other,
were least tted to cope with the conditions o existence they were sub-
ject to. e killing- o o relatively- feeble tibes, or tibes relatively want-
ing in endurance, or courage, or sagacity, or power o co- operation, must
have tended ever to maintain, and occasionally increase, the amounts o
life- preseving powers possessed by men (Spencer , ).
However, Spencer also noted that in “higher societies,” competition
would tend toward cultural and economic battle rather than overt vio-
lence. is was, he argued, for the benet o the elevated races, since
“destuctive activities” had “injuious eects on the moral natures o
their members . . . which outweigh the benets resulting from the extir-
pation o infeior races. . . . Aer this stage has been reached, the pui-
fying process, continuing still an important one, remains to be caried
on by an industial war—by a competition o societies duing which
the best, emotionally, physically, and intellectually, spread most, and
leave the lest capable to disappear gradually, from failing to leave a
suciently- numerous posteity” (Spencer , –). e message,
in other words, was that while advanced civilizations should refrain
from actively exteminating native peoples, nature would eventually do
the job for them.
e attitudes towards human extinction expressed by Wallace and
Spencer (and implicitly by Lyell and Dawin) can be seen in vaying
degrees across a wide spectum o literature in Bitain, France, and the
United States between and . e belie that native peoples—
“savages”—encountered by Europeans duing colonial expansion were
“doomed” to extinction has been documented by a number o histo-
ians as compising an “extinction discourse” in later Victoian cul-
ture. is discourse, according to literay scholar Patick Brantlinger,
acted as “a powerful axis o ideas that has been hegemonic for countless
European explorers, colonists, witers, artists, ocials, missionaies,
humanitaians, and anthropologists” (Brantlinger , ). e be-
lie in the inevitable extinction o infeior races in many ways assuaged
the guilt o European impeialists and, from one perspective, can be
seen as a subset o contemporay race theoy. At the same time, there
was a great deal o heterogeneity and debate from the s onward in
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
72 CHAPTER TWO
anthropological and biological circles concening the innate hereditay
supeioity o certain races over others. Racism, in other words, could
take many foms, ranging from cude hereditaian theoies o innate
physical dierence to more relativistic arguments about cultural supei
-
oity. While theoies o European racial supeioity certainly contib-
uted to this extinction discourse, I have tied to locate the roots o these
attitudes more deeply in the biological understanding o extinction and
its consequences developed by naturalists throughout the nineteenth
centuy, because I think this gives us a broader and more interesting
context in which to understand how broadly cultural and elite scientic
values intepenetrated one another at this time.
Dawin’s views about the essential unity o the human species—his
rejection o polygenism—were widely shared by his contemporaies in
the s and aewards. is did not mean, o course, that all races o
people were considered equal. An earlier discourse o cude physiologi-
cal hierarchy, based on “scientic” evidence from elds such as crani-
omety, came to be replaced by anthropological views that emphasized
evolved cultural supeioity, and which opened the possibility o the
“elevation” o infeior races. Even so, this attitude was ultimately con-
sistent with the dominant biological intepretation o extinction, since
it still envisioned a competitive stuggle between cultures in which the
more “advanced” would inevitably tiumph, even i it led to the peaceful
assimilation rather than violent extemination o the vanquished. e
“progress” that was envisioned by Dawin, Wallace, Spencer, and others
might result in a kind o “so” extinction, but either way the outcome
would be the narrowing o human cultural diversity towards a “mono-
culture” based on the European ideal.
While it would be tedious to catalog statements by Europeans re-
ecting such views, a representative sampling will seve to empha-
size the contibution o scientic extinction discourse into a broader
cultural and political extinction imaginay. e extemination o the
pimitive was a trope that had broad cultural resonance in the later
nineteenth centuy, even as a kind o poetic metaphor. Heny David
oreau’s Walden (), for example, speaks o seeking individual
puity by overthrowing “savage” instincts and appetites: “We are con-
scious o an animal within us, which awakens in proportion as our
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN A VICTORIAN KEY 73
higher nature slumbers. . . . Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must
be overcome” (oreau , –). Overcoming nature could take a
vaiety o foms: it could include extracting maximum economic yield
from crops and livestock, establishing plantations o imported vaieties
in colonial teritoies, or improving the (European) standard o living
through technological innovations in transport, communication, and
medicine. And, quite explicitly, it could involve displacing, assimilat-
ing, or even eradicating populations o human beings that stood in the
way o European expansion. e point, however, is that the received
view o biological extinction contibuted to this discourse by natural-
izing Europeans’ political and economic interests. It was not merely an
ad hoc justication for rapacious impeialism—it was central to how
European elites understood their role in the economy o nature.
Many authors quite explicitly associated Dawin’s theoy o natu-
ral selection—and by extension, his intepretation o extinction—with
the kind o inevitable racial extinction that implicitly or explicitly justi-
ed European expansion. In an infamous Fraser’s Magazine article
titled “On the Failure o ‘Natural Selection’ in the Case o Man,” the
essayist and free- trade promoter William R. Greg noted that “in evey
part o the world, and in evey instance, the result has been the same;
the process o extinction is either completed or actively at work” (Greg
, ). Greg’s piece, which is oen cited as an early inspiration for
the eugenics movement, was broadly concened with arguments about
the role o social welfare laws in preseving “less t” members o society.
But he had no doubt that “the pinciple [natural selection] does not ap-
pear to fail in the case o races o men,” where “the abler, the stronger,
the more advanced, the ner in short, are still the favored ones,” who
“exteminate, goven, supersede, ght, eat, or work the infeior tibes
out o existence.” Greg explicitly cited Dawin as an authoity for his
views, and in particular glowingly endorsed Wallace’s essay, which he
quoted for more than a full page. Furthemore, Greg was clear that no
number o moral qualms would make any dierence for the outcome:
“e process is quite as certain, and nearly as rapid, whether we are just
or unjust; whether we use carefulness or cuelty. Eveywhere the sav-
age tibes o mankind die out at the contact o the civilized ones” (Greg
, ).
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
74 CHAPTER TWO
Similar sentiments were common in European and Ameican politi-
cal and scientic publications and discussions throughout the remain-
der o the centuy. For example, the Geman physiologist and philoso-
pher Fiedich Karl Chistian Ludwig Büchner, a major exponent o
anti- Romantic “scientic mateialism,” published a book that was trans-
lated into English in as Man in the Past, Present, and Future. Büch-
ner was a fan o both Dawin’s and Wallace’s witings on the opera-
tion o natural selection in human societies, and his own book reected
many o the sentiments we have already obseved—for instance, that
“all backward branches o the great human family will by degrees dis-
appear with but few exceptions under the pressure o civilized man.”
What is particularly interesting about Büchner’s arguments is how he
imagined that this process would homogenize the human species. Here
he separated a “reducing movement” (i.e., extinction) from a “dier-
entiating one,” arguing that gradual extinction o infeior races would
“supeinduce a greater unifomity or similaity o mankind in all parts
o the earth”; and he looked foward to “the time when a certain uni-
fomity o culture and mateial conditions . . . will be diused over the
greater part o the inhabited and habitable part o our planet” (Büchner
, –). Like Wallace, Büchner saw the reduction o diversity as a
positive outcome, at least in regard to human culture.
Büchner’s case reveals that “Dawinian” justications o the inevi-
table extinction o humans through contact with Europeans were not
limited to an Anglo- Ameican context. Oscar Schmidt, a zoology pro-
fessor at the University o Strasbourg, was an early Geman supporter
o Dawin and the author o a popular book translated into English as
Darwin and the Doctrine o Descent and Darwinism (). Schmidt’s
position on the human race veered towards polygenism; he wrote that
“infeior human races exist—we may call them human species—which
are related to the others, as are lower animals to higher.” He also en-
dorsed a fairly stark view o the consequences o European impeialism:
We are not to be misled by the contray statements o missionaies and
other philanthropists. . . . i we contemplate the ethnology and anthro-
pology o savages, not from the standpoint o philanthropists and mis-
sionaies, but as cool and sober naturalists, destuction in the stuggle
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN A VICTORIAN KEY 75
for existence as a consequence o their retardation (itsel regulated by
the universal conditions o development), is the natural course o things
(Schmidt , –).
In fact, it is quite dicult to nd any European naturalists, anthro-
pologists, or explorers in the later nineteenth centuy who did not re-
gard racial extinction as the inevitable—and basically unpreventable—
outcome o European expansion. We see this in Alfred Newton’s
exasperated comment that “It is seldom that any one but a Fennimore
Cooper or a Charles Kingsley feels the romance that clings around the
histoy o an expiing race. Most men—men o science especially—
nowadays believe in the suvival o the ttest, and are content to let
the dead buy their dead” (Newton , ). Newton, who was the
rst professor o anatomy and zoology at Cambidge, was a passion-
ate early activist for biological consevation. But even he separated ex-
tinction into two categoies—“natural” versus “articial” (i.e., caused
by human agency)—and his concen was pimaily directed toward a
few specic examples o species, such as the great auk, that were being
threatened by human activity. And even Newton’s arguments for con-
sevation were based mostly on the potential loss o valuable scientic
infomation, rather than on any consideration o the value o biological
diversity as such.
Indeed, by the later nineteenth centuy there was increasing pub-
lic interest in the role o human activities, especially hunting, in caus-
ing species extinctions. From the mid- s onward, letters and edito-
ials in Bitish and Ameican newspapers reected a growing popular
concen with preseving individual species—or at least with recogniz-
ing the hamful eects o human agency aer the fact. A number o
letters were published in the Times o London from through the
end o the centuy descibing, in elegiac tems, the extinction or pro-
spective extinction o North Ameican elk and antelope, Afican ele-
phants and aardvarks, and even larks and robins in Italy. Likewise, at
the same time in the United States, the New York Times featured letters
and articles that not only descibed the plight o individual species—the
Missoui beaver, the Labrador duck, the great auk, and o course the bi-
son—but also summaized scientic understandings o the causes and
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
76 CHAPTER TWO
evidence for prehistoic extinctions. In evey case, however, the con-
cen or regret expressed was couched in romantic language that cele-
brated the beauty or utility o particular species, and did not reect a
more general concen with the presevation o “diversity” as such, or
with what we might now consider the ecological or evolutionay con-
sequences o extinction. What these witings do show, particularly in
the case o the New York Times articles, is a public with a growing inter-
est in and awareness o the lessons that scientists in elds such as pale-
ontology had for understanding the economy o nature in the present.
In any event, it would be a mistake to associate the attitude o later
nineteenth- centuy “consevationists” with those o consevation bi-
ologists today. Explorers and sportsmen like eodore Roosevelt and
Fredeick Selous may have voiced concens about the extemination
o the chaismatic animals they hunted, but these views did not nec-
essaily translate into broader attitudes about diversity or concen for
cultural consevation. Selous, an English explorer and personal fiend
o Roosevelt’s, published a number o popular accounts o his travels,
including Sunshine and Storm in Rhodesia (), where he discussed
the theme o European expansion. He urged that “the whole question
o the colonization by Europeans o counties previously inhabited by
savage tibes must be looked at from a broad point o view,” by which
he meant that “nal results” could justify sometimes unpleasant actions.
As one example, Selous presented the “noble red man” who “has been
exteminated by the more intelligent white man,” but obseved that “in
place o a cuel, hopeless savagey there has aisen a civilization whose
ideals are surely higher than those o the displaced barbaism” (Selous
, –). Similarly, in South Afica “an orderly civilization has been
established over a large area o this once savage county, and no one but
an ignorant fanatic would, I think, assert that its present condition is
not preferable from a humanitaian point o view to its fomer barba-
ism.” While Selous’s attitude was itsel not exceptional for its time, his
comments are particularly interesting because o the overt connection
they drew to biological theoy. As he concluded, “e Bitish colonist
is but the irresponsible atom employed in carying out a preordained
law—the law which has uled upon this planet ever since, in the far o
misty depths o time, organic life was rst evolved upon the earth—the
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN A VICTORIAN KEY 77
inexorable law which Dawin has aptly temed the ‘Suvival o the Fit-
test.’” (Selous , ). Selous’s somewhat tenuous grasp o Dawin’s
own position is not the issue here (it was Spencer, not Dawin, who
coined the tem “suvival o the ttest”). Rather, the point is that there
is a clear connection between discussions o competition and extinc-
tion in elite scientic circles and the deployment o those ideas in popu-
lar and political discourse (such as in the earlier parliamentay discus-
sions o the s).
A vey prominent nexus for biological and political discussions o
racial extinction was the debate about the fate o freed slaves following
the Ameican Civil War. Histoians are now beginning to draw atten-
tion to the calamitous health cisis that faced migrant Afican Amei-
cans duing the Reconstuction era, and to the unpreparedness o the
US federal govenment to cope with the problem. But at the time, a
number o white, mostly Southen physicians discussed the issue as an
example o the unintended consequences o disturbing the system o
slavey, couched in explicitly, though supercially, “Dawinian” tems.
For example, in his essay “e Future o the Colored Race in the US,”
physician Eugene Rollin Corson argued that “it is to the school o Dar-
win, Wallace, and Spencer that we must tun” for guidance on the ulti-
mate fate o the “negro” race, which, freed from the protective institu-
tion o slavey, must engage in a “stuggle for existence” (Corson ,
–).
One o the most important discussions o this topic was Joseph Le
Conte’s book e Race Problem in the South (). Le Conte was for-
mally trained as a physician, and he grew up in Georgia, seving in the
Confederacy duing the Civil War. But he also studied geology and
natural histoy with Louis Agassiz at Havard, and aer the war joined
the faculty in biology at the University o Califonia. He published
widely on topics relating to Dawinian thought, and his discussion o
the “Negro problem” was explicitly couched in the language o evolu-
tion. In e Race Problem, Le Conte used an argument about extinc-
tion to justify the practice o slavey: Since Aficans were by nature “in-
feior” to Europeans, the only altenative to slavey “would have been
the extinction o the weaker race.” He regarded the institution o slavey
to be “a natural one,” and insisted that “whatever is natural can not be
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
78 CHAPTER TWO
wholly wrong” (Le Conte , ). e proo o this, for Le Conte,
came in the “failure” o freed slaves to successfully compete with people
o European descent (he conveniently ignored any political, sociologi-
cal, or economic explanations). His more general conclusion was that
In organic evolution the contact o two diverse foms detemines either
the extinction o the weaker or else its relegation to a subordinate place in
the economy o Nature; the weaker is either destroyed or seeks safety by
avoiding competition. In human evolution the same law must hold, with
a dierence to be detemined by reason (Le Conte , ).
In essence, Le Conte argued that domination was preferable to ex-
temination, although he also expressed the hope that Afican Amei-
cans had expeienced sucient “race evolution” to suvive the transition
from enslavement. However, he regarded the issue as one o broader
import, since “eveywhere the white race is pushing its way among the
lower races. Eveywhere, now that slavey is inadmissible, the result is
gradual extinction o the lower race” (Le Conte , –). Whether
“extemination, then, [was] the inexorable fate o all the lower races” Le
Conte did not profess to know, but he speculated that the ultimate re-
sult o “the stuggle for life and the suvival o the ttest” among human
races would be a nal, perfect race that was most general and “coexten-
sive with human nature” (Le Conte , ).
In the later nineteenth centuy, then, biological theoies o competi-
tion and extinction could be deployed both as justication for European
impeial expansion and as apologia for slavey. ese attitudes began to
shi somewhat duing the rst part o the twentieth centuy, but the
rst decade o that centuy did not see a shap decline in the rhetoic
surrounding inevitable racial extinction. At the same time, some au-
thors began to question the logic o applying biological concepts o t-
ness and selection to human societies. For example, in the English
economist John A. Hobson wrote a scathing citique o European im-
peialist ambitions in Political Science Quarterly, where he citicized the
“dogmatism” o arguments that “defend the necessity, the utility, and
even the ighteousness o maintaining to the point o complete subjuga-
tion or extemination the physical stuggle between races and types o
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN A VICTORIAN KEY 79
civilization” (Hobson , –). He maintained that “impeialism
is nothing but this natural- histoy doctine [suvival o the ttest] re-
garded from the standpoint o one’s own nation,” which he character-
ized as a belie that committed the naturalistic fallacy o equating “can”
with “should” (Hobson , ). Yet Hobson ultimately adopted a
Spenceian view o cultural competition, in which “we cease ghting
with bullets in order to ght with ideas.” In the end, “All the essentials
o the biological stuggle for life are retained—the incentive to indi-
vidual vigor, the intensity o the stuggle, the elimination o the un-
t and the suvival o the ttest” (Hobson , ). In other words,
Hob son’s main objection to “the impeialist argument” was that it relied
overtly on violent force, and that it targeted entire groups rather than
unt individuals. He took for granted that humanitaianism that arti-
cially propped up the “weak” in society caused more ham than good,
and he concluded that “eective intenational govenment for national
and racial selection can alone be regarded as an accurate and economi-
cal instument o world progress” (Hobson , ).
Witing a year later, Lester Ward, the Yale sociologist and ardent
Spenceian, had fewer qualms about violent extemination in his in-
uential book Pure Sociology (). He opined that “war has been
the chie and leading condition o human progress,” and drew a direct
analogy between “natural” and cultural extinction:
In the organic world the stuggle has the appearance o a stuggle for exis-
tence. e weaker species go to the wall and the stronger persist. ere is
a constant elimination o the defective and a suvival o the ttest. On the
social plane it is the same, and weak races succumb in the stuggle while
strong races persist (Ward , ).
Likewise, in his paean to eugenics, the English statistician Karl
Pearson unapologetically declared, “Histoy shows me one way, and
one way only, in which a high state o civilization has been produced,
namely, the stuggle o race with race, and the suvival o the physi-
cally and mentally tter race” (Pearson , ). Pearson argued that
although the stuggle between races was oen “terible,” the outcome,
a higher level o civilization, more than counterbalanced any sueing
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
80 CHAPTER TWO
along the way; such stuggle was “the ey cucible out o which comes
the ner metal” (Pearson , ). His arguments explicitly rejected
the value o cultural diversity, for he deided “the romantic sympathy
for the Red Indian generated by the novels o Cooper and the poems o
Longfellow,” and he stressed that “the nation organized for the stuggle
must be a homogeneous whole” (Pearson , , ). e broad pic-
ture Pearson painted was stark, and as redolent o Victoian cultural and
biological attitudes as anything published thirty or forty years earlier:
Mankind as a whole, like the individual man, advances through pain and
sueing only. e path o progress is strewn with the wreck o nations;
traces are eveywhere to be seen o the hecatombs o infeior races, and
o victims who found not the narrow way to the greater perfection. Yet
these dead peoples are, in vey tuth, the stepping- stones on which man-
kind has aisen to the higher intellectual and deeper emotional life o to-
day (Pearson , ).
Conclusion
e tenets o the dominant nineteenth- centuy view o extinction were:
() Extinction is a regular, law- abiding, and natural process. () Extinc-
tion is diven pimaily by competition; individuals or species that be-
come extinct have failed to remain adapted to their environments, or
have failed to compete for resources, and therefore “deseve” to die.
() Extinction is inevitable; it is the logical consequence o natural
selection. () Extinction tends to be equally balanced by the appear-
ance o new species (speciation), thus maintaining the “economy o
nature.” () e number o taxa (i.e., the diversity) in the world there-
fore exists in dynamic equilibium. e corollay to these tenets was the
assumption that diversity was an inherent and self- renewing property
o the “economy o nature,” and thus required no special protection or
independent valuation. As I have argued in this chapter, this particular
way o conceiving o extinction was also implicated in a cultural and
political imaginay—especially in Bitain and the United States—that
supported impeialism and downplayed the value o protecting species
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN A VICTORIAN KEY 81
and peoples from threat o extinction. Duing the nineteenth centuy,
at a time when naturalists understood nature to be an essentially end-
lessly renewable resource, diversity was taken for granted, and extinc-
tion was not perceived as a threat to the economy o nature. erefore,
diversity per se did not have nomative value. Rather, extinction was
understood to be nature’s way o strengthening and improving itsel by
weeding out the unt, and competition was celebrated as the source
o natural progress. is view supported Victoian ideologies o social
progress and impeial expansion, and justied a lack o concen about
the inevitable victims o progress—combined with, at most, romantic
nostalgia for cultures that passed away. When competition is natural, it
was thought, extinction is inevitable and not to be resisted.
As I have suggested, both sets o views—about extinction, and also
about the value o diversity—would begin to shi duing the twentieth
centuy. As was the case in the earlier peiod, the discourses surround-
ing extinction and diversity were enmeshed in a complex web involving
biological, ecological, and anthropological theoies, as well as political
and cultural perceptions o nature and society. e next two chapters
will begin to untangle these threads, focusing especially on new scien-
tic perspectives that developed for the study o extinction dynamics
and ecological systems, and which contibuted to and reected a new
extinction imaginay dramatically dierent from the one it replaced.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
3
CATASTROPHE AND MODERNITY
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
e cataclysm has happened, we are among the uins, we
start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes.
It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the
future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles.
We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
—D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover ()
With these words, the English witer D. H. Lawrence opened his con-
troversial novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a work remembered
mostly for its frank treatment o sexual themes that tested censorship
ules in its day. At rst glance, it may seem an odd way to continue our
exploration o the histoy o extinction. Lawrence was not a biologist,
and he did not engage directly with biological or scientic themes in his
witing. But this passage captures the deep sense o pessimism, doubt,
and doom that pevaded European and Ameican culture duing the
decades between and the Second World War that marks a major
tuning point in our stoy. Whereas the nineteenth centuy was char-
acteized by a pevasive sense o optimism and faith in the potentially
limitless progress o Westen civilization and its values, the early twen-
tieth centuy presents us with a sudden and stiking contrast. is is re-
ected in the arts, in philosophy, in social theoy, in histoical scholar-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
84 CHAPTER THREE
ship, in political discourse, and in science as well: the positivism o the
Victoian era was replaced by a far darker mood, in which to many con-
temporay obsevers the secure values o the previous society were
called into question at seemingly evey tun.
is new and pessimistic sensibility is sometimes simply called
“Modenism,” though as a general label the tem fails to capture the
specicity o the transfomation I am descibing. e eminent Bitish
histoian Eic Hobsbawm has more aptly descibed the opening de-
cades o the twentieth centuy as “the Age o Catastrophe,” since the
notion o “catastrophe” conveys the sense in which Westen society, as
Hobsbawm puts it, was expeiencing a profound cisis “which, in one
way or another, was in the process o destroying the bases o its exis-
tence, the systems o value, convention and intellectual understanding
which stuctured and ordered it” (Hobsbawm , ). at sense o
“catastrophe” or “cisis” is especially visible in the work o “literay Mod-
enists” such as Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Louis-
Ferdinand Céline, Virginia Woolf, and many others, where imagey o
catastrophe or apocalypse oen features prominently. But such themes
also appear in contemporay philosophy—for example, in the work o
Fiedich Nietzsche and Albert Camus; in the psychoanalytic theoy o
Sigmund Freud; in the pessimistic histoical theoy o Oswald Speng-
ler; in the speculative ction o H. G. Wells and Jack London; and in a
vaiety o other cultural contexts, both “high” and “low.” And this broad
cultural sensibility—o cisis, catastrophe, and decline—did not fail to
leave a mark on the science o the day. is was especially the case with
theoies o biological extinction, which tended to abandon the more
progressive Dawinian account discussed in the last chapter in favor o
explanations that invoked inevitable degeneration and “racial senility,”
oen analogized directly with contemporay histoical discussions o
inevitable social and cultural decline and extinction.
One o the major themes in this book is the extent to which cultural
and biological values surrounding extinction mirrored and reinforced
one another, constituting what I am calling an “extinction imaginay.”
In the Victoian era, optimism about social and industial progress reso
-
nated in biological theoies emphasizing progress through healthy com-
petition between organisms and species. Extinction was oen seen as
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
CATASTROPHE AND MODERNITY 85
nature’s way o cleaing away dead bush to allow healthy roots to thive.
Duing the early decades o the twentieth centuy, however, grow-
ing pessimism about the vey possibility o unlimited human progress
found an echo in biological theoies—popular especially among Amei-
can and Geman paleontologists—that saw the extinction o species
as the inevitable result o predetemined racial “life cycles,” in which
lengthy peiods o “matuity” teminated in a nal stage o racial “se-
nility” or “senescence.” In many cases, these biological theoies explic-
itly invoked contemporay histoical accounts—such as Speng ler’s—o
similar cycles o social ouishing and decline which oen forecast the
imminent demise o Westen civilization itself. e timing o the emer-
gence o this new biological approach to understanding extinction is
quite important: such theoies, which fall under the general label o
“orthogenesis,” became popular between the s and the s, at
precisely the time that pessimistic cyclical histoical accounts came into
vogue, especially in Gemany. As I will show in this chapter, this was
not mere coincidence; rather, it can be fairly conclusively demonstrated
that such intepretations o human histoy directly inuenced many o
the leading proponents o cyclical biological theoies.
Another important theme duing this peiod is a climate o what
might be called “apocalyptic thinking.” is notion, exemplied in the
Lawrence quotation that begins this chapter, held that Westen society
had reached such an advanced state o decay that only a dramatic and
perhaps violent catastrophe could oer any hope o rebirth or renewal.
Visions o apocalypse, either gurative or literal, feature prominently in
poems and novels o the time, and oen drew quite directly upon con-
temporay scientic concepts such as themodynamics and extinction.
Apocalyptic rhetoic was not incompatible with contemporay histoi-
cal accounts o social decline, with one important distinction: whereas
histoians such as Speng ler generally imagined repeating cycles o the
ise, ouishing, and decline o civilizations, apocalyptic visions tended
to emphasize a more linear conception o histoy, with nal apoca-
lypse representing a decisive culmination o some kind. In this sense,
secular apocalypticism harked back to earlier Judeo- Chistian roots in
which a nal apocalypse would mark the end o histoy. But while sev-
eral prominent literay gures—Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot—oen did a-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
86 CHAPTER THREE
vor their visions o apocalypse with more traditional religious themes,
a parallel strain o apocalyptic literature emerged, especially early sci-
ence ction, which imagined apocalypse in purely secular tems that
did not necessaily hold out a promise o puication or redemption.
One might distinguish, then, between a kind o “secular millenai-
anism” in which a hoped- for cataclysm would redeem a corupt society,
and a more pessimistic apocalypticism in which humankind, at least,
had little hope for a future. In the latter case, science ction authors in
particular imagined apocalyptic scenaios that invoked astronomical or
geological events which strongly resembled earlier “catastrophic” geo-
logical theoies, such as Cuvier’s. Intiguingly, with a vey few excep-
tions early- twentieth- centuy geologists and paleontologists shied away
from overtly “catastrophist” accounts o extinction which, as the next
chapter will discuss, reemerged only in the s and s. Here I will
suggest that the secular apocalypticism o the pre– World War II era was
an important cultural context for the later emergence o catastrophic
mass extinction in scientic discourse—something that one might, in
evolutionay tems, label a kind o “preadaptation” for the acceptance
o catastrophic biological theoies. Ultimately, however, the twentieth
centuy presents a tuning point in the Westen extinction imaginay:
increasingly, extinction was seen not only as an intinsic check on the
nineteenth- centuy dream o potentially limitless progress, but also
as something o direct relevance and concen to the future o human
civilization.
Degeneration and History
e roots o early- twentieth- centuy catastrophism can actually be
traced back to the late Victoian era, when anxieties about social and
biological “degeneration” became a prominent theme in European sci-
entic and political discourse. As a concept, degeneration drew from
fairly long- standing concens about the future progress o racial and so-
cial development, mixing Dawinian and Spenceian evolutionay ideas
with nineteenth- centuy theoies o racial characteistics and contem-
poray pessimistic histoiography. In a biological context, degenera-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
CATASTROPHE AND MODERNITY 87
tion refers to the potential “reversion” o an individual or a species to a
more “pimitive type,” or the failure o a race to maintain the “genera-
tive force” necessay to maintain adaptation or to progress to “higher”
stages o evolution.
Degeneration was also an important concen for early hereditaian
biological theoies: before the wide recognition o Mendel’s laws o
inheitance in the early twentieth centuy, there was much confusion
and debate about how the mechanism o heredity functioned. In the
rst edition o Origin o Species, Dawin himsel descibed mysteious
cases in which “the child oen reverts in certain characters to its grand-
father or grandmother or other much more remote ancestor,” though
his theoy o evolution via natural selection would appear to imply that
such “reversions” would not become xed in a population unless they
conveyed immediate adaptive advantage.
Dawin was mostly concened here, and in his e Variation
o Animals and Plants under Domestication, with cases where traits re-
appeared in humans or domesticated plants and animals aer an ab-
sence o one or a few generations. But the discussion was complicated
by ideas such as the Geman embyologist Enst Haeckel’s “recapitula-
tion theoy,” which held that stages o fetal development o an animal
(ontogeny) mirrored the evolutionay histoy o its lineage (phylogeny).
I a developing fetus actually passed through earlier evolutionay
stages, as Haeckel proposed, then it seemed possible that mature organ-
isms themselves might have the capacity to revert to foms represent-
ing much earlier evolutionay steps. In fainess to nineteenth- centuy
scientists, this is an enomously complex subject that still occupies the
attention o moden biology, particularly in the eld o evolutionay
development (evo- devo). Moden genetics has identied mechanisms
by which genes that become inactive can remain domant in a genome
for long peiods o time, only to reappear through a rare mutation: so-
called atavisms, such as the appearance o a vestigial tail in humans or
legs in snakes. But the notion that a species or a race could “devolve,” or
the vey idea o one species being more “pimitive” than another, is not
supported by moden evolutionay theoy.
Nonetheless, this is precisely what many late- nineteenth- centuy
biologists believed, and the idea t well with attempts to classify hierar-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
88 CHAPTER THREE
chies o biological race in humans, for example, as discussed in the pre-
vious chapter. Furthemore, it occurred to some that allegedly “patho-
logical” characteistics in humans—such as sexual deviancy, insanity,
or ciminality—could be explained as evolutionay degenerations.
is was the argument infamously proposed by the Italian physician
and ciminologist Cesare Lombroso in his L’uomo delinquente, or
e Criminal Man, which posited that ciminals tend to exhibit physi-
cal characteistics that reect those o pimitive human ancestors or
even apes. Lombroso’s work was deeply infused with assumptions o
the now discredited science o anthropomety, which relied on skull
measurements and other physical characteistics to infer emotional and
mental capacities. But it was extremely inuential in its time and was
widely cited well into the twentieth centuy, especially in the United
States by proponents o eugenics who opposed immigration from na-
tions with high incidences o racial “degeneracy.” Degeneration also
became a common trope in speculative literature, featuing promi-
nently, for example, in works such as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan o
the Apes (), H. G. Wells’s e Time Machine () and e Island o
Doctor Moreau (), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula ().
Degeneration is not a theoy o biological or social extinction per se,
but elements o degeneration theoy found their way into a number o
discussions o natural and human histoy that postulated a nal stage
o degenerate “senility” leading to the extinction o species or civiliza-
tions. One early and inuential example was E. Ray Lankester’s Degen-
eration: A Chapter in Darwinism, which was published in . Lan-
kester was a Bitish zoologist who rose to prominence as a member
o omas Heny Huxley’s newly established University College Lon-
don in the s and s, and he was a staunch ally o Huxley’s who
defended Dawin’s mechanism o natural selection against challenges
from Lamarckian and other non- Dawinian evolutionay theoies. He
dened biological degeneration as “a gradual change o the stucture
in which the organism becomes adapted to less vaied and less complex
conditions o life,” which he based on extensive studies o the evolution-
ay histoies o maine invertebrates.
Degeneration thus led to a decrease in adaptive tness that could
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
CATASTROPHE AND MODERNITY 89
ultimately result in the temination o a lineage; however, unlike many
contemporay biologists and paleontologists who saw degeneration as
the outcome o intinsic organic life cycles, Lankester did not regard
the degenerative phase as inevitable, and he situated the idea in an ex-
plicitly Dawinian context. He also drew analogies between biological
and social degeneration, arguing that “high states o civilisation have
decayed and given place to low and degenerate states,” such as when
“Rome degenerated when possessed o the iches o the ancient world”
(Lankester , , ). In this sense Lankester, like other contempo-
ray obsevers, connected social degeneration with excess o wealth or
power that inhibited creativity, competition, and cultural progress. O
his own society he commented that among “the white races o Europe,
the possibility o degeneration seems to be worth some consideration,”
and argued that “we have at least reason to fear that we may be degen-
erate” (Lankester , –).
Lankester’s gloomy prognosis resonated strongly in a culture in-
creasingly preoccupied with social and racial decline. Francis Galton,
Dawin’s rst cousin and a widely acknowledged early proponent o
eugenics, combined anxieties about race mixing, female emancipation,
and cultural degeneration in an account o the fall o ancient Greek
civilization that was a thinly veiled reference to Bitain’s own possible
future. As he put it in his inuential Hereditary Genius (),
We know, and may guess something more, o the reason why this
mavelously- gied [Greek] race declined. Social morality grew exceed-
ingly lax; mariage became unfashionable, and was avoided; many o the
more ambitious women were avowed courtesans, and consequently in-
fertile, and the mothers o the incoming population were o a heteroge-
neous [read: infeior] class. In a small sea- bordered county [much like
England!], where emigration and immigration are constantly going on,
and where the manners are as dissolute as were those o Greece in the
peiod o which I speak, the puity o a race would necessaily fail. It
can be, therefore, no supise to us, though it has been a severe misfor-
tune to humanity, that the High Athenian breed decayed and disappeared
(Galton , –).
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
90 CHAPTER THREE
Indeed, degeneracy o this type became a great concen o the eugen-
ics movement that emerged in the United States and Europe duing the
early twentieth centuy, where strategies designed both to strengthen
the “pure” stock through selective breeding and to inhibit the inux o
degenerate individuals through immigration restiction, forced steil-
ization, and (most horically) mass murder were pursued with state
sponsorship. But one feature o the eugenics movement that distin-
guishes it from other similar biosocial approaches to degeneration—
and a reason why it will not feature more prominently in this book—is
its essential optimism: unlike many o the more pessimistic prophets o
Modenism discussed in this chapter, most eugenicists believed mly
and idealistically in the power o moden science to redeem civilization
and ensure its continued progress.
In the study o human histoy, degeneration contibuted to the am-
plication o an earlier rhetoic o inevitable social decay. While many
mid- and later- nineteenth- centuy histoians were swept up in the
spiit o progress and Positivism that buoyed Victoian era impeialism,
a notable faction both in Gemany and Bitain had taken a less opti-
mistic stance. In the early nineteenth centuy, for example, the Geman
histoian Barthold Georg Niebuhr suggested disturbing parallels be-
tween the decline and fall o Rome and the future o his own contempo-
ray civilization (and Niebuhr was one o the histoians who inuenced
Charles Lyell’s histoical conception o earth histoy as cyclical rather
than progressive). e French theoist August Comte’s philosophy o
Positivism—which identied cycles o social progress through theo-
logical, metaphysical, and scientic stages—was in many ways a direct
response to such thinking, with the important distinction that Comte
did not envision a peiod o decline that followed a civilization’s ascen-
dancy. But the gloomier tradition persisted, especially in Gemany,
where the work o Jacob Burkhardt inuenced many with its pessimis-
tic predictions about the future o contemporay European culture in
the face o an encroaching “universal barbaism.” Burckhardt’s major
works, published largely in the s and s, inuenced a genera-
tion o histoians; and through his scholarship and personal fiendship,
Burkhardt strongly inuenced the development o Fiedich Nietz-
sche’s own uniquely pessimistic philosophy.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
CATASTROPHE AND MODERNITY 91
Probably the most concise and inuential single account o degen-
eration as a histoical force, though, was an book by Max Nordau
titled simply Degeneration, which encapsulated most o the anxieties
that would surface in vaious guises in the catastrophic Modenism o
the next centuy. Nordau was bon to an Austian Jewish family, and
he eventually became a major gure, along with eodor Herzl, in the
World Zionist Organization aer concluding that Jewish emancipa-
tion would not succeed in Europe following the notoious Dreyfus af-
fair in France in . is gives Nordau’s approach to degeneration a
somewhat unique avor, in that he was not, like many contemporay
obsevers, defending traditional Nordic Chistian European values.
Nonetheless, he did diagnose in his own society a decline in morality
and idealism, which he descibed as “the end o an established order,
which for thousands o years has satised logic, fettered depravity, and
in evey art measured something o beauty” (Nordau , ).
Nordau took exception to the growing populaity o the notion o
n- de- siècle (end o the centuy), since he regarded as absurd the idea
that articial units o time like “centuy” have independent histoical
meaning. Rather, he proposed the tem n- de- race as more accurately
captuing “the prevalent feeling . . . o imminent perdition and extinc-
tion” felt across Europe. “In our days,” he wrote, “there have aisen in
more highly- developed minds vague qualms o a Dusk o the Nations, in
which all suns and all stars are gradually waning, and mankind with all
its institutions and creations is peishing in the midst o a dying world”
(Nordau , ). He justied this overtly catastrophic vision by citing
studies o biological degeneration—including Lombroso’s in particu-
lar—as contibuting to an increasingly unhealthy society that would
be incapable o pepetuating itself: “Degeneracy is a pathological state;
the most convincing proo o this is, that the degenerate type does not
propagate itself, but becomes extinct” (Nordau , ). In addition
to the now familiar references to social and cultural decay, Nordau also
drew metaphors from natural catastrophe, including the famous eup-
tion o the Indonesian volcanic island o Krakatoa in that killed
tens o thousands and disupted global weather pattens for years:
“Massed in the sky the clouds are aame in the weirdly beautiful glow
which was obseved for the space o years aer the euption o Kraka-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
92 CHAPTER THREE
toa. Over the earth the shadows creep with deepening gloom, wrapping
all objects in a mysteious dimness. . . . e day is over, the night draws
on” (Nordau , ).
Without doubt, the great traumatic event o the early twentieth
centuy was the First World War, which profoundly inuenced the dis-
mal mood o European literature, philosophy, and histoy duing the
s and s. is was the “cataclysm” Lawrence referred to in the
opening o Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which had “brought the roo down
over” Constance Chatterley’s head: Having been brought back from
Flan ders to England “more or less in bits,” Constance’s husband Clif-
ford attempted to resume nomal life, “but he had been so much hurt
that something inside o him had peished, some o his feelings were
gone” (Lawrence , –). Constance’s later aair, then, is traceable
directly back to this calamitous event. But while it is impossible to ex-
aggerate the trauma inicted on the European psyche by the war, it
is important to emphasize that, as the preceding discussion has indi-
cated, the war did not create the culture o doom and catastrophe that
pemeated the rst hal o the twentieth centuy. On the contray, to
many obsevers it simply conmed the dire predictions they had been
making for some time. One important eect war may have had, how-
ever, was to enhance pessimism towards redemptive hopes that secular
millenaians clung to with increasing tenuousness—though, as I will
discuss in the next chapter, the nal blow probably did not come until
the Second World War.
Oswald Speng ler’s great opus e Decline o the West—a monumen-
tal histoical treatise on the ise and fall o the world’s civilizations—is
oen seen to epitomize the mood o postwar Europe, and indeed it was
received that way. As the Geman philosopher Enst Cassirer descibed
it in ,
In there appeared Oswald Speng ler’s Decline o the West. Perhaps
never before had a philosophical book such a sensational success. It was
translated into almost evey language and read by all sorts o readers—
philosophers and scientists, histoians and politicians, students and
scholars, tradesmen and the man in the street.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
CATASTROPHE AND MODERNITY 93
But as Cassirer went on to make clear, Speng ler’s book galvanized feel-
ings that had been deeply felt for some time:
e title Der Untergang des Abendlandes was an electic spark that set the
imagination o Speng ler’s readers aame. e book was published in July,
, at the end o the rst World War. At this time many, i not most o us,
had realized that something was rotten in the state o our highly praised
Westen civilization. Speng ler’s book expressed, in a shap and trenchant
way, this general uneasiness (Cassirer , ).
While Decline o the West was not published until aer the amistice in
, it had in fact been conceived as early as , shortly aer a mod-
est inheitance following his mother’s death allowed Speng ler to resign
a position as a high school teacher and to pursue scholarship full- time.
As Speng ler himsel explained it, “At that time the World- War appeared
to me both as imminent and also as the inevitable outward manifes-
tation o the histoical cisis, and my endeavour was to comprehend
it from an examination o the spiit o the preceding centuies—not
years” (Speng ler , ). In Speng ler’s own fomulation, then, the
work itself—and its theoy o cycles o ise and fall o civilizations—was
less inspired by the war as the war was “the inevitable outward mani-
festation” o the theoy, which had much deeper antecedents. In par-
ticular, Speng ler cited Nietzsche and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as
his major inspirations, and his view o histoy owed a deep debt to the
nineteenth- centuy tradition o Romantic and pessimistic histoicism.
e main thesis o Decline o the West is that civilizations, like organ-
isms or species, have predetemined life cycles that last no more than
about a thousand years. As Speng ler put it, “Evey Culture, evey ado-
lescence and matuing and decay o a Culture, evey one o its intinsi-
cally necessay stages and peiods, has a denite duration, always the
same, always recuring with the emphasis o a symbol” (Speng ler ,
). To prove this point, the book suveys the great civilizations o
“world histoy,” and argues that the Westen belie in its own exception-
alism is analogous to the “geocentism” o cosmology before Copeni-
cus. Consequently, Speng ler descibed his viewpoint as “Copenican,”
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
94 CHAPTER THREE
since “it admits no sort o pivileged position to the Classical or the
Westen Culture” (Speng ler , ). Rather, as his work shows, world
histoy is “the drama o a number o mighty cultures, each spinging
with pimitive strength from the soil o a mother- region to which it re-
mains mly bound throughout its whole life- cycle . . . each having its
own idea, its own passions, its own life, will, and feeling, its own death”
(Speng ler , ). On this last point, Speng ler was quite explicit that
the “death” o a civilization is analogous to the biological extinction o
species, since “each Culture, further, has its own mode o spiritual extinc-
tion, which is that which follows o necessity from its life as a whole”
(Speng ler , ).
What is remarkable about Speng ler’s theoy o histoy—and this
has, I think, been missed by many readers—is how much it engages
with biology and geology. Speng ler’s philosophy was broadly anti-
Dawinian and Romantic, which is to say he rejected the stict matei-
alism o natural selection and random genetic mutation as the basis for
evolutionay change. Indeed, his belie that human civilizations have
“life cycles” is founded on an organic conception o social organization
that owes much to the “vitalist” tradition in Romantic Geman biology
o the nineteenth centuy: the notion that, as he put it, to each indi-
vidual organism or species “is given also a denite energy o the fom—
by virtue o which in the course o its self- fulllment it keeps itsel pure
or, on the contray, becomes dull and unclear or evasively splits into nu-
merous vaieties” (Speng ler , ). Speng ler’s use o the tem “fom”
here echoes Goethe’s use o the tem “mophology” (the tem Speng ler
uses in the Geman oiginal is morphologie), which Goethe frequently
employed to discuss anatomical similaities between organs o distinct
species o organisms (what we would now call “homologies”—for in-
stance, the analogy between the wing o a bat and the n o a dolphin).
Speng ler paid this debt to Goethe in the subtitle to the Geman edition
o his book, Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte (Outlines o a
Mophology o World Histoy), which refers to the analogies Speng-
ler detected between the stages o the vaious civilizations he studied.
In Speng ler’s eyes, the mechanism that explains the development o
organisms, species, or civilizations through distinct and predetemined
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
CATASTROPHE AND MODERNITY 95
stages o a life cycle is an intinsic property—a vital “force”—that can-
not be reduced to what Speng ler saw as lifeless mechanical causes.
Speng ler viewed Lyell’s and Dawin’s accounts o natural histoy as “but
deivatives o the development o England itself,” which “in place o
the incalculable catastrophes and metamophoses such as von Buch and
Cuvier admitted . . . put a methodical evolution over vey long peiods
o time and recognize as Causes only scientically calculable and indeed
mechanical utility- causes” (Speng ler , ). But Speng ler had reason
to question this mechanical account, since “there is no more conclusive
refutation o Dawinism than palaeontology.” Rather than the smooth
unbroken seies o transitional foms Dawin predicted the fossil record
should reveal, Speng ler argued, “we nd perfectly stable and unaltered
foms perseveing through long ages, foms that have not developed
themselves on the tness pinciple, but appear suddenly and at once in
their denitive shape; they do not thereaer evolve towards better adap-
tation, but become rarer and nally disappear, while quite dierent
foms crop up again” (Speng ler , ). e only explanation for this,
Speng ler believed, was an intenal vital force responsible for the birth,
ouishing, and death o species, which he descibed as “a life- duration
o this form, which . . . leads naturally to a senility o the species and
nally to its disappearance” (Speng ler , ). And he was absolutely
clear that it was this same “life- duration o fom” that explains
the swi and deep changes [that] exert themselves in the histoy o the
great Cultures, without assignable causes, inuences, or puposes o any
kind. e Gothic and the Pyramid styles come into full being as suddenly
as do the Chinese impeialism o Shi- hwang- ti and the Roman o Augus-
tus, as Hellenism and Buddhism and Islam (Speng ler , ).
It is important to note that while Speng ler’s biological analogy may
seem out o sync with our current understanding o evolutionay bi-
ology, it was quite widely supported (as will be discussed below) by
a number o inuential contemporay Geman and Ameican paleon-
tologists, who also advocated theoies o species life cycles. Speng ler
was obviously well aware o these theoies, and even predicted that
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
96 CHAPTER THREE
“without doubt the biology o the future will—in opposition to Dar-
winism and to the exclusion in pinciple o causal tness- motives for
the oigins o species—take these preordained life durations as the start-
ing point for a new enunciation o its problem” (Speng ler , ).
Speng ler was wrong in this prediction—he did not foresee the Moden
Evolutionay Synthesis o the s, which with ample reason would
establish Dawinism as the unchallenged model for evolutionay expla-
nation. But in its time, Speng ler’s work was a comprehensive system o
human histoy pemeated through and through with biological thinking
that was up to date with regard to explanations, in particular, for ex-
tinction. Furthemore, as I will discuss shortly, this inuence was not
one- way; paleontologists o the era were as likely to invoke analogies
between natural and human histoy as were social theoists, and a num-
ber o inuential Geman paleontologists took explicit inspiration from
Speng ler’s work in developing their own theoies o intinsic species
life cycles.
Apocalypticism, Cataclysm, and Modernism
Depictions o cataclysmic geological upheaval would become common
as metaphors in Modenist literature o the next several decades, but
they would also feature more literally in speculative apocalyptic sci-
ence ction, as well as in ostensibly scientic accounts o natural and
human histoy. Catastrophe was also a prominent theme in the “cata-
clysmic” histoy and social theoy o a group o late nineteenth- and
early- twentieth- centuy Ameican intellectuals that included Ignatius
Donnelly, Homer Lea, Brooks and Heny Adams (direct descendants
o US Presidents John and John Quincy Adams), and Jack London
(the famous adventure novelist). While this group was quite heteroge-
neous in background, belief, and genre o expression—ranging from
the speculative popular geology o Donnelly to the highbrow economic
histoies o the Adams brothers and the pulp ction o London—it can
be loosely characteized by a shared belie that society had reached a
dangerous impasse, threatened both from within by immigration, labor
unrest, and predatoy capitalism, and from outside, especially by inevi-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
CATASTROPHE AND MODERNITY 97
table racial conict with an ascendant Japan. Although biological de-
generation did not gure prominently in the works o these authors,
Ameican “cataclysmists” (as the histoian Fredeic Jaher has labeled
them) shared with their European counteparts a foreboding that
“a bleak future in which sudden destuction or slow stagnation lay in
wait for a rotten civilization” (Jaher , ).
For some cataclysmists, catastrophe could take the fom o a vio-
lent physical event or bloody global war—as was predicted by Homer
Lea, whose Valor o Ignorance () imagined a catastrophic war be-
tween the United States and Japan. For others, including Brooks and
Heny Adams, the catastrophe was more likely to be economic or po-
litical. is sense was probably amplied by the great economic uncer-
tainly in the United States duing the decades between the s and the
s, where cycles o panic and economic depression severely destabi-
lized the traditional social stuctures that the Adamses, in particular, as
Boston “Brahmins,” had taken for granted. A major economic depres-
sion in the s may have catalyzed this thinking, as did militant labor
organization and violent stikes throughout the s. ese included
the notoious Haymarket Aair in Chicago, in which a group o “anar-
chists” was convicted o inciting a iot in which several police ocers
were killed; the Homestead Stike o , in which Pennsylvania steel
workers clashed violently with Pinkerton agents employed by Andrew
Canegie; and the Panic o , on the eve o the World’s Columbian
Exposition in Chicago, that saw nationwide unemployment rates reach
as high as percent.
e reaction o the Adams brothers is best exemplied in Brooks
Adams’s book e Law o Civilization and Decay, which ts within
the tradition o pessimistic cyclical histoiography o Burkhardt and
later Speng ler, but has a uniquely “Ameican” focus in its obsession
with rampant capitalism, which Adams blamed for most o the social
disintegration plaguing moden society. Adams presented his theoy as
scientic, since he based his “law” o civilization on “the accepted sci-
entic pinciple that the law o force and energy is o universal applica-
tion in nature, and that animal life is one o the outlets through which
solar energy is dissipated” (Adams , viii– ix). His theoy, then,
roughly proposed that a kind o themodynamics applies to human
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
98 CHAPTER THREE
societies, where civilizations have natural endowments o “energy”
that are eventually dissipated through war or scientic and industial
production, leading either to stagnation or reversion to a more “pimi-
tive fom o organism” (Adams , xi). Needless to say, he viewed his
own contemporay society as exhibiting symptoms o extreme dissipa-
tion, mostly thanks to the centralization o capital by powerful—and
Jewish— families such as the Rothschilds (Adams was an overt anti-
Semite), and he predicted that it must eventually give way to some new,
more energetic, civilization. In this regard, Adams found nothing spe-
cial in the fate o Westen culture, since his histoical suvey showed
“a progressive law o civilization, each stage o progress being marked
by certain intellectual, moral, and physical changes” that would repeat
through endless cycles o stuggle, consolidation o energy, and dissi-
pation. (Adams , ).
In contrast to the blue- blooded Adams, Ignatius Donnelly was a
populist agraian with utopian leanings whose early career was spent
in politics, where he represented Minnesota in the US Congress duing
the s before retiing to pivate law practice and amateur scientic
witing. Aer leaving politics Donnelly channeled these interests into
pseudoscientic works in which he proposed cycles o astronomical
and geological catastrophe that he alleged had shaped human histoy.
e rst o those works, Atlantis: e Antediluvian World () was a
popular success and inspired a revival o interest in the Atlantis myth
that persisted well into the later twentieth centuy. e second was a
more ambitious treatise, grandiosely entitled Ragnarok: e Age o Fire
and Gravel (), which proposed to explain major changes in human
histoy as the result o astronomical cataclysms in the distant past and
perhaps future.
Ragnarok made its debt to geological catastrophism clear on its title
page, where it quoted Cuvier’s statement in his “Preliminay Discourse”
to Revolutions on the Surface o the Globe:
I am not inclined to conclude that man had no existence at all before the
great revolutions o the earth. He might have inhabited certain disticts
o no great extent, whence aer these terible events he re- peopled the
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
CATASTROPHE AND MODERNITY 99
world. Perhaps, also the spots where he inhabited where swallowed up
and his bones lie buied under the beds o the present seas.
Indeed, Donnelly’s central argument was that long ago—but well within
the bounds o human prehistoy—a comet had impacted the earth, set-
ting o a dramatic seies o cataclysms that included vapoized seas
and huge stoms, earthquakes and volcanic euptions, and ultimately
a global ice age which lowered temperatures so dramatically that its
eects are still felt in the present (g. .). Donnelly’s “evidence” for this
event was what he referred to as “the Di”: a layer o sediment at the
top o the earth’s cust containing clay, gravel, fragmented stones, and
evidence o recent human and animal life, but no fossils, which he ar-
gued could only be “the result o violent action o some kind” (Donnelly
, ). Further evidence o this catastrophe, he argued, is found in
the mythologies o civilizations from ancient Egypt to classical Greece
to Judaism and Islam: why else, he wondered, would nearly evey so-
ciety record ancient cataclysms, like the ood stoies that appear so fre-
quently in myths and sciptures from around the world? Donnelly pro-
posed that the profound cataclysm that created the Di had occurred
perhaps as long as thirty thousand years ago, and wiped out a thiving
civilization—perhaps the one descibed in the Atlantis myth. But he
le open the possibility that other, similar astronomical and geologi-
cal catastrophes had stuck at other points in human histoy, and even
that such an event might occur again, as part o a grand cycle o de-
stuction and rebirth: “In endless seies the ages stretch along—birth,
life, development, destuction. And so shall it be till time is no more”
(Donnelly , ). But, perhaps inuenced by his devout Catholic
upbinging, Donnelly held out hope that our current civilization might
be spared by divine intevention, provided that society proves itsel to
be virtuous and worthy. “From such a world,” he wrote, “God will fend
o the comets with his great ight am, and the angels will exult over it
in heaven” (Donnelly , ).
While it was presented as a scientic theoy, one would be hard
pressed to distinguish many elements o Donnelly’s comet impact hy-
pothesis from contemporay speculative ction, which around
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
100 CHAPTER THREE
began to demonstrate increasingly apocalyptic preoccupations. In-
deed, it might be fair to say that the genre o “apocalyptic” ction was
invented in this peiod. e idea o apocalypse is o course a vey old
one, and in the Chistian tradition it extends back many centuies. But
I am distinguishing Modenist “secular apocalypticism” from the more
3.1 A depiction o a comet crossing the path o the earth, in Ignatius Donnelly,
Ragnarok: e Age o Fire and Gravel (New York: Appleton and Co., ), . As Don-
nelly speculated in Ragnarok, the earth may have passed through the tail o a mighty
comet. “Or, on the other hand, the comet may, as descibed in some o the legends, have
stuck the earth, head on, amid- ships, and the shock may have changed the angle o incli-
nation o the earth’s axis, and thus have modied pemanently the climate o our globe”
(Donnelly , –).
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
CATASTROPHE AND MODERNITY 101
explicitly religious vaiety for several reasons. First, Chistian apoca-
lyptic thinking tends to view the apocalypse as a puifying and redemp-
tive event, whereas the secular version is far less optimistic about a new
beginning for humanity aer the catastrophe. Second, in religious tra-
ditions humans occupy the central focus o the histoical stage, so that
the apocalypse that ends the human drama is also literally “the end o
the world.” In contrast, by the late nineteenth centuy secular apoca-
lyptic visions oen presented the end o humanity as simply an event in
the continuation o a broader natural histoy; many apocalyptic novels
and stoies imagined plants and animals reclaiming a world vacated by
human beings. is attitude was no doubt inuenced by the nineteenth-
centuy discovey o “deep time,” which, as Martin Rudwick has argued,
was a revolution in human awareness no less profound, or potentially
unsettling to notions o human importance, than the Copenican one.
Finally, the agent o apocalyptic catastrophe in the secular context is
always some kind o naturalistic event, whether extenal to human af-
fairs (e.g., a comet, plague, or other natural disaster) or intenal (war or
an industial or scientic accident). In this regard, apocalyptic ction o
the early twentieth centuy drew quite explicitly on contemporay sci-
ence to imagine realistic scenaios, and tended to avoid arbitray super-
natural agents o destuction.
e fascinating question to ask is why apocalyptic literature ap-
peared so suddenly, around the tun o the twentieth centuy, and
with almost no precursors. Based on a fairly careful census, I nd that
the peiod between and saw the publication o only a small
handful o stoies, poems, and novels imagining a secular apocalypse;
between and the number increased to several dozen; and
aer apocalyptic novels, stoies, and lms number in the hun-
dreds. I argue that this phenomenon is a product o the same shi in
thinking about Westen progress—cultural and scientic—that char-
acteized anxieties about degeneration and decline in the other mani-
festations we have already discussed. In fact, it would not be too strong
to say that the vey idea o the end o humanity, in a secular context,
only became thinkable in the context o these broader anxieties, and
that this apocalyptic “imaginay” helped to create a context in which
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
102 CHAPTER THREE
scientic theoies o catastrophic extinction would come to be taken
more seiously.
May Shelley’s speculative novel e Last Man, published in , is
oen considered the rst moden apocalyptic novel (the French novel
Le dernier homme, published in , is sometimes given that distinc-
tion, but because it has strong religious elements I do not consider it
properly “secular”). Shelley’s novel, which was witten shortly aer the
death o her husband, the great Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley,
tells the stoy o the sole human suvivor o a worldwide plague some-
time in the twenty- rst centuy. While the novel can be read as a ci-
tique o science in the same vein as her earlier and much more suc-
cessful Frankenstein (), the ovewhelming theme o e Last Man
is rather the intense loneliness and isolation o the main character. As a
number o scholars have suggested, this mood was inspired by Shelley’s
own feeling o isolation aer the deaths o her husband and Lord Byron,
and the consequent unraveling o their circle o Romantic idealists.
What is especially noteworthy about e Last Man, however, is how
poorly it was received. is owes in part to the quality o the narrative—
both the prose and the plot are well below the standard o Franken-
stein—but there is equal reason to suspect that the subject itsel was
unpalatable to contemporay tastes. e reviews were scathing: one re-
viewer descibed it as “a sickening repetition o horrors,” and another as
“the osping o a diseased imagination, and o a most polluted taste,”
while a third simply called it an “abortion.” Nor was the reading pub-
lic vey interested: it sold the least well o all o Shelley’s novels, and
died into obscuity in the decades aer its publication.
e Last Man was not the only such work o its time, but it was
the longest and most ambitious. George Gordon, Lord Byron’s poem
“Darkness,” published in , also imagined a civilization- ending catas
-
trophe, but this event was couched in fairly oblique and metaphoical
tems. e poem imagined a future in which
e bight sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the etenal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
CATASTROPHE AND MODERNITY 103
and presented the dismal prospect where
e world was void,
e populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump o death—a chaos o hard clay (Byron ).
Not only was the message o the poem quite bleak, oeing little in the
way o hope for humankind’s salvation, but the imagey itsel was drawn
from contemporay events: in the Indonesian volcano Mount Tam-
bora eupted, darkening skies worldwide with ash and causing the “Year
without a Summer” in Europe, which Byron claimed was the initial in-
spiration for his poem.
Not to be outdone, the Scottish poet omas Campbell published a
poem titled “e Last Man” in , which occasioned a minor pioity
dispute with Byron (some obsevers commented on the similaities be-
tween Campbell’s and Byron’s imagey, leading Campbell to claim that
he had in fact suggested the idea to Byron before the publication o
“Darkness”). But while Byron’s poem held out little hope o redemption
for humankind (the nal lines read “And the clouds peish’d; Darkness
had no need/ O aid from them—She was the Universe”), Campbell was
explicit in presenting apocalypse as a precursor to divine redemption:
is spiit shall retun to Him
Who gave its heavenly spark;
Yet think not, Sun, it shall be dim
When thou thysel are dark!
No! it shall live again, and shine
In bliss unknown to beams o thine,
By Him recalled to breath,
Who captive led captivity,
Who robbed the grave o victoy,
And took the sting from death (Campbell ).
In this way, while the two poems share many fomal similaities, their
messages were quite dierent: as one literay scholar has pointed out,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
104 CHAPTER THREE
Byron’s poem was among the rst works o literature that “envisaged
apocalypse without millennium,” something it shared in common with
Shelley’s novel, the collective weight o which “moved almost the en-
tire citical establishment to deny the possibility o imagining Lastness”
(Paley , ).
However unwilling Georgian and Victoian readers may have been
to imagine “lastness,” by the end o the nineteenth centuy things had
changed signicantly. Between and the Second World War a ra
o stoies and novels depicting the extinction or near extipation o the
human race were published, many o which invoked astronomical or
geological catastrophes. One o the rst such works was Richard Jef-
feies’ novel Aer London (), which descibed the aemath o an
unnamed catastrophe in which human suvivors revert to a pastoral,
agraian lifestyle reminiscent o the Middle Ages. Jeeies was a nature
witer with decidedly Romantic leanings, so it is not supising that he
approved o his ctional development; in his disdain for industialized
society, his views closely match those o contemporay agraian apoca-
lypticists in the United States. But the witer probably most closely as-
sociated with early apocalyptic science ction was the English socialist
witer and social citic H. G. Wells, whose novels and stoies explored
themes o catastrophe, degeneration, and apocalypse and reached an
enomous reading public.
Wells’ best known apocalyptic novel is e Time Machine (),
a “scientic romance” in which a contemporay English time traveler
visits a distant future in which humanity has split into two distinct races:
the peaceful, childlike Eloi, whom he discovers to be the food supply
for the subterranean, butish Morlocks. Aer escaping from the Mor-
locks, the traveler visits an even more distant future in which nearly all
life on earth has been extinguished, and the sun hangs reddened and
dying above a bleak landscape: “Beyond the lifeless sands the world was
silent—silent! It would be hard to convey to you the stillness o it. All
the sounds o man, the bleating o sheep, the cies o birds, the hum
o insects, the stir that makes the background o our lives, were over”
(Wells , ). e book thus manages to imagine three distinct
types o extinction: the “racial senescence” o humanity, the extinction
o life on earth, and the heat death o the sun itself.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
CATASTROPHE AND MODERNITY 105
It was no accident that Wells’s visions o apocalypse drew heavily
on contemporay scientic theoies and anxieties. Despite having had a
rather eclectic fomal education, Wells studied biology with T. H. Hux-
ley and was intimately familiar with Lankester’s theoy o biological
degeneration, which infomed his characteizations both o the senile,
ineectual Eloi (essentially the European upper class) and the degen-
erate Morlocks, who represented the butish lower classes. ese were
themes Wells also explored a year later in e Island o Doctor Moreau,
which descibes the discovey o a mysteious island where an insane
scientist is expeimenting with creating animal- human hybids. Despite
the monstrousness o these articial hybids, the protagonist’s expei-
ence among them ultimately causes him, upon his retun to civilization,
to see his fellow humans as in the process o degenerating to an animal
state.
In a short stoy from this peiod, “e Star” (), Wells imag-
ined a dierent kind o extinction, where the world is threatened by the
discovey o a strange celestial “wanderer” on a trajectoy for a seem-
ingly inevitable catastrophic head- on impact with the earth. While the
impending event sets o mass panic and hysteia, it is a near miss in
the end: though much o humanity is killed by earthquakes, tsunamis,
and volcanoes caused by the gravitational disuption o the wanderer,
humanity suvives and is even inspired towards a “new brotherhood” in
the aemath. Finally, in his novel e World Set Free, Wells con-
jured a new kind o human- instigated catastrophe, in which the power
o radioactivity (recently discovered, in , by Heni Becquerel and
identied and named by Maie and Pierre Cuie) is hanessed to pro-
duce devastating, continual explosions that are never fully exhausted.
Although his prediction about the exact nature o eventual nuclear ex-
plosives was inaccurate, Wells was quite familiar with the latest atomic
science, and may even have read the physicist Fredeick Soddy’s much-
publicized comment that knowledge o radioactivity must “make
us regard the planet on which we live rather as a storehouse stued with
explosives, inconceivably more powerful than any we know of, and
possibly only awaiting a suitable disaster to cause the earth to revert to
chaos” (Soddy , ).
While Wells was certainly the most popular author o apocalyptic
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
106 CHAPTER THREE
ction at the time, he was far from the only one. Between and
a number o similar works were published, such as M. P. Shiel’s e
Purple Cloud (), Frank Lillie Pollock’s “Finis” (), E. M. Forster’s
“e Machine Stops” (), Jack London’s e Scarlet Plague (),
William Hope Hodgson’s e Night Land (), George Allen England’s
Darkness and Dawn (), S. Fowler Wight’s Deluge and Dawn (),
Wells’s e Shape o ings to Come (), Stanley G. Weinbaum’s e
Black Flame (), and many others. Collectively, these stoies imag-
ined apocalypse coming in the fom o plague; poison gas; solar extinc-
tion; extraterrestial impact; ood; and, increasingly aer , massive
war. Unlike Wells’s desciptions, which were in many ways rather tame,
these novels and stoies oen descibed the consequences o catastro-
phe in guesome detail, lingeing on the horror expeienced by the sur-
vivors and the oen gisly eects o the catastrophe. Clearly, there was
a growing reading public with a fascination for such stoies, and with a
tolerance for what would have been considered “the osping o a most
diseased imagination” duing the previous centuy. is no doubt re-
ects changing social mores and tolerances in Europe and the United
States resulting from public exposure—through jounalism, photogra-
phy, and eventually lm—to horic scenes o war and natural disaster
in the later decades o the nineteenth centuy and early twentieth. (In
the United States, for example, the Civil War photographs o Mathew
Brady, rst displayed in the s, were the rst unltered view o the
canage o war to which the public was exposed.) But something else is
required to explain the avid fascination that witers and readers had de-
veloped for imagining the end o the world in increasingly detailed and
scientically accurate tems—a trend that has continued to the present
day, as will be discussed in later chapters.
In some o this literature, the inuence o contemporay theoies
o biological and social degeneration or cyclism is clear. In addition
to Wells, Jack London also invoked themes o degeneration, particu-
larly in his novel e Scarlet Plague, which descibed the aemath o a
worldwide plague (in ) that decimated the human population and
reduced the suvivors to bitter and animalistic stuggle. In recounting
the immediate devastation that followed the plague, London explained:
“In the midst o our civilization, down in our slums and labor- ghettos,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
CATASTROPHE AND MODERNITY 107
we had bred a race o barbaians, o savages; and now, in the time o
our calamity, they tuned upon us like the wild beasts they were and
destroyed us” (London , ). In London’s pessimistic vision, it was
precisely the most butal and unrened who were most successful fol-
lowing “the calamity,” just as it was the “weeds and wild bushes” that
suvived while “so and tender” domesticated crops were wiped out.
London also invoked a cyclical view o human histoy in which “the
human race is doomed to sink back farther and farther into the pimi-
tive night ere again it begins its bloody climb upward to civilization,”
despite the ultimate tuth that “just as the old civilization passed, so will
the new. . . . All things pass” (London , , ).
M. P. Shiel’s e Purple Cloud, a stoy about a catastrophe caused
by the volcanic release o poison gas, took a dierent scientic basis—
the “catastrophist” geology o Cuvier—in presenting an updated “last
man” narrative. In this case, following a geological catastrophe, a single
human suvivor travels an empty world, witnessing scenes o death and
horror eveywhere he tuns, eventually going insane and declaing him-
sel emperor o the world. In descibing his plunge into megalomaniacal
madness, the narrator o the novel meditates on his own descent from
the “Westen, ‘moden’ mind” to “a pimitive and Easten one” (Shiel
, ). Eventually he encounters a young woman, and aer consider-
ing “the nobility o self- extinction,” he opts to restart the human race.
In addition to being fascinated with theoies o geological catastrophe,
Shiel, an Englishman o mixed Iish and West Indian ancesty, was also
strongly inuenced by late Victoian theoies o racial degeneration.
Ultimately, early apocalyptic ction was part o the same milieu in
which social and biological degeneration, evolutionay theoy and ge-
ology, contemporay physics, and other “scientic” themes met anxi-
eties about social, economic, and political disuption to fom a power-
ful cultural discourse. Readers o pulp novels were exposed to this
culture o pessimism just as were readers o “highbrow” literature: the
prose may have been less artful, but the desciptions o catastrophe and
apocalypse were no less vivid in the work o Wells or Shiel than, say,
in the poety o Yeats or Eliot. Like Lawrence’s opening to Lady Chat-
terley, some o the most famous lines from Modenist literature o this
peiod are vivid with apocalyptic despair. In poety, Yeats’s “e Second
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
108 CHAPTER THREE
Coming” descibed the terror o a society in which “things fall apart;
the centre cannot hold,” and “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,”
while Eliot conjured a vision o “hooded hordes swaming/ Over end-
less plains” in “e Waste Land” (), and pictured a “valley o dying
stars” before declaiming, “is is the way the world ends/ Not with a
bang but a whimper” in “e Hollow Men” (). Likewise, in prose
ction Joseph Conrad’s narrator in Heart o Darkness () descibes a
London sunset as “a dull red without rays and without heat, as i about
to go out suddenly, sticken to death by the touch o that gloom brood-
ing over a crowd o men.” William Faulkner’s e Sound and the Fury
() recalls the gi o a watch from father to son as “the mausoleum
o all hope and desire,” since time “only reveals to man his own folly and
despair.” And Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist o James Joyce’s Ulysses
(), descibes histoy as “a nightmare from which I am tying to
awake.” It is noteworthy, too, that many o these novels and poems es-
chew traditional stucture and narrative resolution. Novels by Faulkner,
Joyce, Wool and others, for example, employ stream- of- consciousness
narrative that emphasizes the incoherence or irresolvability o human
expeience—a condition aptly encapsulated in Faulkner’s title allusion
to Macbeth’s soliloquy in which life “is a tale told by an idiot, full o
sound and fuy, signifying nothing.”
History, Biology, and Extinction
Up to this point, we have considered histoical cyclism, degeneration,
and extinction from the standpoint o broader cultural attitudes. It is
now time to examine these topics from a scientic perspective. e
broad argument I will make, though, is that, as with all extinction imag-
naies, it is impossible to neatly distinguish “science” and “culture” when
it comes to discussing these themes duing the early part o the twenti-
eth centuy. As has already been suggested, science played a major role
in the literay imagination o decline and apocalypse at the tun o the
centuy, and accounts o the ise and fall o civilizations drew frequent
and direct analogies with organic theoies o evolution and degenera-
tion. Likewise, as we will see, scientic understandings o extinction
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
CATASTROPHE AND MODERNITY 109
and cyclical organic development were oen explicitly linked to con
-
temporay understanding o human histoy and progress, and many
paleontologists and biologists were unwilling to draw a clear line be-
tween “laws” o human and natural histoical development.
e decades between and were a complicated and con
-
fusing time in evolutionay biology. Sometimes referred to as the
“eclipse o Dawin,” this peiod saw a proliferation o evolutionay theo-
ies—from old- fashioned Lamarckism to newer ideas, such as “muta-
tionism,” based on early Mendelian genetics—that competed with the
standard Dawinian account for scientic consensus. While Dawin’s
theoy o evolution via natural selection never tuly le the scientic
mainstream, it was not until the ules o population genetics were given
a fomal mathematical basis in the s and s that Dawinism
(or “neo- Dawinism,” is it is sometimes called) emerged as the ortho-
dox view in biology. It is worth beaing in mind, therefore, that while
some o the biological theoies discussed in this section may sound far-
fetched to a moden reader, nearly all were considered well within the
bounds o reasonable scientic discussion in their time.
e most salient non- Dawinian theoy for our puposes was the
widespread belie that evolution proceeds in a predetemined direction
because o intenal forces or innate tendencies acting on an evolution-
ay lineage. e broad label for this view is “orthogenesis,” a tem intro-
duced and populaized in the s by the Geman zoologists Wilhelm
Haacke and eodor Eimer, but it really descibes a constellation o
loosely similar approaches to evolution—many o which have much
earlier roots—rather than a distinct school o thought. Late- nineteenth-
centuy orthogenesis might, for example, invoke intenal Lamarckian
forces; or, on the contray, it might explain directional evolution as the
innate response o lineages to environmental pressures. One major fea-
ture o orthogenetic thought, though, was an emphasis on a cyclical
view o evolutionay development; in this sense, orthogenesis was a re-
tun to Giambattista Brocchi’s analogy between individual and species
life cycles, which we examined in chapter .
Cyclical orthogenesis was especially popular among paleontolo-
gists, particularly in the United States and Gemany, in part because
o the perception that the fossil record did not display the smooth,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
110 CHAPTER THREE
even patten o evolutionay transitions that Dawin predicted should
be found there. Instead, what oen emerged was a patten o lengthy
evolutionay stasis, in which little or no mophological change was ob-
seved in a lineage, followed by the abupt appearance o new foms
that might appear to be only distantly related to their putative evolu-
tionay ancestors. is gave ise to speculation that natural selection
alone might not be sucient to explain the oigin o genuinely new
species or higher taxonomic groups, which many scientists—from the
“Dawinian” T. H. Huxley to the “mutationist” Hugo de Vies to the ge-
neticist Heman Muller—accounted for as evolutionay “saltations,” or
rapid jumps. While moden evolutionay theoy has uled out the possi-
bility that large genetic saltations could produce viable new species, the
notion that broad pattens o evolution obseved in the fossil record t
a patten o stasis and rapid evolution persists to this day, most promi-
nently in Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould’s hypothesis o “punc-
tuated equilibia.”
e most common intepretation o extinction in an orthogenetic
context was that the temination o evolutionay lineages represents
a nal, inevitable stage o decline in the life cycle o a species. Despite
Dawin’s apparent solution to the problem o extinction by treating
it as nature’s way o balancing the scales through natural selection,
it remained a mysteious and contentious phenomenon to many ob-
severs. Dawin’s explanation, for example, did little to illuminate why
some long- lived and apparently well adapted groups disappear quite
abuptly from the fossil record—tilobites, ammonites, and dinosaurs
were favoite examples—nor why large ensembles o oen heteroge-
neous taxa seem to have become extinct in coordinated fashion at cer-
tain points in the histoy o life.
In the rst case, the problem was less about proving that fomerly
successful taxa actually became extinct—the fossil record, notoiously
incomplete as it may be, is nonetheless quite clear on this point—than
it was about identifying ules, mechanisms, or even laws that could ex-
plain why one group suvived while another did not. e answer o
many orthogenetic intepretations was that all species have predeter-
mined life cycles, and that it is possible to identify species in the nal,
senescent stage by obseving certain characteistic trends in their mor-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
CATASTROPHE AND MODERNITY 111
phology—such as gigantism, overspecialized anatomy, atrophied or
vestigial organs, and so on. e second case reignited the debate about
mass extinctions—episodes o widespread catastrophic extinction in
a geological instant—that had been fairly quiet since Lyell’s repudia-
tion o Cuvier’s theoy o peiodic revolutions. As paleontologists col-
lected more fossils, it became increasingly clear that the major breaks
in the histoy o life obseved by Cuvier and others in the early nine-
teenth centuy (which became the basis for stratigraphic divisions in
geology) were not going away, and that the possibility o catastrophic
mass extinction, unpalatable as it was to Dawin, would have to be re-
visited. Broadly speaking, these were separate issues, and orthogenetic
life cycles did not have much explanatoy value for understanding mass
extinction. Nonetheless, many authors did take these problems to be
related, and together they fomed the basis for a new geological view o
extinction that emerged in the early twentieth centuy.
ese issues were concisely summaized by the Ameican paleon-
tologist Alpheus Packard in an paper titled “Geological Extinction
and Some o Its Apparent Causes,” in which he remarked:
e fact o extinction is indeed not less mavelous than that o evolution,
and one cannot in these days feel satised that the solution o the prob-
lem lies in the theoy o natural selection, which accounts for the preser-
vation o species rather than their oigin or extinction (Packard , ).
is essay was published in the jounal e American Naturalist, which
Packard himsel had cofounded in along with Alpheus Hyatt and
other naturalists sympathetic to neo- Lamarckian or orthogenetic evo-
lutionay theoies, and which was eventually purchased by the arch-
Lamarckian vertebrate paleontologist Edward Dinker Cope. Pack-
ard’s own intepretation o extinction was explicitly cyclical, and he
proposed “a natural limit to the age o species as well as to individu-
als,” noting that just as individual organisms expeience “a youth, man-
hood and old age, so species and orders ise, culminate and decline”
(Pack ard , ). He also descibed his views as “opposed to ultra-
unifomitaian ideas,” and while he was careful to stress that they had
“nothing in common with the Cuveian catastrophic doctine,” he none-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
112 CHAPTER THREE
theless obseved that “the known facts o paleontology postulate long
peiods o quiet preparation, succeeded by more or less sudden cises,
both local and general, to certain faunas or groups o animals, as well as
individual species” (Packard , ). is statement may seem some-
what equivocal, and it was; the taint o Cuveian “catastrophism” was
still powerful enough—as it would remain for decades—that even non-
Dawinian evolutionay theoies were wise to steer clear o it. But in-
creasingly, paleontologists were open to acknowledging that relatively
sudden events on a local, i not global, scale bore some responsibility
for causing extinctions. In Packard’s case, as in many similar views, such
“sudden cises” could be invoked as the death blow that dispatched al-
ready senile species, rather than as the pimay cause for their extinc-
tion. is conveniently also helped explain why, even in times o mass
extinction, some groups were annihilated while others escaped un-
scathed.
While the fossil record for maine invertebrates such as mollusks
and custaceans was and continues to be the largest source o data for
analysis o the histoy o life (because those organisms are more nu-
merous and easily fossilizable than maine or terrestial vertebrates), it
is undeniable that large terrestial animals—mammals, reptiles, birds,
and o course dinosaurs—are the stars o paleontology. Public fasci-
nation with dinosaurs began when the group was rst named in the
mid- nineteenth centuy by the English comparative anatomist Richard
Owen, and it has continued ever since. e late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuies also saw a pronounced eort on behal o museums
and universities in Europe and especially the United States to fund ex-
peditions in the hope o discoveing new dinosaurs and collecting com-
plete dinosaur skeletons that could be assembled for public display. is
“great dinosaur ush” occupied considerable scientic as well as public
attention, and it fueled a number o controversies, including the famous
“bone wars” between the Ameican paleontologists Cope and Othenio
Charles Marsh. It also helped elevate dinosaurs as the paradigm case
for explaining extinction. e obvious question, in the late nineteenth
centuy as today, was, Why did such a diverse and dominant group o
animals peish in such an apparently short amount o time?
Absent some kind o Cuveian catastrophe, the most popular ex-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
CATASTROPHE AND MODERNITY 113
planation was inevitable racial decline. is notion was present as far
back as Owen’s characteization o dinosaurs as slow, lumbeing, cold-
blooded reptiles who eventually had to give way to the smaller, nimble,
and more intelligent mammals. In this context, dinosaurs easily t a
Victoian morality play about inevitable progress: being unable to keep
up, they were simply le behind. is view began to change by the
early twentieth centuy, however, as it became increasingly clear that
mammals, generally small in body size and not teribly diversied at
the late- Cretaceous temination o the dinosaurs’ reign, hardly posed
a competitive threat. As the great Ameican vertebrate paleontolo-
gist Heny Faireld Osbon put it in his authoitative Age o Mammals
(), “ere is little doubt that the extinction o the large terrestial
and aquatic reptiles, which suvived to the vey close o the Cretaceous,
prepared the way for the evolution o the mammals” (Osbon , ).
In other words, while the mammals beneted from the extinction o the
dinosaurs, they could not possibly have caused it. Osbon himsel was
reluctant to assign a cause to the dinosaur mass extinction, although in
this book and in witings on mammalian extinction he frequently dis-
cussed senescence as a possible cause o extinction.
Others, however, were less dident about the subject. In his sec-
tion report to the Bitish Association for the Advancement o Science in
, the paleontologist Arthur Smith Woodward carefully noted that
“the new race [mammals] did not immediately replace the old [dino-
saurs], or exteminate it by unequal competition.” But with equal con-
dence, he asserted that the dinosaurs were the victims o “racial old
age,” evidenced by “a superuity o dead matter, which accumulates
in the fom o spines or bosses as soon as the race they represent has
reached its pime and begins to be on the downgrade” (Woodward ,
, ). e prominent Yale University paleontologist Richard Swann
Lull similarly argued in his inuential textbook Organic Evolution ()
that the dinosaurs suered “racial death” because o extreme senility
and overspecialization. In fact, he wrote, the dinosaurs had become so
senescent at the time o their demise that “the mavel is, not that they
died, but that they suvived so long” (Lull , ). Likewise, Lull’s
Yale colleague Charles Schuchert, in his own popular textbook,
stressed environmental changes as the probable source o extinction in
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
114 CHAPTER THREE
a group “so highly specialized as were the Cretaceous dinosaurs”; but
more broadly argued that since “just as individuals may in old age de-
velop senescent characters, so frequently do the races. . . . When races
are senile, or overspecialized, or are the giants o their stocks, they are
apt to disappear with the great physiographic and climatic changes that
peiodically appear in the histoy o the earth” (Schuchert , ,
–).
e examples above merely exemplify a broad general opinion that
racial senility was one o the leading causes o extinction o apparently
well adapted groups in the histoy o life. e distinctive feature here is
that, while duing the Victoian era theoies o extinction tended to re-
inforce a narrative in which nature steadily progressed through a com-
petition in which “supeior” foms replaced “infeior” ones, by the early
twentieth centuy the broad picture looked less and less progressive.
As the histoian Peter Bowler notes, “e general feeling that the mam-
mals got their chance to expand only when some extenal agency re-
moved the dinosaurs suggests that the image o inevitable progress was
now being heavily qualied” (Bowler , –).
is attitude was closely connected with contemporay ideas about
human histoical progress. In his four- volume Outline o History (),
H. G. Wells devoted considerable attention to prehistoy, and in par-
ticular to dinosaur extinction, which he descibed as “beyond all ques-
tion, the most stiking revolution in the whole histoy o the earth be-
fore the coming o mankind.” Refering to the event as a “catastrophic
alteration,” Wells acknowledged that “as for the Mammals competing
with and ousting the less t reptiles . . . there is not a scrap o evidence
o any such direct competition,” and concluded that “rst the reptiles
in some inexplicable way peished, and then later on, aer a vey hard
time for all life upon the earth . . . [mammals] developed and spread to
ll the vacant world” (Wells , –). Many o the paleontologists
we have already discussed also explicitly compared organic cycles o de-
velopment to human ones, including an end phase o inevitable extinc-
tion. Packard wrote in that, as “species and orders ise, culminate
and decline,” so “nations have isen, reached a maximum o develop-
ment and decayed.” Meanwhile, Lull argued that the dinosaurs “do not
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
CATASTROPHE AND MODERNITY 115
represent a futile attempt on the part o nature to people the world with
creatures o insignicant moment, but are comparable in majestic ise,
slow culmination, and dramatic fall to the greatest nations o antiquity”
(Packard , ; Lull , –). As Bowler again explains, “e
growing debate over the causes o their [major groups’] decline and ex-
tinction . . . mark the revival o interest in a model o histoy that has
strong parallels with the ise and fall o great empires in human civiliza-
tion” (Bowler , –).
As we have seen, cyclical histoical models were especially popular
in Gemany, and they reached an apotheosis in Speng ler’s Decline o the
West, which was published ight in the middle o these debates about
organic extinction. It should be no supise to lean, then, that cycli-
cal theoies o biological development—and o extinction resulting
from inevitable racial decline—had special populaity among Geman-
speaking paleontologists, and indeed remained popular well aer they
had begun to lose favor in Bitain and the United States. e nineteenth-
centuy embyologist Enst Haeckel had already established a model o
phases o evolutionay development in his Generelle Morphologie
der Organismen, which he compared by direct analogy to the life stages
o an individual organism: “We call the rst stage o phylogeny, which is
equivalent to the ontogenetic Anaplase, its time o blooming (Epacme),
the second, which corresponds to the Metaplase, the oweing- time
(Acme), and the third, which corresponds to the Cataplase, the wilting-
time [Verblühzeit] (Paracme).” Epacme, acme, and paracme thus cor-
respond to the birth, matuity, and senile stages o the life o an indi-
vidual, and the last stage, paracme, which Haeckel explicitly associated
with “old age” (Greisenalter) and “time o degeneration” (Rückbildungs-
zeit), ultimately leads either to transmutation or to “total extinction”
(Haeckel , –).
Haeckel’s inuence on the development o subsequent approaches
to orthogenesis in Gemany was quite signicant, and a number o
prominent early- twentieth- centuy Geman- speaking paleontologists
expanded the cyclical notion into a broad intepretation o the histoy
o life. Othenio Abel, an Austian paleontologist active duing the rst
several decades o the twentieth centuy, promoted an intenal theoy
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
116 CHAPTER THREE
o evolutionay degeneration and extinction. Abel opposed a Dar-
winian, environmental intepretation o extinction, witing that “the
degeneration o the species should be seen as a consequence o reach-
ing the optimum o existence, and not as a consequence o particular
changes in conditions o life”; and he argued that i it was not the only
cause o extinction, degeneration was “certainly one o the most impor-
tant” (Abel , ). Abel’s conception o degeneration had an ideo-
logical component as well, and he was an early supporter o the Nazi
party and a proponent o eugenic “race hygiene” arguments.
While Abel did not necessaily present a cyclical view o the histoy
o life, his rejection o extenal inuences on development in favor o
intenal forces or dives was emblematic o a distinctively Geman “völ-
kisch” biological ideology that came to be associated with a tradition o
Geman paleontology oen referred to as “idealistic mophology.” is
is too large a subject to enter here, but the basic idea behind idealistic
mophology—as developed by the poet and naturalist Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe, and other Romantic- era biologists—was that vaiations in
organic fom are deived from a single, transcendental “bluepint” or
archetype. In the later nineteenth centuy, however, the idea took on
an explicitly evolutionay context, requiing the invocation o mystei-
ous, vitalistic intenal forces to explain the evolutionay development
o organisms along pathways deived from a mophological ideal type.
e leading proponent o this new approach in the twentieth cen-
tuy was the Geman paleontologist Karl Beurlen, who, along with his
contemporay Otto Schindewolf, was responsible for populaizing a
cyclical, intenalist theoy o evolutionay development known as typo-
strophism, which dominated Geman paleontology for several decades.
ypostrophism generally combined a version o idealistic mophology
with a saltational view o species change (e.g., rapid production o new
types) and, most important for our discussion, a cyclical view o evolu-
tionay development. As Beurlen dened his approach:
It is a general ule that the path o development within a related unit—
and apart from whether it is a unit o higher or lower order—proceeds
cyclically, in which the development from a beginning phase, with icher,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
CATASTROPHE AND MODERNITY 117
more vaiable, and more explosive mophogenesis passes into a phase
o orthogenetic continuation, in which development is directional and
predetemined and does not produce new types, to an endphase o over-
growth and degeneration o fom, which therefore leads to extinction
(Beurlen , ).
While Beurlen did not invent the tem (Schindewol would do so a few
years later), this is the essence o typostrophism, which we can see is not
teribly dierent from other orthogenetic theoies we have considered.
What was perhaps somewhat dierent was the context. Witing in
the early s, Beurlen was deeply inuenced both by Speng leian
cyclical views o human histoy, and by National Socialism. Beurlen was
an avid member o the Nazi party, and a supporter o a movement that
has been labeled an “Ayan biology,” one tenet o which was that the
biological environment and human society are analogous, each being
held together by a complex web o interdependence that can be ex-
plained by basic “laws o life” (Lebengesetze) applying equally to both.
In this view, however, mechanical causality was to be rejected in favor
o a more holistic understanding o relationships both in the develop-
ment o human society and in nature, As Beurlen put it,
It is not a simple causal relationship in which we can understand organic
development; because the causality o the organic, which [the embyolo-
gist Hans] Diesch descibed with the tem “wholeness” [Ganzheit] and
Speng ler with the tem “fate” [Schicksal], is irreversible and character-
ized by the inevitable cycle o birth—youth—matuity—old age—death.
e expression o this “causality o the individual” in phylogeny is the
cyclical development process with its dierent phases (Beurlen , ).
In addition to invoking Speng ler, Beurlen also drew on the Nietz-
schean concept o the “will to power,” which he invoked as an expla-
nation for the relationship between an organism and its environment.
While he acknowledged Dawin’s recognition o the essential role o
stuggle, he took exception with the notion that the stuggle for life
was merely a matter o a butish “stuggle for the feeding- trough or for
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
118 CHAPTER THREE
expediencies and utilities,” prefering a more ennobling “stuggle for
the power, which makes possible a characteistic self- dierentiation in-
dependent o the environment” (Beurlen , ). Beurlen explicitly
associated this biological will to power with ideological themes in Na-
tional Socialism that emphasized the individual control and domination
o the social environment. Speng ler, himsel no fiend o the Nazis, had
also drawn on a Nietzchian conception o “will” to explain the dive that
brought civilizations to dominance. Despite ideological dierences,
then, Beurlen and Speng ler shared a similar worldview: one that mixed
elements o the Romantic idealism o Goethe and Haeckel, rejected
mechanical notions o causality and especially Dawinism, and viewed
histoical development as a nonprogressive cyclical process in which
collective entities, whether species or civilizations, passed through pre-
detemined stages leading ultimately to senility and extinction.
ypostrophism found its fullest and most inuential expression,
however, not with Beurlen but with his colleague Otto Schindewolf,
whose Grundfragen der Paläontologie (Basic Questions in Paleon-
tology) was probably the most important work in Geman- speaking
paleontology o the mid- twentieth centuy. ough they shared a com-
mitment to an intenalist, cyclical theoy o evolutionay development,
and had both established promising university careers duing the s
and early s, Beurlen and Schindewol vey much moved in oppo-
site directions. Beurlen capitalized on his association with the Nazis to
attain a leading place in Geman paleontology through prestigious ap-
pointments in the Reich Research Council and a professorship at the
Ludwig- Maximillians- University in Munich. Schindewolf, on the other
hand, refused to support National Socialism and was publicly attacked
by Beurlen, losing his position at the Pussian Geological Suvey in
the process (he actually began witing the Grundfrage duing the Sec-
ond World War, but was unable to publish it until aeward). Aer
the war, however, the situation changed dramatically: “denazication”
stipped Beurlen o his positions and respectability, forcing him ulti-
mately to emigrate to Brazil in order to continue his scientic career,
while Schindewol rose to become the leading paleontologist in Ger-
many, rst as a professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and later
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
CATASTROPHE AND MODERNITY 119
as professor and director o the Paleontological Institute at the Univer-
sity o Tübingen. Such was Schindewolf ’s status that, as late as ,
Stephen Jay Gould recalled attending a lecture in Tübingen where a
“hushed awe” surrounded his participation, and “not a single younger
Geman paleontologist dared to question anything he said duing the
public foum” (Gould , ix).
Another dierence between Beurlen and Schindewol is that the
latter, unlike many Geman paleontologists o his day, shied away from
the overtly Romantic, even “mystical” tendencies in idealistic mor-
phology, in favor o a more igorous interest in empiical compaison
o foms. As Schindewol put it in the Grundfrage (which was rst trans-
lated into English in ), while “the position we take here is mopho-
logically idealistic inasmuch as it consciously sets up as the basis for its
system only the mophological relationships among organisms,” it was
not the system “o Goethe and his pre- Dawinian successors, who saw
in idealistic mophology the ultimate ideal o biological knowledge,”
nor did it regard mophology “as an end in itsel and an ultimate goal
for biology.” Rather, Schindewol regarded his mophological approach
quite straightfowardly as
purely empiical scientic research. It proceeds with igorous objectivity
from the real, natural data, from the existing foms and the graded, suc-
cessive steps o their diversity, and arranges them according to logical
pinciples in a graduated conceptual system (Schindewol , –).
While this conceptual dierence was signicant, it did not prevent
Schindewolf, at least in his works up through , from endorsing
a cyclical view o evolution strongly indebted to earlier orthogenetic
theoies and to the intenalist histoiography o Speng ler and others
(g. .). He introduced the tem “typostrophism” in a paper
where he laid out the three stages o the life cycle o a species. e rst,
“typogenesis,” involved the rapid emergence o a new evolutionay type
(and thus quite accurately led Schindewol to be labeled a “saltation-
ist”). e second, “typostasis,” was an orthogenetic phase where the
species developed, oen for lengthy peiods, in a progressive mopho-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
120 CHAPTER THREE
logical direction. And the nal, “typolysis,” was a peiod o senescence
where the species degenerated to extinction. As Schindewol explained
in the Grundfrage,
e third phase, typolysis, or the dissolution o types . . . bings each evo-
lutionay cycle to a close. is phase is characteized by multiple indi
-
cations o decline, degeneration, and the loosening o the mophologi-
cal constraints embodied in the type. Overspecialization and gigantism
in the lineages destined for extinction give this peiod its special mark
(Schindewol , ).
e phrase “destined for extinction” highlights the degree to which
Schindewolf ’s views, as well as those o similarly- minded proponents
3.2 An illustration o the ypostrophic phases in Schindewolf’s theoy. e
oiginal caption states that duing “the bief, nal typolytic phase these subtypes lose
their consistent mophological identity and produce all kinds o degenerative oshoots”
before the lineage teminates through extinction. From Otto H. Schindewolf, Basic
Questions in Paleontology (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, ), .
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
CATASTROPHE AND MODERNITY 121
o orthogenesis in this peiod, departed from the earlier Victoian read-
ing o extinction as a mechanism for progressive evolutionay develop-
ment. As Schindewol quite bluntly put it, “is author believes that
these phenomena [e.g., senescence] argue for a progressive aging o lin-
eages and contradict the belie in unlimited progress held by Dawin
and Lamarck” (Schindewol , ).
e extent to which Schindewolf ’s attitude towards extinction o
species reected broader contemporay themes o cultural pessimism
is dicult to pinpoint exactly. However, it is signicant that, in a later
essay from titled “Erdgeschichte und Weltgeschichte” (“Earth His-
toy and World Histoy”), Schindewol made an extensive argument
for the analogy between natural and human histoy that drew directly
on the cyclical model:
Today it has been recognized, especially by O. Speng ler and A. J. Toyn-
bee, that the histoy o mankind does not so much un in a single track, as
had been previously thought, but rather that a large number o oiginal,
independent cultures have existed, passing through their histoical de
-
velopment in parallel, side- by- side or one aer another, and sometimes
without reciprocal interactions. All o these cultural bodies [Kultur
-
körper] have a limited lifetime and peiod o ouishing [Blütezeit]; they
emerge, grow, fade and in each case are replaced by a new one.
is is exactly what the histoy o life bings to mind for us. e ora
and fauna also do not unfold in a linear, unifom histoical course, but
the development is realized independently and autonomously in numer-
ous parallel phyla. Only the orders o magnitude are dierent. What in
the histoy o life are phyla, classes, and orders correspond respectively
in human culture cycles to races o a single human species and, i we add
prehistoy, to a few closely related species (Schindewol , ).
In addition to Speng ler, Schindewol cited the Bitish political his-
toian A. J. Toynbee, whose twelve- volume A Study o History (–
) postulated a patten o cyclical ise and fall o the world’s great
civilizations. Schindewol went further than suggesting a supercial
analogy, though, in proposing that the stages o civilization recognized
by Speng ler and Toynbee corresponded exactly with typostrophic
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
122 CHAPTER THREE
counteparts in natural histoy: “A vey remarkable parallel seems to me
to exist, in that the cycles o human histoy occur in similar phases as we
have become acquainted with from the development o geological and
life histoy” (Schindewol , ). Just as the rst stage, typogenesis,
brought about rapid, saltational organic change, as “O. Speng ler, A. J.
Toynbee, R. Coulbon and many others have shown, . . . civilizations
arose respectively through a revolutionay act. ese revolutions, that
created the new type o culture, took place in a vey short time.” Like-
wise, Schindewol argued that the nal, typolitic stage had its parallel
in human histoy:
Vaious authors have oen descibed in similar tems that oiginality
would subside, the creative imagination and power would ebb away, no
further possibilities for blossoming would be achieved, etc. e cultural
body breaks down into smaller units that at the point o their cultural
apex sink back down to pimitive stages. ese are the features o our
typolytic phase. e initial indication o decline sometimes conceals itsel
under the mask o the seemingly greatest blossoming o power. at is,
according to Toynbee, for example, the case with the mighty pyramids o
the fourth Egyptian dynasty, which to the same extent can be placed on
the same level as the monstrous dinosaurs. rough the outbreak o a new
revolution, the dying culture may under certain circumstances recover
and continue life through another cycle. Othewise it expires or is sup-
planted by another culture, but in each case only aer it had already in-
tenally eroded and collapsed, as is consistent with what took place with
the displacement o reptiles by the mammals at the Cretaceous- Tertiay
bounday (Shindewol , ).
Conclusion
Interest in cyclical intepretations o the histoy o life persisted in Ger-
many well aer the Second World War, thanks largely to the inuence
o Schindewol on the subsequent development o Geman paleon-
tology. is inuence has been descibed as inhibiting, since it eec-
tively prevented Geman evolutionay theoy from keeping in step with
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
CATASTROPHE AND MODERNITY 123
developments in Bitain and the United States that, beginning in the
s, saw a fairly decisive shi back towards a Dawinian paradigm
o adaptation and selection. Indeed, witing a year before the publi-
cation o Schindewolf’s Grundfrage, the Ameican vertebrate paleon-
tologist George Gaylord Simpson declared, “Races, or groups o or-
ganisms in general, do not seem to have any such life patten. . . . Still
less do they seem to have an inherent growth patten or metabolic sys-
tem which bings them to matuity at denite times and which dooms
them to death from the intenal ravages o old age” (Simpson , ).
Simpson was speaking from his expeience studying the evolution o
mammals (especially horses), as well as from his perspective as one o
the major framers o the Moden Evolutionay Synthesis. e Moden
Synthesis—especially as articulated by two o Simpson’s colleagues, the
geneticist eodosius Dobzhansky and the population biologist Enst
Mayr—had little tolerance for the Romantic conceptions o “force” or
“will,” or any o the other mysteious intenal evolutionay mechanisms
popular with orthogenesis and its fellow travelers.
At the same time, the issue o extinction would remain contentious
for biologists and paleontologists for many more decades. Whether or
not extinction was seen as the result o intinsic life cycles or exter-
nal selection pressures, the general sense—among paleontologists, at
least—was that the Dawinian model o gradual competitive replace-
ment was inadequate to explain certain phenomena in the fossil record.
A major issue which had already cropped up in the pre- Synthesis years
was the question o whether mass extinctions are a regular feature o
the histoy o life. A number o paleontologists—including Osbon,
Schindewolf, and Simpson—acknowledged that violent environmen-
tal events might play at least a local role in producing episodes o wide-
spread extinction; and a vey few—Schindewol and Hary Marshall,
for example—were open to the possibility that such events might be
global and catastrophic, perhaps tiggered by some extraterrestial
mechanism. Aer the Second World War a chous o new voices would
be added to these early speculations, and catastrophic mass extinction
would nally reenter the mainstream o paleontological theoy. In part
this was because o new data and new intepretive frameworks; the ad-
vent o digital computers and multivaiate statistical analysis allowed
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
124 CHAPTER THREE
for new approaches to “reading” the fossil record. I will also argue, how-
ever, that broader cultural forces played a role in the more widespread
acceptance o “catastrophism”—none greater than the splitting o the
atom and the detonation o nuclear weapons over the cities o Hiro-
shima and Nagasaki. Living in a world where global nuclear annihilation
was just the push o a button away produced a culture o anxiety that
spilled into other areas as well: into fears o social collapse from popu-
lation explosion, environmental catastrophe as the result o pollution,
cataclysmic climate change produced by human industy, and the dis-
integration o traditional political stuctures and social mores through
violent revolution. As Hobsbawm has put it, “Mass catastrophe, and in-
creasingly the methods o barbaism, became an integral and expected
part o the civilized world,” teaching us “by the expeience o our cen-
tuy to live in the expectation o apocalypse” (Hobbsbawm , ).
is chapter has suggested that clear roots o this later “catastrophic
thinking” were planted in the decades before the Second World War.
e rst important shi was a reaction against the optimistic progres-
sivism o the Victoian era, which we have followed in the literature,
social and histoical commentay, and science o the early twentieth
centuy. e general pessimism toward progress that marked Moden-
ist literature was also present in intepretations o human histoy, in
theoies o biological degeneration and decline, and in evolutionay
thought. An additional feature highlighted in this chapter, “apocalyp-
ticism,” had growing cultural currency, but did not translate directly
to theoies o biological extinction until aer the Second World War.
at shi will be discussed in the next chapter, where biological under-
standing o mass extinction will be placed in a broader cultural con-
text o “postapocalyptic” thinking, which is distinguished from earlier
foms o cultural pessimism in that the threat o potential catastrophe
was no longer seen as metaphoical or avoidable, but rather understood
to be inevitable and perhaps already undeway. I in the early twentieth
centuy apocalypse was a waning about a possible fate that might yet
be averted, in the postwar, postapocalyptic context came the recogni-
tion that it might already be too late, and that we may be the agents o
our own destuction. e science o extinction drew from this cultural
context and infomed it, both by demonstrating the histoical traces o
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
CATASTROPHE AND MODERNITY 125
past catastrophes and by quantifying the consequences o the destuc-
tive path Westen society had taken. What for Lawrence’s readers was
gloomy metaphor would become, for inhabitants o the later twentieth
centuy, dismal fact: “e cataclysm has happened, we are among the
uins.”
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
4
EXTINCTION IN THE SHADOW
OF THE BOMB
In the early hours o the moning on July , , a small group o
scientists and militay obsevers witnessed something that the world
had never seen before: a mushroom cloud blooming in the desert at
the inity test site in the Jonada del Muerto desert in New Mexico.
is was, o course, the rst detonation o a nuclear weapon, and it was
an event so unprecedented that some o the assembled scientists re-
portedly took morbid bets about whether it would set o a catastrophic
chain reaction that would incinerate the entire atmosphere. More
soberly, the Manhattan Project scientic director J. Robert Oppen-
heimer later recalled his feelings at the time:
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few
people cied. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the
Hindu scipture, the Bhagavad- Gita; Vishnu is tying to persuade the
Pince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-
amed fom and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer o worlds.”
I suppose we all thought that, one way or another (Oppenheimer ).
e Atomic Age had begun, and Oppenheimer was indeed correct: the
world would forever be dierent in many ways. e specter o cata-
strophic annihilation that had shadowed the imagination o poets,
scientists, histoians, and politicians o previous decades had now be-
come a reality.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
128 CHAPTER FOUR
As we have seen in the previous chapter, an apocalyptic sensibility
was already well- established in the extinction imaginay o Westen
societies since the tun o the twentieth centuy. What was new about
the atomic age was not the idea o a nal civilization- ending catastro-
phe, but rather the fact o its imminence. is sentiment appeared time
and again in contemporay commentay about life aer the bomb. For
example, in a widely read essay in the Saturday Review titled “Moden
Man is Obsolete,” the political jounalist and peace advocate Noman
Cousins wrote in that nuclear anxiety
is a pimitive fear, the fear o the unknown, the fear o forces man can
neither channel nor comprehend. e fear is not new; in its classical fom
it is the fear o an irrational death. But ovenight it has become intensi-
ed, magnied. It has burst out o the subconscious and into the con
-
scious, lling the mind with pimordial apprehensions (Cousins , ).
In a similar though more explicitly philosophical vein, the Geman theo-
ist Karl Jaspers argued in his book Die Atombombe und die Zukun
des Menschen (translated in simply as e Future o Mankind):
In the past there have been imaginative notions o the world’s end. . . .
But now we face the real possibility o such an end. e possible reality
which we must henceforth reckon with—and reckon with, at the increas-
ing pace o developments, in the near future—is no longer a ctitious end
o the world (Jaspers , ).
is notion o the transfer o cataclysmic fear from the subconscious
to the conscious, or from the finges to the mainstream, was also high-
lighted by the prominent University o Chicago sociologist Edward
Shils, who wrote in his e Torment o Secrecy:
e atom bomb was a bidge over which the phantasies ordinaily con-
ned to resticted sections o the population . . . entered the larger society
which was facing an unprecedented threat to its continuance. e phan-
tasies o apocalyptic visionaies now claimed the respectability o being a
reasonable intepretation o the real situation (Shils , ).
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB 129
In other words, as histoian Spencer Weart puts it, “Nuclear weapons
gave the twentieth centuy’s nihilism a dismal solution. Immediately
upon heaing the news from Hiroshima, sensitive thinkers had realized
that doomsday—an idea that until then had seemed like a religious or
science- ction myth, something outside worldly time—would become
as real a part o the possible future as tomorrow’s breakfast” (Weart
, ). e consequences o this social transfomation—or per-
haps collective psychological transfomation in mass society—were
profound and far- reaching. In politics it ushered in an age o “rational”
paranoia symbolized in such cultural touchstones as “mutually assured
destuction” and the “Doomsday Clock.” In mass media and literature
it took the fom o a heightened, almost resigned fatalism that has been
descibed as a “postapocalyptic” mentality characteizing the works o
authors as vaious as Walter Benjamin, J. G. Ballard, and Richard Mathe-
son; and it was found equally in high- culture treatises and in popular
entertainments. In science, it opened the door for a reconsideration o
the central topic o this book, extinction, as a potentially catastrophic
threat o vital personal concen to evey member o the human species.
As Jaspers put it, the central threat imposed by the atomic age was “the
extinction o life on the surface o the planet” (Jaspers , ).
is chapter will follow the tactic o the book as a whole so far by
using political culture as a lens through which to understand the sci-
ence o extinction, and vice versa. e most stiking obsevation is
that, beginning in the s, the biological understanding o extinction
undewent a slow but ultimately profound transfomation that saw the
gradual acceptance o a catastrophic model o mass extinction in pale-
ontology and ecology as the best explanation o major changes in the
diversity o life in the past—and perhaps in the future. is resulted in
what would ultimately be descibed in the s as the emergence o a
“new catastrophism” that took hold in mainstream science, but it has
clear oigins in the culture and science o the decades immediately fol-
lowing the Second World War. As in the previous examples I have pre-
sented, this was not a straightfoward matter o cause and eect; cul-
tural anxieties did not “produce” a scientic catastrophism any more
than new ideas about mass extinction generated social and political un-
ease. Rather, the extinction imaginay o the s and s presents
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
130 CHAPTER FOUR
us with a tapesty in which a number o key themes are intewoven.
ese included, but were not limited to, the threat o sudden catastro-
phe (nuclear or othewise), large- scale social unrest, increased aware-
ness o environmental degradation, a discourse o cultural pessimism in
the arts and humanities, the emergence o ecological theoies that high-
lighted interconnectedness and fragility in ecosystems, and a scientic
(and pseudoscientic) “catastrophism” around extinction.
e era aer the Second World War has also retrospectively been
labeled by many obsevers as “postmoden,” a designation that has
resonances with the topic o this chapter. While the tem itsel was rst
coined by Jean- François Lyotard in , evidence o what Lyotard
called the “postmoden condition” extends back to the immediate post-
war peiod or even earlier. Many o the central themes in postmoder-
nity—a suspicion towards grand narratives, radical subjectivity, pro-
nounced irony, a citique o late capitalism, and a pevasive discourse
o disoientation—have roots in the literature and philosophy o Mod-
enism, especially in the witings o Fiedich Nietzsche, Ludwig Witt-
genstein, and Martin Heidegger. Postmodenism can then be seen as
an extension or outgrowth o the literay and philosophical Modenism
and existentialism discussed in the previous chapter, with a couple o
key qualications. While Modenist authors frequently commented on
the disintegration o traditional stuctures o meaning, many nonethe-
less harked back to the apparently m certainties o an earlier age (evi-
dent in the romantic pastoralism found equally in poets such as Yeats
and Eliot and in social commentaies by Brooks Adams and Ignatius
Donnelly), or expressed hope for a revitalized civilization. Postmod-
enism, in contrast, is characteized by a deeper sense o hopelessness
or fatalism, as well as by an abandonment o earlier Westen narratives
o histoical progress.
is is not the place to delve deeply into the topic o Postmod-
enism, but it is worth noting that many obsevers regard the horic
events o the Second World War—in particular, the Holocaust and the
bombing o Hiroshima and Nagasaki—as watershed moments in the
break between modenity and postmodenity. Events such as these
were oen referred to as “unthinkable,” and the postmoden era there-
fore is seen as a peiod o time when fomerly unthinkable events had
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB 131
become a reality. is sentiment resonates especially with some o the
comments about the nuclear age presented above—where “ctions” or
“phantasies” about the catastrophic end o humanity had become real.
In religious tems, this corresponds to a transition from a premillen-
nial theology, which anticipated a coming cisis as an opportunity for
rebirth or renewal, to a postmillennial one, which regarded the world
as already and irrevocably fallen. In more secular language, we might
speak o a distinction between apocalypticism and postapocalypticism,
the latter o which the literay scholar eresa Heenan descibes as
a realization that we now “live in a time aer the apocalypse, aer the
faith in a radically new world, o revelation, o unveiling” (Heenan
, ).
Postapocalyptic thinking took a vey literal fom in ctional imag-
inings, both literay and cinematic, o the aemath o a nuclear war or
environmental disaster—a genre that expanded dramatically from the
s onward. But these literal depictions o the aemath o apoca-
lypse had a strongly metaphoical element as well. For example, images
o bombed cities and radioactive seas invoked contemporay realities
o overcrowding and urban decay or industial pollution that were in-
creasingly becoming the focus o public and political concen. In other
words, while the atomic bomb was a tangible symbol o impending
catastrophe, it alluded to a broader culture o catastrophism and an
extinction imaginay that emerged aer the war and took many other
foms. One consequence o this was that it opened cultural space for
new ideas—many o which were progressive, such as the civil ights
movement in the United States, the decolonization o European em-
pires, and relaxed sexual and moral standards. But it also occasioned
backlash and anxiety toward cultural change. is was tue in science as
well; the s and s, which have been descibed as a peiod o radi-
cal social change, also saw an antiestablishmentaianism among scien-
tists, which manifested both in increased political activism by scientists
and in a more pemissive culture towards fomerly heterodox ideas.
One such heterodox idea was mass extinction, which had been
broadly rejected for nearly a centuy by mainstream paleontologists
and geologists. While still by no means a widely accepted notion dur-
ing the s and s—as the uckus over Immanuel Velikovsky’s
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
132 CHAPTER FOUR
“pseudoscientic” histoical catastrophism, discussed below, will
highlight—potentially catastrophic episodes o mass extinction in the
earth’s past became more frequent topics for discussion in paleontology
and ecology. Although it would be too much to claim that the reconsid-
eration o mass extinction was a direct product o nuclear fears, it is
impossible to overlook the dramatic increase in the cultural currency
o the tem “extinction,” which was frequently invoked as the cata-
strophic—and global—consequence o nuclear war. is had a circu-
lar reinforcing eect. On the one hand, nuclear annihilation provided
a vivid image o the reality o world- alteing physical cataclysm; on the
other, empiical recognition o the reality o geological mass extinc-
tions, which began to take hold in the late s, gave histoical vali-
dation to doomsday prophecies. And as time went on, models o the
mechanisms and ecological consequences o catastrophic extinctions
became the basis for predicting the eects o nuclear and ecological
catastrophes o the present or future—though this will pimaily be a
topic for later chapters.
Finally, a new ecological understanding o the interconnectedness o
life—and the ise o notions like the “ecosystem” and the “biosphere”—
gave a more concrete conceptual vocabulay for descibing the role o
diversity in the natural world than had existed previously. In particular,
ecologists began to theoize the relationship between ecological diver-
sity and stability, arguing that diversity could be seen as a hedge against
environmental or adaptive disuptions—and potential extinctions. is
helped create a new, positive valuation o biological diversity in ecology
and evolutionay biology, as well as a new sense o the fragility o the
environment and the isks posed by unchecked human intevention. It
also helped cement the notion that human beings are an intinsic part
o the global ecosystem and are subject to the same ecological forces
that goven all other organisms—on whom we rely for the suvival o
our own species. is manifested itsel in the consolidation o the mod-
en environmental movement, and focused attention on cises involv-
ing industial pollution and exponential population growth, which were
clearly linked to both notions o ecological stability and the threat o
mass extinction. It is in the scientic and political culture o the late
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB 133
s that we see the clear roots o the late- twentieth- and twenty- rst-
centuy science and politics o biodiversity and extinction.
Nuclear Armageddon and the Future of Humankind
e rhetoic o potential nuclear catastrophe became a persistent fea-
ture o Westen cultural discourse almost as soon as the announcement
that the US B- bomber Enola Gay had dropped an atomic bomb on
the Japanese city o Hiroshima on August , . e world was not
entirely unprepared for the event; ever since the publication in
o H. G. Wells’s novel e World Set Free, which imagined the conse-
quences o a world war fought with pimitive atomic weapons, ctional
accounts o nuclear war or disaster had become a feature o speculative
ction and commentay. In , Robert A. Heinlein published a short
stoy titled “Blowups Happen” in the pulp magazine Astounding Science-
Fiction, which descibed the tense atmosphere in a ctional nuclear
power plant. e magazine’s editor, John W. Campbell Jr., was fasci-
nated by the theme o atomic disaster, and duing the s he encour-
aged his authors to explore the theme in their ction. Campbell and his
contibutors drew inspiration from publicly available documentation
o nuclear ssion in scientic literature. Fictional accounts o the time
closely paralleled public wanings from scientists, and may have be-
come something o a feedback loop; the Hungaian- bon nuclear physi-
cist Leo Szilard, one o the chie architects o the rst nuclear reactor
and a prominent Manhattan Project contibutor, later admitted that he
was inspired to pursue ssion by the witings o Wells and others.
Nonetheless, once the reality o nuclear weapons became public,
anxiety about the possibility o sudden nuclear Amageddon spiked
nearly instantaneously. As Weart comments, the “idea o apocalyptic
power cropped up eveywhere at once, like domant seeds sprouting
under a sudden rain” (Weart , ). In the summer o , only a
year aer the bombings o Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Committee on
the Social Aspects o Atomic Energy o the US Social Science Research
Council commissioned a national suvey o Ameicans’ attitudes about
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
134 CHAPTER FOUR
nuclear proliferation and war. e results o the suvey bear out Weart’s
assessment: some percent o respondents reported being concened
about the danger o an atomic attack on the United States, and per-
cent descibed the chances o themselves or a family member being
killed by a nuclear weapon as either “vey great” or “fairly great” (Cot-
trell and Eberhart , –). It is noteworthy that these suveys were
conducted before the heyday o nuclear paranoia in the s, asso-
ciated with the infamous “duck and cover” civil defense dills.
From the vey start, anxieties about nuclear disaster were a feature
o the Ameican popular psyche. ese anxieties were no doubt stoked
by gim commentaies in highly visible newspapers and magazines,
which immediately cast the invention o nuclear weapons as an existen-
tial threat to humankind. For example, in a editoial in Life maga-
zine, three prominent nuclear scientists descibed atomic forces as “re-
sponsible for the life and death o the stars” and waned that nuclear
weapons are “a threat to the vey existence o us all.” Beyond this exis-
tential threat, they also pointed to the psychological impact o “a world
in which atomic weapons will be owned by sovereign nations, and secu-
ity against aggression will rest on fear o retaliation.” ey predicted
that this would result in “a world o fear, o suspicion and almost in-
evitable nal catastrophe” (Hill and Simpson , –). Noman
Cousins, whose waning from the pages o his magazine Saturday
Review is mentioned at the beginning o this chapter, argued that the
advent o nuclear bombs heralded a new age in which the threat o “ex-
tinction” hung like “a blanket o obsolescence not only over the meth-
ods and the products o man but over man himself ” (Cousins , ).
is theme o epochal change in the Westen mentality was echoed in
other popular outlets as well. In a New York Times opinion piece
titled “What the Atomic Age Has Done to Us,” Michael Amine con-
tended that the bomb “underscores” a deeper lesson, that “civilizations
can peish,” and argued that it “attacks directly the belie almost uncon-
sciously accepted by Westen man: progress is inevitable. . . . e death
o this idea is the most important death forecast by Hiroshima.” Amine
suggested a “new humility in place o that pide which had been a con-
comitant o our belie that all evolution was upward. . . . e mushroom
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB 135
as a symbol radiates ideas more capable o chain reactions than neu-
trons” (Amine ).
e connection between the atomic age and a new, pessimistic
vision o the future for humankind was taken up in academic and philo-
sophical discourse as well, featuing in the witings o European intel-
lectuals including Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Ellul.
Perhaps the most explicit o such expressions was Karl Jaspers’s Future
o Mankind, which was widely read and reviewed on both sides o the
Atlantic. Jaspers’s main consideration was whether the threat o nuclear
catastrophe would produce “a revolution in our way o thinking” to
avert a potential cisis. roughout the book, Jaspers clearly identi-
ed the danger posed by nuclear weapons as “extinction”; again and
again, he alluded to “the threat o total extinction,” “the extemination
o life,” and “the destuction o mankind, o life itself ” (Jaspers ,
, , ). While the chie aim o the book was to promote “a new poli-
tics” and “a call for reection” that might avoid disaster, Jaspers was also
quite stark in his assessment o the threat. “Now, mankind as a whole
can be wiped out by men,” he wrote. “It has not merely become possible
for this to happen; on purely rational reection it is probable that it will
happen” (Jaspers , ). Ultimately, he concluded, humanity needed
to recognize that a cucial histoical tuning point had been reached:
In the past, the worst disasters could not kill mankind. . . . Life went on.
Remnants led to new beginnings. Now, however, man can no longer af-
ford disaster without the consequence o universal doom—an idea so
novel, as a real probability, that we hesitate to think it through (Jaspers
, ).
Not all analysis o the threat o nuclear war explicitly took the exis-
tential threat to humanity for granted, however. One o the iconic works
o the nuclear age was Hemann Kahn’s weighty treatise On ermo-
nuclear War, which was published in . Kahn was a researcher at
the RAND coporation—the chie US think tank for strategic analy-
sis duing the s and s—and he was tasked with a “quantita-
tive analysis” o possible scenaios involving nuclear exchange. As he
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
136 CHAPTER FOUR
wrote in the preface, the book “examines the militay side o what may
be the major problem that faces civilization, compaing some o the
altenatives that seem available and some o the implications in these
choices” (Kahn , preface). In more than six hundred chilling pages,
Kahn outlined a cost- benet analysis o a number o hypothetical sce-
naios, complete with a tally o the tens o millions o “megadeaths”
that would result from the exchange. Nonetheless, he mly believed
that nuclear war would not necessaily mean the end o humanity, or
even o democratic society. ere would still be a society to rebuild,
and he challenged the notion that, in the aemath o nuclear conict,
“the suvivors will envy the dead.” Despite Kahn’s calm assurances, the
book was received with anything but relief. Most public attention was
drawn to the later chapters in which Kahn contemplated a hypotheti-
cal “doomsday machine”—a device that could, at the push o a button,
end all life on earth. Kahn intended this example to underline his thesis
about the deterrence o so- called “mutually assured destuction,” but
in fact it had the opposite eect, captuing public anxieties about mad
scientists that had long been the stu o science ction. is was used to
dramatic eect in Stanley Kubick’s lm Dr. Strangelove; or, How
I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, in which the title char-
acter—an amalgam o several notable scientists and strategic analysts,
including Kahn—presents the militay with an actual doomsday device
which is accidentally tiggered at the end o the movie.
e cultural discourse o catastrophe, as presented especially in
lm and ction, mirrored the new, more pessimistic tone o conversa-
tions around apocalypse aer the Second World War. While ctional
accounts o the end o the world had been circulated over the previous
decades, as discussed in chapter , they burst from the finges o cul-
ture and into the mainstream duing the s. is, again, presents
something o a chicken- and- egg problem: While the growing popu-
laity o apocalyptic and postapocalyptic science ction undoubtedly
reected broader cultural and political anxieties o the time, changes in
mass media also brought speculative stoies to a much wider audience.
For one thing, the lm industy on both sides o the Atlantic changed in
signicant ways duing and aer the war. In both Bitain and the United
States, the lm industy supported the war eort by producing propa-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB 137
ganda and patiotic lms, many o which depicted scenes o wartime
destuction and casualties. Newsreel footage also brought the physical
devastation o war home to Ameican audiences who were geographi-
cally removed from scenes o actual conict. Images o the London
Blitz and the devastation o occupied Berlin were viewed by millions
o theatergoers, and while the US govenment tightly controlled ac-
cess to footage o the aemath o Hiroshima and Nagasaki, newsreels
did present images o the complete destuction o both cities, revealing
postapocalyptic landscapes o utter devastation that were eeily absent
o living people.
e s also saw the ise o the television industy, with an esti-
mated six million televisions in US homes by , and sixty million
by . While this made lms even more accessible to many Amei-
cans, it also presented a challenge to the lm industy, which responded
by enticing moviegoers with more extravagant productions, provoca-
tive topics, and better special eects. Not supisingly, many lms o
the s and s dealt, either directly or indirectly, with themes o
war and catastrophe. Some movies attempted to depict the aemath
o nuclear war in literal and realistic tems. One o the earliest o these
was the Columbia Pictures lm Five (), which followed ve sur-
vivors o a nuclear war stuggling in a postapocalyptic landscape. While
Five may have been the rst such lm, it was soon joined by others,
such as ’s e Day the World Ended (directed by a young Roger Cor-
man, who later rose to prominence as the “king” o B- movies), ’s
On the Beach (adapted from the best- selling novel by Nevil Shute),
and ’s Panic in Year Zero. In , Stanley Kubick’s Dr. Strange-
love showed that nuclear annihilation could even be the subject o black
comedy: one o the lm’s most memorable scenes depicts the cowboy-
hatted Major Kong iding an atomic warhead as it descends towards its
target, and the lm concludes with a montage o nuclear explosions set
to the sentimental Second World War song “We’ll Meet Again.”
But ctionalized accounts o nuclear war were only a small subset
o the s and s lms that dealt with themes o catastrophe and
apocalypse. is era was a heyday o paranoid science ction cinema,
and lms such as When Worlds Collide (), e War o the Worlds
(), World without End (), Invasion o the Body Snatchers (),
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
138 CHAPTER FOUR
e Time Machine (), e Day o the Trids (), e Last Man on
Earth (), e Day the Earth Caught Fire (), and many others de-
picted world- ending catastrophes in a vaiety o imaginative ways. As a
genre, apocalyptic and postapocalyptic lms have dealt metaphoically
with a number o cultural and political themes, from ecological disaster
and ovepopulation (e.g., Soylent Green, , and Logan’s Run, ),
to repressive totalitaianism (Invasion o the Body Snatchers, , and
Fahrenheit , ), to social unrest (George Romero’s Night o
the Living Dead, and sequels)—but they share a common undertone o
pessimistic anxiety. Even when not being fightened by gim prognos-
tications about actual nuclear proliferation, Cold War audiences appar-
ently enjoyed being entertained by ctional portrayals o the collapse
o civilization. At the vey least, these lms helped the public envision
possible catastrophe in increasingly vivid detail.
e second major transfomation in mass media culture was the ise
in appeal o science ction literature for mainstream audiences. Duing
the s and s, science ction was relegated largely to pulp maga-
zines like Astounding Science- Fiction, which attracted a mostly juvenile
male audience with stoies o adventure on alien planets. Some litera-
ture o this era did deal with more mature themes, like global annihila-
tion, as discussed above; but the circulation o these works was limited
to a relatively small niche audience. In the s, however, science c-
tion authors broke into the mainstream, as traditional book publishers
began releasing speculative ction in hardcover fomats that opened
new readerships in libraies and bookstores. e result was a ood o
apocalyptic sci- literature onto popular consciousness. Some authors,
like the fomer Bitish militay ocer John Wyndham, were responsible
for multiple enties. Wyndham became famous with his e Day o the
Trids (), a novel about a species o aggressive ambulatoy plants
that wipe out humankind, but he also penned the nuclear war novel
Tomorrow! () and the postapocalyptic suvival tale e Chrysalids
(). Likewise, the noted Bitish dystopian author J. G. Ballard began
his career with a sting o novels imagining the end o civilization as the
result, vaiously, o destuctive winds (e Wind from Nowhere, ),
climate change (e Drowned World, , and e Burning World,
), and bizarre ecological disaster (e Crystal World, ).
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB 139
Many o these novels focused on the expeiences o suvivors, either
alone or in small groups, in fightening postapocalyptic landscapes. For
example, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend () depicted a lone sur-
vivor in a post- plague world o hungy vampires, and has been the basis
for three lm adaptations. Wyndham’s Day o the Trids also follows the
attempts o a plucky group o suvivors to seek refuge from murderous
plants, while e Chrysalids imagines a society many centuies aer a
cataclysmic nuclear war. is latter theme was the subject o a number
o other novels, including Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Lebowitz
(), which follows a postapocalyptic society over thousands o years
o rebuilding, and Pierre Boulle’s Planet o the Apes (), in which
astronauts jouney to a distant planet where a humanlike race has been
diven to pimitive savagey and is enslaved by intelligent simians (the
lm version introduced time travel, and located the stoy on the earth
o the future).
More so than lms (although many o these novels were adapted to
the screen), science ction literature dealt with themes o alienation
and despair, and oen, unlike their lm adaptations, ended on a pes-
simistic note. A Canticle for Lebowitz, for example, concludes with the
suggestion that civilization is doomed—à la Oswald Speng ler—to a
cycle o destuction and rebirth, while I Am Legend ends with the death
o the protagonist. Novels also allowed for extended authoial digres-
sions or monologues that explored the causes and consequences o so-
cial decay and war, explicitly projecting moden anxieties onto ction-
alized catastrophes. Take, for example, Wyndham’s Chrysalids, where
the long- ago disaster is referred to only as “the ibulation,” and the
world’s fomer inhabitants (i.e., we) are descibed as “only ingenious
half- humans, little better than savages; all living shut o from one an-
other.” As one character explains to another:
ey could never have succeeded. I they had not brought down ibu-
lation which all but destroyed them; then they would have bred with the
carelessness o animals until they had reduced themselves to poverty and
misey, and ultimately to stavation and barbaism. One way or another
they were foredoomed because they were an inadequate species (Wynd-
ham ).
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
140 CHAPTER FOUR
Novels such as these reect not just a paranoia about nuclear pro-
liferation or ecological disaster but also a deep disenchantment with
earlier narratives o human progress and technological advance-
ment. e message is that something is fundamentally wrong with
hu manity—“an inadequate species”—and that where some glimmer
o hope for improvement is held out, it can only be achieved through
a profound transfomation o human society. When, upon seeing the
remnants o the Statue o Liberty at the end o the lm version o Planet
o the Apes (), Charlton Heston’s unlucky astronaut George Taylor
cies out “You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you
all to hell!” he is echoing Jaspers’s sentiment that “the end is either the
extemination o life or the transfomation o man and the human con-
dition, so that physical conict ceases” (Jaspers , ).
Earth in Upheaval: Catastrophism
in Science and Pseudoscience
In the s, fanciful stoies o world- shatteing catastrophes were not
limited exclusively to science ction. In , the Russian- bon psycho-
analyst Immanuel Velikovsky created a sensation when he published
the book Worlds in Collision with the respected trade and textbook pub-
lisher Macmillan and Company. While largely forgotten today (except
in some coners o the Intenet), Velikovsky’s book was an immediate
bestseller—as well as, in histoian Michael Gordin’s words, “one o the
greatest publishing scandals o the postwar peiod” (Gordin , ).
Velikovsky—who had no fomal training in geology, astrophysics, ar-
chaeology, histoy, or any o the other topics considered in his book—
was inspired by earlier authors such as Ignatius Donnelly to examine
the mythology and sciptures o ancient civilizations for evidence that
the earth has been subject to immense, worldwide catastrophes at vai-
ous points in human histoy. His thesis, as stated at the beginning o
Worlds in Collision, was “) that there were physical upheavals o a global
character in histoical times; ) that these catastrophes were caused by
extraterrestial agents; and ) that these agents can be identied” (Veli-
kovsky , ix).
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB 141
Specically, Velikovsky claimed that around BCE a comet was
ejected from Jupiter toward the earth, causing major disturbances in
the earth’s magnetic eld and a reoientation o the earth’s axis, un-
leashing meteor stoms, tidal waves, and earthquakes before settling
into orbit around the sun as the planet Venus. Among other events,
this cosmic visitation was alleged to have been the source for the bib-
lical passage in the Book o Daniel where Joshua commanded the sun
to “stand still” (since the earth’s rotation would have been temporaily
interupted). Velikovsky claimed to have found similar passages in con-
temporay mythologies o Greece, Egypt, Asia, and Mesoameica. A
précis o these ideas was presented by the jounalist Eic Larrabee in a
breathless article in Harper’s magazine titled “e Day the Sun Stood
Still” in Januay , leading to several months o eager anticipation
o the book’s publication. While the article noted that many o Veli-
kovsky’s ideas were unorthodox, Larrabee nonetheless concluded that
the work applies “all the apparatus o leaning—from astronomy and
physics to folklore, religion, classical literature, archaeology, geology,
paleontology, biology, and psychology” to the “awesome task . . . o ap-
plying the techniques o scholarship and psychoanalysis to the entire
human race” (Larrabee , ).
Most scientists, however, did not share Larrabee’s enthusiasm.
Even before the book was published, a fuious campaign was launched
against Macmillan in an eort to quash it, most prominently led by the
Havard astronomer Harlow Shapley. Immediately following the pub-
lication o Larrabee’s Harper’s article, Shapley wrote to Macmillan’s
editoial department to report that “a few scientists with whom I have
talked to about this matter . . . are not a little astonished that the great
Macmillan Company, famous for its scientic publications, would ven-
ture into the Black Arts without rather careful refereeing o the manu-
scipt.” He added that Velikovsky’s thesis “is the most arrant nonsense
o my expeience,” and expressed his “great relief ” upon heaing umors
(unfounded, as it tuned out) that Macmillan had canceled publication
plans. Macmillan editor James Putnam quickly wrote back to correct
Shapley’s misapprehension, and to assure him that “we are publishing
this book not as a scientic publication, but as the presentation o a
theoy which, it seemed to us, should be brought to the attention o
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
142 CHAPTER FOUR
scholars in the vaious elds o science with which it deals.” Putnam
added that he expected there would “be a great diversity o reaction to
the book” (Putnam to Shapley, Januay , ).
e entire correspondence between Shapley and Macmillan editors
has been preseved publicly on a website devoted to Velikovsky’s ideas
(http:// www .varchive .org/), and it makes entertaining reading. De-
spite Shapley’s ominous wanings about irreparable damage to Mac-
millan’s scientic reputation, Worlds in Collision was indeed published
in Apil , and, as Putnam had predicted, reactions to the book were
“diverse.” Or, rather, they were split quite dramatically between those
o scientists and highbrow intellectuals, who violently denounced the
book, and the general book- buying public, who couldn’t get enough
o it. While sales gures are dicult to obtain, it is fairly certain that
“millions” o copies were sold duing Velikovsky’s time in the sun be-
tween and the mid- s. Worlds in Collision entered the New
York Times bestseller list at number fourteen on Apil , . By the
next week it was number three, and by May it was number one among
nonction books—a ranking it held for nine weeks. Ultimately, it stayed
on the Times list for thirty- one weeks duing its initial un, and was con-
tinuously in pint for decades, becoming—like similar works by Eich
von Daniken (Chariots o the Gods) and L. Ron Hubbard (Dianetics)—
popular among college- age and countercultural audiences in the s
and s.
Unsupisingly, the scientic community took a much dimmer view
o Velikovsky’s book. Reviewers in elds from astronomy to geology to
classical archaeology were “unanimously negative” in their assessments,
and focused on both major aws (e.g., violations o the laws o gravity)
and minor ones (misreadings o ancient texts). To put it bluntly, Veli-
kovsky’s argument is completely implausible. Were an object the size
o Venus to pass anywhere remotely near the earth, the consequences
would be far more violent than Velikovsky proposed, and individual
eects such as a temporay suspension o the earth’s rotation are, from a
physical point o view, impossible. Velikovsky, however, refused to back
down, and in he published a follow- up, Earth in Upheaval, which
expanded his argument to a broad geological theoy o catastrophism.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB 143
Needless to say, this book was no more successful in convincing scien-
tists, but it did maintain his popular momentum.
Leaving aside the scientic reaction for now, it is noteworthy that
even Velikovsky’s vehement citics recognized the cultural appeal o
Worlds in Collision. For example, in his review in the Ne w Yo rk e r maga-
zine, Alfred Kazin descibed the book as “extraordinaily unconvinc-
ing,” and “preposterous and intellectually pimitive to an extreme,” and
he lamented the general state o education among a public who would
eagerly embrace such nonsense. But he also noted that as a “pathetic,
ominous, and superstitious piece o work by a man whose thinking is
completely dominated by cataclysms, catastrophes, and global distur-
bances,” the book “ts only too well into the intellectual melodrama o
this peiod” (Kazin , ). e real reason for the book’s appeal,
Kazin reasoned, was not in its scientic claims, but rather “that man is
always on the bink o universal destuction, and that the most he can
be is a recording agent o these prodigious disasters” (Kazin , ).
Indeed, Kazin continued, Velikovsky’s argument played “ight into the
small talk about universal destuction that is all around us now,” and
encouraged a passivity and pessimism in the face o incomprehensible
forces. “ese days,” Kazin concluded, “even as we sit on the bink and
wonder i all o us yet may go over, we can always read our fate in ad-
vance” (Kazin , –). Velikovsky himsel seemed to realize and
encourage such connections between his discussion o ancient catastro-
phes and the moden climate o geopolitical cisis. In the introduction
to Worlds in Collision, he reected:
e years when Ages o Chaos [a separate book detailing textual evidence
for catastrophes] and Worlds in Collision were witten were years o a
world catastrophe created by man—o war that was fought on land, on
sea, and in the air. Duing that time man leaned how to take apart a few o
the bicks o which the universe is built—the atoms o uranium. I one day
he should solve the problem o ssion and fusion o the atoms o which the
cust o the earth or its water and air are composed, he may perchance, by
initiating a chain reaction, take this planet out o the stuggle for suvival
among the members o the celestial spheres (Velikovsky , ix).
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
144 CHAPTER FOUR
While Worlds in Collision generally drew negative responses from
astronomers and physicists, who were outraged at the book’s prepos-
terous claims about celestial mechanics, it did not engage directly with
any central issues in contemporay mainstream science. ere were no
debates in the s (or, for that matter, in the s or the s) about
the gravitational eects o planets passing close by one another. Ge-
ology, though, was a dierent matter. Toward the end o Worlds in Col-
lision, Velikovsky noted that “in the present volume geological and pale
-
ontological mateial was discussed only occasionally,” but he promised
to take up those topics more thoroughly in a future work. In his next
major book, Earth in Upheaval, Velikovsky expanded his theoy o cos-
mic catastrophe to a broader geological catastrophism, and extended
the cycle o upheaval back into deep prehistoy. He also found a new
publisher; aer the furor over Worlds in Collision, Macmillan had de-
cided to cancel their publishing agreement with Velikovsky, leading him
to tun to Doubleday, which was more than happy to have his business.
In Earth in Upheaval, Velikovsky presented a theoy o cyclical mass
extinctions reminiscent o Georges Cuvier’s cycles o “revolutions.”
In fact, while he citicized Cuvier’s vague explanations for the mecha-
nisms responsible for his revolutions, Velikovsky positioned himsel
vey much as the heir to Cuvier and other nineteenth- centuy catastro-
phists. In explaining the long dominance o the “unifomitaian” view
in geology, he pointed explicitly at cultural factors: “No wonder in that
climate o reaction to the euptions o revolution and the Napoleonic
Wars the theoy o unifomity became popular and soon dominant in
the natural sciences” (Velikovsky , ). Now, however, he believed
that there was sucient evidence to overtun that paradigm once and
for all, and to demonstrate that “the extemination o great numbers
o animals o evey species, and o many species in their entirety, was
the eect o recurrent global catastrophes” (Velikovsky , ). In
making his case, Velikovsky presented vey little evidence that would
not have been available to a nineteenth- centuy geologist; his chie wit-
nesses were geological features like “erratic” boulders (deposits le
behind by retreating ice sheets), geological unconfomities (tilted se-
quences o strata), continental upthust, climate change, ice ages, and
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB 145
the like. He drew on virtually no contemporay paleontological studies,
and indeed seemed to have a positive disdain for recent research. De-
spite two decades o paleontological research into extinction, in the
foreword to the edition o Earth in Upheaval Velikovsky claimed
he saw no reason to alter the edition’s text. Toward the end o the
book, Velikovsky nonetheless asserted:
e fact that the geological record shows a sudden emergence o many
new foms at the beginning o each geological age does not require the
articial explanation that the records are always defective; the geological
records tuly reect the changes in the animal and plant worlds from one
peiod o geological time to the next. Many o the new species evolved in
the wake o a global catastrophe, at the beginning o a new age, were en-
tombed in a subsequent paroxysm o nature at the end o that age (Veli-
kovsky , ).
Intentionally or othewise, here Velikovsky was treading closer to
an area o genuine scientic debate: whether the geological record
should be viewed as an “imperfect document,” as Dawin had urged his
readers, or rather as a mostly complete text whose pages could be read
literally. In the Origin o Species, Dawin had famously proclaimed, “We
have no ight to expect to nd in our geological fomations, an innite
number o those ne transitional foms, which on my theoy assuredly
have connected all the past and present species o the same group into
one long and branching chain o life” (Dawin, , ). e reason
for this, he argued, was that the fossil record is imperfect: “I look at
the natural geological record as a histoy o the world imperfectly kept,
and witten in a changing dialect” (Dawin , ). While most pale-
ontologists aer Dawin accepted this dim view o their data source, a
vocal minoity had persisted in the belie that discontinuities in the fos-
sil record—moments where major groups either disappeared suddenly
or emerged in a geological instant—were a valid biological “signal,” and
not the artifact o a poor record. By the late s, the paleontolo-
gist George Gaylord Simpson had joined his inuential voice to those
eorts, arguing in Tempo and Mode in Evolution () that “the face o
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
146 CHAPTER FOUR
the fossil record really does suggest nomal discontinuity at all levels,”
and that even apparent “incompleteness is an essential datum and . . .
can be studied with prot” (Simpson , , ).
Simpson did not focus signicant attention on the problem o mass
extinctions, but his protégée and close colleague at the Ameican Mu-
seum o Natural Histoy (AMNH), a young invertebrate paleontolo-
gist named Noman Newell, took up the topic enthusiastically. Newell,
who would have a long career at the AMNH duing which he would
make foundational contibutions to evolutionay paleobiology, maine
paleoecology, and statistical analysis o the fossil record, is best remem-
bered for championing the reality o mass extinctions at a time when
they were still viewed with suspicion, i not outight hostility, by the
majoity o the paleontological profession. He also embraced Simp-
son’s view that the fossil record is an adequate source o data for broad
evolutionay conclusions. Witing in on the subject o “peiodicity
in invertebrate evolution,” he noted that while the record “is neither
complete, nor unifomly good, . . . the record o fossil invertebrates
is an impressive one, and probably is an adequate sample o the evo-
lutionay histoy o the better known groups” (Newell , –).
Newell’s comments here mark an important tuning point in the histoy
o paleontological study o extinction: while previously much attention
had been given to the spectacular disappearances o “chaismatic” ver-
tebrate groups such as the dinosaurs—and, to a lesser extent, more re-
cent extinctions o large mammals like the mastodon—from this point
on the problem o extinction would center on maine invertebrates like
tilobites and mollusks. is is not to say that scientists or the public lost
their fascination with dinosaur extinction—far from it, as we will see
in the next chapter—but rather that as a source o data, maine inver-
tebrate fossils, which have been preseved in quantities many orders o
magnitude greater than vertebrate remains, oer a much better statisti-
cal sample on which to base theoretical conclusions.
In his paper Newell took for granted that the invertebrate fossil
record revealed “mass extinctions o maine genera on a global scale,”
but he did not probe the causes or consequences o these events. is
changed in , when he published a paper titled “Catastrophism and
the Fossil Record” in the jounal Evolution (notably, he chose a jour-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB 147
nal widely read by biologists rather than a more narrowly specialized
paleontological jounal). is essay was framed as a response to sev-
eral papers on mass extinction by Otto Schindewol that hypothesized
global mass extinctions caused by bursts o cosmic radiation. While
Newell did not accept Schindewolf ’s explanation, he did agree that
“enigmatic, apparently world- wide, major interuptions in the fossil
record. . . . are real, approximately synchronous, and are recognizable
at many places in dierent parts o the world,” and that “citical events
in the histoy o life evidently were responsible for these world- wide
revolutionay changes” (Newell , ). Newell hesitated, though,
to label these mass extinctions as “catastrophic,” since he felt that they
could be explained as the cumulative eects o more gradual environ-
mental trends, such as sea level changes. Nor was he comfortable with
the “hypothetical cosmic agencies” proposed by Schindewolf, which
Newell felt violated the “time- tested scientic procedure to avoid, i
there is a practical altenative, hypothetical solutions, no matter how
tempting, that depend on highly speculative and untested premises”
(Newell , ).
Newell’s response to Schindewolf—and indeed his approach to the
problem o mass extinction throughout his career—demonstrates an
important characteistic: Newell was, on the whole, an extremely care-
ful and even consevative scientist who avoided speculation at all costs,
and who repeatedly subjected his own ndings to igorous second-
guessing and statistical testing. is is one reason why, in an era o popu-
lar excitement about speculative theoies like Velikovsky’s, Newell was
relatively immune to being stuck with the much- feared label “crack-
pot.” Newell was a widely respected scientist with impeccable creden-
tials and an institutional aliation that shielded him from suspicion o
ulteior motives, which helped him, virtually singlehandedly, to estab-
lish the respectability o scientic investigation o mass extinction. Both
his credentials and his measured approach, then, distinguished Newell
from other witers about extinction at the time. For example, when the
Ameican spongiologist M. W. de Laubenfels, notably not a paleontolo-
gist, published a paper in Journal o Paleontology that posited an
asteroid impact as the source o the extinction o the dinosaurs, he re-
ceived virtually no response. Despite the apparent reasonableness o
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
148 CHAPTER FOUR
de Laubenfels’s arguments—he pointed out physical evidence o major
impacts in the earth’s past, along with astronomers’ estimates o the
relative frequency o near- earth asteroid encounters—his hypothesis
was treated merely as idle speculation. Geologists and paleontologists
are consevative by nature, and it would take ovewhelmingly dramatic
evidence for a similar hypothesis to be generally accepted some twenty-
ve years later (as we will see in the next chapter).
is characteization is accurate, at least, for the Anglo- Ameican
scientic community, where speculative catastrophic theoies were
relegated to popular books like Velikovsky’s, or to only slightly more
respectable works like geochemist Allan Kelly and astronomer Frank
Dachille’s book Target Earth, or Belgian mathematician and ama-
teur geologist René Gallant’s similar Bombarded Earth (). In the
Soviet Union, however, several paleontologists, including N. S. Shatskij,
V. I. Krasovskiy, and I. S. Shklovskiy, explored possible extraterrestial
extinction mechanisms, though their work was never translated and
therefore failed to make an impact on the wider profession. e main
standard- bearer for catastrophic extinction remained Schindewolf,
who despite being viewed with suspicion by many Ameican scientists
was still the most inuential paleontologist in Gemany. His nal major
publication on the subject was the paper “Neokatastrophismus?,”
which was cited in a number o Newell’s later publications. But even
Schindewolf ’s endorsement o “catastrophism” was somewhat equivo-
cal, as signaled by the question mark in the title; he accepted the tem
“only so long as it is made clear that the ideas it portrays have hardly
anything to do with Cuvier’s catastrophism,” and broadly argued that
since cosmic radiation is merely the mechanism for inducing mutations
that accelerate episodes o racial senescence in some groups, “this is
not conceived in the tems o a natural catastrophe that has betaken the
whole o the Earth with great suddenness and absolute simultaneity”
(Schindewol , , ).
Nonetheless, despite his cautious nature, by the early s Newell
was prepared to be more aggressive in his claims. In , as outgoing
president o the Paleontological Society, he had the opportunity to pre-
sent a major address titled “Paleontological Gaps and Geochronology.”
Here he focused mainly on the question o whether major breaks in
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB 149
stratigraphic sequence—Dawin’s “missing pages” from the histoy o
the earth—were real or artifacts o poor presevation, and he argued
that at least two o the most celebrated such breaks—at the end o the
Pemian some million years ago, and again million years ago at
the end o the Cretaceous—were likely correlated with major mass ex-
tinctions. e next year, in , he presented a major study o mass
extinctions, “Revolutions in the Histoy o Life,” at a special sympo-
sium organized by the Geological Society o Ameica, the proceedings
o which were not published until . Here Newell made the bold
claim that “the pupose o this essay is to demonstrate that the histoy
o life . . . has been episodic rather than unifom, and to show that mod-
en paleontology must incoporate certain aspects o both catastroph-
ism and unifomitaianism while rejecting others” (Newell , ).
While he avoided endorsing traditional Cuveian catastrophism explic-
itly, Newell nonetheless emphasized the unpredictable nature o the
histoy o life, and took aim at some basic unifomitaian assumptions,
witing that “catastrophism ightly emphasized the episodic character
o geologic histoy, the rapidity o some changes, and the diculty o
drawing exact analogies between past and present” (Newell , ).
In particular, this paper emphasized that mass extinction played a
much more important role in evolution than had been nomally cred-
ited. Noting that peiods o mass extinction tended to be followed by
“episodes o exceptional radiation” (i.e., bursts o accelerated evolu-
tion), Newell argued that mass extinctions were key events that cleared
ecological space for new adaptive opportunities and evolutionay ex-
peiments. To illustrate this correlation, he published a graph in which
major adaptive radiations were supeimposed against mass extinctions
(g. .).
is highlights another important feature o Newell’s extinction
studies, which was their quantitative methodology: Newell’s conclu-
sions about mass extinctions were based on an extensive evaluation o
data on thousands o taxonomic groups (this paper focused at the taxo-
nomic level o the family), which he analyzed statistically in order to
detemine relatively precise calculations for extinction rates at particu-
lar times. Mass extinctions were identied—and would continue to be
in future extinction studies—as episodes where quantitative extinction
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
150 CHAPTER FOUR
rates were identiably higher than in “nomal” times. In other words,
mass extinctions came to be redened as statistical anomalies in taxo-
nomic data, or as episodes when the standing diversity o life dropped
below nomal thresholds.
Another cucial feature o Newell’s approach to extinction was that
he explicitly understood mass extinctions as anomalous uctuations in
diversity. raditionally, “extinction” has been a rather nebulous concept
in biology. Its broad denition, as given, for example, in Keywords in
Evolutionary Biology, is “a teminal event in the histoy o a population,
species, or higher taxon” (Damuth , ). Right away, the confusion
is evident: extinction would seem to result when the death o the vey
last member o some group occurs. e natural level at which this de-
nition would make most sense would be the species, since species are
4.1 Graph o appearance (dotted line) and disappearance (solid line) o maine
animals in the fossil record. e solid- line peaks represent the major mass extinctions at
the ends o the Cambian, Devonian, Pemian, iassic, and Cretaceous peiods. Note
that they are generally followed a short time later by episodes o increased diversica-
tion. Noman D. Newell, “Revolutions in the Histoy o Life,” in Uniformity and Sim-
plicity, Geological Society o Ameica special paper (Boulder, CO: Geological Society
o Ameica, ), . Used with pemission o the Geological Society o Ameica.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB 151
oen invested with some kind o concrete existence—they are “onto-
logically real” or “natural kinds,” as a philosopher would say. e death
o an entire population, then, would seem only to be extinction i that
population was the last o a particular species anywhere on earth. e
“extinction” o higher categoies (like genus or family) would also ap-
pear problematic, since those groups are generally considered less
“real” or distinct than species. What we are saying when we say that a
genus has become extinct is really that all o its constituent species have
died out.
Furthemore, how do we detect extinction? Since extinction is de-
ned as the absence o some entity, we face the old dictum that “ab-
sence o evidence is not evidence o absence.” It can be vey dicult to
denitively establish tuly that no living member o a species exists any-
where in the world, and indeed we oen see news reports that a mem-
ber o some previously extinct species has been “found,” usually in some
remote locale (famous examples, like the coelacanth, abound). From a
paleontological perspective the task would seem more straightfoward,
since for more than two centuies paleontologists have kept detailed
taxonomic records on when individual species and higher taxa appear
in and disappear from the fossil record. But o course the fossil record is
notoiously incomplete; and even i it is regarded as being reliable, the
fact that a species drops out o a stratigraphic sequence—which may
cover tens o millions o years—gives us vey little infomation about
when or why it died out. In addition, paleontology faces the problem o
so- called “pseudoextinction”: when a particular lineage ends because it
has evolved into a new species (hence, we sometimes refer to birds as
“living dinosaurs”). is underscores the fact that species are not really
stable entities, but rather are taxonomic units composed o populations
that share similar but not necessaily identical genetic traits, and which
can be widely distibuted geographically. “Speciation” occurs when
biologists or paleontologists detemine that members o a population
have suciently dierentiated either genetically or mophologically,
respectively, from their peers. Needless to say, this is not always easy
to pinpoint.
What this shows us is that from a biological or paleontological per-
spective, it is vey dicult to precisely identify the circumstances or
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
152 CHAPTER FOUR
causes o extinction, which perhaps explains scientists’ reluctance to
study the phenomenon in great detail before the s and s. I it
is dicult verging on impossible to precisely document the extinction
o a particular species, it makes much more sense to adopt a statisti-
cal or probabilistic model o extinction: i species or groups o species
are prevalent in the fossil record at some point, and at some later point
are entirely absent, extinction most likely has taken place somewhere
in between. e concept o mass extinction identies cases in which
some large number o groups (usually measured at the genus or family
level, but ostensibly made up o individual species) disappear from the
record in coordinated fashion, usually within a few million years o one
another. e evidentiay threshold is somewhat lower for mass extinc-
tions, because even i we are wrong about the timing o a few individual
extinctions, we can still establish a statistical likelihood that many o
them are real.
Mass extinctions are, therefore, more easily identiable than indi
-
vidual extinctions, because they stand out against the “background”
more clearly. And how is this detected? As has already been mentioned,
since the early nineteenth centuy, paleontologists and geologists have
continuously added to a census o life on earth over time, taking careful
note o when species appear and disappear from the record. In the rst
instance, this infomation was used to document the diversity o life
and to understand how life has evolved and how ecosystems function.
Indeed, Newell’s own extinction studies began, as discussed in his
paper on peiodicity in evolution, as an attempt to quantitatively assess
diversity. He identied mass extinctions because he recognized that,
while on the whole diversity has increased over the histoy o life, there
are anomalous peiods where diversity drops shaply. Mass extinction,
then, came to be dened not just as a phenomenon most easily identi-
ed by statistical analysis o fossil data, but as an anomalous uctuation
in data about diversity. A “mass extinction” is a peiod o unusually low
levels o standing diversity—and this is a concept that Newell helped
populaize that is still relied upon today.
But merely identifying peiods o shap diversity loss doesn’t tell
us vey much about how or why mass extinctions have taken place—
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB 153
so Newell’s studies opened up more questions than they answered.
For most o his career, Newell argued, as he did in his symposium
paper, that worldwide decline in sea level was the most likely culpit. As
he put it, “It seems clear that rapid emergence o the continents would
result in catastrophic changes in both terrestial and maine habitats
and such changes might well tigger mass extinctions among the most
fragile species” (Newell , ). Note, however, that while he used
the tem “catastrophic” to descibe the changes, he was not descibing a
single short- tem event like an asteroid impact, but rather a process that
might well have played out over tens o millions o years. Furthemore,
since he regarded these extinctions to mostly aect “the most fragile
species,” he remained convinced, like Dawin, that extinctions had a
strongly selective component. Newell’s insights were the inspiration for
many further studies o mass extinction, and the causes he assigned are
still oen widely regarded as valid, but they provided relatively little
insight into cases where enomously widespread and broadly adapted
groups, like the dinosaurs, disappear from the record in a geological in-
stant. Still less did they settle the lingeing, and at the time resurgent,
debate between catastrophism and unifomitaianism.
In his symposium paper, Newell was quite careful to avoid step-
ping into this larger debate or adding fuel to any wider cultural associa-
tions with extinction. A tem like “catastrophism is a tem with an emo-
tional connotation that implies calamity and destuction,” he argued,
“and as such it is not appropiate in any scientic context” (Newell
, ). However, in he also adapted his extinction research to
an essay in the popular magazine Scientic American, titled “Cises in
the Histoy o Life,” in which he was notably less restrained. In par-
ticular, Newell drew compaisons between histoical mass extinctions
and current environmental depredation and even the threat o nuclear
war: “We are now witnessing the disastrous eects on organic nature
o the explosive spread o the human species and the concurrent de-
velopment o an ecient technology o destuction” (Newell , ).
Newell pointed to a number o factors as contibuting to rapid loss o
species, including hunting, the destuction o habitats, pollution and in-
secticides, urban sprawl, and invasive species, concluding overall:
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
154 CHAPTER FOUR
is cursoy glance at recent extinctions indicates that excessive preda-
tion, destuction o habitat and invasion o established communities by
man and his domestic animals have been the pimay causes o extinc-
tions within histoical time. e resulting disturbances o community
equilibium and shock waves o readjustment have produced ecological
explosions with far reaching eects (Newell , ).
is statement raises several important points. In the rst place, it
marks the beginning o a trend—which continues to this day—in which
paleontologists, nomally conned to matters o the deep past, used pa-
leontological expertise about extinction and biodiversity to communi-
cate with the public about moden diversity cises. From this point on,
paleontologists would have an important voice in political and cultural
discussions about extinction and endangement. Second, in his popular
article Newell more explicitly introduced an ecological logic for link-
ing mass extinction with diversity. In descibing mass extinctions o
the geological past, he explained that “the interdependence o living
organisms, involving complex chains o food supply, may provide an
important key to the understanding o how relatively small changes in
the environment could have tiggered mass extinctions” (Newell ,
). In other words, a small environmental change could have a snow-
ball eect, since the removal o one even apparently tivial or humble
component o the system could initiate a domino- like propagation
o ecological failure. As Newell put it, “No organism is stronger than
the weakest link in its ecological chain”—a lesson as potentially vital
for human suvival as it was for that o the tilobites or the dinosaurs
(Newell , ). Furthemore, the local consequences o ecological
disuption could propagate in time as well: loss o diversity was always
followed by eventual ecological recovey, but what was lost in ecologi-
cal or genetic diversity could never be tuly recovered. An underlying
conclusion, therefore, was quite simple: “Extinction is an evolutionay
as well as an ecological problem” (Newell , ).
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB 155
Diversity, Stability, and Extinction
What we see, then, in the development o scientic ideas about extinc-
tion by the mid- s is twofold: rst, a recognition that mass extinc-
tions may have been a recurrent feature o the histoy o life on earth,
and second, awareness that a key to understanding the causes o past
extinctions—and potentially predicting the consequences o future
ones—lies in understanding ecological interdependence. e concept
o diversity is important in both cases. Mass extinctions are dened as
major depletions o standing biological diversity, and are measured by
studying the histoy o organic diversity in the fossil record. But diver-
sity is also important because in an ecological sense it can contibute
to the stability or instability o a system. Remember that Dawin as-
sumed that diversity had essentially remained constant over the histoy
o life—there were no mass extinctions, but also no real threat o eco-
logical collapse, since nature tended to replace species with organisms
equally well suited for their particular environments.
In the early s, the notion that diversity was an important com-
ponent in the stability o complex systems was fairly new. Newell was
not alone among paleontologists in invoking this explanation: for ex-
ample, the paleontologist James Beerbower’s widely used college text-
book Search for the Past () argued that species exist “in a rather
delicate ecological adjustment to one another,” and that “i someone
upsets the applecart by being extinct—due, say, to climactic change—
the whole system is likely to be unfavorably aected,” potentially result-
ing in mass extinctions. But this notion was part o a broader transfor-
mation—in ecology and genetics, particularly—that had taken place
over the previous few decades, and it would have cultural as well as sci-
entic ramications.
At the heart o the matter are deep- seated biological assumptions
about equilibium and stability—the “balance o nature.” As we saw in
the rst two chapters, nineteenth- centuy biologists tended to assume
that nature remains in pepetual balance because o some kind o inher-
ent regulating pinciple. In cude tems, this meant that nature tended
to ensure that all available resources were maximized by placing organ-
isms in “stations” appropiate to the needs and habits o each. In the
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
156 CHAPTER FOUR
earlier part o the nineteenth centuy, there was oen the strong suspi-
cion that this balance was divinely inspired; aer Dawin, the pinciple
o natural selection naturalized such notions by naming selection as
the “agent” responsible for maintaining this balance. By Dawin’s logic
(followed by that o others, including Alfred Russell Wallace), natural
selection ensured that the earth was always populated by a relatively
stable diversity o species, since the zero- sum pinciple o competitive
replacement meant that species were ghting for a nite number o en-
vironmental resources.
Much o this thinking was focused and cystallized with the emer-
gence o the moden discipline o ecology, which was a late- nineteenth-
centuy development. e introduction o the niche concept—rst
coined by Joseph Ginnell in , and later codied by Charles Elton
in the s and s—created a language for talking about the rela-
tionship between organisms and their environments that allowed more
precise, quantitative investigations. In its initial development, the niche
concept hewed vey close to Dawin’s logic: according to Elton, the
pinciple o “competitive exclusion”—the notion that only one species
could occupy a particular niche in a local ecosystem—was a central fea-
ture in the balancing o ecological systems. is did not, however, mean
that nature was static: on the contray, Elton believed that competi-
tion meant that ecosystems were in constant ux, shuing the species
that occupied particular niches. As he put it in his classic textbook Ani-
mal Ecology and Evolution, “‘e balance o nature’ does not exist, and
perhaps has never existed. e numbers o wild animals are constantly
vaying to a greater or less extent, and the vaiations are usually irregu-
lar in peiod and always irregular in amplitude’” (Elton , ). Im-
portantly, Elton was strongly drawn to the idea that ecosystems tended
towards equilibrium, which he opposed to classic notions o the balance
o nature.
wo o the central concepts in ecology, then, as the discipline
moved into the mid- twentieth centuy, were competition and equilib-
ium. e constant vaiation in numbers o particular organisms was
seen as a function o competition—between individuals o a species,
between species (predator- prey relationships, competition for scarce
resources), and between all organisms and their environments—but
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB 157
the overall eect was that an ecosystem as a whole tended towards sta-
bility, in the sense that ecological niches were full and the food web
was complete. As the Soviet ecologist Vladimir I. Venadsky—one o
the chie populaizers o the tem “biosphere”—put it in , “e
single living organism recedes from view; the sum o all organisms, i.e.,
living matter, is what is important” (Venadsky , ). is stability,
though, is a tenuous arrangement: individual organisms and species
are constantly under stress, and entire ecosystems can be threatened
by environmental perturbations that can produce violent disuptions.
As the histoian Joel Hagen has obseved, the tension around equilib-
ium in the ecological thought o the time reected broader cultural
perceptions: “e industial society that Elton saw in nature, though
basically stable, was at times subjected to unpredictable and violent
disturbances,” since “like human industial societies, animal commu-
nities were not completely free from violent and unpredictable events”
(Hagen , –).
Ecology needed a model for understanding this relationship be-
tween volatility and stability, and an important lesson was provided
by contemporay genetics. Duing the s and s, the eld o ge-
netics—especially as directed toward questions o selection and evo-
lution—developed a focus on the population as the key unit o study.
One o the most important contibutors to this shi was the Russian-
bon geneticist eodosius Dobzhansky, who came to the United
States in to work in the world- renowned research group led by
omas Hunt Morgan, one o the founding gures in moden genetics,
whose “Fly Room” at Columbia University was the source o multiple
breakthroughs and Nobel Pizes in the unlocking o the mechanisms
o heredity. By the s Dobzhansky had, following Morgan’s study
o fuit ies (Drosophila melanogaster), established his own reputation,
and in he published a book titled Genetics and the Origin o Species,
which is widely regarded as being one o the fomative texts in the so-
called Moden Evolutionay Synthesis.
Dobzhansky had focused most o his empiical research on examin-
ing how mutations moved through populations o ies, which led him
to ponder the role o genetic heterogeneity—or diversity—in stable
biological populations. is was one o the major topics o Genetics and
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
158 CHAPTER FOUR
the Origin o Species; in fact, the rst chapter was titled, simply, “Organic
Diversity.” While Dobzhansky began by obseving, “For centuies man
has been interested in the diversity o living beings,” he distinguished
between a desciptive approach—“recording as accurately as possible
the multitudinous stuctures and functions o the beings now living and
o those preseved as fossils”—and a “nomothetic” (law- producing)
one—that is, “an analysis o causes underlying the diversity” (Dobzhan-
sky , –). e fomer approach, he argued, is the province o natu-
ral histoy, while the latter should be the goal o genetics. A central
question, then, was why do populations o organisms—say, Drosophila
ies in the wild—contain so much latent genetic vaiability (by which
he meant chromosomal vaiations or latent mutations), while being
physiologically (i.e., phenotypically) so similar?
As Morgan’s group had detemined, most signicant Drosophila mu-
tations proved to be hamful—oeing no selective advantage at best,
and being fatal at worst—yet the Drosophila genotype was lled with
such latent vaiations. Might this inherent vaiability be seen, Dobzhan-
sky mused, as “a destuctive process, a sort o deteioration o the geno-
type that threatens the vey existence o the species and can nally lead
only to its extinction”? (Dobzhansky , ). is was certainly the
fear o the late- nineteenth- and early- twentieth- centuy promoters o
“racial degeneration” we examined in the last chapter, whose anxieties
about a disastrous accumulation o negative hereditay traits in human
populations helped instigate the eugenics movement in the United
States, Bitain, and Europe. However, Dobzhansky dismissed this as
the perspective o “eugenical Jeremiahs,” arguing precisely the reverse:
as he put it, far from being a threat to the suvival o a population, “the
accumulation o geminal changes in the population genotypes is, in the
long un, a necessity i the species is to preseve its evolutionay plas-
ticity” (Dobzhansky , ). By “evolutionay plasticity,” Dobzhan-
sky meant the ability for a population to ty out new phenotypic solu-
tions to evolutionay challenges, which could be accomplished only
i there existed, latent in the population’s genotype, sucient options
(in the fom o recessive mutations, for example) for new expeiments.
“e environment is in a state o constant ux,” he wrote, “and its
changes, whether slow or catastrophic, make the genotypes o the past
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB 159
generations no longer t for suvival. . . . Hence the necessity for the
species to possess at all times a store o concealed, potential, vaiability”
(Dobzhansky , –). In other words, genetic diversity, far from
being hamful, was a storehouse o potential vaiation that could pre-
seve a population or species should drastic environmental or adaptive
changes take place. Or, as Dobzhansky gimly waned, “A species per-
fectly adapted to its environment may be completely destroyed by a
change in the latter i no hereditay vaiability is available in the hour o
need” (Dobzhansky , ).
As well as being a shap rebuke to the ambitions o eugenicists—
whose utopian visions usually imagined a homogeneous human so-
ciety composed o only those with the “best” traits—Dobzhansky rea-
soning opened up a new line o argument for the value o diversity in
many contexts. Dobzhansky himsel was a lifelong advocate for racial
equality, and oen used similar arguments to undemine beliefs that
supercial phenotypic dierences among humans (like skin color) be-
tokened quantiable dierences in behavior, intelligence, or the like. In
fact, he stressed that human racial diversity was a positive attibute o
the species, witing in his popular book Mankind Evolving () o his
“hope that mankind may eventually prot by this diversity more than
it might have gained by monotonous sameness, even o the most ‘ad-
vanced’ kind” (Dobzhansky , ). But Dobzhansky’s insight about
the relationship between diversity—meaning adaptive exibility—and
stability had much farther- reaching inuence. In a sense, this is one
o the later twentieth centuy’s most important (i oen unexamined)
cultural notions: that any complex collection o biological entities—
whether a genetic population, an ecological system, or a human so-
ciety—is made stronger and more resilient to change by having a “store-
house” o vaiability. Diversity, in other words, became reconceived as
an inherent property o healthy collectives, and therefore came to hold
inherent positive value.
is conception is evident in the kind o ecological thinking ex-
pressed by paleontologists like Newell and Beerbower when they wrote
o “the interdependence o living organisms” or the “rather delicate eco-
logical adjustment” o species as factors detemining extinction or sur-
vival duing mass extinctions o the geological past. It also became an ex-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
160 CHAPTER FOUR
plicit tenet o contemporay ecology, which duing the s and s
taking was its own “nomothetic” tun. One o the main gures in this era
was the Yale ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson, who moved from an early
career studying lake ecology following the tradition o Elton and others
to an interest in an approach to a causal understanding o ecological re-
lationships centered around abstract mathematical models. Hutchin-
son established a thiving school o “theoretical ecology” around him
at Yale, and his most prominent student, the mathematical ecologist
Robert MacArthur, became a pioneer in an approach to ecology using
simple mathematical models as heuistic devices for understanding
complex ecological dynamics. In a paper titled “Fluctuations o
Animal Populations,” MacArthur argued that a key component o eco-
logical stability is a constant level o species abundance, which he ex-
pressed as the number o paths energy can take through a food web.
Stability increases, he argued, as the number o links in the food web
increase—in other words, as the number o distinct interrelated niches
in an ecosystem are lled—because more o the energy in the system is
being reabsorbed.
Taking his student’s reasoning a step further, in Hutchinson
published a paper with the unusual title “Homage to Santa Rosalia”
(whom he nominated as the patron saint o evolutionay biologists)
and the subtitle “Why Are ere So Many Kinds o Animals?” Noting
that humans have been fascinated with the great diversity in the organic
world for centuies, Hutchinson proposed an ecological answer, which
he acknowledged was deived from MacArthur’s paper: “ere is a great
diversity o organisms because communities o many diversied organ-
isms are better able to persist than communities o less diversied or-
ganisms” (Hutchinson , ). He justied this claim on the grounds
o MacArthur’s reasoning about ecological themodynamics, as well
as for evolutionay reasons closely analogous to Dobzhansky’s argu-
ments, witing that “it is probable that a group containing more diversi-
ed species will be able to seize new evolutionay opportunities [more]
than an undiversied group” (Hutchinson , ). Hutchinson’s (and
MacArthur’s) thinking on this topic would prove to be enomously in-
uential, especially in later paleontological analysis o diversication
and extinction. It would—as we will see in the next chapter—provide
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB 161
a line o argument for explaining why certain groups appear to have
been dierentially aected by mass extinctions o the past. It would also
give insight into the consequences o major extinction events, which by
denition deplete, perhaps pemanently, the global ecosystem’s store-
house o both ecological and genetic diversity. is last point would be-
come central in debates about the consequences o the accumulating
biodiversity cisis, but Hutchinson anticipated those later arguments
by several decades. As he concluded in his paper, human activity
has reduced global ecological diversity “in an indisciminate manner,”
and we may only “hope for a limited reversal o this process when man
becomes aware o the value o diversity no less in an economic than in
an esthetic and scientic sense” (Hutchinson , ).
Indeed, by the early s this ecological message had already begun
to make its way to a wider public audience. e theme o “interconnec-
tion” was, as histoian omas Robertson has argued, a common Cold
War trope in politics as well as in science. Noting that President Eisen-
hower referred to “the basic law o interdependence” in his inaugu-
ral address, Robertson shows that discussions o interconnection were
especially prominent in the ise o “neo- Malthusian” thinking, or con-
cen about the ability o the earth to sustain an exponentially grow-
ing human population. One o the most prominent members o this
school was the Stanford University biologist and environmental activ-
ist Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich is best known for his bestselling book e
Population Bomb (cowitten, as many o his popular books would be,
with his wife, Anne Ehrlich), which revived omas Malthus’s gim
late- eighteenth- centuy calculations about the relationship between
population growth and the availability o food resources. Having re-
ceived his PhD in , Ehrlich was deeply steeped in both the popu-
lational approach o the Moden Evolutionay Synthesis and the new
ecological thinking promoted by Elton, Eugene Odum, Hutchinson,
and others; and he applied these lessons to his analysis o the problems
he saw facing global society in the twentieth centuy.
While Ehrlich was aggressive in applying ideas from population bi-
ology and ecology to contemporay social problems, he was skeptical
about what he saw as outdated ideas about the stability o nature. In-
deed, in a paper coauthored with the Australian geneticist Louis
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
162 CHAPTER FOUR
Charles Birch, he noted that while the notion o “a ‘balance o nature’
is commonly held by biologists,” it is “dicult to explain why it persists
in the witings o ecologists” (Ehrlich and Birch , ). e concept,
Ehrlich and Birch argued, is a holdover o the fallacy that one- for- one
replacement is a feature o ecological systems, and a misapplication o
the notion o equilibium. Yes, they conceded, ecosystems do tend to
oscillate around a mean value, achieving a kind o equilibium, but that
does not mean they are stable; this equilibium uctuates in response
to changing environmental factors, and major disturbances in any o
the vaiables that constitute an ecological system can easily throw that
system into disarray. is is most evident in the case o population size:
while for decades ecologists had pointed to intenal constraints on
population growth—so- called density- dependent factors, which were
thought to limit population size by reducing populations through at-
tition as resources were used up—Ehrlich and Birch argued that this
would not necessaily prevent population explosions with disastrous
ecological consequences. As Ehrlich and Birch bluntly concluded in
their paper, “e notion that nature is in some sort o ‘balance’ with re-
spect to population size, or that populations in general show relatively
little uctuation, is false” (Ehrlich and Birch , ).
is reasoning was the basis for e Population Bomb, which ap-
peared the following year (g. .). One o the dening features o the
book was its pessimistic tone: ight from the start, Ehrlich waned that
“the battle to feed humanity is over,” and predicted that duing the
s “hundreds o millions o people will stave to death in spite o any
crash programs embarked upon now” (Ehrlich ). is distinguishes
Ehrlich’s book from earlier wanings about population explosion, such
as Faireld Osbon’s Our Plundered Planet, which had generally
adopted the view that a catastrophe could still be averted. In this sense,
Ehrlich’s views o population t comfortably into what I have descibed
as the postapocalyptic Cold War worldview, which regarded cisis as
a foregone conclusion rather than one o several possible future out-
comes. While Ehrlich did not predict that human extinction was a nec-
essay result o global ovepopulation, he nonetheless raised it as a pos-
sibility, arguing, “e birth rate must be brought into balance with the
death rate or mankind will breed itsel into oblivion” (Ehrlich , pro-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
4.2 e cover o Paul Ehrlich’s best seller e Population Bomb (New York:
Ballantine, ).
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
164 CHAPTER FOUR
logue). Many o Ehrlich’s claims have been challenged over the years,
and in the early twenty-rst centuy it is clear that his most dire prog-
nostications did not come to pass. But it is undeniable that his views
found a receptive public: since its publication e Population Bomb has
sold more than two million copies, and it helped launch Ehrlich’s career
as an inuential public intellectual.
One o the central features o Ehrlich’s population arguments was a
focus on the dynamics o ecological systems. “One o the basic facts o
population biology,” he wrote, “is that the simpler an ecosystem is, the
more unstable it is” (Ehrlich , ). He argued that humankind had
been systematically simplifying global ecosystems through industial-
ized faming and agiculture, the use o pesticides, and urban sprawl,
and that this activity would have dire consequences. While he did not
explicitly use the tem, Ehrlich was developing what would become a
lifelong concen with preseving biological diversity; and, as we will see
in later chapters, he became a major voice in the biodiversity movement
o the s and beyond. Ehrlich also would be a public gure in scien-
tic commentay about the dangers o nuclear proliferation, which he
connected to population explosion in painting a dismal potential sce-
naio in e Population Bomb. Projecting a political cisis that could re-
sult from the worldwide famines he predicted would take place duing
the s, Ehrlich imagined the outbreak o nuclear war in the s
as the nal capstone to the global cisis, leading to an extinction event
from which “the most intelligent creatures ultimately suviving . . . are
the cockroaches” (Ehrlich , ).
As we have seen in the case o nuclear anxieties earlier in this chap-
ter, it is dicult to make causal claims about the relationship between
scientic ideas and social fears duing this peiod. Clearly, authors such
as Ehrlich tapped into complex currents o popular anxiety at the time.
Ehrlich’s choice o the tem “bomb” in the title o his book was deliber-
ate, and was explicitly intended to invoke technological horror and fear
o sudden catastrophe—which, in addition to nuclear holocaust, in-
cluded mistust o rapid social change and o new environmental move-
ments. Furthemore, projections similar to Ehrlich’s had long been
circulating in strategic analysis circles in Washington and elsewhere.
As the environmental histoian Jacob Hamblin has shown, modeling o
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB 165
catastrophic scenaios by RAND and other policy analysts was not lim-
ited to nuclear war; a whole host o environmental catastrophes—as the
result o global climate change, crop failure, ovepopulation, and other
factors—had been researched as part o the broader Cold War program
o isk assessment in the United States since the s. It was even
suggested that some o these outcomes might be deliberately tiggered
as part o militay strategy. As Hamblin argues, these projections inu-
enced a counter- response by environmentalists, and were a key factor
in the birth o the moden environmental movement.
One o the signature early works o that emerging movement was
Rachel Carson’s best seller Silent Spring, which alerted a mass pub-
lic audience to the dangers o industial pesticides, and which was pub-
lished duing the height o the Cuban Missile Cisis. e theme o mass
extinction was a feature o Carson’s witing, as was the new ecological
perspective on the stability o nature. As Carson explained, the dangers
posed by pesticides was not merely their toxicity to humans, but also
their eect on the diversity o entire ecosystems, o which humans were
active members:
e balance o nature is not a status quo; it is uid, ever shiing, in a con-
stant state o adjustment. Man, too, is part o this balance. Sometimes the
balance is in his favor; sometimes—and all too oen through his own ac-
tivities—it is shied to his disadvantage (Carson , ).
Carson also emphasized that environmental consevation was not
merely a matter o protecting the most visible endangered species;
given the close interrelationships between all organisms, even tiny
changes to our environment could have dramatic consequences. Here
she was strongly inuenced by Elton, who had devoted the nal chap-
ter in his book e Ecology o Invasions to the topic o “the conser-
vation o vaiety.” Taking an argument similar to those o MacArthur
and Hutchinson, Elton waned that in “the exploited lands o the world
we see a decrease in ichness and vaiety o species” due to the use o
pesticides and industial monoculture, and he stressed his belie “that
consevation should mean the keeping or putting in the landscape o
the greatest possible ecological vaiety—in the world, in evey conti-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
166 CHAPTER FOUR
nent or island, and so far as practicable in evey distict” (Elton ,
–). In Silent Spring, Carson quoted the botanist LeRoy Stegman,
who had obseved, “A few false moves on the part o man may result in
the destuction o soil productivity and the arthropods may well take
over” (Stegman ). Ultimately, Carson argued, the specter facing
humankind was a potential mass extinction o its own devising: “Along
with the possibility o the extinction o mankind by nuclear war, the
central problem o our age has therefore become the contamination o
man’s total environment with such substances [pesticides] o incredible
potential for ham” (Carson , ).
Conclusion
e picture painted in this chapter o the two decades following the
Second World War is undoubtedly one o pevasive gloom and cisis.
Mass extinction, I have argued, was a central conduit between scientic
and popular anxieties about a world that seemed to many to be perched
on the bink o catastrophe. e specter o nuclear annihilation was the
obvious touchstone in this culture o anxiety, and it both contibuted
to and was reinforced by biologists’ and paleontologists’ investigations
o the dynamics o extinction and biological diversity. is extinction
imaginay, I have also argued, can broadly be descibed, in distinction
to the one that characteized the rst hal o the twentieth centuy, as
postapocalyptic, meaning that the threat o ultimate disaster and ex-
tinction was viewed no longer as a potential future outcome, but rather
as something already undeway. Part o this sense came from the reality
o events like the Holocaust and the bombings o Hiroshima and Naga-
saki, but on the scientic side it also came from a growing acceptance o
the fact that, perhaps many times in the geological past, great catastro-
phes had been visited on the earth, with perhaps pemanent ecological
and evolutionay consequences.
At the same time, the message was not entirely pessimistic. e
development o ecology—and its inuence on a growing popular en-
vironmental consciousness—contibuted to a greater sense o inter-
connectedness between peoples o all nations, between organisms in
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB 167
ecosystems, and between human beings and their fellow inhabitants o
the earth. is theme o interconnection and interdependence helped
create a new valuation o diversity as an essential component in the
stability o complex systems. Humans had not yet entirely given up on
the hope for a better future, but it was becoming clear that the way for-
ward would involve much greater humility and responsibility toward
one another and our environments. is was an essential precondition
for the eventual recognition o a biodiversity cisis and a “sixth mass ex-
tinction,” and for the beginnings o a new culture o catastrophe—one
might call it “post- postapocalypticism”—that was less anthropocentic
and less focused on the single devastating event than previous cultures
had been. I will discuss this in the sixth and nal chapter o this book,
where I will argue that, following the breakup o the Easten bloc and
the end o the Cold War, twenty- rst- centuy societies have adopted
a longer- tem perspective in their catastrophic thinking. e threats
facing humanity, global climate change and biodiversity depletion, have
largely replaced sudden nuclear annihilation as the dystopian outcome,
and the sense o humans’ relationship to the rest o the organic world
has adopted the rhythms o the deeper scales o geological time. is is
reected in the current widespread belie that we are now living in the
era o the “Anthropocene.”
But rst we need to follow our stoy through the s and s,
and in particular we must trace the further development o scientic
understanding o mass extinction—which reached its apex in the early
s—and the escalating fear o violent nuclear confrontation and its
aemath on the popular imagination. ese topics will be the subject
o the next chapter, and will set the stage for a consideration o how we
have come to understand extinction and diversity to be so vitally linked
today.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
5
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR
On November , , some hundred million Ameicans sat down to
watch the ABC Sunday Night Movie e Day Aer. e lm, which was
billed as an “authentic” depiction o the eects o nuclear war, captured
public attention and sparked a national (and intenational; it was even-
tually screened in theaters abroad) discussion about the consequences
o nuclear exchange in a way that no single event had done since the
dropping o the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was ar-
guably one o the most signicant television events o the twentieth
centuy: its Nielson rating (.), market share ( percent), and num-
ber o households (more than million) still rank the initial showing
as one o the most watched broadcasts o all time (supassed only by
a handful o Super Bowls, the nal episode o M*A*S*H, and the re-
veal to the “Who Shot JR?” clianger o Dallas). It had a particularly
profound eect on the millions o school- aged children who gathered
with their families to watch it: one o the lm’s most indelible moments,
played out in total silence, in which a mushroom cloud eupts from
a spectacular ash o light, bathing stranded motoists eeing Kansas
City in an eeie orange light, became a regular feature o nightmares
for a generation.
To viewers today, many elements o the lm might come o as
hokey—even as they did at the time—and the special eects were
largely unimpressive. e cast o characters was standard TV movie
fare, including an assortment o stereotypical “average Ameicans” (re-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
170 CHAPTER FIVE
cently engaged high school sweethearts, an eanest college student, a
noble doctor, a stoic famer) coping with the realization o imminent
attack and then the devastating aemath. e lm featured few recog-
nizable stars (Jason Robards, as the heroic doctor, being the notable
exception), and the production was beset by problems that included
battles between the director, Nicholas Meyer, and network executives
and censors over the movie’s length and pacing and the graphic nature
o some scenes. But despite all o this, e Day Aer was and remains
a powerful and haunting lm, and it cystallizes a dening moment in
the cultural histoy o nuclear anxiety. From this point on, it became
increasingly dicult to avoid acknowledging what some political ob-
severs and scientists had been waning for a number o years: that a
large- scale nuclear exchange was not something that moden civiliza-
tion could suvive in any meaningful sense, and that it might well bing
about the extinction o the human species.
While the most pessimistic outcomes were only hinted at in the lm
itsel (which limited its dramatic scope to the inhabitants o Kansas City
and Lawrence, Kansas), viewers were made all too aware o the poten-
tial consequences o total war. Even before the nal credits rolled (over
a scene in which Robards collapses in a silent embrace with a fellow
suvivor amid catastrophic destuction), a text appeared onscreen an-
nouncing, “e catastrophic events you have just witnessed are, in all
likelihood, less severe than the destuction that would actually occur in
the event o a full nuclear stike against the United States.” e broad-
cast was immediately followed by a live ninety- minute ABC News de-
bate moderated by Ted Koppel that featured cold wariors including
Heny Kissinger, William F. Buckley Jr., and Robert McNamara, along
with the holocaust suvivor and author Elie Wiesel and the astronomer
Carl Sagan, who had gained great public visibility through his PBS
seies Cosmos. Many millions o viewers stayed tuned for an exchange
that was, though at times contentious, supisingly univocal in its con-
demnation o nuclear proliferation. While some panelists deided the
lm itsel (Buckley descibed it as “antinuclear propaganda”), virtually
all agreed that it highlighted the need for sane, bilateral reductions in
nuclear stockpiles.
One o the most memorable moments o the post- viewing debate
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 171
came when Sagan used a vivid metaphor to characteize Soviet- US stra-
tegic deterrence, descibing the supepowers as “two implacable ene-
mies” sitting in “a room awash with gasoline,” each holding thousands
o matches. But it was another comment, in response to a provocation
by Buckley, that stands out with more signicance in retrospect. un-
ing to the cameras, Sagan stenly intoned his “unhappy duty to point
out that the reality is much worse than what’s been portrayed in this
movie,” descibing a bleak scenaio:
e nuclear winter that will follow even a small nuclear war . . . involves
a pall o dust and smoke which would reduce the temperatures—not just
in the northen mid- latitudes, but pretty much globally—to subfreezing
temperatures for months. In addition, it’s dark, the radiation from radio-
activity is much more than what we’ve been told before, agiculture will
be wiped out, and it’s vey clear that beyond the one or two billion people
who would be killed directly . . . the overall consequences would be much
more dire, and the biologists who’ve been studying this think that there’s
a real possibility o the extinction o the human species from such a war
(Sagan a).
e nuclear winter scenaio Sagan was descibing would become cen-
tral to ongoing debates about ams reduction and deterrence. e idea
itsel had been unveiled by Sagan and colleagues in simultaneously
published popular (Parade magazine) and scientic outlets (Science)
less than a month before e Day Aer was broadcast, and the hypothe-
sis was immediately connected with the political message o the lm.
As multiple editoials pointed out, the nuclear winter scenaio not only
portended a potential global extinction event, but could also be tig-
gered by a smaller exchange (e.g., one hundred megatons) than full-
blown nuclear war—thus alteing the strategic calculus assumed in
most assessments o “limited exchange.”
e threat o widespread global extinction conjured by Sagan and
others coincided with another spectacular and spectacularly popular
scientic development in the early s: the discovey, by a team led
by the father- son duo Luis and Walter Alvarez, o an anomalous layer o
iidium at the stratigraphic break between the Cretaceous and Tertiay
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
172 CHAPTER FIVE
peiods o geological histoy. e Alvarez hypothesis, as it came to be
known, was both a scientic and popular bombshell. e initial study,
published in , suggested that the only mechanism for depositing
large quantities o iidium (a rare element on the upper layers o the
earth’s cust) in the sediment would have been an impact with a large,
extraterrestial body—an asteroid or comet perhaps ten kilometers
in diameter. Furthemore, the timing o this impact appears to have
been quite signicant: the Cretaceous- Tertiay (K- T) bounday dates to
roughly sixty- ve million years ago, precisely when the dinosaurs—not
to mention a number o other terrestial and maine groups—abuptly
disappear from the fossil record. While there was some precedent for
hypotheses involving spectacular extraterrestial tiggers for mass ex-
tinction, as we have seen in previous chapters, no pior theoy had the
solid empiical grounding and testability o the Alvarez hypothesis. e
eect was to catalyze discussions o catastrophic mass extinction that
had been building momentum towards the end o the s, and to gal-
vanize opinions among geologists, paleontologists, and astrophysicists
about the nature and consequences o extinction events that would
radically change understandings o the histoy o life.
e Alvarez hypothesis also coincided dramatically with late– Cold
War nuclear anxieties, projecting the fate o the dinosaurs as an object
lesson for humanity in countless popular articles and opinion pieces.
is, however, was more than mere coincidence. Consider the descip-
5.1– A seies o paintings from depicting an artist’s conception o the
asteroid that caused the extinction o the dinosaurs: (a) the asteroid one second before
impact; (b) the moment o impact, with an ejecta plume already ising; (c) the “dust
pall” in the earth’s atmosphere one month aer impact; and (d) the impact crater a cen-
tuy aer the stike. Interestingly, the artist, Bill Hartmann, is himsel a major gure in
the histoy o asteroid impact geology, and was one o the oiginators o the theoy that
the earth’s moon was fomed duing a “catastrophic” impact o the earth with a planet-
sized body (Hartmann and Davis ). Hartmann, an astronomer and geologist, spent
his career studying the dynamics o bolide impacts and intepretations o the resulting
stuctural features on Mars and the moon. A prolic illustrator o astronomical scenes,
he was intigued by the Alvarez impact hypothesis when it rst appeared. He recalls it as
having “seemed reasonable,” but explains that aer new discoveies he oen wondered,
“But what would that have looked like to a human obsever?” (Hartmann, personal com-
munication, Apil , ). is seies o paintings explored that question. Copyight
William K. Hartmann; used with the artist’s pemission.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 175
tion o the catastrophic event presented in the Alvarez et al. article
in Science, which concluded by presenting a scenaio in which
an asteroid stuck the earth, fomed an impact crater, and some o the
dust- sized mateial ejected from the crater reached the stratosphere
and was spread around the globe. is dust eectively prevented sun
-
light from reaching the surface for a peiod o several years, until the
dust settled to earth. Loss o sunlight suppressed photosynthesis, and as
a result most food chains collapsed and the extinctions resulted (Alvarez
et. al. , ).
While it lacks the colorful language that Sagan and others would later
use to vividly conjure a nuclear winter, it eectively descibes the same
phenomenon. In fact, the climate modeling for both studies would be
caried out by the same researchers (fomer students o Sagan’s), and
in many ways the nuclear winter scenaio was directly inspired by the
Alvarez hypothesis.
e close association between dinosaur extinction and the potential
extinction o humanity through nuclear exchange was thus linked, both
scientically and psychologically, in the extinction imaginay o the
s. e appetite for stoies about catastrophic extinction—which
eventually were extended to hypotheses involving a wandeing “death
star” responsible for peiodic mass extinctions—clearly resonated with
a public increasingly anxious about its own potential fate. is was re-
ected in the oen dramatic language used by the press—and even
scientists themselves—to descibe extinction. As literay scholar Doug
Davis has argued, the Alvarez hypothesis “cast the Cold War’s nuclear
threat into the planet’s histoy. e death o the dinosaurs becomes an
atomic war stoy as researchers across disciplines mobilize the models
and metaphors o nuclear war- ghting to read the earth’s ancient record
o catastrophic impacts” (Davis , ).
As important as is the connection between dinosaur extinction and
nuclear winter in this stoy, it is only one element o a broad transitional
moment in the late- twentieth- centuy extinction imaginay. e Alva-
rez hypothesis was a spectacular scientic discovey, but its signicance
was amplied by a somewhat quieter transfomation that took place
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
176 CHAPTER FIVE
in paleontology and evolutionay theoy in the years on either side
o its announcement. Broadly speaking, paleontology went through
a “revolution” in methods and agenda that saw a certain approach to
the study o life’s histoy—one that was quantitative and theoretical—
become established as a subdiscipline known as “paleobiology” (Sep-
koski ). One o the central themes in this emerging movement was
an approach to studying pattens o diversication o life over long pei-
ods o time using simplifying models drawn from ecology, and employ-
ing computers for sophisticated statistical analysis o large quantities
o fossil data. A major result o this study was a new understanding o
both mass extinction and the dynamics o ecological and evolutionay
stability in geological time.
In its own way, this new understanding had an even greater inu
-
ence on the scientic and cultural signicance o extinction than the
Alvarez hypothesis. I the convergence o the Alvarez impact extinction
and nuclear winter scenaios represented the apotheosis o the kind o
anxiety represented by Cold War nuclear fears, the broader scientic
understanding o extinction developed duing the s, which increas-
ingly understood mass extinction through the lens o biological diver-
sication, pointed towards a transition towards a new sense o catas-
trophe: one that would become linked with concens about humanity’s
role in upsetting the earth’s ecological balance in less sudden though
potentially equally devastating ways. at nal part o the stoy will
largely occupy the next chapter. For the remainder o this chapter, we
will rst tun to a bie oveview o changes in the paleontological and
ecological understanding o diversication and extinction as it devel-
oped through the s and early s. Next, we will examine how
the Alvarez hypothesis catalyzed what was sometimes referred to as
a “new catastrophism” in science, and how this and other well publi-
cized theoies, along with the nuclear winter scenaio, contibuted to a
broader extinction imaginay. We will then suvey some o the cultural
responses to these developments, ranging from postmodenist citiques
to apocalyptic lm and literature, exploing the diverse ways that cata-
strophic extinction resonated in late– Cold War “catastrophic” society.
Finally, I will argue that scientic and popular interest in mass extinc-
tion was in large part responsible for a transition to a new conception
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 177
o catastrophe, dened in ecological and environmental tems that to a
great extent still exists today.
Diversity and Mass Extinction in Life’s Past
Witing to a close colleague in , the paleontologist David Raup com-
mented, “I am becoming more and more convinced that the key gap in
our thinking for the last years is the nature o extinction” (Raup to
Schop Januay , ). What Raup—one o the leading promoters
o the “paleobiological” agenda, and one o the foremost theoists o
extinction in his generation—meant by this was that the evidence pro-
vided by the fossil record about the diversication and extinction o life
over time did not support the expectations o the Dawinian view. As
his letter went on to explain,
I we take neo- Dawinian theoy at face value, the fossil record makes
no sense. at is, i we have a) adaptation through natural selection and/
or species selection and b) extinction through competitive replacement
or displacement, then we ought to see a vaiety o features in the fossil
record that we do not such as: a) clear evidence o progress, b) decrease
in evolutionay rates (both mophologic and taxonomic), c) probably a
decrease in diversity.
In other words, Raup was arguing in eect that Dawin’s reasoning about
selection and extinction was based on assumptions not bone out by
evidence. Because Dawin implicitly assumed that Lyell’s steady- state
model o geology must goven the histoy o life as well, he assumed
that extinction and speciation must balance one another in a slow, grad-
ual patten. But, obseving the state o the eld at the end o the s,
Raup had reason to challenge this view. Not only had studies o histoi-
cal pattens in diversity shown that diversication rates had actually
increased over time; the same studies also suggested that extinctions—
mass extinctions, in particular—did not necessaily operate according
to nomal selective ules. Or, as he put it, “e neo- Dawinian system
is at work all the time—producing tilobite eyes and pterosaur ight—
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
178 CHAPTER FIVE
but never really gets anywhere in the long un because the tilobites and
pterosaurs get bumped o (through no fault o their own!). . . . e sys-
tem is always heading toward a steady state but never gets there.”
Raup himsel had a central role in creating this new understand-
ing o diversication and extinction that had developed over the previ-
ous ten years. is was a peiod o both extraordinay intellectual fer-
ment and debate in paleontology, and rapid advancement in empiical
knowledge and techniques for data analysis. Most o the excitement was
centered around the study o invertebrates, for the fairly simple fact
that—as was discussed in the context o Noman Newell’s pioneeing
work on mass extinction in chapter o this book—the invertebrate
fossil record is icher and more complete than the vertebrate record,
by several orders o magnitude. Most importantly, by the late twentieth
centuy data collections in invertebrate paleontology had improved to
the point where they could be looked upon as reliable sources o evo-
lutionay inferences, and statistical techniques such as multivaiate fac-
tor analysis had become established as powerful methods for resolving
pattens out o the accumulated data. is was the era when computers
were adopted as research tools by paleontologists, and Raup was one o
the foremost pioneers in this area.
Along with Raup, one o the early innovators in the study o maine
invertebrate diversication was the paleoecologist Jim Valentine. Val-
entine, who has the distinction o being perhaps the only living pale-
ontologist to have belonged to a motorcycle gang (in his s youth),
spent most o his career from the early s to the s at the Univer-
sities o Califonia at Davis and Berkeley, where he applied many o the
exciting developments in theoretical ecology produced by G. Evelyn
Hutchinson and his students to the study o the fossil record. In particu-
lar, his work helped establish the importance o interactions between
ecological and evolutionay hierarchies; in other words, he drew atten-
tion to relationships between levels o taxonomic hierarchy (species,
genus, family, etc.) and those o ecology (e.g., population, community,
ecosystem, biome), and to histoical pattens in their changes. For ex-
ample, his work in the late s and early s argued that dierent
pattens o diversity apply to dierent levels o taxonomic hierarchy;
while diversity was greatest for the highest taxonomic levels (order,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 179
class, phylum) vey early in the histoy o life, it has steadily increased
at the lower levels (family and genera) over the Phanerozoic eon (the
past ve hundred- plus million years). Another way o putting this is to
say that while the amount o sheer diversity (the absolute number o
species and genera) has increased over the histoy o life, the amount o
“dispaity,” or the degree o dierence between groups, has decreased.
is is an extremely important point to which we will retun in this and
the following chapter, but for now it is sucient to note that Valentine
has explained this as a consequence o natural selection settling on par-
ticular major body plans and life habits (e.g., phyla), coupled with the
increasing crowding o maine ecospace resulting in more and more
specialized adaptations to smaller and smaller units o ecological hier-
archy.
Valentine’s early work raised some signicant questions about the
mechanics and pattens o maine diversication, and it sparked im-
mediate debate with Raup, who was intigued by Valentine’s approach
but way o potential weaknesses in the data Valentine used. In particu-
lar, Raup thought that the appearance o increased diversication at
lower taxonomic levels might simply be an artifact o “sampling bias,” or
the likelihood o particular fossils to be preseved or discovered. Taking
potential bias into account, he produced, using statistical analysis, a
revised picture o diversication that suggested that diversity had in-
creased to a maximum in the mid- Paleozoic era (roughly three hundred
million years ago) and then stabilized at a fairly constant equilibium up
to the present. Raup did, however, acknowledge that (a) the question
could not be denitively settled without more and better data at lower
taxonomic levels (Valentine’s analysis involved extrapolating numbers
o species and genera from known data at the family level), and (b) i
Valentine’s increase was genuine, it would have “broad implications” for
our understanding o evolution (Raup , –).
It was recognized at the time that an important question to investi-
gate was whether changes in levels o diversity over time were coordi-
nated between dierent ecological or taxonomic groups. As discussed
in chapter , Newell had previously suggested that peiods o mass ex-
tinction and “exceptional radiation” among coordinated groups o or-
ganisms appear to have been a regular feature o the histoy o life, ar-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
180 CHAPTER FIVE
guing as early as that “the ise and fall in apparently evolutionay
activity is not at random” (Newell , ). In , Newell’s AMNH
colleague John Imbie (one o the early pioneers in multivaiate statis-
tical approaches to paleontological data) and Karl Flessa produced a
study that applied statistical tests to Newell’s obsevation that multiple
groups o maine organisms appear to have diversied simultaneously
at several points in the geologic past. Here they applied factor analysis,
which is a statistical test o the probability o meaningful correlation be-
tween vaiables, to detemine that most uctuations o diversity in the
fossil record can be correlated into ten “diversity associations” among
maine and terrestial groups. e major nding o their analysis was
that while the average rate o taxonomic change for the entire Phanero-
zoic has been roughly steady, change itsel has not been smoothly con-
tinuous, but rather can be resolved into a seies o distinct and fairly
rapid “taxonomic tunovers” or “evolutionay pulsations” where one di-
versity association gave way to another (Fless and Imbie ).
An important realization developing in the study o diversication
was that whether rates o taxonomic change were stable or increasing,
underlying mechanisms that controlled when and how these changes
occurred were fairly mysteious. As Flessa and Imbie themselves ac-
knowledged, while their analysis showed a patten o episodic change,
it could not explain it. One way o tying to intepret pattens in diver-
sity over time explored by Valentine, Raup, and others was to incopo-
rate heuistic mathematical models developed by ecologists like Rob-
ert MacArthur (who was biey introduced in the chapter ), such as
the species- area relationship, which predicts the number o species that
will occupy a given area or habitat, or the model o island biogeogra-
phy (developed by MacArthur and E. O. Wilson) that explains the re-
lationship between immigration and extinction on islands as a function
o the habitat’s size and carying capacity. For example, Raup’s analysis
drew implicitly on these heuistic models in its assumption that early
diversication would result from expansion into relatively unoccupied
ecological niches in the initial evolution o complex life, followed by a
dynamic equilibium once ecospace had been lled. e shape o such
a patten would appear as a “logistic” or S- shaped cuve, which is the
basic assumption o the MacArthur- Wilson model as well. is heuis-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 181
tic approach was central to the eventual “solution” o the problem o
Phanerozoic diversication, but so was the accumulation o better data
for statistical analysis.
One o the most important contibutors to both aspects o the prob-
lem was Raup’s colleague—rst at the University o Rochester, and then
at the University o Chicago—J. John (Jack) Sepkoski Jr., a young pale-
ontologist with a air for mathematics and a willingness to cary out
fairly thankless long- tem data collection. As a graduate student at Har-
vard in the early s, Sepkoski studied with the notable paleontolo-
gist and public intellectual Stephen Jay Gould, where he found his tue
calling (he had oiginally planned to work on fairly traditional problems
in stratigraphy and paleoecology) in the analysis o data about the his-
toy o life. A cucial moment came when—as part o a project Gould
had initiated with Raup and University o Chicago invertebrate paleon-
tologist omas J. M. Schopf, attempting to simulate evolutionay pat-
tens with a computer—Gould asked Sepkoski to begin collecting data
on the maine fossil record to test against the simulated outputs. Sep-
koski realized that no existing collection or data set was up to the task,
so he set about building his own, by drawing on available large compi-
lations as well as obscure monographic literature in several languages.
e initial phase o the project ended up taking a decade, but the
result, published in , fomed the basis for the rst computeized
database o maine fossils, and generated a new approach to studying
the histoy o life (though one clearly indebted to earlier studies by
New ell, Valentine, Raup, and others). Ultimately, Sepkoski’s database
would be a central resource for the analysis o mass extinction duing
the s and beyond, but even before it was completed, Sepkoski him-
sel published several important papers that contibuted to the under-
standing o pattens o diversication. In particular, he was, even more
than Raup, drawn to the application o theoretical ecological models to
paleontological problems. In , Sepkoski published the rst o sev-
eral papers that argued that general pattens in Phanerozoic maine di-
versity could be modeled as a logistic cuve—following MacArthur and
Wil son—in which an initial phase o rapid diversication was followed
by leveling to equilibium. What distinguished Sepkoski’s analysis
from earlier attempts (such as those o Raup, Imbie, and Flessa) was
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
182 CHAPTER FIVE
both the improved quality o the data (drawn from his unpublished
database) and the attempt at deiving causal explanations for the phe-
nomenon. One conclusion o Sepkoski’s paper was that major di-
versication events, such as the Cambian “explosion” o multicellular
life, can be explained simply by the dynamics o intenal ecological re-
lationships. at is, given a large, fairly unpopulated ecosystem, evo-
lutionay radiation from relatively few, unspecialized groups to many
more specialized ones is the logical expectation, and it accounts for
the initial exponential portion o the logistic cuve. e second phase,
where the graph levels o to equilibium, is likewise explained by so-
called density- dependent factors; as ecospace becomes lled, greater
competition, smaller population sizes, and reduced niche sizes will act
as a natural curb on further diversity increases.
Complicating Sepkoski’s initial study, however, was his realization
(as a result o the improved resolution his new database was making
available) that Phanerozoic diversication was a matter not o a single
logistic patten but o multiple, overlapping, successive ones, each char-
acteized by dierent constituent “faunas,” and each carying its own
evolutionay trajectoy. In Sepkoski updated his analysis by iden-
tifying a second, post- Cambian logistic patten that “greatly altered
both diversity and faunal composition in the world ocean” (Sepkoski
, –). Not only was this patten o diversication characteized
by an entirely dierent collection o organisms—he called it the “Paleo-
zoic shelly fauna” because mollusks came to dominate the seas—but it
also appeared to be correlated with the decline, to extinction or low
levels o diversity, o the previous Cambian fauna. To this two- cuve
model Sepkoski would in add a third diversication cuve, begin-
ning in the iassic (around two hundred million years ago) and char-
acteized by vertebrates and larger custaceans, which has continued
its upward sweep through the present. is completed what came to be
known as the “kinetic model” (because diversity “moves” up and down
the successive logistic cuves) or simply the “Sepkoski cuve” (g. .;
Sepkoski , –).
A signicant conclusion o Sepkoski’s work on evolutionay faunas
was his emphasis on the role o “intenal” constraints—the dynamics o
populations under ecological pressures—for constraining pattens o
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 183
diversication. However, i nomal pattens were generated by these in-
tenal constraints, this provoked the question o why major faunal tun-
overs, which appeared to interupt and then restart the nomal logis-
tic patten, took place. In fact, the initial (single- cuve) logistic model
would appear to support the Dawinian assumption o a steady- state
equilibium in the histoy o life, and furthemore would appear to be
nicely explained by classic Dawinian mechanisms like competition and
selection. is is precisely what Raup, witing to Schop at exactly the
time Sepkoski was publishing his results, was arguing had been thrown
into doubt. What explains the discrepancy?
I Sepkoski had only ever proposed the single logistic cuve, then
Raup might have had little basis for his assertions to Schopf. However,
Raup was working closely with Sepkoski and was intimately aware that
Sepkoski’s thinking about diversication had changed signicantly be-
tween and . In identifying a second, and eventually a third,
logistic patten, Sepkoski found his attention drawn to irregulaities in
the cuves his data descibed. While his idealized model represented
5.2 Jack Sepkoski’s graph o three successive “faunal stages” in the diversi-
cation o life over time (Sepkoski , ). e shap “dips” in diversication show the
“Big Five” mass extinction events as losses in standing diversity.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
184 CHAPTER FIVE
the logistic patten as a smooth, unblemished line, the actual patten
was anything but. In fact, the three- cuve diagram (g. .) shows a
number o quite prominent spikes and troughs in the patten—several
o which appear to be too steep to be merely the result o random uc-
tuations. e most signicant o these, in a statistical as well as a collo-
quial sense, appear not coincidentally at the boundaies between major
geological peiods—which, we will recall, were initially identied by
Cuvier and others because they were demarcated by major changes in
the fossils populating corresponding stratigraphic layers. is was, o
course, a major reason for Cuvier’s theoy o global catastrophes, and
the obsevation o similar deviations in data pattens was the basis for
New ell’s assertion o the reality o mass extinctions. A similar conclu-
sion appeared obvious to Sepkoski: the major dips, which could not be
explained as aising from poor data or random inections, represented
major peiods o mass extinction.
It was signicant enough that Sepkoski’s higher- quality data seemed
to conm Newell’s earlier proposals; what made the results even more
important was what they implied in the context o diversication pat-
tens. Each o the ve major troughs (labeled in the gure) represents
a well- known peiod o suspected major extinction—that much was
already known from anecdotal evidence from the fossils. But when
viewed in the broader context o faunal replacement, it becomes ap-
parent that, following the most dramatic extinction events—such as the
end- Pemian extinction, where the number o living families dropped
almost percent—came peiods o evolutionay radiation that intro-
duced distinctively new foms o life and were dominated by entirely
dierent organisms. Sepkoski was able to model these events as “per-
turbations” o the logistic patten, aer which a new logistic growth
phase would begin again. e inescapable conclusion was that not only
did mass extinctions feature as fairly regular episodes in life’s histoy,
appear to aect “associations” (in Flessa and Imbie’s tems) o seem-
ingly unrelated groups, and seem to open opportunities for previously
marginal groups (as the mammals following the K- T trough), but they
also appeared to have a major role in pemanently alteing the subse-
quent histoy o the diversity o life, in most cases by actually promoting
greater subsequent rates o diversication. e implication was that
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 185
without mass extinctions, the earth might still be populated by those
foms that radiated duing the Cambian. In this context, mass extinc-
tions appear to be one o the major engines o diversication in life’s
histoy.
O course major questions remained, including the possible mecha-
nism(s) that could produce this patten. But, at the beginning o the
s, research on diversication had reopened debates that had not
been broadly entertained for well over a centuy. And an irony was
that, as Sepkoski later reected, “the data were not even compiled to
investigate mass extinction, and only serendipitously contained infor-
mation useful in the [subsequent] extinction controversies” (Sepkoski
, ).
Bad Genes or Bad Luck?
One o the most intiguing potential revelations o the studies o diver-
sication descibed above was the suggestion that extinction, and thus
evolution, might not always be directed by Dawinian ules o selection
and adaptation, at least as these concepts had been traditionally under-
stood. is is what Raup was hinting at in his letter to Schopf: that,
as he put it, tilobites and pterosaurs died out “through no fault o their
own,” raising the possibility that “extinction is random with respect to
tness” (Raup to Schopf, Januay , ). is is a question that had
been occupying Raup for a number o years, dating back to his collabo-
ration on computer simulations o evolutionay pattens, and it would
ultimately infom a radically new understanding o extinction that he
and colleagues would develop throughout the s and s.
As Raup pointed out in a presidential address to the Paleontological
Society in late titled “Approaches to the Extinction Problem,” vir-
tually evey explanation o major episodes o extinction that had ever
been proposed had assumed that extinction must result from some
“common failure or deciency” among aected species. Illustrating the
point with the example o the suvival o the echinoids (urchins) and the
extinction o the blastoids (a previously well established related group)
at the end o the Pemian, Raup obseved, “We assume that ‘echinoid-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
186 CHAPTER FIVE
ness’ was somehow better than ‘blastoidness’” (Raup , –). But
why should this necessaily be the case? is kind o reasoning, he ar-
gued several years later, at best produces unresolvable debates about
which traits were to blame, and at worst leads to tautological reason-
ing. In a case o dierential suvival and extinction o two contempo-
ray groups, there is usually vey little “evidence at all o the infeioity
o the victims except their lack o suvival.” Raup considered this kind
o thinking to result from “oveuse o the Dawinian paradigm,” since it
was the assumption that extinction must result from infeioity that be-
came the evidence o that infeioity—a circular argument. e appeal
o this reasoning seemed obvious to Raup: it implied that extinction has
a kind o moral, and that evolution is “a fair game where goodness ti-
umphs in the end,” a lesson he suspected “ts well with the traditional
Calvinist views that many o us grew up with.”
e problem with Raup’s altenative view o extinction was that,
in the late s, there was vey little evidence o a phenomenon that
could provide a mechanism for potentially nonselective mass extinc-
tions. But unbeknownst to Raup, that would soon change. In the
geologist Walter Alvarez and his father, the Nobel Pize– winning physi-
cist Luis Alvarez, had embarked on a project that they hoped would
combine their respective elds o expertise: they suspected that it might
be possible to more reliably correlate stratigraphic layers across dier-
ent geographical locations by identifying distinctive levels o trace ele-
ments present in multiple locations—a project that nicely combined
the techniques o a nuclear physicist and a geologist. It was this, and
not any attempt to solve the iddle o dinosaur extinction, that led them
to well preseved sections o the K- T bounday in Gubbio, Italy, where
they detected unusually high levels o iidium (one o the elements they
identied as a potential stratigraphic signature) precisely at the loca-
tion where the dinosaurs disappear from the fossil record. Puzzled by
this anomaly, they spent nearly two years carefully analyzing their nd-
ings, and ultimately submitted an unusually long paper to Science titled
“Extraterrestial Cause for the Cretaceous- Tertiay Extinction” (Alva-
rez et al. ).
e publication o the initial Alvarez paper in June would be
the beginning o a seies o rapid developments in extinction theoy
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 187
that gained enomous popular attention, but initially the paper caused
few ipples in the public eye. For example, the New York Times, which
would go on to extensively cover developments in extinction over the
next decade, mentioned the paper only once that year, in a short article
reporting on “two new theoies” o mass extinction. O these theoies
(the other was a theoy o lunar volcanic euption published in Nature
the same year), the Alvarez hypothesis received just ve scant para-
graphs, less than a quarter o the article’s length, and the article gave
little indication o the potential importance o the proposal for under-
standing the general dynamics o extinction.
Among geologists and paleontologists, however, it was another mat-
ter. e Alvarez paper attracted immediate attention and controversy,
and led to an almost instantaneous consideration o its vaious propos-
als and their meits. In October o , a conference titled “Large Body
Impacts and Terrestial Evolution” was convened at the Snowbird ski
resort in Utah, jointly sponsored by the National Academy o Science
and the Lunar and Planetay Institute. is conference, which attracted
more than a hundred participants to hear more than y papers, was
billed explicitly as having “grow[n] out o the stimulation o the scien-
tic community by the provocative paper by Alvarez, et al. (Science,
, , p. ) on the signicance o iidium geochemical anomalies
at the Cretaceous- Tertiay bounday.” In addition to an update from
the Alvarez team, the published proceedings featured articles by most
o the major paleontologists involved in studying extinction, including
Newell, Raup, Sepkoski, Schopf, Dale Russell, William Clemens, and
others. In his introduction to the volume, Leon T. Silver rather breath-
lessly proclaimed, “Catastrophism has been rekindled!” and opined,
“Among students o the evolutionay paths, the ecological sensitivities,
and the causes o extinction in vaious classes o biota, the Alvarez and
others [sic] proposals have shed new light for some, but have drawn
some heat and not a little smoke from others” (Silver and Schultz ,
xiii).
Indeed, this meeting seems to have been the real launching point
for wider interest in mass extinction for two pimay reasons. e rst
is that the conference was attended by several jounalists, whose inter-
ests were nally piqued enough to begin penning sometimes sensa-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
188 CHAPTER FIVE
tionalist accounts o the scientists’ ndings. e second was that the
meeting put the Alvarez team in direct contact with Raup and Sep-
koski, and eectively drew the independent threads o research—by
the paleobiologists on diversication and mass extinction, and by the
geophysicists and astrophysicists on impact evidence and physical con-
sequences—under the same umbrella. In some ways the two groups
were natural allies; paleobiologists like Raup and Sepkoski had con-
tinued to face considerable skepticism towards their accounts o mass
extinctions from paleontologist and geologist colleagues who viewed
“catastrophism” with suspicion, while the Alvarezes faced marginaliza-
tion as “outsiders” by biologists and paleontologists. Years later, Walter
Alvarez reported having been “delighted” that Raup and Sepkoski were
willing to talk to him at the Snowbird meeting and to give his ideas an
open heaing.
In tems o furtheing the understanding o past mass extinctions,
the conference also saw two important new pieces o infoma-
tion oered. e rst was a paper by Bian Toon and several colleagues
oeing an estimate and simulation o the atmospheic consequences
o a ten- kilometer asteroid impact, based on compaisons with both
obseved volcanic euptions and computer climate models. is was
an important study because the Alvarez hypothesis required signi-
cant atmospheic and environmental consequences to have tiggered
the widespread mass extinctions obseved in the fossil record; the im-
pact alone would likely have caused only local extinctions. Here the
paper by Toon et al. was favorable, estimating that the energy produced
by the impact would have been on the order o a million times that
o the Krakatoa euption, disupting global photosynthesis for at
least three months and causing freezing temperatures for hal a year.
For some, these calculations bolstered the likelihood o the Alvarez hy-
pothesis, but others woried that the atmospheic eects weren’t su-
ciently severe. In the eyes o the most skeptical scientists, the hypothe-
sis would only be vindicated when an impact crater o appropiate size
dating to the ight peiod was discovered—which would not happen
until the s.
e second major paper was presented by Sepkoski on continuing
analysis he and Raup had perfomed on their fossil database in an at-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 189
tempt to test whether mass extinctions that had been qualitatively iden-
tied by past researchers would appear as statistically signicant events
using Sepkoski’s new data on maine families. In a companion paper
published the same year () in Science, Raup and Sepkoski explained
that their procedure was to calculate the number o family extinctions
that had taken place duing each o the seventy- six recognized strati-
graphic stages since the early Cambian—essentially by counting the
last appearances o families in Sepkoski’s database and correlating them
with time. Next they perfomed regression analysis on the seventy- six
extinction points, to identify statistical outliers. Five such points ap-
peared, at exactly the locations where previous qualitative analysis had
suggested that mass extinctions may have taken place. ese included
the greatest extinction in the histoy o life, at the end o the Pemian,
when between and percent o all maine species may have died
out, but also four major additional events—each representing a mo-
ment when at least to percent o standing familial diversity had
been lost over less than een million years—including the K- T event.
e upshot o this research was both to validate the so- called “big ve”
mass extinctions as statistically signicant empiical phenomena, and
to demonstrate that “major mass extinctions are far more distinct from
background extinction than has been indicated by previous analyses”
(Raup and Sepkoski , ).
Despite cautioning at the end o their article in Science that “the data
do not tell us, o course, what stresses caused the mass extinctions,”
Raup and Sepkoski, as well as many other obsevers, found the Alva-
rez hypothesis to oer a compelling potential mechanism that might
be generalized beyond just the K- T event. In a long piece in the New
York Times based on coverage o the Snowbird meeting, the jour-
nalist Walter Sullivan, who had authored the tepid earlier article de-
scibing the Alvarez hypothesis, reported: “From evidence still being
gathered, a number o geologists believe the Cretaceous extinction that
killed o the dinosaurs and numerous other animals million years
ago coincided with the impact o an asteroid or giant meteoite. Per-
haps, they say, such catastrophes caused most o the great extinctions
and are bound to happen again” (Sullivan ). Sullivan also obseved,
somewhat inaccurately, that the current debate “has its roots in the th
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
190 CHAPTER FIVE
centuy when those who, reared in a Biblical tradition, believed in cata-
strophic events were pitted against adherents o gradual change”; but he
noted, “Today many geologists have adopted a mix o both concepts.”
e Snowbird meeting—and the reactions o Sullivan and other par-
ticipants and obsevers—raises an important point: acceptance o the
Alvarez iidium data, and even the intepretation that it resulted from
a major bolide impact, did not necessaily require adopting a “catastro-
phist” viewpoint. As Raup put it in a summay o the conference pub-
lished in the jounal Paleobiology, the updated Alvarez evidence had led
even those “not inclined toward catastrophic explanation” to agree that
“there was probably a large body impact at the end o the Cretaceous”
(Raup , ). But it was one thing to acknowledge the probability o
an asteroid stiking the earth now and again; aer all, the moon gives
vivid testimony that such events have happened in the past. It was an-
other to accept—as only some o the Snowbird participants did—that
the impact was solely responsible for the extinction o the dinosaurs and
other groups associated with the K- T event. A number o other candi-
date explanations still circulated, the most seious o which was concur-
rent increased volcanic activity in a large area o what is now westen
India. And while some found the impact scenaio promising, vey few
people were willing to suggest that such extraterrestial impacts might
have been responsible for all o the mass extinctions identied by Raup
and Sepkoski. As Raup himsel summaized it, “When all the retuns
are in . . . we may have little more than an important new tool for strati-
graphic correlation (many Ir spikes scattered throughout the record) or
we may have totally new paradigms for geological and paleobiological
intepretation o the Phanerozoic” (Raup , –). Pivately, in a let-
ter to Schopf, he was somewhat more eusive, witing that “this is one
really exciting time to be alive in geology and evolutionay biology. We
may be witnessing a major revolution—or perhaps a large red hering”
(Raup to Schopf, October , ).
For the developing theoies to genuinely be considered catastroph-
ism, a few important facts would have to be established. First, that ex-
tinction events involved multiple unrelated groups in a wide vaiety o
global environments, and were o sucient magnitude that they would
stand out recognizably from nomal background rates. Second, that
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 191
such events were a regular feature o the histoy o life and not just iso-
lated aberrations. ird, that they were tiggered by some mechanism
extenal to nomal evolutionay and geological processes—that is to
say, that they involved mechanisms that were not reducible to nomal
evolutionay dynamics (e.g., competition and selection between indi-
viduals) or obsevable environmental processes (gradual climate or sea
level change, etc.). Fourth, that the consequences o these events—on
future evolution and diversication or environmental composition or
both—were distinctive, lasting, and perhaps pemanent. At the begin-
ning o , when Sullivan’s article appeared, there was tantalizing evi-
dence for all four citeia, but little consensus. Points one and two were
addressed by Sepkoski and Raup’s analysis o extinction data, but not
denitively enough to erase concens about the nature o their data and
analysis (for example, whether data collected for families was legiti-
mately extrapolated to rates o species extinction, or whether their time
seies was ne- grained enough to reliably detect rapid events). Point
three appeared to have been more clearly resolved by the Alvarez data,
but the broader hypothesis—that the impact would have tiggered a
global environmental cisis sucient to have caused mass extinction—
was less certain. And the nal point—the impact o extinction on the
future o life—had hardly yet been explored.
The New Catastrophism and the Cold War
I argue that for the research on diversication and extinction caried
out from the early s to the mid- s to genuinely deseve the label
“new catastrophism”—and I believe that it does—we need to consider
broader developments in science and culture, as well as arguments
made by paleontologists and geologists. From the vey beginning in
the nineteenth centuy, when William Whewell coined the tems, labels
like “catastrophism” and “unifomitaianism” were much more than de-
sciptions o scientic positions in geology. ey were, in the rst in-
stance, characteizations o scientic methodologies. So- called catas-
trophists (whose ostensible proponents almost never used the tem
themselves) were alleged to be wildly speculative, perhaps even theo-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
192 CHAPTER FIVE
logically motivated theoists, while unifomitaians were understood to
be practitioners o sober, empiically sound, and inductively reasoned
science. More than that, though, as discussed in chapter o this book,
catastrophism was oen associated with a view o histoy, including
human events, that saw revolution and upheaval as part o the regular
and perhaps even desirable course o things, while unifomitaianism
reected a belie in stability, constancy, and predictable order. Espe-
cially duing the volatile years o the mid- nineteenth centuy, these two
labels had strong cultural and political valences, and reected compet-
ing extinction imaginaies.
I this was the case in the nineteenth centuy, then why not in the
twentieth? It is certainly the case that the rst level o association con-
tinued to adhere to the two tems; aer all, in geology one o the major
objections to the geological theoy o plate tectonics was that it violated
the pinciple o unifomitaianism. Likewise, in biology the Moden
Evolutionay Synthesis o the s had stamped out any suggestion
that evolutionay change could happen in any way other than the slow,
minute accumulation o benecial traits in populations over vey long
peiods o time. In the evolutionay and environmental sciences, even
in the s and beyond, the assertion o abupt, signicant, and dis-
continuous change remained anathema in many coners.
On the other hand, scientic and cultural forces had been brew-
ing for some time that likely prepared the way for the retun o a cata-
strophic view o extinction. Some o these—nuclear fears, environ-
mental anxieties, political instabilities, and war—have already been
discussed in previous chapters. Others, such as the radical politics o
the late s and s (student activism, antiwar protests, civil ights,
women’s and gay ights movements) gave the peiod a sense o impend-
ing transfomation, upture, and even revolution that colored percep-
tions o scientists and public alike. It is worth noting—although dicult
to make m causal claims about—the fact that a number o partici-
pants in the mass extinction debates had taken part in s- era protest
movements as students or young faculty, and had quite actively par-
ticipated in a counterculture whose slogans—“e Times ey Are
a- Changin’,” “Anarchy in the UK”—betokened and celebrated radical
change in politics and society.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 193
e political landscape o the s was certainly eventful, and par-
ticular developments had an inuence on a developing culture o cata-
strophic anxiety that was not just a continuation but the apotheosis o
nuclear fears discussed in the previous chapter. In fact, in many ways
the peiod from the late s through the beginning o the s saw
something o a reduction in general social anxiety about the threat o
nuclear war. Following the Cuban Missile Cisis, it appeared that both
supepowers had stepped back from the bink, and genuine diplo-
matic eorts aimed at reducing the potential for nuclear catastrophe—
underlined by the Strategic Ams Limitation Talks (SALT I and II)
caried out throughout the s—seemed to promise a genuine reduc-
tion in the capacity for human civilization to destroy itself. is is not to
say that the s were a peaceful decade, but rather that the focus o
social unease, especially in the United States, was diverted to a vaiety
o environmental, economic, and domestic political concens.
A combination o circumstances, however, arose at the beginning
o the s that would elevate cultural anxieties around nuclear con-
ict to a new peak. wo events in late —the Iran hostage cisis and
the Soviet invasion o Afghanistan—dramatically raised tensions in
intenational politics, and the election o President Ronald Reagan in
brought an escalation o Cold War postuing that had been scaled
back duing the previous administration o Jimmy Carter. Duing his
rst tem in oce, Reagan took a number o steps that contibuted
to a much more aggressive stance towards the Soviet Union, such as
dramatically increasing US amed forces deployment, developing the
MX missile program (explicitly designed to counterattack a Soviet rst
stike), deploying the Pershing II missile system in West Gemany, and
proposing the Strategic Defense Initiative (or “Star Wars”) missile de-
fense system to potentially repel a Soviet attack. Additionally, Reagan’s
rhetoic ratcheted up hostility toward the Soviet Union to levels not
seen in over a decade, including statements that communism would
wind up “on the ash heap o histoy,” and that the Soviet Union was an
“evil empire.”
It was into an already charged atmosphere o anxiety and uncer-
tainty, then, that Carl Sagan dropped his dire assessment that the con-
sequences o even a limited nuclear exchange could have eects far
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
194 CHAPTER FIVE
beyond those previously imagined, almost surely leading to the destuc-
tion o civilization and perhaps the extinction o the human species.
e public announcement came in a short piece Sagan published on
October , , in Parade magazine (a syndicated supplement then
caried by many US newspapers in their Sunday editions) titled, simply,
“e Nuclear Winter.” Ominously, it waned that while a nuclear war
“would represent by far the greatest disaster in the histoy o the human
species and, with no other adverse eects would probably be enough to
reduce at least the Northen Hemisphere to a state o prolonged agony
and barbaism. . . . the real situation would be much worse” (Sagan
c). Specically, Sagan explained that the dust and soot from the ex-
plosions and resulting restoms would result in a prolonged peiod o
cold temperatures and darkness that would “represent a severe assault
on our civilization and our species.” ere was, he argued, no question
o a “winnable” nuclear war, even one involving a relatively moderate
exchange. e only real question would be the extent o the catastrophe.
As Sagan explained,
Many biologists, consideing the nuclear winter that these calculations
descibe, believe they cary somber implications for life on Earth. Many
species o plants and animals would become extinct. Vast numbers o sur-
viving humans would stave to death. e delicate ecological relations
that bind together organisms on Earth in a fabic o mutual dependency
would be ton, perhaps irreparably. ere is little question that our global
civilization would be destroyed. . . . And there seems to be a real possi-
bility o the extinction o the human species.
is statement, coming in stark tems from one o the most recogniz-
able and tusted scientists in Ameica, who had been a regular visitor to
living rooms through his wildly popular television seies Cosmos, came
as a shock to many. North Ameicans and Europeans had for many years
lived in the shadow o the mushroom cloud, but Sagan’s waning pre-
sented the threat as something potentially worse: a major extinction
event.
From the vey beginning, Sagan and his colleagues explicitly pre-
sented the nuclear winter scenaio as analogous to recent discoveies
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 195
about the major mass extinctions o life’s past. In two much more de-
tailed reports on the climactic and biological consequences o nuclear
exchange published in December o in Science, little doubt was le
as to the potential seveity o the aemath. “A severe extinction event
could ensue,” one article waned, “leaving a highly modied and de-
pauperate Earth” in which “species extinction could be expected for
most tropical plants and animals, and for most terrestial vertebrates o
north temperate regions, a large number o plants, and numerous fresh-
water and some maine organisms” (Ehrlich et al. , ). e same
article highlighted the importance o ecosystems that provide “food and
their maintenance o a vast libray o species from which Homo sapiens
has already drawn the basis o civilization,” and stressed that the “loss
o these genetic resources would be one o the most seious potential
consequences o nuclear war” (Ehrlich et al. , ). In this respect,
the eects o war were descibed explicitly in tems o a loss o diversity
that could have “irreversible” consequences for the future global eco-
system. is was precisely the way paleontologists had come to under-
stand the aemath o major mass extinction events, and the accom-
panying article, on atmospheic eects, explained, “e discovey that
dense clouds o soil particles may have played a role in past mass extinc-
tions o life on Earth has encouraged the reconsideration o nuclear war
eects” (Ehrlich et al. , –).
Another feature o the presentation o the nuclear winter scenaio
was the explicit mobilization o a large group o scientists representing
many disciplines to make a public call for attention and action. ese
eorts were somewhat reminiscent o actions taken by scientic orga-
nizations and advisoy panels in the past on matters o public concen
such as nuclear fallout or environmental disaster, but the s saw new
levels o scale and media savvy in such activities. Many o the scientic
articles themselves were coauthored by large teams: for example, Sagan
and his colleagues Richard urco, Bian Toon, Tom Ackeman, and
James Pollack (oen abbreviated as “TTAPS,” from the authors’ last
names) published a number o articles in a vaiety o disciplinay jour-
nals, and the Science article on biological consequences o war was
signed by some twenty authors including Paul Ehrlich, Sagan, the evo-
lutionay biologists Peter Raven and Enst Mayr, the ecologists Robert
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
196 CHAPTER FIVE
May and Noman Myers, and Stephen Jay Gould. Moreover, Sagan’s
Parade article was followed by a major scientic conference that took
place in Washington on October , (the day aer the magazine
piece appeared), which was attended by ve hundred scientists and one
hundred jounalists, and remarkably featured a ninety- minute discus-
sion with Soviet counteparts via live satellite link. is kind o major
mobilization and presentation as scientic extravaganza—complete
with press releases and mass media coverage, and followed up with co-
ordinated editoials, articles, and books aimed at popular audiences—
would become a feature o future eorts to raise public awareness about
biodiversity loss and global climate change. From the s onward, at
least as far as topics relating to environmental and biological catastro-
phe were concened, the line between scientic and public discourse
would eectively be erased.
e meeting on nuclear winter certainly brought a spate o
media attention, with notice in opinion pieces and editoials in most o
the major news outlets in the United States and many abroad. A distilled
account o the proceedings was published the following year by W. W.
Norton as a book titled e Cold and the Dark: e World aer Nuclear
Wa r (g. .). Descibed in the jacket copy as “a work o science, not
science ction,” the book featured two chapters on atmospheic and
biological consequences o nuclear war that were authored by Sagan
and Ehrlich respectively, followed by transcipts o panel discussions
and the conversation with Soviet scientists. While the two main chap-
ters largely covered the same mateial as the more technical articles
published the previous December in Science, the foreword and intro-
duction to the volume tuned up the rhetoic about potential extinc-
tion and the connection between nuclear winter and prehistoic impact
scenaios.
Interestingly, the foreword and the introduction were witten not by
main researchers in the study, but by academic administrators o high
standing whose perspectives presumably were meant to bidge between
the general reading public and the experts analyzing the data. In his
foreword, Lewis omas, chancellor o the Memoial Sloan- Ketteing
Cancer Center in New York, gave a passionate call to avert a catastro-
phe that could “mean nothing less than the extinction o much o the
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
5.3 e cover o Sagan and Ehrlich’s study o the nuclear winter phenomenon,
e Cold and the Dark. Repinted with pemission o W. W. Norton & Co.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
198 CHAPTER FIVE
Earth’s biosphere,” potentially reducing the planet’s life to “a level com-
parable to what was here a billion years ago” (omas, in Ehrlich et al.
, xxi– xxiii). omas went on to note, “e last great extinction o
planetay life occurred million years ago . . . probably as a result o
an asteroid collision with the Earth. It is this kind o event that is fore-
cast by the models used in these studies.” In the book’s introduction,
the Stanford University president, biologist, and fomer FDA commis-
sioner Donald Kennedy went even further in making his connection,
arguing, “is new view results in part from a new general paradigm
in scientic thinking about the processes that have inuenced Earth’s
histoy”—one that overtuned Lyell’s “revolution” against “the catas-
trophist view,” in favor o “one based upon a doctine o unifomitai-
anism”:
Today the earth sciences are in the middle o a second revolution, tig-
gered by the remarkable discoveies o plate tectonics, and the emphasis
has moved back toward more dramatic events. Increasingly, it is recog-
nized that major discontinuous inteventions such as volcanic euptions
and asteroid collisions may have had profound eects on the histoy o
the Earth and o the life on it (Kennedy, in Ehrlich et al. , xxx).
One important point to make here is the obvious—and acknowl-
edged—role that the study o mass extinctions in the geological past
had on the constuction o the nuclear winter scenaio. is was broadly
evident in how the biological consequences o nuclear war were under-
stood—as disuptions in a stable ecological equilibium, with poten-
tially pemanent consequences for biological diversity—as well as in
the atmospheic and climatic models that were presented for the win-
ter itself. Indeed, the central team o climate modelers for the nuclear
winter scenaio was precisely the same group o scientists—“TTAPS,”
minus Sagan—who had developed the atmospheic model for the Alva-
rez hypothesis presented at the Snowbird extinction meeting and
in several subsequent papers. e connection between nuclear winter
and the Alvarez hypothesis was frequently referred to in press accounts,
where the Alvarez study was vaiously descibed as having “inspired,”
“helped to shape,” been “similar to,” or been a “vaiant on” the nuclear
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 199
winter scenaio. Little supise, then, that in the public eye, at least,
the two scenaios were oen easily conated.
Nemesis and a New View of Life’s History
As signicant as the Alvarez impact hypothesis was on popular and sci-
entic perceptions o extinction in the s, it was only one piece o
a larger suite o extinction research duing that decade that attracted
wide notoiety and excitement. In fact, following the initial studies by
the Alvarez group, Raup and Sepkoski, and others, the study o mass ex-
tinction and its consequences vey quickly became something o a cot-
tage industy within paleontology and related elds. While some com-
mentators obseved wyly that the hubbub surrounding extinctions had
made “media stars out o some o our colleagues” (feature articles in
Time, Newsweek, Discover, and other publications o this peiod oen
featured awkward photographs o paleontologists crouched over com-
puter pintouts), it was certainly the case, as Karl Flessa commented in
a opinion piece in Paleobiology, that extinctions were “IN” (Flessa
, ).
As discussed previously, Raup and Sepkoski’s quantitative analysis
o diversication had by identied ve major mass extinctions that
rose far above the threshold o background noise, along with a dozen
or so more “minor” events o more questionable statistical relevance.
One o the questions their initial article had raised was about the tim-
ing and regulaity o these extinctions: did they distibute randomly in
time, or was there some regular patten? To answer this question, Raup
and Sepkoski analyzed a rened subset o the data from their oiginal
study—removing data from poorly sampled or othewise question-
able groups—and perfomed what Raup later descibed as a kind o
“gestalt” expeiment, where they generated a long pintout and stood
across the room, looking for pattens. Sepkoski remembered the
graph looking like “a seismic reection prole,” with peaks regularly
spaced in time. “‘Oh shit,’” Sepkoski recalled thinking; “‘Fischer and
Arthur were ight’” (Sepkoski , ).
Sepkoski was refering to a paper by the Pinceton geologist
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
200 CHAPTER FIVE
Alfred Fischer and his student, Michael Arthur, who had proposed a
thirty- two- million- year cycle in episodes o maine diversication. Ac-
cording to Fischer and Arthur, uctuations in the “rhythm” o diver-
sity in the oceans—between peiods o higher and lower diversity—
correspond to cycles o change in ocean temperatures, sedimentation
rates, and general climate pattens. While they did not directly attibute
a cause to this patten, they suggested corresponding cycles o change
in solar activity or plate tectonics as likely agents. And although they did
not propose this as a “catastrophic” process, they nonetheless acknowl-
edged that these were “changes o a sort not considered by Hutton,
Lyell, and other classical unifomitaianists [sic]” (Fischer and Arthur
, , ).
While Fischer and Arthur’s paper had gone relatively unnoticed,
Raup and Sepkoski’s analysis, which they quickly wrote up for publica-
tion as a short article in Proceedings o the National Academy o Sciences
in early , attracted immediate attention and controversy. is was
in part due, no doubt, to their use o a more rened data set than Fischer
and Arthur had, and to their application o igorous statistical analy-
sis to their results, something Fischer and Arthur had not done. More
broadly, the dierential reaction to these two studies shows the major
shi that had taken place in the eld in just a few years: the combination
o the Alvarez team’s impact hypothesis and paleontological analysis o
mass extinction events had introduced a climate in which it was now
legitimate, i not universally accepted, to at least discuss the possibility
o a “new catastrophism.”
What Raup and Sepkoski found was a somewhat shorter cycle in
which mass extinctions resolved as statistically signicant peaks at al-
most precisely twenty- six- million- year intevals. Raup and Sepkoski did
not themselves invoke the tem “catastrophism,” and their initial article
stuck a fairly cautious tone, focusing on the data and on the robust-
ness o their statistical tests, rather than on the broader consequences o
the patten. Nonetheless, they acknowledged at the end o their paper
that i the twenty- six- million- year peiodicity held up, then “the impli-
cations are broad and fundamental” (Raup and Sepkoski , ).
While the authors acknowledged that the “forcing agent” behind such
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 201
a cycle remained mysteious, they expressed their preference for “extra-
terrestial causes . . . where the cycles are o xed length and measured
on a time scale o tens o millions o years.” But they concluded that,
regardless o the exact mechanism, “the implications o peiodicity for
evolutionay biology are profound,” since they suggested that the “evo-
lutionay system” may be signicantly directed by extenal “perturba-
tions” without which “the general course o macroevolution could have
been vey dierent.”
Interestingly, it was only aer the presentation o Raup and Sep-
koski’s twenty- six- million- year peiodicity study that the press began
to take an interest in extinction science in eanest. While some notice
had been taken o the Alvarez scenaio, from late onward a slew
o articles appeared in major intenational newspapers, as well as in
popular science and news magazines (g. .). e sociologist Eliza-
beth Clemens has tallied up the number o magazine articles mention-
ing impact debates duing the s, and the results are intiguing.
Between and (the three years following the Alvarez team’s
announcement), the thirteen major magazines she suveyed—ranging
from Time, Newsweek, and the Ne w Yo rk e r to Discover, Scientic Ameri-
can, and Science Digest—published a combined thirty- two articles on
mass extinction theoies. However, over the next three years—between
and —that total grew to a combined y- nine, and the up-
ward trend continued for several more years. Clemens’s analysis does
not include newspaper articles, but there my own more qualitative sur-
vey reveals an even more stiking patten: whereas vey few newspapers
gave the Alvarez discovey more than passing initial mention, the topic
suddenly became prominent aer the peiodicity hypothesis became
widely known.
My explanation for this phenomenon has to do with timing and
convergence. e Alvarez scenaio, while intiguing to those mem-
bers o the public with an interest in dinosaur extinction, did not an-
nounce itsel as a major revision o conventional scientic understand-
ing. It merely accounted for a fact already fairly well accepted—that
the dinosaurs died out suddenly—albeit with a fairly dramatic potential
mechanism. None o the Alvarez group’s published scientic accounts
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
5.4 Time magazine cover with the headline “Did Comets Kill the Dinosaurs?”
(May , ).
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 203
featured the vivid language that would later be used to descibe the
scenaio; that would come later—for example, in a number o popular
books, including Walter Alvarez’s own T- Rex and the Crater o Doom,
that descibed the fatal impact in language reminiscent o atomic war
literature. And while the stoy o the death o the dinosaurs was poten-
tially fertile ground for analogy and moral lessons regarding the fate
o humanity, it appears that such connections became apparent only
later, aer other developments came to be registered in the public con-
sciousness.
ough published in early , the Raup- Sepkoski peiodicity
analysis was in fact rst presented in August in Flagsta, Ai-
zona, at a conference called “Dynamics o Extinction,” which featured
papers discussing not only the mass extinctions o the geological past
but also potential extinctions in the present. Paul Ehrlich, for example,
gave a talk in which he waned both o the threat to “the vey future o
humanity” caused by biodiversity loss (more on this topic later), and o
“the single greatest threat o extinction hanging over the planet—large-
scale themonuclear war” (Ehrlich , ). e ecologist Daniel
Simberlo likewise descibed current levels o extinction in tropical
regions as an “imminent catastrophe,” and the paleontologist David
Jablonski gave an early exposition o his developing work—expanding
on Raup’s studies—on the ways in which mass extinctions shape the
course o evolution by changing the “ules” o selectivity duing times
o cisis.
e Flagsta conference was attended by jounalists, and accounts
o the meeting were eventually published. What is particularly interest-
ing, though, is that some o the most prominent desciptions, focusing
especially on the extinction peiodicity hypothesis, were published only
several months later. For example, John Noble Wilford’s piece in the
New York Times, “Study Indicates Extinctions Stike in Regular Inter-
vals,” appeared on December , , and drew attention to Raup and
Sepkoski’s “potentially revolutionay” nding that “elevates the impor-
tance o rare, catastrophic events in setting the course o life,” ultimately
“pushing science further in accepting catastrophe as a ‘nomal’ part o
the earth’s histoy” (Wilford ). In similar tems, in a MacLean’s
article published on December , a jounalist opined that i peiodicity
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
204 CHAPTER FIVE
was conmed, “the way in which mankind views the evolution o life
on Earth may change irrevocably”; the article concluded that “human
beings can ultimately thank the jolt o an errant asteroid, or some cycli-
cal extraterrestial event, for allowing them to step into their role as
Earth’s most intelligent creatures” (Ohendor ).
e signicance o the timing o these articles, o course, was that
they appeared aer both the aiing o e Day Aer and the announce-
ment in late October o the nuclear winter hypothesis. It is certainly
conceivable that production schedules or other assignments delayed
the accounts o the Flagsta conference, or that the peiodicity hy-
pothesis would have received the same attention independently; but I
think the broader phenomenon, that the public took special notice o
mass extinction only aer late October , is more than mere coinci-
dence. In hindsight, what appears to have happened is that the Alva-
rez discovey stoked some mild initial interest that did not translate to
broader public fascination until the catastrophic death o the dinosaurs
had been placed in a context that spoke meaningfully to contempo-
ray anxieties (about nuclear winter) and was associated with a recur-
ing phenomenon (peiodicity) whose implications potentially altered
our view o the nature o evolution. e death o the dinosaurs may
have seved as an object lesson about the possible fate o the human
species—a once proud and dominant group brought down instantly in
a ey cataclysm—but the message o the peiodicity hypothesis was
that such events may be a regular feature o the histoy o life, and that
existence on this earth may be a much more tenuous aair than previ-
ously suspected.
But it is easiest to let a contemporay obsever speak to the cul-
tural signicance o the relationship between nuclear anxiety and ex-
tinction science at the time. Ellen Goodman, a jounalist whose syn-
dicated column was caried duing the s by newspapers such as
the Boston Globe and Washington Post, wrote a rather remarkable essay,
titled “Musings o a Dinosaur Groupie,” that was published on Janu-
ay , . In the piece, she descibed her lifelong fascination with
dinosaurs and with theoies o their demise, which she evocatively
connected to changing cultural perceptions. It is worth quoting from
the piece at some length. In characteizing traditional views o the ex-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 205
tinction o the dinosaurs, which she hersel recalled growing up with,
Goodman wrote:
ere was a chaming egocenticity to these theoies. My dinosaurs were
evolution’s failure and we were its successes. . . . Evolution drew a reason-
able patten in the universe. Over time, species grew better and better. In
the rough justice o nature, the ttest suvive.
But the theoy didn’t suvive intact. A few years ago, another gen
-
eration o scientists oered up evidence about my extinct subjects. e
dinosaurs didn’t gradually die o their evolutionay aws. e scientists
speculated that million years ago an asteroid stuck the earth and pro-
duced a worldwide crop failure that did them in. My giant vegetaian,
the brontosauus, was the victim o a climatic disaster, a cosmic accident.
en, in the past year, two scientists at the University o Chicago re-
ported that such disasters have occurred like cosmic clockwork evey
million years over the past million years, wiping out huge numbers
o life foms. e dinosaurs were just the biggest, most memorable o the
victims.
Goodman went on to muse whether “evey era gets the dinosaur
stoy it deseves,” noting that “scientists are also part o their culture,
their times,” and that this made them at “one moment or another . . .
open to a certain line o questioning, a path o inquiy that would have
been unlikely earlier on.”
e scientists o the th centuy—a time full o belie in progress—saw
evolution as part o the planet’s plan o self- improvement. e ugged
individualists o that centuy blamed the victims for their own failure. . . .
e latest theoies may reect our own contemporay world view.
Surely we are now more sensitive to cosmic catastrophe, to accident.
Surely we are more conscious o the shared fate o the whole species. . . .
Most signicantly, another group o scientists wans us that a nuclear war
between two great powers would bing a universal and winty death. One
hemisphere is no longer immune from the mistakes o the other hemi-
sphere.
In that sense, the latest dinosaur theoy ts us uncomfortably well.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
206 CHAPTER FIVE
“Our” dinosaurs died together in some meteoic winter, the victims o a
global catastrophe. As humans, we fear the same fate (Goodman ).
One interesting feature o the peiodicity hypothesis is that it
brought back, in a sense, the narrative o ise, ouishing, and decline
present in late- nineteenth- and early- twentieth- centuy theoies o
orthogenesis and cyclical histoy. In contrast to those earlier theoies,
however, the new understanding o mass extinctions, whether or not
they occurred with regular peiodicity, emphasized an essential arbi-
trainess in the histoy o life. ilobites and dinosaurs did not “deseve”
to die: they were simply caught up in larger forces over which they had
no control. No doubt this resonated psychologically with average citi-
zens who felt helpless in the face o impersonal political forces holding
the power o life and death at the push o a button; but it also perhaps
provided a cuious kind o comfort. One message the extinction scien-
tists stressed was that, despite its precaious existence on a tiny rock in
an implacably hostile universe, somehow life itsel seems to have man-
aged to hang on, and even thive—at least so far.
I anything, new theoies about extinction appeared to repudiate
elements o the inherent uthless competitiveness implicit in the Dar-
winian account o nature. I extinction is viewed as essentially arbitray,
and not the outcome o a “fair game” in which suvival is synonymous
with success, it would seem more dicult to celebrate human tenden-
cies toward greed, exploitation, and aggression as being products o a
“natural” order. I the s was a decade o great geopolitical anxieties
and unprecedented economic dispaities, it was also a time when many
long- standing assumptions were challenged. ough billed as a tiumph
o ideology, the Berlin Wall came down in in part because ordinay
citizens simply refused to follow the stoy their leaders had been act-
ing out for years, and opted instead for community and openness rather
than suspicion and division. And as much as the vaunted mateialism
and acquisitiveness o Ameican culture o the time was celebrated in
popular culture, it was as oen as not the source o suspicion and citi-
cism—whether in Madonna’s song “Mateial Girl,” or the charac-
ter Gordon Gekko’s famous line “Greed is good,” in the lm Wall
Street.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 207
Media accounts o the extinction debates tended, in fact, to amplify
the sense in which new theoies challenged this older view o nature.
Ellen Goodman’s column descibed contemporay views as overtun-
ing a perspective where “in the rough justice o nature, the ttest sur-
vived”; it reminded readers that “the astronauts travel into space and
report back that they see no national borders.” Other popular descip-
tions highlighted extinction theoies as being a direct challenge to Dar-
winism itself. One Washington Post article announced, “e new
emphasis on extinction stands in contrast to Dawin’s proposition that
evolution was a response to competition for scarce resources”; a
Time magazine report suggested that the cyclical extinction hypothesis
“call[s] into question the current concept o natural selection” (Rens-
berger ).
ese media accounts may have somewhat distorted the scientic
message, but some paleontologists were attentive to the ways that mass
extinction theoy upset previous assumptions. In a discussion titled
“Some Implications o Mass Extinction for the Evolution o Complex
Life,” for example, Sepkoski drew attention to the constuctive role that
mass extinction has played, noting that “it may prove that total stability
is actually detimental to the evolution o complex life,” since “pertur-
bations o the biotic environment . . . may actually be essential to ensure
the continuation o evolutionay expeiment” (Sepkoski , ).
And in a popular essay in Discover magazine in May , Gould wrote
that “it makes little sense, though it may fuel our desire to see mam-
mals as inevitable inheitors o the earth, to guess that dinosaurs died
because small mammals ate their eggs” (Gould a, ). On the other
hand, Gould noted that the close association between dinosaur impact
hypotheses and nuclear Amageddon could have a salutay eect on
geopolitical tensions: “I am heartened by a nal link across disciplines
and deep concens. . . . A recognition o the vey phenomena that made
our evolution possible by exteminating the previously dominant dino-
saurs and cleaing the way for the evolution o the large mammals, in-
cluding us, might actually help save us from joining those magnicent
beasts in contorted poses among the strata o the earth” (Gould a).
Media interest in extinction was also heightened by a spectacular
new hypothesis that was emerging in early to explain Raup and
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
208 CHAPTER FIVE
Sepkoski’s proposed extinction peiodicity: cyclical comet showers
stiking the solar system evey twenty- six million years, tiggered by
some undiscovered extraterrestial phenomenon. is idea was actu-
ally proposed independently by two groups o astronomers; remark-
ably, both papers were published in the same issue o the jounal Nature
in Januay o that year. e rst paper, by Michael Rampino, Richard
Stothers, and other colleagues, speculated that a transit o the solar sys-
tem vertically through the plane o the Milky Way galaxy might bing
our local neighborhood into peiodic contact—roughly evey thirty
million years or so—with gas and dust that could disturb the Oort
comet cloud, a hypothetical disk containing billions or perhaps tillions
o planetesimal bodies located far beyond the furthest edge o the solar
system. is might produce peiods lasting up to a million years duing
which the isk o impact on earth would be dramatically heightened,
potentially explaining the regular peiodicity o extinctions. e sec-
ond article, which received signicantly greater attention—in part be-
cause it was received pior to the one by Rampino and Stothers and was
thus awarded pioity—was authored by the astronomers Marc Davis,
Piet Hut, and Richard Muller. It proposed essentially the same eect
as Rampino et al., with an altenative mechanism that was even more
speculative: a hypothetical red or brown dwar star orbiting the solar
system on an eccentic orbit that passed through the Oort cloud evey
twenty- six million years.
e media was instantly taken with the notion o this “dark compan
-
ion to the sun,” which its authors colorfully named Nemesis, “aer the
Greek goddess who relentlessly punishes the excessively ich, proud,
and powerful” (Davis, Hut, and Muller , ). Sometimes referred
to in the popular press as a “death star” (an obvious reference to the
Star Wars tilogy popular at the time), the Nemesis hypothesis injected
a sense o menace and inescapable doom to discussions about extinc-
tion. As the science witer Denis Overbye put it in a May article
in Discover, “Ever since human beings looked to the skies, comets,
with their long glowing tails blazing through the night, have portended
doom. Now it seems that these pimordial fears may have a basis in
reality” (Overbye , ). Many scientists and some media outlets
regarded the theoy with skepticism or even scon; a notable Ne w Yo rk
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 209
Times editoial remarked that “astronomers should leave to astrologers
the task o seeking the causes o earthly events in the stars.” But the
public was fascinated by the idea, even though reporters hastened to
reassure their readers that the next retun o Nemesis was nearly thir-
teen million years away.
Gould, who frequently championed both the Alvarez scenaio and
the peiodicity hypothesis in both popular and scientic articles, had
a somewhat dierent take. While he supported investigating the basic
phenomenon—and did not nd a hypothetical companion star neces-
saily implausible—he made a plea to Davis, Hut, and Muller: “I alia,
the goddess o good cheer, smiles upon you and you nd the sun’s com-
panion star, please do not name it (as you plan) for her colleague Neme-
sis, [since] she represents eveything our new view o mass extinction is
stuggling to replace—predictable, deteministic causes aicting those
who deseve it” (Gouldb, –). Gould reasoned that “i mass ex-
tinctions are so frequent, so profound in their eects, and caused fun-
damentally by an extraterrestial agency so catastrophic in impact and
so utterly beyond the power o organisms to anticipate,” then scientists
must develop “new and undiscovered ules for perturbations” rather
than “laws that regulate competition duing nomal times.” As an alter-
native to “Nemesis,” Gould proposed the name Siva, “the Hindu god o
destuction, [who] foms an indissoluble tiad with Brahma, the cre-
ator, and Vishnu, the presever,” and who, unlike Nemesis, “does not
attack specic targets for cause or for punishment.” In Gould’s reason-
ing, Siva better personied the sense that “mass extinctions are not un-
swevingly destuctive in the histoy o life,” but also are a “source o
creation as well” by providing “the pimay and indispensable seed o
major changes in life’s histoy.” us, unlike Robert Oppenheimer’s
invocation o Siva as simply “destroyer o worlds” (a reference Gould
knew vey well), Gould’s proposal reected the sense in which the new
view o extinction acknowledged that “destuction and creation are
locked together in a dialectic o interaction.”
In this sense, by the mid- s, both the science and the culture o
extinction had found a new context for anxiety and a new sense o moral
lesson. e regular occurrence o mass extinctions in the histoy o life
did indeed suggest that, as Raup put it, “our planet may not be such a
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
210 CHAPTER FIVE
safe place”—but it also led to a growing awareness that, i extinction is
eectively arbitrary, at least with respect to the selective conditions o
the environment pior to the extinction event, then it is rarely ever nec-
essary (Raup , ). e pessimistic message this presented was that
no species is too dominant, too well adapted, or too widespread to be
safe in the event o the catastrophe. I it happened to the dinosaurs, it
could happen to us. And the particular scenaio proposed for the ex-
tinction o the dinosaurs did sound uncomfortably similar to descip-
tions o nuclear Amageddon. As Walter Alvarez later put it in his popu-
lar account o his hypothesis, the asteroid arived with the energy “o
a hundred million hydrogen bombs,” creating scenes like those vividly
portrayed in e Day Aer. Alvarez went on to descibe the imagined
scenaio:
In the zone where the bedrock was melted or vapoized, no living thing
could have suvived. Even out to a few hundred kilometers from ground
zero, the destuction o life must have been nearly total. . . . Animals living
just over the hoizon rst witnessed a ash o light in the sky, then a last
moment o calm. en, as the ground began to shake uncontrollably from
the passing seismic waves, the sky itsel tuned lethal. . . . Soon the Earth’s
surface itsel became an enomous broiler—cooking, charing, igniting,
immolating all trees and all animals which were not sheltered under rocks
or in holes. . . . Entire forests were ignited, and continent- sized wildres
swept across the lands. e ejecta particles had barely fallen to Earth and
the lethal, incandescent sky retuned to nomal, when the air was black-
ened by ising plumes o soot from res which were consuming the for-
ests and removing the oxygen from the atmosphere (Alvarez , –).
As terifying as this vision was, however, it could also act as inspi-
ration to avoid the dinosaurs’ fate, as Gould and others pointed out.
e dinosaurs could not escape their asteroid, but humans might yet
take action to stave o their own extinction. e pessimistic reading o
mass extinction theoy thus also oered a more optimistic corollay:
While the ouishing o mammals and eventual ise o human civiliza-
tion may have been all just the result o a “cosmic accident,” there was
no reason to suppose that any species, including our own, was fore-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 211
ordained to die. In an indirect way, extinction theoy, combined with
nuclear winter projections and growing public awareness o the mag-
nitude o the catastrophe that would result from even a limited nuclear
exchange, certainly had an inuence on easing geopolitical tensions and
encouraging nonproliferation and disamament in the late s and
the s. More directly, it encouraged awareness and action around
other potential cises—such as anthropogenic climate change and bio-
diversity depletion—that began to replace nuclear war as major cul-
tural and political anxieties. As David Jablonski put it, “e mass ex-
tinctions in the fossil record have compelling implications for the plight
o today’s wildlife and for the suvival o the human species”—namely,
“that major upheavals can and do occur and that such biological cises
can be rapid, irreversible, and unpredictable.” Waning that humans
were “on the bink o causing, single- handedly, the worst mass extinc-
tion in million years,” Jablonski urged, “It is up to us, as benecia-
ies o the last major mass extinction, to reverse this trend . . . before
many o the species we hold dear—including our own—go the way o
the dinosaur” (Jablonski c, –). is was the beginning o a new
extinction imaginay—discussed in depth in the next chapter—that
transferred the anxiety about catastrophic human activities to an overt
call for action and activism that has characteized a new extinction dis-
course, and which persists to this day.
Extinction, History, and Culture
We have so far dealt with the direct relationship between the science o
mass extinction and the culture and politics o the late Cold War era as
a fairly overt shaing o imagey, rhetoic, and even empiical evidence
about the consequences o major catastrophic events in the physical and
biological environment. But there are also other ways in which the late
s and s were a time o cultural confrontation with extinction
and catastrophism in less literal, though nonetheless important, foms
o expression. One sense in which this manifested was in the notion
that late modenity is an intinsically “catastrophic society” in which
threat and isk have been intenalized in political beliefs, psychological
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
212 CHAPTER FIVE
reactions, and literay and artistic expressions to the extent that stuc-
tures o meaning and certainty have broken down. is was to some ex-
tent a continuation o the gloomy pessimism o Modenism discussed
in chapter o this book. But insofar as it took shape in an era o art
and philosophy that had also transcended the early twentieth centuy’s
nostalgia for those lost stuctures—the “postmoden” era—these new
views had a distinctive character that in many ways complemented de-
velopments in the science o extinction.
Postmodenity itself—or postmodenism—is hard to dene, and
indeed perhaps intentionally resists denition. But, as introduced by
continental European thinkers like Jean- François Lyotard, Jacques
Derida, Michel Foucault, and others (not all o whom would have con-
sented to be grouped under this label), it emphasized an essential am-
bivalence around extracting stable categoies or “meaning” from texts
or discourse, owing to the inherent instability o language. As Lyotard,
for example, famously declared in his seminal book e Postmodern
Condition, “I dene postmodern as incredulity toward meta- narratives”
(Lyotard , xxiv). ese included the supposed certainties o sci-
ence as well as the knowledge stuctures o politics, philosophy, art,
and other foms o cultural discourse. As applied to the study o texts—
indeed, one feature o postmodenism was to expand the notion o
“text” to encompass virtually any fom o human expression—this skep-
ticism was oen expressed by Derida, Jean Baudillard, and others as
a rejection o the notion that meaning is grounded in some objective
extenal reality. Since language is understood to be constitutive o our
perceived reality, and since words are seen merely as “signs” with no
stable relationship to objective referents, then what we expeience is a
simulation—or, as Baudillard put it, a “simulacum”—o meaning in
which images are reproduced and recycled without retaining any refer-
ence to some oiginal.
is notion is admittedly quite abstract, and while it was popular
among students and intellectuals especially duing the s and early
s, it should not be overstated as a broad cultural phenomenon.
Postmodenist philosophy did engage directly with some o the central
themes o contemporay extinction imaginay, however, and it gives
an interesting perspective on the wider cultural manifestation o the
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 213
issues in this chapter. I a major characteistic o Modenism was the
notion that the values and societies o the West were in a state o de-
cline and disintegration, then postmodenism oen adopted the per-
spective that those vey stuctures that had fomerly oered meaning—
in art, politics, philosophy, and even science—were fractured beyond
repair. Modenism oen presented society as waiting in anticipation o
some apocalypse (“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be bon?”); postmodenism, in con-
trast, saw the apocalypse as having already happened. e perceived
cataclysm was understood to some extent as a metaphoical notion, but
it also drew inspiration and imagey from tangible twentieth- centuy
political and environmental events. As Simon Malpas puts it in a study o
postmodenism, “e threat o the obliteration o all existence, whether
brought about by nuclear war or natural catastrophe, has weighed on
ideas o what it is to be part o a community or society, and even what it
is to be human, forcing thoroughgoing reconceptualisations o some o
the most basic categoies o philosophical, social and political thought”
(Malpas , ).
Implicit in many philosophies o histoy associated with postmod-
enism, including those o Jürgen Habemas and Foucault, is a rejec-
tion o the notion that histoy proceeds toward ever better models o
rationality and social arrangement. e sense o histoical continuity is
eroded with the departure o guiding metanarratives, which are oen
considered a product o an Enlightenment transfer o Chistian provi-
dential theology to a seculaized view o human progress (particularly
embodied in the nineteenth- centuy Geman philosopher G. F. Hegel’s
progression o histoy toward an “absolute”). In this sense, it is fairly
easy to draw parallels between post- Enlightenment histoiographies
o human and natural histoy; just as Hegel or August Comte viewed
human histoy as a linear progression toward greater rationality and
self- awareness, Dawinian evolutionay histoy—i not exactly reect-
ing Dawin’s own view, particularly in the intepretation o Herbert
Spencer—saw the progression o life as a march towards greater com-
plexity and order.
From this perspective, the postmodenist citique aligns comfort-
ably with contemporay reintepretations o the histoy o life. In the
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
214 CHAPTER FIVE
context o the new understanding o mass extinctions, life’s histoy
becomes less a steady, continuous stream than a seies o distinct epi-
sodes, broken by drastic upheavals that reset environmental and biotic
conditions. e notion o “punctuation” or “upture” as a feature o his-
toical development had fairly wide currency in both biology and his-
toiography in the s and s. In , for example, Stephen Jay
Gould and Niles Eldredge proposed a controversial model they labeled
“punctuated equilibia,” in which evolutionay lineages were charac-
teized as being mostly unchanging and static except for relatively bie
moments o rapid change when new species were produced in a geo-
logical instant. In similar fashion, the French theoist Michel Foucault
had argued in his book e Order o ings (published in English
translation in ) that human histoy resolves to a seies o distinct
“epistemes,” or worldviews, punctuated by uptures that have altered
basic notions o tuth and representation (Foucault ). Foucault’s
intepretation o histoy shares some marked similaities with the phi-
losopher omas Kuhn’s view o science as presented in his Struc-
ture o Scientic Revolutions, which argued that the histoy o science is
composed o a seies o distinct “paradigms,” which in more radical in-
tepretations (for example, by the philosopher Paul Feyerabend) have
altered conditions for tuth and meaning. Notably, Foucault irted
with a kind o metaphoical notion o extinction, concluding at the end
o e Order o ings that “the gure o man” is a fairly recent Enlight-
enment concept which, should the conditions that brought it into being
erode, “would be erased, like a gure drawn in sand at the edge o the
sea” (Foucault , –). While it certainly would be possible to
make too much o the similaities between these scientic and philo-
sophical reintepretations o histoical change, Gould himsel (who fre-
quently invoked philosophers when presenting paleontological ideas)
commented on their similaities, picking out Kuhn and Foucault in
particular. In an essay titled “Toward the Vindication o Punctuational
Change,” in which he broadly suveyed challenges to geological unifor-
mitaianism (and name- checked Foucault and Kuhn), Gould concluded
that while he did not “know how much o this new fascination for punc-
tuational change resides in the stresses o our general culture, . . . our
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 215
uncertain world o nuclear amaments and deteiorating environment
must also encourage a departure from gradualism” (Gould c, ).
In a vaiety o ways, s- era citiques o narratives o progress
resulted in a discourse around the notion o “the end o histoy.” is
did not necessaily mean the literal end o human civilization—through
extinction, for example—as much as an end, as Malpas puts it, to our
“ability to fom a narrative from [events in the past] that demonstrates
their coherent, developmental logic and points to a utopian future in
which the conicts and contradictions between them will have been re-
solved” (Malpas , –). is notion could manifest in a vaiety o
philosophical viewpoints, not all o which could be descibed as “post-
moden.” e neoconsevative theoist Francis Fukuyama, for example,
argued in a much- discussed essay titled “e End o Histoy” (ex-
panded to a book in ) that the fall o the Berlin Wall represented a
kind o culmination o Westen democratic ideals, which he descibed
as “the end point o mankind’s ideological evolution and the universal-
ization o Westen liberal democracy as the nal fom o human gov-
enment” (Fukuyama , ). While he certainly did not see this as an
entirely unwelcome development, he also argued that “the end o his-
toy will be a vey sad time,” since the disappearance o ideology would
mean that “daing, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced
by economic calculation, the endless solving o technical problems, en-
vironmental concens, and the satisfaction o sophisticated consumer
demands.” Stikingly, he concluded that “in the post- histoical peiod
there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the pepetual caretaking
o the museum o human conict between states” (Fukuyama , ).
Fukuyama was no postmodenist, and was indeed roundly citicized
by Derida and others for what they perceived as Westen tiumphal-
ism. But in a sense his vision o the end o histoy resonates with the
postmodenist argument that we have reached a stage where we are
simply rearranging images o the past in a kind o pastiche without de-
veloping any new stuctures o meaning. is was a central argument
o Baudillard’s study o popular culture, Simulacra and Simula-
tion, where he argued that mass communication has dissolved all stable
notion o reference into an endlessly self- referential “hyperreality.” In a
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
216 CHAPTER FIVE
short essay published in titled “e Anorexic Ruins,” Baudillard
compared the pepetual recycling o hyperreality to “cancerous metas-
tases,” and descibed the “merciless short circuit” as “a catastrophe in
slow motion.” But unlike previous cultures, Baudillard argued, our
own has lost even the possibility o some kind o nal “reckoning, de-
nouement, and apocalypse”—some possibility o either destuction or
rebirth—since “we have already passed it unawares and now nd our-
selves in the situation o having exhausted our own nalities” (Baudil-
lard , –). Here Baudillard invoked the nuclear anxieties o his
age with a stiking statement: “Eveything has already become nuclear,
faraway, vapoized. . . . e explosion has already occurred, the bomb is
only a metaphor now.” In this view, the tue catastrophe would not be
the end o our existence—aer all, we would not be around to expei-
ence it—but our continued existence in an “amnesiac world” capable
only o recycling images o its own past. e lm e Day Aer, he ar-
gued, did not conjure up the horror o a possible fate; rather, he claimed
that “this lm itsel is our catastrophe,” since “it says that the catastro-
phe is already there, that it has already occurred because the very idea
o the catastrophe is impossible” (Baudillard , ). What he appears
to mean by this is not that nuclear weapons do not exist or that nuclear
war is impossible, but that our society has lived in a state o pepetual
catastrophe for such a long time that we now exist in “a pepetual simu-
lation o cisis” without having developed a new philosophy or means
o expression to move beyond it (Baudillard , ).
I Baudillard’s analysis recasts catastrophe as a metaphoical con-
cept, his fomulation nonetheless touches on a theme present in other,
more tangible assessments o s political culture. One example is the
concept o “isk society” developed by the Geman sociologist Ulich
Beck, a prominent public intellectual whose book o the same
name (its English translation appeared in ) argued that moden-
ization has inherently led to “the social production o risks” as conse-
quence o the generation o wealth (Beck , ). Beck descibed the
current political climate as “reality that is out o joint,” destabilized by
the proliferation o human- engineered “destuctive forces” that “endan-
ger all foms o life on this planet” and are able to “outlast generations”
(Beck , , ). While Beck was much more concened than Bau-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 217
dillard with tangible manifestations o catastrophe—ecological disas-
ter or industial accident—like Baudillard, he highlighted the social
eects o existing in a state o pepetual cisis, where “the state o emer-
gency threatens to become the normal state,” and where the possibility o
transfomative cisis is foreclosed: “e isk society is thus not a revo-
lutionay society, but more than that, a catastrophic society” (Beck ,
–).
e diagnosis that Beck, Baudillard, and others provided was thus
as much about the spiit or psychology o catastrophic or postapoca-
lyptic society as it was about the danger o actual, immediate physi-
cal cataclysm. is signals an important tuning point in the histoy o
catastrophic thinking: while threats like nuclear war or environmental
disaster continued to have a prominent role in the popular imagination,
the sense o the time scale on which they were anticipated or expei-
enced began to be expanded, and their hamful eects were projected
onto the present as well as onto an imagined future. As we will see in
the next chapter, this became a central theme in extinction discourse
from the mid- s onward, particularly in discussions o biodiversity
loss and anthropogenic climate change. But it was also manifested in
other cultural foms including, for example, the dramatic growth in the
populaity o postapocalyptic science ction duing the late s and
the s, with stoies that increasingly focused on characters attempt-
ing to cope with life in catastrophic landscapes, rather than with cata-
strophic events as the culmination o a narrative.
Even ctionalizations o nuclear war began to reect this shi.
Whereas e Day Aer ended in the immediate aemath o a nuclear
exchange, the BBC lm reads (oen regarded as much supeior
to e Day Aer) followed its central characters, a young woman named
Ruth and her infant daughter, through a seies o vignettes set days,
weeks, months, and ultimately years aer the war. In addition to oeing
the rst cinematic representation o nuclear winter, reads presented
a decidedly ambivalent vision o the suvival o humanity. e scenes
set weeks or months aer the initial explosions followed the charac-
ters through a desolate wasteland accompanied by titles accounting the
numbers o the dead, but in the lm, humanity does not immediately
die out. Rather, we are forced to contemplate the awful circumstances
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
218 CHAPTER FIVE
o Ruth’s suvival, in which she scrounges for food and shelter, bart-
ers sex for dead rats to eat, and develops symptoms o radiation sick-
ness. Viewers are infomed that, three to eight years aer the attack, the
population has reached its minimum, thus implying that nal extinction
has been staved o. But the society Ruth and her daughter occupy is dis-
mal: existence is barely at a subsistence level, people are le to scavenge
clothes and other necessities from uined cities, and children speak a
kind o gunting language and scue for food like animals. When, ten
years on, Ruth nally succumbs to her illness, her daughter emotion-
lessly removes her few valuable items and caries on.
is new perspective was found in other, more commercial depic-
tions as well. A pime and extremely inuential example is the
Australian cult favoite Mad Max, which tells the stoy o a policeman
seeking vengeance against a group o motorcycle- iding thugs who have
killed his family, and which is set “a few years from now,” in what ap-
pears to be some kind o postapocalyptic wasteland. e context o the
dystopian setting is never explained, however, and the lm’s climax is
Mel Gibson’s character, Max, defeating the gang leader, aer which he
simply dives o into the distance. James McCausland, who cowrote
the lm, later recalled being inspired not by nuclear apocalypse but by
the impact o the s oil cisis on Australian society, and basing the
gim scenaio on “the assumption that nations would not consider the
huge costs o providing infrastucture for altenative energy until it was
too late” (McCausland ). Although sequels like e Road Warrior
() and Mad Max: Beyond underdome () would later esh
out some details—hinting, in the third installment, at a nuclear war—
the ctional setting in which the stoy takes place is self- contained
and static; its characters have accepted the bleak, terifying scenaio
in which they live, and the lms are about their stuggles, largely free
from nostalgia for the lost world or hope o redemption for a new one.
In many ways, the new spiit o anxiety that developed duing the
s was captured in a seies o long essays published by Jonathan
Schell across successive issues o the Ne w Yo rk e r in Febuay o ,
and published later that year as a book titled e Fate o e Earth.
Schell, a longtime sta witer for the magazine, had an established
reputation as a political reporter and citic, having covered the Viet-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 219
nam War and the Watergate scandal, and was descibed by the envi-
ronmental activist and scholar Bill McKibben aer his death in
as having been “for many years a central gure both at this magazine
and in the intellectual life o the nation” (McKibben ). But Schell’s
ovewhelming concen—an obsession, even—was in waning the pub-
lic about the dangers o nuclear weapons before it was too late. e
essays collected in e Fate o the Earth registered as some o the most
powerful and resonant arguments yet made; the New York Times review
o the book called it “a work o enomous force” and “an event o pro-
found histoical moment” (Eikson ).
e book is broken into three parts. e rst, “A Republic o Insects
and Grass,” vividly descibes the world in the aemath o a nuclear ex-
change, emphasizing not just the toll on human populations but the
enomous environmental catastrophe that would ensue. e third, “e
Choice,” outlines the role o the politics o national sovereignty in the
deterrence strategy o mutually assured destuction, arguing that the
only way out o the stando is for humans to identify as a collective
species rather than as nations and factions. Neither essay presents a par-
ticularly oiginal viewpoint, though Schell’s accomplished literay style
and the urgency o his prose probably accounts for the attention they
received. ere is nothing in “A Republic o Insects and Grass,” for in-
stance, that could not be gleaned from more technical reports, and even
the eusive New York Times reviewer acknowledged that the argument
o “e Choice” had “been said so oen before that the sheer mention
o it simply sounds naïve.”
It is the second essay, titled “e Second Death,” that stands out.
An exploration o the metaphysical, rather than physical, consequences
o nuclear war and extinction, this essay essentially argues that extinc-
tion—taken by Schell to be the likely outcome o a nuclear war—would
produce two kinds o “death”: both “the untimely death o eveyone in
the world,” which “would in itsel constitute and unimaginably huge
loss,” and “a separate, distinct loss that would be in a sense even huger—
the cancellation o all future generations o human beings” (Schell ,
). e essay thus departs from other similar discussions, such as Karl
Jaspers’s e Future o Mankind, not only in contemplating the possi-
bility o human extinction and its ethical and political consequences,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
220 CHAPTER FIVE
but in delving into the philosophical and psychological consequences
o this awareness: it is an investigation into the meaning o extinction.
Schell noted that mass extinctions have been a feature o life’s past,
and that the extinction o humans “would constitute an evolutionay
setback o possibly limited extent . . . perhaps no greater than any o
several evolutionay setbacks, such as the extinction o the dinosaurs.”
However, no other species, he assumed, has ever had the ability to con-
template its own extinction; we are unique, having “eaten more deeply
o the fuit o the tree o knowledge,” and have “caused a basic change
in the circumstances in which life has been given to us, which is to say
that we have altered the human condition.”
One might plausibly argue, as Schell acknowledged, that this “sec-
ond death” o extinction is “merely redundant,” since once our species
is extinct there will be nobody to moun it (Schell , ). Indeed, he
granted that “we, the living, will not suer it; we will be dead.” How-
ever, he also noted an apparent paradox in extinction: while it might ap-
pear to be “the largest misfortune that mankind could ever suer,” since
by denition nobody would be le to expeience it, “it doesn’t seem to
happen to anybody, and one is le wondeing where its impact is to
be registered, and by whom” (Schell , ). e answer, o course,
is that it is the living who suer. Here Schell quoted Montaigne, who
wrote: “You are in death while you are in life, for you are aer death
when you are no longer in life. Or, i you prefer it this way, you are dead
aer life, but duing life you are dying; and death aects the dying much
more roughly than the dead, and more keenly and essentially” (Mon-
taigne, in Schell ). “We are similarly,” Schell argued,
“in extinction” while we are in life, and are aer extinction when we are
extinct. Extinction, too, thus aects the living “more roughly” and “more
keenly and essentially” than it does the nonliving, who in this case are not
the dead but the unbon. Like death, extinction is felt not when it has ar-
ived but beforehand, as a deep shadow cast back across the whole o life.
. . . We the living expeience it, now and in all the moments o our lives.
Hence, while it is in one sense tue that extinction lies outside human life
and never happens to anybody, in another sense extinction saturates our
existence and never stops happening (Schell , ).
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 221
For Schell, extinction is thus “more terible—is the more radical
nothingness—because extinction ends death just as surely as it ends
birth and life” (Schell , ). It is both “the death o death” and “the
murder o the future”—and its consequences can only be felt by the
living (Schell , ). It is this condition—the recognition o being
“in extinction”—that characteizes the transfomation o the extinc-
tion imaginay duing the s. It was brought about only when people
fully absorbed the potential for human extinction (via nuclear war and
especially nuclear winter) as well as its environmental and evolutionay
consequences, through the new understanding o mass extinction. Ex-
tinction is now a “specter” that “hovers over our world and shapes our
lives with its invisible but terible pressure,” accompanying us “from
birth to death” (Schell , ). In this sense, as Baudillard would
later put it, “the explosion has already occurred”—or at least it may as
well have occurred, since we the living are the ones fated to expeience
the horror o extinction. e “postmoden condition” is thus aptly de-
scibed as being “postapocalyptic”; as Schell concludes, “It is the tuth
about the way we now live.”
Conclusion
While Schell’s message was potentially quite gloomy, pessimism is not
the central message with which I want to conclude this chapter. e
larger importance o Schell’s diagnosis—that we are now “in extinc-
tion”—is what it signies about the signicant transfomation o ex-
tinction discourse duing the s, a shi manifested in scientic and
popular imaginations o the causes and consequences o extinction,
which altered perceptions o the nature o the threat, the time scale
on which it played out, and the role o human agency in its prevention.
In the rst place, the science o mass extinction contibuted directly
to the acceptance o catastrophic change as a regular feature o earth’s
histoy. While sometimes referred to as “catastrophism,” this new
understanding was sometimes also characteized as a “new unifomi-
taianism,” as it was in the title o a collection o essays on sudden geo-
logical change published in (Van Couveing et al. ). is em-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
222 CHAPTER FIVE
phasized the way in which sudden perturbation was being incoporated
into a model o histoical change that nonetheless also exhibited signi-
cant regulaity and predictability. From the perspective o geology, this
new view combined elements o both the Lyellian steady- state and the
Cuveian revolution. As Sepkoski’s perturbed logistic model showed,
the general tendency o the earth’s biota is toward a stable equilibium,
but that equilibium can be and has been disturbed by major cises that
have reset ecological and environmental conditions, and which have
had major consequences for diversication.
e resulting picture is one o contrasting pattens on dierent
levels o histoical scale. Viewed from the perspective o hundreds o
millions o years, life on earth actually appears to be remarkably stable,
having withstood cises (such as the late Pemian event) that destroyed
nearly all living species without sueing an absolute decline in diver-
sity. At the same time, as Sepkoski’s colleague David Jablonski showed,
fundamentally dierent ules may apply duing peiods o mass extinc-
tion, upsetting the Dawinian assumption that, as Gould put it, “order
ules as the predictable stuggle o individuals translates to pattens
o increasing complexity and diversity” (Gould b, ). In fact, as
Jablonski argued in an inuential article, the histoy o life dem-
onstrates two distinct “macroevolutionay regimes”: one that applies
duing nomal “background” times, and the other at moments o en-
vironmental cisis. Jablonski emphasized that “mass extinctions are
not simply intensications o processes operating duing background
times,” but are processes “qualitatively as well as quantitatively dierent
in their eects,” and that ultimately are responsible for “shap[ing] large-
scale evolutionay pattens in the histoy o life” (Jablonski a, ).
A number o important implications followed from this new under-
standing o mass extinction. On the one hand, as Raup put it, “Our
planet might not be such a safe place.” While potentially unsettling,
this message was not news to the generations who had lived through
two world wars, genocides, environmental catastrophes, and social up-
heaval, and who had grown up in the shadow o the bomb. I Cuvier’s
catastrophism was ultimately rejected by his nineteenth- centuy con-
temporaies because it was inimical to Victoian notions o stability and
progress, then clearly by the late twentieth centuy cultural assump-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 223
tions had become much more receptive to an inherent sense o insta-
bility and catastrophe. e work o Raup and Jablonski also highlighted
the sense in which past success could not necessaily guarantee future
suvival, since “many traits o individuals and species that had enhanced
suvival . . . duing background times become ineective duing mass
extinctions.” is fact undercut assumptions about inherent directional
progress, and also stressed the essential unpredictability—or contin-
gency—o the patten o life’s histoy: as a result o mass extinctions,
“evolution is channeled in directions that could not have been pre-
dicted on the basis o pattens that prevailed duing background times”
(Jablonski a, ).
On the other hand, the paleontologists also emphasized that major
upheavals had potential benets, at least from the perspective o the
overall diversity o life. As Sepkoski argued, “In the absence o mass
extinction . . . macroevolution would be conned to the slow process
o anagenesis [species evolution without branching] and evolutionay
novelties would appear rarely at best. . . . Only mass extinction would
break this stagnation by cleaing ecospace for the radiation o new lin-
eages.” Sepkoski was implying that without mass extinction, life might
not be vey diverse or complex (Sepkoski , ). Whether or not
this was perceived overall as positive or negative is, then, a matter o
perspective. e Pemian extinction was bad news for the tilobites
but good news for clams; the Cretaceous- Tertiay event was bad for
the dinosaurs but good for mammals. e stoy, though, does not yield
a moral about winners and losers as easily as does the traditional Dar-
winian account; the tilobites and dinosaurs did not “deseve” to be-
come extinct, nor did clams and mammals deseve to suvive. While
each group had genetic traits that contibuted to ultimate suvival or
failure, none could have anticipated the selective conditions that were
suddenly applied when a mass extinction stuck. As Raup quipped, it
was simply “bad luck to have bad genes.”
Another major feature o the emerging scientic understanding o
extinction was an increasing focus on the relationship between ecologi-
cal diversity and stability. While Sepkoski’s long- tem analysis suggested
that stability was perhaps “detimental” to evolutionay expeiment and
diversication, it became increasingly clear just how important stability
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
224 CHAPTER FIVE
was to the maintenance o existing levels o diversity. Duing times o
mass extinction, levels o standing diversity plummeted, in part be-
cause complex relationships o interdependency within ecological sys-
tems were disturbed. Again, the value attached to this phenomenon is
a matter o perspective: while from a long- tem evolutionay vantage
the peiodic collapse o diversity may have opened up opportunities for
“expeiment,” from the perspective o the inhabitants o the aected
ecosystems, these events were catastrophic.
It was not lost on the scientists who contibuted to this new view
that lessons could be drawn from the past for our human present.
Jablonski obseved in a essay,
e mass extinctions in the fossil record have compelling implications for
the plight o today’s wildlife and for the suvival o the human species.
e fossil record is telling us that major upheavals can and do occur and
that such biological cises can be rapid, irreversible, and unpredictable.
Once a species is extinct or a network o interacting species falls apart, it
is gone forever (Jablonski b, ).
As early as , at the meeting on the “Dynamics o Extinction” in Flag-
sta, this message was adapted directly to the present- day environmen-
tal cisis. In a paper titled “What Is Happening Now and What Needs to
Be Done,” Ehrlich argued, “e earth’s biota now appears to be enter-
ing an era o extinctions that may ival or supass in scale that which oc-
curred at the end o the Cretaceous. . . . For the rst time in geologic his-
toy, a major extinction episode will be entrained by a global overshoot
o carying capacity by a single species—Homo sapiens” (Ehrlich ,
). At the same conference, the ecologist Daniel Simberlo addressed
the cisis o deforestation in tropical rain forests, and concurred with
Ehrlich that “the imminent catastrophe in tropical forests is commen-
surable with all the great mass extinctions except for that at the end o
the Pemian” (Simberlo , –). Nor were the ecologists alone in
making such claims; Jablonski as well had waned, bluntly, “Our species
. . . is on the bink o causing, single- handedly, the worst mass extinction
in million years” (Jablonski b, ). In identifying current eco-
logical cises with past mass extinctions, Ehrlich, Simberlo, and their
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 225
paleontologist colleagues were thus gestuing toward a new framework
for understanding the impact o human beings on their environment:
humans could now be understood as agents o global environmental
change—perhaps on a par with the geological or extraterrestial forces
that have caused the pass extinctions o the past—as well as its poten-
tial victims. In the iconography o the emerging extinction imaginay,
we are both the asteroid and the dinosaur.
A central outcome o this rhetoical tun was that diversity itsel
became identied as the entity threatened by mass extinction. Ehrlich,
for example, did not single out one species or another for special con-
cen, but rather argued that “the vey future o humanity depends on
preseving organic diversity” as a whole, in part because o “the utter
dependence o our species on the free sevices provided by ecosystems”
(Ehrlich , , ). e notion that biological diversity is an in-
herent source o health and stability for ecosystems will be explored in
much more detail in the next chapter, but a vitally important point to
emphasize here is the close dependence that the emergence o “biodi-
versity” as an “inherent value” in the language o consevation biology
and politics had on the developing science o mass extinction by pale-
ontologists. It was paleontologists like Raup, Sepkoski, and Jablonski
who had redened the study o mass extinction as a study o pattens
in taxonomic diversication, and who likewise had explored the eco-
logical and evolutionay consequences o mass extinctions from which
ecologists and biologists drew. In a somewhat later study, Jablonski, for
example, obseved that paleontology is “our only direct source o in-
fomation on how biological systems respond to large- scale perturba-
tions and thus can provide important insights into potential outcomes
i habitat destuction or climate change proceeds unchecked.” One o
his most signicant ndings was that mass extinctions tended to favor
“weedy species . . . rats, ragweed, and cockroaches,” capable o sur-
viving in a vaiety o environmental conditions, at the expense o “the
larger number o species that are more useful to humans as food, medi-
cines, and genetic resources” (Jablonski , ).
wo nal points can be made about the preceding discussion. e
rst is that, in the evolving conversation about the moden- day ex-
tinction cisis in biological diversity, the tem “resource” emerged as
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
226 CHAPTER FIVE
a multivalent concept. Individual species o plants and animals can be
identied as resources—as they were for many years in earlier con-
sevation discourse—because o their utilitaian or aesthetic value to
human beings. But biological diversity only came to be seen as a re-
source in itsel when the ecological viewpoint developed duing the
s and s (discussed in chapter ) that identied the stability o
ecosystems with the diversity o their inhabitants was projected onto
an understanding o global and histoical pattens o diversication and
extinction in the s and s. In this perspective, the diversity o
life is not only a conucopia o useful mateials from which humans can
draw, but also a vital hedge against unpredictability and environmental
collapse. A mass extinction is understood, by denition, as a cascading
phenomenon that takes place when any portion o the foundation on
which ecosystems are stabilized is removed; it is not dened by how im-
portant any individual group that dies may seem to us.
Second, in this perspective, biological diversity, like genetic diver-
sity, is understood to be a reseve not just o things but o “infomation”
or “potential.” In e Fate o the Earth, Schell noted that i we can under-
stand the life o an individual creature to be “infomation, and death is
the loss o infomation,” then in the extinction o a species “the sources
o all future creatures o those kinds are closed down, and a portion
o the diversity and strength o terrestial life in its entirety vanishes
forever” (Schell , ). As Sepkoski found in his study o Phanero-
zoic diversity pattens, when life rebounds following extinction events,
it tends to diversify within a narrower range o possible foms. Aer
all, since evolution does not repeat itself, the removal o a higher taxon
means removing all o the genetic infomation contained within its indi-
vidual lineages, leaving less raw mateial to work with. And what tend to
remain are what Jablonski calls “weedy species” which, like many o the
animals and plants transplanted by Europeans into their colonial pos-
sessions, can dominate large environments to the exclusion (and extinc-
tion) o more vaied, specialized foms o life. Mass extinction, then,
is not just the temporay reduction o life’s vaiety, but the potentially
pemanent depaupeization o the earth’s biota.
is, then, is the context for the nal chapter in our stoy: an extinc-
tion imaginay combining a new view o the causes and consequences
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
THE ASTEROID AND THE DINOSAUR 227
o extinction and a new sense o the role human beings play in the main-
tenance o diversity and stability in our world. It is also the envisioning
o a new slow- motion catastrophe whose eects have already begun to
be felt, but whose ultimate consequences may not be known for many
years or decades. It is the foundation for the discourses o the “Sixth
Extinction” and the “Anthropocene”; but, more broadly, for a new per-
spective on the place o humans in their natural world—one in which
our sense o intinsic importance to this planet is challenged at the same
time as the impact o our agency is magnied.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
6
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? THE MAKING
OF A BIODIVERSITY CRISIS
e recognition, just in recent years, that mass extinctions do
not represent the processes o background extinctions wit
large must rank as one o the most important discoveies in
evolutionay biology o this centuy. Whatever their cause, mass
extinctions operate by dierent ules from those prevailing
duing background extinction. Dawinian evolution, important
in background times, is suspended duing biotic cises.
—Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, e Sixth Extinction (),
Humanity has initiated the sixth great extinction, ushing to etenity
a large fraction o our fellow species in a single generation.
—E. O. Wilson, e Diversity o Life (),
It is rare that the oigin o a signicant cultural movement can be located
in a single event—histoy is nomally much too messy and complex for
such easy explanations. Indeed, in the case o the movement around
what is now widely understood to be the “biodiversity cisis,” this is
vey much the case: as this book has argued, the development o late-
twentieth and early- twenty- rst- centuy attitudes and beliefs concen-
ing the value o biological diversity and the threat o anthropogenic ex-
tinction have had a long, complicated histoy stretching back more than
two hundred years. However, one element o this histoy, the invention
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
230 CHAPTER SIX
o the tem “biodiversity,” can be traced to a single point o oigin, and
it can be argued that the emergence o the tem itsel and the rapid as-
similation o the concept into wide political and cultural currency went
hand in hand.
e event in question was the “National Foum on BioDiversity”
held in Washington in September , which attracted an audience
o several hundred scientists, policy makers, jounalists, and members
o the public to hear some sixty speakers discuss the causes and conse-
quences o human- caused extinction o plant and animal species. e
meeting was cosponsored by the National Academy o Sciences and
the Smithsonian Museum, and was the brainchild o National Research
Council senior sta ocer and plant physiologist Walter G. Rosen, who
enlisted E. O. Wilson as the intellectual diving force. As was later re-
ported by both Wilson and Rosen, duing the planning stages Rosen
was concened that the phrase “biological diversity,” in circulation
since about , was too much o a mouthful. In a letter to Wilson he
wrote, “We can save three syllables by taking the logical out o biologi-
cal.” Over Wilson’s initial objections, the neologism was adopted for the
title o the conference. Wilson may not have loved the contraction, but
the tem stuck—as did the public and scientic concens raised duing
the conference—in the eventually published proceedings (which Wil-
son edited) and in a coordinated campaign o jounal and magazine
articles, popular books, public lectures, and policy initiatives duing the
following years.
Viewed from one perspective, biodiversity awareness burst on the
scene suddenly and with rapid success. Wilson’s paean e Diversity o
Life was a best seller when released in , and it has remained con-
tinuously in pint to this day. And at the “Earth Summit” held in
Rio de Janiero, more than nations signed the United Nations “Con-
vention on Biological Diversity,” which fomally acknowledged bio-
logical diversity as a cultural and economic resource. Within a decade
o the Washington foum it was broadly accepted that human activi-
ties—most prominently tropical deforestation, but also anthropogenic
climate change, industial agiculture, human population explosion,
and global development—had precipitated a cisis in which as many
as hal o all existing species o plants and animals could become ex-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 231
tinct within a centuy. By the mid- s, the cisis had acquired an-
other, more foreboding name—the “Sixth Extinction”—that has eec-
tively drawn great public attention to biodiversity loss by connecting
the present depletion to the mass extinctions o the geological past. As
the literay scholar Ursula Heise has obseved, in the new millennium
“the threat o mass extinction now oen features as one o several global
ecological cises, ight behind climate change in the urgency o action it
requires” (Heise , ).
At the same time, however, both the biodiversity cisis and the “Sixth
Extinction” concept—along with the wider set o global environmental
concens grouped together under the label o the “Anthropocene”—are
simply the most recent manifestation o the cultural and scientic dis-
course around extinction and humankind’s future we have been follow-
ing through this entire book. While the tems, anxieties, and imagined
consequences o the current dialogue are novel in many ways, they also
show the strong impint o a set o concepts and concens that have
been in circulation since the s and s i not earlier: fear o a
catastrophic end to civilization, awareness o the interconnectedness
and fragility o ecosystems, a growing valuation o diversity as a bul-
wark against unpredictable change, and o course appreciation o the
reality o mass extinctions as a major feature in the histoy o life. As
the environmental histoian Timothy Fanham aptly put it, “e ise o
populaity o the biological diversity cause was not necessaily a para-
digm shi, but it was a conuence o values and concen that had been
fostered over time, coming together in one concept that represented
the protection o the living components o the natural world” (Fanham
, ). It is this conuence o values that foms the center o the cur-
rent extinction imaginay.
While we might consider the biodiversity cisis and Anthropocene
concepts to be the apotheosis o the post– Second World War extinction
discourse traced in chapters and o this book, many o its central
preoccupations have been reframed and relationships redened. For
one thing, while a considerable anthropocentism is retained in both
concepts (biological diversity is still oen dened in tems o its value
to humans, and Anthropocene proponents would like to name a geo-
logical era aer ourselves), this is in tension with a broader recognition
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
232 CHAPTER SIX
that humans are but one species o many, our suvival is not guaran-
teed, and the inexorable march o geological time moves at a tempo
not easily reconciled with or answerable to our human concens. While
these themes emerged to prominence in the s and s, as dis-
cussed in the previous chapter, by the s and into the s they had
been recongured in dramatically dierent responses.
What most obsevers seem to agree on is that we have, in fact,
crossed a threshold in which species loss and climate change have
reached irreversible proportions, and human impact on the global envi-
ronment is essentially indelible on any time scale meaningful to human
beings. For some, this is a development essentially to be embraced—
either as a challenge to human ingenuity to be solved by geoengineer-
ing, “de- extinction,” space colonization, and the like, or as an opportu-
nity to engage in a radical reevaluation o humanity’s place in nature
through development o a “multispecies ethics,” the abolition o tra-
ditional categoies o biological self- classication, and vaious foms
o transhumanism. For others, though, it is a further indication that
humanity is heading toward a catastrophic end. An intiguing aspect o
this new apocalypticism, however, is that unlike late- nineteenth- and
early- twentieth- centuy Modenists who saw the catastrophe as a pos-
sibly avoidable calamity, or Cold War pessimists who predicted an inevi-
table sudden holocaust, or postmodenists who viewed society as exist-
ing among the postapocalyptic uins, the Anthropocene apocalypse is
sometimes descibed as a “slow- motion catastrophe” that has been on-
going for decades, centuies, or even millennia. Our own chapter is un-
folding in medias res, and while it may be hard to locate its beginning,
it is similarly dicult to predict its endpoint: rather than envisioning a
sudden ey annihilation, we may have bequeathed a slow, protracted
descent into greater misey and irrelevance to our future generations.
Our current pessimists would argue that T. S. Eliot was ight: our world,
at least, may end “not with a bang but a whimper” (Eliot ).
Leaving such grand considerations aside for now, this nal chapter
will bing our narrative to a close by examining the fomation o the
science, rhetoic, and valuation o our most current version o the ex-
tinction imaginay. It has three concrete tasks to accomplish. e rst
is to document the emergence o the argument that we are currently
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 233
facing a cisis o declining biological diversity as the basis for a signi-
cant scientic movement. While concens about the fate o endangered
species certainly long predated the s, it was duing that decade that
such anxieties cystallized into a broader mandate to preseve the diver-
sity o all life. To put it another way, while past eorts tended to focus
on individual species under threat—and particularly on those to which
humans had some kind o emotional or economic attachment—the
biodiversity movement located its concen with diversity as a value in
itself. is frequently drew on arguments about the interconnectedness
o ecology, the dependence o human society on “ecosystem sevices”
(self- regulating properties o the organic and inorganic biosphere),
the importance o genetic diversity as a source for future evolutionay
potential, and the limitation o human knowledge about consequences
o drastic environmental change such as deforestation and global wam-
ing. In this fomulation, the anathema was not just extinction but mass
extinction—dened as episodes duing which a signicant proportion
o the earth’s species are lost duing a sudden geological inteval, with
perhaps a signicant impact at the higher taxonomic levels as well. is
presented the prospect o long- tem and irreversible ecological and
evolutionay trends.
A major source o infomation and rhetoic for biodiversity propo-
nents came from the paleontological studies o mass extinction that rose
to prominence by the middle o the s, as discussed in the last chap-
ter. e study o extinction in life’s past, it was argued, could be taken as
a model and a waning for understanding the present and predicting the
future, particularly in regard to the ecological dynamics that resulted
from sudden drops in life’s overall diversity. While the resilience o the
biosphere was frequently noted—aer all, life has recovered from the
ve major mass extinctions o the past, and has even increased in over-
all taxonomic diversity—biodiversity champions were quick to point
out that such recoveies oen took place on geological time scales (any-
where from ve to twenty million years, depending on the seveity o
the event) that dwarfed the span o our individual lifetimes and the en-
tirety o human histoy itself. Furthemore, these recoveies, in both
the short and long tem, have been highly unpredictable, and suvival
and success has rarely been guaranteed to those species that fomerly
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
234 CHAPTER SIX
dominated the globe. Human beings, aer all, evolved from a lineage
o small, insignicant mammals who beneted from the extipation o
the dinosaurs.
For this reason, it became rhetoically eective to compare the cur-
rent depletion o diversity to past mass extinctions, and even to predict
that anthropogenic species loss would eventually ival or exceed the
greatest dyings o the past. e second section o this chapter will ex-
amine the development o this rhetoic, along with the scientic basis
for analogizing between past and present mass extinctions. Ultimately,
these arguments led to the fomulation o the widely inuential notion
that we are currently witnessing a “Sixth Mass Extinction,” rst and
most prominently advanced in Wilson’s e Diversity o Life and
subsequently taken up as a rallying cy for consevationists to this day.
While the sixth- extinction concept has proven enomously eective in
galvanizing public attention and concen, it has not been without its
citics—including some o the vey same paleontologists whose studies
o mass extinction became so central to the conceit.
Finally, the chapter will conclude by examining the relationship be-
tween conceptions o biological diversity developed duing the s
and early s and a broader discourse o the value o diversity in the
cultural sphere. By the early s, a movement had emerged cham-
pioning the protection o “biocultural diversity,” in which the poten-
tial extinction o languages and other human cultural traditions was di-
rectly linked—through analogy—to the loss o biological species and
genetic infomation. A central point to make here, though, is that the
valuation o diversity o all kinds—and the threat posed to diversity by
the specter o extinction—is a cultural and scientic co- constuction.
at is to say, while proponents o biocultural diversity drew explicit
analogies between biodiversity and cultural diversity, this relation-
ship was not merely analogical; as this book has argued, it is impossible
to cleanly separate scientic values and beliefs from those circulating
more widely in social, political, and cultural discourse. At least in West-
en society, the strong valuation that has, by our current moment, be-
come attached to the inherent benet o diverse foms o life, language,
ideas, ethnicity, and other cultural foms is the expression o a deeper
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 235
and more unied belie in the inherent value o diversity that exists
pior to any specic disciplinay or cultural context.
From Endangered Species to Biological Diversity
On the nal evening o the BioDiversity Foum, a group o the
meeting’s most prominent participants, including E. O. Wilson, Paul
Ehrlich, omas Lovejoy (director o consevation at the World Wild-
life Fund), and the botanist Peter Raven, convened a “national telecon-
ference” to discuss the challenges facing the consevation o biological
diversity. is event was broadcast live to more than one hundred col-
leges and universities, and was watched by an estimated audience o be-
tween ve and ten thousand viewers. Duing this teleconference, a pas-
sage was read from a statement issued duing the foum by the so- called
Club o Earth—a group o biologists including Wilson, Ehrlich, Raven,
and others—arguing that the current extinction cisis was “a threat to
civilization second only to the threat o themonuclear war,” a comment
reported in several newspaper articles about the meeting. e fact that
this rather dramatic statement was not widely challenged in press ac-
counts testies to the rapid elevation o biodiversity as a broad political
concen—as well as to the signicant escalation in the stakes attached
to consevation—duing the s. Aer all, despite high emotions at-
tached to campaigns to protect endangered species such as the Sibeian
tiger, the Califonia condor, and even the infamous snail darter, nobody
ever claimed that the fate o the human species depended on their sur-
vival.
In tuth, arguments around the presevation o species and ecosys-
tems had taken an important tun beginning in the early s, when
in some quarters attention began to gradually shi from appeals for the
protection o individual chaismatic species, and toward stewardship
o what would eventually be labeled “biological diversity.” As histoi-
ans have pointed out, a landmark moment in the establishment o the
environmental movement in the United States—the passage o the En-
dangered Species Act (ESA) in —built on growing momentum
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
236 CHAPTER SIX
established duing the previous decade and expressed by such highly
visible public statements as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Ehr-
lich’s e Population Bomb. e histoian Mark Barrow, for example,
notes that duing this peiod, “Ameicans grew increasingly uneasy
about myiad threats to their quality o life,” including industial pes-
ticides and wildeness destuction, providing “fertile ground” for pas-
sage o the ESA (Barrow , ). What had previously been typi-
cally expressed as separate, i oen politically aligned, interests—the
protection o endangered species and the presevation o wildeness
and natural environments—became joined, thanks in part to a growing
recognition that human societies depend on natural resources that are
bound together in complex ecological relationships. is is the “conu-
ence o values” Fanham has descibed, which came together “in one
concept that represented the protection o the living components o
the natural world”: the value o diversity. “By the s,” Fanham con-
tends, “the desire to protect all o the natural vaiety present on Earth
was most oen expressed in conjunction with a reminder o all the
benets humans would lose should the diversity o nature be reduced”
(Fanham , ).
is attitude is apparent, for example, in a report commissioned by
the Committee on Science and Policy o the National Academy o Sci-
ences in , published several years later as a book titled Biology and
the Future o Man (). Each chapter was composed by a panel o ex-
perts chaired by a prominent biologist, and the topic “e Diversity o
Life” fell to the evolutionay biologist and systematist Enst Mayr. is
was signicant because Mayr, whose considerable reputation deived in
part from his activities in promoting the so- called Moden Evolution-
ay Synthesis o classical Dawinism with moden population genetics,
gave a distinctly population- oiented spin to the problem o biological
diversity. While he noted that interest in natural diversity may be a
kind o innate human inclination, he highlighted both the importance
o species as “unique genetic system[s],” and the threat o extinction for
reducing available genetic resources for future evolution. Arguing that
“the important point is that the entire biota at any one time is inter-
related and interdependent in an extremely complicated manner,” Mayr
waned that
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 237
man’s technological progress has released forces that lead to our ever ac-
celerating destuction o natural habitats. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, o
species are annihilated each year, species that required hundreds or thou-
sands or millions o years to evolve. ey cannot be replaced. Whenever
man transfoms the landscape for his own puposes, he destroys most o
the native populations, usually causing their replacement by a few species
that thive in man- made environments.
wo years later, an even more sweeping statement about the dan-
gers o unchecked development was articulated by Barbara Ward and
René Dubos in Only One Earth (), a summay o an unocial report
commissioned by the United Nations Conference on the Human Envi-
ronment. Summaizing the views o a distinguished intenational panel
including Konrad Lorenz, Peter Medawar, Margaret Mead, Jan Tinber-
gen, and the explorer or Heyerdahl (o Kon- Tiki fame), Ward and
Dubos waned ominously that “the two worlds o man—the biosphere
o his inheitance, the technosphere o his creation—are out o balance,
indeed potentially in deep conict.” ey argued that humanity stands
at “the hinge o histoy,” facing “a cisis more sudden, more global,
more inescapable, more bewildeing than any ever encountered by the
human species” (Ward and Dubos , ). e nature o this cisis,
they maintained, was the threat o widespread extinction tiggered by
the disturbance o nely balanced ecological systems. While they ac-
knowledged that “interdependence o living things implies a certain sta-
bility,” they nonetheless argued that “behind the interrelationships lies
the isk o unpredictable and sometimes destuctive consequences” that
“can elicit so violent a response that the system may not be capable o
retuning, by itself, to a desirable and stable system” (Ward and Dubos
, ). is isk was presented in the direst possible tems, as threat-
ening not only the natural environments that humans depend on but
the vey future o humanity itself: “I man continues to let his behavior
be dominated by separation, antagonism, and greed, he will ultimately
destroy the delicate balances o his planetay environment. And i they
were once destroyed, there would be no more life for him” (Ward and
Dubos , ).
As these examples demonstrate, the notion that biological diver-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
238 CHAPTER SIX
sity and ecological balance are vital resources for human civilization—
and are perhaps even essential to the continued suvival o the human
species—was well established long before the biodiversity movement
o the s and beyond took shape. Given its histoical proximity to
other anxieties discussed in this book—the threat o nuclear war, the
pollution o the environment, ovepopulation, and famine—concen
for the presevation o biological diversity should be considered a cen-
tral part o Cold War extinction discourse, thoroughly intertwined with
these other fears. At the same time, however, discussions o biological
diversity presented an interesting new winkle, which manifested as a
tension between anthropocentic concen for diversity as a source o
essential resources and a broader ethical mandate to value the com-
plexity o the natural world for its own sake. is tension has never been
resolved—indeed, it is one o the central features, and perhaps contra-
dictions, o the current Anthropocene concept—but it would contib-
ute substantially to the evolution o what would become the biodiver-
sity movement.
In its basic fomulation, the “resource” argument for maintaining
biological diversity has changed remarkably little over more than forty
years. Whether understood concretely as tangible mateial resources—
food products, medicines, economic goods—or more abstractly as “in-
fomation”—for example, genetic infomation—the “utilitaian” value
o biological diversity has tended to take the spotlight. is notion was
enshined in the justication for the Endangered Species Act,
which argued that, “from the most narrow possible point o view, it is
in the best interests o mankind to minimize the losses o genetic vaia-
tions [whose value is] quite literally, incalculable [as] keys to puzzles
which we cannot solve, and [which] may provide answers to questions
which we have not yet leaned to ask” (Congressional Research Sevice
, ). More recently, the notion o biological diversity as an im-
portant contibutor to “ecosystems resources” has been articulated to
descibe the value o even the most humble species (such as bacteia,
algae, insects, and the like) to feedback mechanisms that regulate the
earth’s water, soil, and atmosphere, on which humans depend.
But from the vey start, some consevation- minded biologists ac-
tively opposed anthropocentic- minded justications for preseving
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 239
diversity, arguing that such a perspective seved only to pepetuate at-
titudes that had brought the cisis on. One o the most prominent cit-
ics o anthropocentism was the Rutgers University biologist David
Ehrenfeld, a leader o the consevation biology movement duing the
s, who made waves with his book e Arrogance o Human-
ism, which citicized what he called “the core o the religion o human-
ism: a supreme faith in human reason—its ability to confront and solve
the many problems that humans face, its ability to rearrange both the
world o Nature and the aairs o men and women so that human life
will prosper” (Ehrenfeld , ). While this later book captured wider
public attention, Ehrenfeld’s rst foray into the topic, his Conserv-
ing Life on Earth, helped set many o the tems for subsequent debate.
In a stiking analogy, Ehrenfeld descibed the attempt to convince the
public to value the diversity o life on earth as being akin to “advertis-
ing color television on black and white screens,” since “one can assert,
persuasively, how beautiful and ich the colors are, but acceptance o
the idea is still an act o faith on the part o the inexpeienced audi-
ence” (Ehrenfeld , xii). Dismissing traditional consevation eorts
to preseve individual species as “elitist” and “pastoral,” he argued in-
stead for an ethic that was “holistic,” acknowledging “both the com-
plexity o ecological relationships and the high degree o connectedness
binding together the biological world, the atmosphere, the surface o
the earth, the fresh and salt waters, and the artifacts o human civiliza-
tion” (Ehrenfeld , ).
Above all, Ehrenfeld argued, the “beast” or “central problem” facing
humanity was “the loss o irreplaceable diversity,” which he descibed
as “outight the, since once species have been obliterated they can-
not be reconstituted” (Ehrenfeld , ). Indeed, Conserving Life on
Earth was noteworthy for providing one o the rst instances in pint
o the tem “biological diversity,” which Ehrenfeld descibed as “one o
the main themes o this book” (Ehrenfeld , ). While he stressed
that the concept was “naturally based in large measure upon the num-
ber o species in a given community,” Ehrenfeld also acknowledged the
importance o genetic diversity, protection o which was “a matter o re-
taining the maximum number o options for the future,” or the mainte-
nance o “irreplaceable biological ‘infomation’” (Ehrenfeld , ).
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
240 CHAPTER SIX
On this basis, he argued, the “great tragedy o the Green Revolution”—
that is, o the agicultural initiatives duing the late s and s that
saw particular, robust strains o wheat, ice, con (maize), and other
crops established in Afica, Latin Ameica, South Asia, and other areas
o famine and ovepopulation, and which were widely credited with
staving o the dire scenaios predicted in Ehrlich’s Population Bomb—
“is that it tends to destroy the vey diversity that the world needs to sur-
vive and prosper” (Ehrenfeld , ). To Ehrenfeld, the unintended
consequences o intevening in nature were stark. In attempting to ad-
dress one problem, well- intentioned planners had introduced another,
perhaps more severe: “the spread o a deadly agicultural unifomity.”
For this reason, Ehrenfeld resisted the temptation to assign value
to nature as “resources,” which he believed implied an “extractive” re-
lationship towards nature (Ehrenfeld , –). is argument ac-
quired even more force several years later with the publication o
e Arrogance o Humanism, where Ehrenfeld citicized “the human-
istic world” for accepting consevation eorts “only piecemeal and
at a pice, [demanding a] logical, practical reason for saving each and
evey part o the natural world that we wish to preseve” (Ehrenfeld
, ). Whereas his earlier appeal pointed to the tangible ham o
such practices in establishing agicultural monocultures, Ehrenfeld
now made the case for a new philosophy or ethic to guide conseva-
tion. is “consevative” value—by which he adamantly did not mean
the kind o consevatism nomally associated with ight- leaning politi-
cal ideology—would explicitly oppose the “exploitative relationship
with Nature” oen found in Westen culture, since the presevation o
“non- resource” species was “oen motivated by a deeply consevative
feeling o distust o irrevocable change and by a socially atypical atti-
tude o respect for the components and stucture o the natural world”
(Ehrenfeld , ). Acknowledging that this view would stike many
as being “non- rational,” Ehrenfeld argued that a new “value” had to be
constucted around the consevation o diversity. I for no other rea-
son, it should have been apparent that species loss caried “a hidden
and unknowable isk o seious damage to humans and their civiliza-
tions,” and that biological diversity must be preseved “because we do
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 241
not know the aspects o that diversity upon which our long- tem sur-
vival depends” (Ehrenfeld , –).
ese arguments about the valuation o natural biological diver-
sity would have an important inuence on the emergence o the eld
o “consevation biology” duing the s, a movement with which
Ehrenfeld was closely associated, seving as the founding editor o the
jounal for the Society o Consevation Biology in (Soulé ,
–). ey also had fairly immediate policy impact as well. As a by-
product o the process that led to the establishment o the US Envi-
ronmental Protection Agency by Richard Nixon in , the Commit-
tee on Environmental Quality was established to report annually to
the oce o the president to assess and coordinate environmental and
policy initiatives across federal agencies. In , this annual report was
presented to President Jimmy Carter, who ocially submitted it to the
US Congress with a short prefatoy letter. While noting that signicant
progress had been made over the previous decade in controlling air
and water pollution and encouraging altenative or more ecient use
o energy resources, Carter’s letter also sounded an alam: despite en-
couraging evidence that the United States, at least, was moving towards
sustainability, “there are also undeniable signs that in many other parts
o the world the Earth’s carying capacity—the ability o biological sys-
tems to meet human needs—is being threatened by human activities”
(Carter , iii). I allowed to proceed unchecked, the letter continued,
as many as “ percent o all species o plants and animals on Earth,
could disappear by the year ,” a trend that could lead to “seious
food scarcities” in many o the “poor nations o the world.” e letter
concluded, “We can no longer assume as we could in the past that the
Earth will heal and renew itsel indenitely,” since “humankind is now
a potent force on the face o the planet. . . . e quality o human exis-
tence in the future will rest on careful stewardship and husbandy o the
Earth’s resources” (Carter , iv).
While the report summaized initiatives and pioities across a wide
vaiety o topics in economics, energy and natural resource manage-
ment, land use, air and water quality, and environmental health, its rst
two chapters focused squarely on biological diversity. e rst chap-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
242 CHAPTER SIX
ter, “e Global Environment,” began with a waning that “a decline in
the earth’s carying capacity” threatened resources “essential for human
suvival” such that the “capacity to support people is being irrevers-
ibly reduced.” ese included “essential” resources like water, sh, and
timber, but also “hundreds o thousands o irreplaceable plant and ani-
mal species,” especially in tropical forests (Council on Environmental
Quality , ). e second chapter, “Ecology and Living Resources:
Biological Diversity,” highlighted the problem o extinction and the
erosion o biological diversity in even starker tems. Noting that it is
dicult to estimate current rates o extinction because many threat-
ened species have likely never been identied and classied, the report
waned o the possibility “that one to three extinctions are now occur-
ing daily and that the rate will increase to one per hour by the late
s,” resulting in a possible loss o as many as one million o the esti-
mated “– million species in existence worldwide . . . within our life-
times.” Such an event “would be unprecedented in the last million
years or, conceivably, since the beginning o life on this planet” (Council
on Environmental Quality , ).
Framing the scope o this extinction problem with a rhetoical ques
-
tion, the report then asked why, “in a world lled with pressing prob-
lems . . . the loss o a million species should be considered an unparal-
leled tragedy.” e “basic answer” it immediately supplied was “that by
reducing biological diversity, humanity is squandeing its greatest natu-
ral resource, on which we depend for food, oxygen, clean water, energy,
building mateials, clothes, medicines, psychological well- being, and
countless other benets” (Council on Environmental Quality ,
). In the rst instance, the value o biological diversity was presented
squarely in tems o the language o resource: the “mateial value” o
new sources o food, natural agicultural pest controls, untapped bio-
logical energy sources, chemicals and other raw mateials, and o
course phamaceutical products. As the report put it, “In natural bio-
logical diversity, humankind has vaied, innitely renewable supplies
o food, energy, industial chemicals, and medicines” (Council on En-
vironmental Quality , ). e report also stressed that these re-
sources were not just mateial but also genetic, arguing that since “each
species in a community is a unique genetic solution to a combination o
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 243
environmental challenges,” genetic diversity “maximizes the likelihood
that at least some individuals o a species will withstand environmental
change” (Council on Environmental Quality , ).
At the same time, however, the report also stressed reasons for pre-
seving biological diversity that did not depend on mateial or eco-
nomic considerations. Beyond an “ancient kinship” that humans feel
with the natural world because o our shared evolutionay ancesty, the
report cited philosophical, religious, and aesthetic arguments for pre-
seving all living things, singling out Ehrenfeld’s citicism o the limited
persuasiveness o utilitaian arguments for particular mention (Council
on Environmental Quality , ). Ultimately, the authors concluded
that whatever the rationale, the best argument for protecting diversity
is our own ignorance: since “our wisest contemporaies are those will-
ing to admit the enomity o what is not yet known,” any potential “dis-
covey o the utilitaian values o the vast majoity o species will lie in
the future, i humankind allows them a future.” In an echo o Ehren-
feld’s citique o the unintended consequences o the Green Revolution,
the report illustrated its case with examples o the ham caused by un-
stable monocultures introduced to address immediate problems, from
the Iish potato famine o the nineteenth centuy to the recent intro-
duction o hybid ice strains in the Philippines. Given the importance
o “genetic resevoirs to respond to uctuating weather and rapidly
evolving crop pathogens,” the report’s authors noted with wy irony
the tendency for “moden agiculture . . . to kill the goose that lays the
golden eggs” (Council on Environmental Quality , ).
It is worth pausing for just a moment to recognize the remarkable
speed with which a notion that had been fomally named perhaps barely
a decade earlier had not only achieved a central place in a major US gov-
enment report, but also had acquired a status o importance on par with
other great global threats such as nuclear war, energy cisis, and pollu-
tion as a matter o pressing danger to humanity. It is tue, as Fanham
and others have noted, that previous consevation eorts, including the
passage o the ESA, “opened the door” for interest in biodiversity, but
that histoy alone does not explain the astonishing success that biologi-
cal diversity had as a focus o scientic and political concen (Fanham
, ). To adequately account for this transfomation requires, as
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
244 CHAPTER SIX
this book has argued, seeing concens about biological diversity not just
as a part o a histoy o consevation and environmental awareness, but
against the broader backdrop o apocalyptic twentieth- centuy anxieties
o all kinds, including fascination—both cultural and scientic—with
catastrophic mass extinctions o the past and potential future.
“74 Species per Day”:
The Making of a Biodiversity Crisis
is last point suggests a question: I we grant that a “conuence o
values” saw ecological theoy, environmental activism, and political will
coalesce successfully at a particular moment in histoy— is a con-
venient date to locate this nexus—how did these environmental and
biological concens become central to the broader extinction imaginay
developing at the time? In other words, what accounts for the ability o
scientists to make—and jounalists to uncitically report—a statement
arguing that biological diversity loss is “a threat to civilization second
only to the threat o themonuclear war” only a few years later, and for
the public and govenment organizations alike to take this seiously?
e vey simple answer is numbers—but, as it tuns out, the num-
bers are anything but simple. is point hinges on a matter both tech-
nical and rhetoical. From the technical standpoint, in order to dem-
onstrate that a “mass extinction” is currently taking place, or is at least
approaching, biologists needed some kind o quantitative metic to
compare current biodiversity losses with the great episodes o mass
extinction in the geological past. Helpfully, by the early s paleon-
tologists had provided some rough estimates (descibed in the previous
chapter) o the percentage o families, genera, and species lost duing
the major extinction events at the end o the Pemian, at the bounday
between the Cretaceous and Tertiay (when the dinosaurs died out),
and in other episodes o heightened extinction. As part o these studies,
paleontologists had also attempted to calculate the nomal “back-
ground” rate o extinction duing peiods o relative calm as a baseline
against which to compare and identify mass extinctions. Furthemore,
by the mid s several paleontological studies—most prominently
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 245
by Dave Raup and David Jablonski—examined the ecological and envi-
ronmental consequences o past mass extinctions, detemining, for ex-
ample, the selective “ules” that apply following extinction events and
the dynamics o ecological recovey in their aemath. ough their
authors were careful to acknowledge the great many uncertainties that
factored into these estimates, such studies were oen used to extrapo-
late to current biodiversity losses and their potential consequences. In-
deed, paleontological evidence became a central pillar o the biodiver-
sity movement as it evolved duing the s and s.
From a rhetoical perspective, consevation advocates immediately
realized the eectiveness o compaisons between the current biologi-
cal diversity cisis and mass extinctions o the geological past. Ehren-
feld, for example, had argued in Conserving Life on Earth that “the
current rate o extinction among most groups o mammals is approxi-
mately a thousand times greater than in the late Pleistocene, a geological
epoch distinguished by a ‘high’ extinction rate” (Ehrenfeld , ).
Likewise, the Environmental Quality report o had concluded that
potential species losses could reach percent by the year , a scale
“unprecedented in the last million years” (or, in other words, since
the extinction o the dinosaurs; Council on Environmental Quality ,
). And in his popular book e Sinking Ark, the biologist and en-
vironmental activist Noman Myers provided even more dramatic esti-
mates, arguing that the next twenty- ve years could see the extinction
rate grow to forty thousand species per year, which “would amount to
a biological débâcle greater than all mass extinctions o the geological
past put together” (Myers , ). Such rhetoic proved enomously
eective in attracting attention from the public and policy makers alike,
and beneted greatly from the contemporay popular interest in mass
extinction studies by Walter Alvarez and others. Over the next decade
and more, these gures would in many ways come to dene the bio-
diversity cisis itself. In his popular treatment e Diversity o Life,
Wilson famously argued that a “cautious” estimate, “selected in a biased
manner to draw a maximally optimistic conclusion, is the number o
species doomed each year is ,. Each day it is , and each hour ”
(Wilson , ). Or, as he had put it a few years earlier in his opening
keynote to the BioDiversity Foum, “e current reduction o diversity
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
246 CHAPTER SIX
seems destined to approach that o the great natural catastrophes at the
end o the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras—in other words, the most ex-
treme in the past million years” (Wilson , –).
From this perspective, the claim that the biodiversity cisis ivals
even the threat o nuclear war hardly seems excessive. Depending on
how many species are estimated to currently exist, it might take only
years for current extinction rates to reach percent or more o all
life, and, as Jack Sepkoski calculated in a article, “only years to
eliminate percent,” a gure matching what is believed to have been
the greatest o all mass extinctions at the end o the Pemian (Sepkoski
, ). It is indeed dicult to imagine the biosphere’s recovey from
such an event, much less the suvival o human civilization.
e problem is that these gures were based on what were at best
educated guesses about the number o currently existing species, the
current rate o extinction, and extinction rates in the geological past. It
should be emphasized here that I am in no way challenging the notion
that biodiversity losses are signicant, or that humanity faces a genu-
ine cisis: whether it is one hundred, one thousand, or twenty- seven
thousand species lost per year, it is still too many, and human beings
bear the ovewhelming responsibility for binging on this state o af-
fairs. What interests me as a histoian, however—and what makes this
issue particularly instuctive for our broader suvey o the histoy o ex-
tinction imaginaies—is the way that these gures and estimates found
such a central place in political and scientic discussions o extinction,
and how they reect the longer histoy o anxieties about the future o
humanity. As we will recall from the previous chapters’ discussions o
the threats posed by nuclear war, population explosion, nuclear win-
ter, and other projected calamities, numbers and gures have been an
essential component in creating broad acknowledgement, concen, and
concrete action in relation to existential threats to humanity. Duing the
s and s, for example, it was publication o stark facts and statis-
tics about projected human casualties in a full- scale themonuclear ex-
change that put a pin in optimistic claims for a “winnable” nuclear war,
leading to politicians’ embrace o a policy o nuclear deterrence. Like-
wise, the calculations o Sagan, Ehrlich, and others about the extensive
aereects o a nuclear winter had a signicant inuence on eorts to
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 247
deescalate tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union
that ultimately led to the end o the Cold War.
e use o quantitative estimates o species loss, then, should be
viewed as a further example o the power o statistics to convince the
public to take heed and action in the face o events that might other-
wise seem beyond the control o individuals or outside o the scope o
human lifetimes. Statistics have long been a key weapon in scientists’
arsenal for inuencing popular opinion; this is simply a feature o mod-
en science. At the same time, statistical analyses tend to “black box”
the phenomena they descibe, oen making them inaccessible to citi-
cism or intepretation by members o the public or even other scientists
who do not have access to the data or techniques relied on to produce
them. A further aspect o black- boxing is that debate and discussion
o contentious positions oen takes place outside public view. Even i
interested lay readers and policy makers theoretically have access to
technical scientic jounal articles, cucial debate can take place in cor-
respondence between scientists, in infomal discussions at meetings,
and duing the condential peer review process. All o these factors
contibuted to the constuction o the “biodiversity cisis.”
In pointing this out, however, I do not mean to suggest that the
biodiversity cisis is an example o unusual scientic practice or, more
woryingly, a case o the improper imposition o “subjective” values
onto science. In the rst place—as this book has maintained from the
vey start—scientic arguments are never free from the values o the
individuals and cultures in which they are framed. e notion o sepa-
rate “scientic” and “cultural” spheres is, in my opinion, a misunder-
standing o how science works. Science is part o culture, and while
scientists employ tools, methodologies, and standards o evidence that
are oen dierent from other cultural productions (art or politics, for
example), science is nonetheless a human production, and scientists are
members o societies. One need only consider examples from the rst
two chapters o this book—concening ideas about race or impeialism,
for instance—to bear this out.
e false dichotomy between science and culture has unfortunately
sometimes characteized commentay on the biodiversity movement.
In his largely infomative and instuctive book e Idea o Biodi-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
248 CHAPTER SIX
versity, the science studies scholar David Takacs makes the claim that
“it is dicult to distinguish biodiversity, a socially constucted idea,
from biodiversity, some concrete phenomenon,” since scientists’ “fac-
tual, political, emotional, aesthetic, ethical, and spiitual feelings are
embodied in the concept o biodiversity” (Takacs , xv, ). So far so
good, though I would argue that in this respect biodiversity is no dif-
ferent from most other scientic topics. But where Takacs’s argument
takes a wrong tun is in its further claim that “in so doing, scientists
jeopardize the social tust that allows them to speak for nature in the
rst place”:
In the tem biodiversity, subjective preferences are packaged with hard
facts. . . . Biodiversity shines with the gloss o scientic respectability,
while undeneath it is kaleidoscopic and all- encompassing: we can nd
in it what we want, and can justify many courses o action in its name
(Takacs , , ).
is view is problematic on two counts. Not only does it establish a false
dichotomy between “subjective” and “objective” views o scientists, but
it also mischaracteizes the debate itsel as being far more nebulous
than it actually was.
A scientist may well have personal reasons for pursuing a particular
topic. A researcher in oncology may have lost a parent to cancer at an
early age, or a Jewish physicist might have joined the Manhattan Project
because she narrowly escaped persecution in Nazi Gemany. ese mo-
tivations may properly be considered subjective, but they are hardly
deteminative o the science produced. Closer to our case, virtually all
researchers in natural histoy disciplines (e.g., botany, zoology, paleon-
tology) report having been fascinated with, and even spiitually moved
by, the beauty and complexity o nature from an early age. is does
not mean, however, that these scientists are necessaily compelled—
consciously or unconsciously—to misrepresent the data or analysis o
their subjects, or to attempt to mislead the public or their colleagues
about their ndings. ey may—and oen do—take up advocacy posi-
tions based on a combination o their scientic expertise and their per-
sonal values, but again this is hardly unusual. Prominent examples can
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 249
be seen in virtually all scientic elds, from physics to biology, over the
past two hundred years o professionalized science.
Takacs’s argument about the biodiversity movement is based largely
on the fact that, in his comprehensive suvey o published literature and
inteviews with dozens o prominent biodiversity advocates (including
Wilson, Ehrlich, and others discussed here), he discovered that deni-
tions o what biodiversity is and how it should be valued vaied quite
widely. In identifying at least twenty- three such fomulations o bio-
diversity, Takacs came to suspect that not only do scientists disagree
about how biological diversity should be understood, but their deni-
tions collectively encompassed such a range o features and values that
the concept is rendered essentially meaningless: “Biodiversity’s eco-
logical value, therefore, looms inexpressively large, virtually unknown,
but incalculably important” (Takacs , ). In other words, not
only do biologists fail to agree on a basic denition for biodiversity, but
they themselves are unable to articulate their own individual concep-
tions coherently and concretely, or to separate their personal values
from their empiical conclusions.
But a central problem with this analysis is that Takacs has chosen to
interrogate a nebulous concept to begin with. It is noteworthy that his
book is titled e Idea o Biodiversity rather than e Science o Biodiver-
sity or e Politics o Biodiversity. I suspect that one would encounter
vey similar disagreement, contradiction, and mixture o personal and
collective values i one were to suvey scientists for a study o “the idea
o evolution” or “the idea o cosmology.” e point is that i we set out
by dening our categoies in a way that does not distinguish between
philosophical, personal, political, and empiical values and beliefs,
we should not be supised i we cannot disentangle them in our re-
sults. is is, in many ways, the approach the book you are reading has
taken; it might well have been titled e Idea o Extinction, since it ex-
plicitly and intentionally seeks to understand the ways in which scien-
tic discussions have been imbicated with cultural, political, and per-
sonal values. e dierence, o course, is that I see this entanglement as
essential to understanding how science works, rather than as a corup-
tion o something that ought to be “pure.”
In point o fact, biodiversity proponents were quite consistent about
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
250 CHAPTER SIX
what biological diversity is, and about the threat its loss poses for the
future. Central to the understanding o biological diversity as an em-
piical phenomenon and a resource—in literature from the early s
through the s and beyond—is the perspective that ecology is an
inticately interconnected system; that natural diversity, whether eco-
logical or genetic, provides both resilience against sudden change and
potential for future adaptation and evolution; and o course that mass
extinctions, though part o life’s natural order, have unpredictable and
irrevocable consequences. is is not only a perfectly concrete and con-
sistent conceptual stance; as this book has demonstrated, it is also the
direct product o specic, contingent histoical developments in the
study o biology and paleontology. Furthemore, as this chapter will
show, the measurement and assessment o the threat o biodiversity loss
also followed a vey consistent path: biodiversity loss is understood to
be calculated by estimating the number o species extinctions in a given
peiod (a day, a year, etc.) in relation to the number o species in exis-
tence, and the magnitude o the problem is calculated by compaing
current rates o extinction to those in the geological past.
Quite importantly, most o the proponents o biodiversity conseva-
tion agreed both about the general estimate o current species extinc-
tion and about the potential for the cisis to escalate to levels approach-
ing those o mass extinctions o the past. Disagreement, such as it was,
came from disputes about the empiical basis for extinction projections
owing to the poor state o existing taxonomic knowledge, especially for
terrestial invertebrates and plants in tropical environments. Duing the
s the generally accepted gure was that about . million species
o plants and animals had been identied, but it was widely acknowl-
edged that this number dramatically underestimated the tue number
o species alive—perhaps by one or more orders o magnitude. While
consevative estimates placed the real gure at between three and ve
million species, many naturalists suspected that the number could be
far higher, but at least ten million. For example, in his inuential e
Sinking Ark, Noman Myers based his projections o biological diver
-
sity loss on a gure o between ve and ten million extant species, ar-
guing that current extinction rates are at least one species per day. He
predicted that this alone would be sucient to alter “basic processes o
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 251
evolution,” but that the real danger lay in the escalating rate o species
depletion, particularly through tropical deforestation (Myers , ix).
Myers acknowledged that his calculations—remember, he believed
that the rate could ultimately climb to forty thousand per year—were
based on a “guesstimate,” but he waned that “any reduction in the di-
versity o resources, including the earth’s spectum o species, narrows
society’s scope to respond to new problems and opportunities,” and
that “the result will be a grossly impoveished version o life’s diversity
on earth, from which the process o evolution will be unlikely to re-
cover for many millions o years.” Ultimately, he predicted, “humanity
might be destroying life that might just save its own” (Myers , ).
Although he never held a university professorship or similar posi-
tion o institutional secuity, Myers became one o the most prominent
and widely- cited gures in the unfolding biodiversity movement. Bon
in England, he spent his much o his early adulthood in Kenya, where
he developed a love o natural diversity and a concen for threatened
species and environments. Aer receiving a PhD in biology from Berke
-
ley, he spent the rest o his career in a vaiety o short- tem, oen grant-
funded positions, conducting ecological suveys and consulting on
consevation projects for a vaiety o intenational agencies and foun-
dations, including the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF); the Intena-
tional Union for Consevation o Nature (IUCN); the World Bank; and
the national academies o the United States, the Soviet Union, and Swe-
den, as well as a plethora o initiatives and agencies sponsored by the
US govenment and the United Nations. By the early s he descibed
himsel as a “consultant in environment and development,” presenting
himsel as an expert in topics including tropical foresty, human popu-
lation expansion, energy resources, sheies, land- use planning, and o
course the economics and policy signicance o biological diversity.
Despite his hectic life (in an undated CV from the mid- s, he re-
ported having worked on “more than assignments in - plus coun-
ties” since alone), Myers was also a prolic author o popular
books, essays, and scientic articles. Over his long publication career he
authored or edited more than twenty books and nearly three hundred
articles; duing the s, especially, he established himsel as a widely
cited expert on biological diversity issues. Along with Wilson and Ehr-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
252 CHAPTER SIX
lich, Myers was one o the key gures in drawing both public and po-
litical attention to the biodiversity cisis, and e Sinking Ark is widely
considered to have had a fomative impact on the consevation biology
and biodiversity initiatives o the s. Yet he always viewed himsel
as something o an outsider, and in numerous letters to Wilson duing
the s and s he expressed anxiety about his lack o a stable posi-
tion and source o funding for his research. Nonetheless, he and Wilson
developed a wam (though somewhat asymmetical) fiendship, with
Wilson frequently depending on Myers’s wide- ranging consevation ex-
peience, and Myers on Wilson’s contacts and clout in secuing visiting
lectureships and awards.
is relationship began in eanest in , when Myers wrote Wil-
son to seek “advice and assistance” duing the planning stages for e
Sinking Ark. In particular, he wanted Wilson’s views about the esti-
mated number o species in existence, which he suspected might num-
ber more than ten million. Aer the book’s publication, Wilson ar-
ranged for Myers to visit Havard (where Wilson spent his entire career,
from to ), and the two began a regular correspondence. Re-
calling their rst meeting several years later, Wilson remarked that he
would “always recall the evening you lectured at Havard, almost a lone
voice on the extinction problem, to an audience o perhaps people,”
while “the rest o the university was o ogling that useless fool the Dalai
Lama,” adding that “what you had to say was far more important than
anything His Holiness could say” (Wilson to Myers, July , ). Wil-
son also frequently acknowledged the importance o Myers’s work for
his own campaign for biodiversity. In he infomed Myers that his
“s prophesy” (a short essay published in Harvard Magazine) “is
based on your important book e Sinking Ark.” A decade later, he told
Myers he was “the most quoted author in DOL [Wilson’s e Diversity
o Life, which was then in the prepublication stage],” and assured him,
“Your contibutions will be showcased in this book” (Wilson to Myers,
December , ). Wilson was indeed generous in crediting Myers’s
contibutions throughout his own publications on biodiversity, and
in arranging for opportunities for Myers to present his views—for in-
stance, by giving him a prominent spot at the BioDiversity Foum.
Another central early inuence on the biodiversity movement was
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 253
Paul Ehrlich, with whom Wilson had an equally close fiendship, al-
though one closer to a relationship o equals. Ehrlich, like Wilson, spent
his entire career at an elite university (Stanford), where, like Wilson,
he collected accolades, awards, and an endowed professorship while
also witing (with his wife, the biologist Anne Ehrlich) a number o
best- selling popular books. We have already discussed Ehrlich’s role in
sounding the alam about global ovepopulation and in developing the
nuclear winter hypothesis, but at the same time he was also closely in-
volved in raising awareness about the biological diversity cisis. Indeed,
for Ehrlich these two issues were closely related. In , he and Anne
published a popular book vey similar to Myers’s Sinking Ark, titled Ex-
tinction: e Causes and Consequences o the Disappearance o Species. At
Ehrlich’s request, Wilson provided an eusive advance blurb, remark-
ing, “Extinction is likely to be one o the most signicant books o the
s, because it compellingly descibes a phenomenon that may out-
rank even nuclear weapony as the most profound long- tem problem
o mankind.” In a pivate note to Charlotte Mayerson, a Random House
marketing executive, Wilson commented, “You will be doing a major
public sevice i you can tun the Ehrlichs’ book into a best seller” (Wil-
son to Mayerson, Febuay , ).
Extinction opened with a stiking metaphor that would be repeated
oen in subsequent public appeals about biodiversity. Imagine, the Ehr-
lichs asked, that a passenger jetliner were to lose a ivet from its wing.
One or two missing pieces wouldn’t aect the integity o the plane,
but at a certain threshold the entire stucture would collapse, sending
all o the passengers to their deaths. is was similar to the problem o
species extinctions, they argued: “A dozen ivets, or a dozen species,
might never be missed. On the other hand, a thirteenth ivet popped
from a wing ap, or the extinction o a key species involved in the
cycling o nitrogen, could lead to a seious accident” (Ehrlich , xii–
xiii). is “ivet- popping” metaphor came to signify a central plank o
the biodiversity campaign: that small changes can have dramatic eects.
(Similarly, Ehrenfeld had once likened this phenomenon to a grain o
sand added to a gearbox.)
Another feature o the Ehrlichs’ argument was an explicit compai-
son between current species extinctions and those o the geological
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
254 CHAPTER SIX
past. While they certainly employed this compaison for rhetoical pur-
poses, they also used it to make substantive point: not only might the
current mass extinction be as severe as past geological events in quan-
titative tems, but it might have even more seious evolutionay conse-
quences. While mass extinctions o the past had indeed removed sub-
stantial portions o the earth’s existing diversity, they nonetheless also
le sucient genetic and ecological resources for diversication to re-
cover and thive. e Ehrlichs argued, however:
Extinctions that are occuring today and that can be expected in the
future are likely to have much more seious consequences than those o
the distant past. First o all, unless action is taken, contemporay extinc-
tions seem certain to delete a far greater proportion o the world’s store o
biological diversity than did earlier extinctions [largely because they are
taxonomically more widespread, whereas previous extinctions tended to
dierentially impact a smaller number o higher taxa]. Furthemore, the
same human activities that are causing extinctions today are also begin-
ning to shut down the process by which diversity could be regenerated.
Entire new groups o organisms are unlikely to evolve as replacements for
those lost i Earth’s ora and fauna are decimated now (Ehrlich , ).
is last argument addressed one o the features o mass extinctions
in the geological past discussed in the last chapter: the sense in which
mass extinctions are, as Raup, Jablonski, Sepkoski, and other paleon-
tologists stressed, “constuctive” as well as “destuctive” events from
an evolutionay perspective. at constuctive aspect can only act on
environments that continue to be physically hospitable to life, and on
ecosystems that retain sucient genetic diversity for natural selection
to produce new adaptations for changed conditions. e signicant cur-
rent extinction o plants, for example—which had come through rela-
tively unscathed in previous extinction events—was particularly wor-
isome, since this suggested a potential breakdown o chemical and
energy cycles on which all life depended.
Regarding the values attached to biological diversity itself, the Ehr-
lichs rehearsed arguments that were by now becoming familiar. Genetic
vaiability was descibed as a source o resistance to extinction in the
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 255
face o environmental change, while ecological diversity was descibed
as “an enomous organic ‘libray’ from which humanity has already
drawn a vast array o useful substances” (Ehrlich , ). Here the
Ehrlichs made it clear that, unlike Ehrenfeld, they regarded utilitaian
arguments as being most compelling for protecting biological diver-
sity. While they acknowledged that valid reasons for valuing diversity
included “simple compassion” or “beauty, symbolic value, or intinsic
interests,” they highlighted as “the most important o all the arguments”
the fact that “other species are living components o vital ecological
systems (ecosystems) which provide humanity with indispensable free
sevices—sevices whose substantial disuption would lead inevitably
to a collapse o civilization” (Ehrlich , ). Indeed, throughout the
early biodiversity campaign, Paul Ehrlich would be one o the most out-
spoken champions o the “ecosystem sevices” argument, a notion he
and Anne had rst promoted as early as in their textbook Popula-
tion, Resources, Environment (Ehrlich and Ehrlich , ).
Ehrlich’s unabashedly anthropocentic view was not, however, the
only important perspective in the emerging biodiversity movement.
In , the broad- spectum biological magazine Bioscience featured
a special issue titled “e Biological Diversity Cisis,” with articles by
a number o biologists and ecologists including Wilson and Michael
Soulé. Soulé, who would be instumental the next year in establishing
the Society o Consevation Biology and its agship jounal Conserva-
tion Biology, took the opportunity to use his article “What is Conseva-
tion Biology?” to promote the new subdiscipline as “a new stage in the
application o science to consevation problems” that “addresses the
biology o species, communities, and ecosystems that are perturbed,
either directly, by human activities or other agents.” Stressing that “its
goal is to provide pinciples and tools for preseving biological diver-
sity,” he argued that “it is oen a cisis discipline,” meaning that “one
must oen act before knowing all the facts; cisis disciplines are thus a
mixture o science and art, and their pursuit requires intuition as well
as infomation” (Soulé , ).
One o Soulé’s central arguments was that, unlike “natural resource
elds” that deal with the economics and other practical aspects o envi-
ronmental regulation and policy, consevation biology is not pimaily
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
256 CHAPTER SIX
concened with “utilitaian, economic objectives” or with preseving
only “a small number o particularly valuable target species” (Soulé
, ). Rather, he urged, the eld should take a “holistic” view to
preseving all foms o life. is he justied by presenting two sets o
“postulates,” which he divided between “functional” and “nomative”
considerations. In the rst case, Soulé emphasized “evolutionay” fea-
tures o ecosystems, which stressed the ecological interdependence o
species on one another as a bulwark against extinction: issues o “scale”
or thresholds above and below which ecological processes “become
discontinuous, chaotic, or suspended”; and “population phenomena,”
such as the inuence o natural selection, genetic di, and population
size on ecological stability (Soulé , –).
e second set o “nomative” postulates were essentially expres-
sions o the values that Soulé believed inevitably followed from the
functional ones, the rst being that “diversity o organisms is good.” Per-
haps supisingly, he explained that “such a statement cannot be tested
or proven,” but that it may reect some deeper human instinct to “enjoy
vaiety” (Soulé , ). Soulé’s postulates were not intended to be
arguments based on empiical evidence or logical deduction. Rather,
like the postulates o Euclidean geomety, they were claims understood
to be self- evidently tue, foming the starting point for further argu-
mentation. A “corollay” o the inherent value o diversity was, accord-
ing to Soulé, that “the untimely extinction o populations is bad,” al-
though he was quick to note that “consevation biology does not abhor
extinction per se,” since in its “natural” fom “it is part o the process o
replacing less well- adapted gene pools with better- adapted ones.” e
essential point, though, was that “natural” extinctions (Soulé seems not
to have been troubled by the vagueness o this tem), understood to be
rare events, did not reduce biological diversity, since they were “oset
by speciation.” It was only when they took place in “catastrophic” fash-
ion, as in the current biological diversity cisis, that they upset the natu-
ral ecological balance.
A citic might point out that in dening the values o biological di-
versity as self- evident “postulates” while justifying them with reference
to so- called natural processes like natural selection and evolution, Soulé
was tying to have his cake and eat it too. at is to say, he was attempt-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 257
ing to ground the value o biological diversity in basic pinciples o evo-
lution and ecology (the “functional” postulates), while simultaneously
implying that they were intinsic and needed no pior justication. In
any event, he dened several additional postulates, including the asser-
tion that “ecological complexity is good” (because it maintains habitat
diversity and stability), that “evolution is good” (because it is the “ma-
chine” o diversication), and ultimately that “biotic diversity has in-
tinsic value, irrespective o its instumental or utilitaian value” (Soulé
, ). is nal nomative postulate was “the most fundamental,”
Soulé argued, since “in emphasizing the inherent value o nonhuman
life, it distinguishes the dualistic, exploitative world view from a more
unitay perspective: species have value in themselves, a value neither
conferred not revocable, but spinging from a species’ long evolution-
ay heitage and potential or even from the mere fact o its existence.”
Soulé evidently had sent a dra o this essay to Wilson for com-
ment, since more than a year pior to its publication Wilson had witten
to say, “I like your essay ‘What is consevation biology,’ as I have liked
most o your witings, as well as appreciated your pioneeing role in
creating consevation biology.” Wilson also commented approvingly on
the tem “cisis discipline,” which he regarded as a “valuable concept”
for promotion o the eld (Wilson to Soulé, August , ). Wil-
son noted that he would forebear commenting on the essay “at length,”
since his forthcoming book Biophilia, to be published later that year,
was “a lengthy commentay on most o the topics you raise. . . . We are
indeed thinking about the same things.” He added that “the crucial step
is getting these issues on the national agenda” would require both a “lit-
eray” approach to reach the general public and a “political” one. Here
he noted his activities with the intenational development board at the
NRC: “With more o us pushing in the same direction, movement may
result.”
In the end, Wilson’s essay “e Biological Diversity Cisis” was pub-
lished in the same issue o Bioscience as Soulé’s, supplementing Soulé’s
philosophical arguments about the values o biological diversity with a
detailed empiical accounting o the scope o the problem, along with
specic policy recommendations. Somewhat mysteiously (I have
found no explanation either in pint or in pivate correspondence), this
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
258 CHAPTER SIX
essay was also published, in nearly identical fom, in another general
science jounal, Issues in Science and Technology, at virtually the same
time as it appeared in Bioscience. It appears that Wilson simply wanted
his arguments to reach the widest possible readership. In a letter to the
managing editor o Issues, he explained, “I am anxious to bing the sub-
ject to the attention o a broader audience. . . . Biological diversity is
one o the rapidly emerging but still poorly articulated issues” (Wilson
to Cook, June , ). At around the same time, Wilson thanked
his colleague Peter Raven—the director o the Missoui Botanical Gar-
den and an important biodiversity advocate—for commenting on his
manuscipt, similarly explaining its pupose as “get[ting] the problem,
particularly that concening systematics, before as large and inuential
audience as possible in a fom that will be read and remembered” (Wil-
son to Raven, June , ). Wilson went on to obseve, “A sea change
may be in the making. . . . You, Noman Myers, and a vey few others de-
seve a great deal o credit [but] a lot remains to be done.” Putting bio-
logical diversity on the radar o inuential politicians, he argued, was
o the utmost importance: “e important people in Congress and else-
where know all about bioengineeing, nuclear winters, and the popu-
lation bomb. . . . Now it’s just a matter o getting tropical deforestation
and the diversity cisis on the top- level agenda. And hopefully with as
positive, upbeat tone as can be mustered.” While it was not explicitly
mentioned in his letter, the BioDiversity Foum to be held the following
year, with which Raven was closely involved, was designed precisely to
achieve this goal.
Wilson’s essay in Bioscience presented a set o arguments that would
be repeated in most o his subsequent appeals for biological diversity
presevation, and in particular it emphasized the quantitative dimen-
sions o the cisis. e essay began with the obsevation, “Certain mea-
surements are cucial to our ordinay understanding o the universe”—
such as the diameter o the earth, the number o stars in the Milky Way,
and the mass o an electron. To these, Wilson added the number o
species currently alive (Wilson , ). e problem was that, un-
like those other gures, biological diversity had not been adequately
measured, “not even to the nearest order o magnitude.” Like Myers
and others before him, Wilson noted that current tabulations o exist-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 259
ing species—around . million, according to the most recent count—
“grossly underestimate[d] the diversity o life on earth,” despite the best
eorts o systematists to improve the state o knowledge. e only way
to begin to assess the scope o the diversity cisis was to rely on esti-
mates and extrapolations—to make a “guesstimate,” as Myers had put
it in e Sinking Ark.
Unlike Myers, the Ehrlichs, and other previous commenters, how-
ever, Wilson was amed with a new source o infomation. In , in a
short paper in the relatively obscure jounal e Coleopterists Bulletin,
the entomologist Tery Ewin had extrapolated the “tue” number o
arthropod species globally from a sample o a single hectare o Panama-
nian tropical forest (Ewin , –). ough it clocked in at a mere
ve bie paragraphs over two pages, Ewin’s article would prove to be
massively inuential for the biodiversity movement, and ultimately can
be considered the source o many dramatic claims for current extinc-
tion rates presented over the next decade—including Wilson’s gure o
seventy- four species per day in e Diversity o Life. Ewin’s argument
was simple and elegant. It began with the familiar obsevation that,
while for more than a centuy naturalists had speculated that the vast
majoity o living arthropod species remained unclassied, estimates
nonetheless put the tue gure at between . and million species.
Since this uncertainty largely owed to the fact that arthropod species
tended to be found in small, locally endemic populations in inaccessible
places, such as tropical forests, Ewin argued that i one could estimate
the actual number o species—including unclassied ones—in a single
local area, a more reliable gure could be extrapolated for the global
population.
Ewin did not actually count the total number o species o arthro-
pods in the single hectare o tropical forest he chose. He limited his
census to only those species found in the upper canopy o the forest,
where animals could be collected from the “large and wide- spaced
leaves” o the tree Lueha seemannii (a kind o evergreen with large,
at leaves, found in Central and South Ameica) (Ewin , ).
Over three seasons o sampling, Ewin’s team identied more than
species o beetles alone, to which he added another weevil species
(identied in similar suveys in Brazil). en came the extrapolation:
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
260 CHAPTER SIX
since it was known that up to species o trees could exist in a single
hectare o “ich” tropical forest, Ewin deduced that an average o
separate tree genera was reasonable. Next, he estimated the number
o “host- specic” arthropods that occupied each genus (i.e., the num-
ber o arthropod species adapted to one and only one genus o tree),
which he “consevatively” put at percent o the total census. Using
these estimates, Ewin calculated that his single case- example o Lue-
hea caried “an estimated load o species o host- specic beetles,”
the rest o which were “transient” (i.e., “resting or ying through Lue-
hea trees”). I there were genera o “geneic- group tree species” in a
hectare o forest, this would mean that there were “, host- specic
species o beetles per hectare, plus the remaining , species o tran-
sient beetles, for a total o , species o beetles per hectare o tropi-
cal forest canopy” (Ewin , ). Ewin did not stop there: noting
that beetles compose percent o all arthropod species, he reasoned
that this would imply that the total number o arthropods in a hectare
o tropical forest canopy was a staggeing ,; and since he believed
that the canopy fauna was “twice as ich as the forest oor and com-
posed o a dierent set o species for the most part,” this meant that
adding another multiple o one- third to the number would produce
“a grand total o , species per hectare o scubby seasonal forest
in Panama!” (Ewin , ). Applying this fomula to the “estimated
, species o tropical trees,” and assuming that “tropical forest in-
sect species, for the most part, are not highly vagile [i.e., don’t move
around much] and have small distibutions,” Ewin concluded that
“there are perhaps as many as ,, species o tropical arthro-
pods, not . million.”
Ewin’s estimate is indeed staggeing, and it suggests that past esti-
mates o the diversity o life may have been low by as much as two
orders o magnitude. Wilson cited Ewin’s study as the source o his
own reasoning in “e Biological Diversity Cisis,” using it as the basis
for his estimate o the inuence that tropical deforestation is having on
extinction, since it should now be possible to approximately calculate
what the reduction in tropical habitat—a gure easily obtained from
geographical suveys—would have on the loss o biodiversity. Wil-
son freely acknowledged that such estimates should be bolstered by
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 261
more accurate assessments o actual species numbers, and the remain-
der o his article argued for greatly increased funding for classication
projects. Still, i Ewin’s numbers were even remotely accurate, the
tue scope o the extinction cisis was magnied enomously. Instead
o losses o perhaps several hundred tropical species per year, we are
in fact dealing with a scenaio in which annual extinctions could reach
the tens o thousands.
at is, o course, a signicant “if,” and a number o scientists
jumped into the debate to raise concens. For example, in a article
titled “How Many Species Are ere on Earth?” the Australian ecolo-
gist Robert May—a pioneer in the eld o theoretical ecology and a
highly decorated professor at Oxford University—argued that Ewin’s
estimate “has been widely cited oen without full appreciation o the
chain o argument underlying it” (May , ). As May pointed
out, the assumption that percent o beetle species are found on only
one species or genus o tree is entirely arbitray, as is the two- to- one
ratio o canopy arthropod species to ground species. Furthemore, we
simply don’t know what percentage o canopy fauna is beetles; a sur-
vey o a single hectare is insucient to draw signicant conclusions.
It might further be argued that there are other shaky assumptions in
Ewin’s analysis: he obtains the gure o million species by dividing
the total number o canopy species (,) by the average number o
species and genera o trees per hectare, another fairly arbitray assump-
tion (), thus producing an estimate o roughly species that can
be attached to a given species o tree. is is then multiplied by the
estimated , species o tropical trees (again, an estimate based on
the assumption that many species o tropical trees have not been dis-
covered), which produces ,, canopy species. To this Ewin
adds one- third o the total number, because o the two- to- one ratio
o canopy to ground species—another ,,—for a grand total o
,,. But why assume that arthropod species endemic to a par-
ticular tree species in one area are not found in another tree species
elsewhere, especially i the oral composition is dierent in the two re-
gions? Why assume that the average number o arthropod species per
tree average is stable across all regions o the tropics? Why assume that
the number o ground and “transient” arboreal arthropods—which are
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
262 CHAPTER SIX
not tied to specic tree species—can simply be multiplied by ,
along with the endemic species (this is an implicit but unstated assump-
tion in deiving one- third o the million endemic arboreal arthro-
pods as additional distinct species)? And why indeed assume, as May
wondered, that beetles account for percent o all undiscovered
canopy- dwelling arthropod species?
e tuth is that a signicant pillar o the empiical estimate o bio-
diversity loss—and one that has remained in circulation for decades—
depends on what are, even by Ewin’s own admission, highly specu-
lative numbers. As Ewin put it in , “I would hope someone will
challenge these gures with more data.” is is precisely why Wilson
argued for the necessity o massive diversity suveys. But at the same
time, and in the unfortunate absence o signicant resources to fund
basic systematics research, Ewin’s gures continued to bolster claims
about extinction rates, whether or not Ewin’s study was explicitly ac-
knowledged. is is not, in any way, to minimize the seiousness o the
biodiversity cisis: even May acknowledged that “maybe hal o all ex-
tant species will become extinct in the next or years i current
rates o tropical deforestation continue” (May , ). But biolo-
gists have no idea whether that actual number is in the thousands or
the millions. In a citical evaluation o another manuscipt by Wilson—
a paper presented in at a joint meeting o the Royal Academy o
London and the Ameican Philosophical Society, titled “Biological Di-
versity as a Scientic and Ethical Issue”—Raven made several o these
points to Wilson. He cautioned Wilson, for example, “I don’t think you
have any real reason for saying that the absolute number o insects cer-
tainly exceeds ve million, and I don’t think anyone has really investi-
gated the basis for Tery Ewin’s estimates carefully” (Wilson to Raven,
June , ). He also expressed concen that his own work with Wil-
son on a report, arguing that there were “twice as many kinds o
organisms in the tropics, minimum,” had “loosely and without any par-
ticular foundation slid up to ‘eveyone agrees that there are at least to
million species o organisms in the world,’” and that this was “a sort
o non- consevative, vey loose and non- scientic kind o estimate
which is being accepted pimaily by repetition.”
In his reply, Wilson conceded some o Raven’s points but defended
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 263
his basic reasoning, in part on the basis that “my more generous esti-
mates illustrate zoologist [Wilson]- vs.- botanist [Ravin] once again. . . .
I think I’m ight this time” (Wilson to Raven, June , ). He based
this largely on personal anecdotal expeience, noting:
Time and again, sometimes to my dismay, I have watched an ant “species”
dissolve into , , or more undeniable sibling species. . . . Most ento
-
mologists [working in the tropics,] even casually, have stoies o new
species o such- and- such beetle or thips genus discovered on one tree
species, new species o mites found in one berlesate, and so forth. e
overall impression is one o a huge fauna o which only a small fraction
is yet known. So at least keep in mind that insects are dierent, and pos-
sibly some other invertebrates as well. irty million may well be far too
high, but million isn’t.
But Wilson also stressed that dierences in empiical calculations
shouldn’t fundamentally aect the plan for taking concrete action, and
he defended the use o estimates while more concrete data were still
unavailable. Both he and Raven supported a comprehensive global sur-
vey, and in the meantime it was vital to “get [policy makers’] attention
with stiking and defensible facts,” since “when enough people o in-
uence care about the problem, they can be presented with detailed
procedures and solutions.” Aer all, Wilson concluded aer he pre-
sented the paper at the Royal Society/APS meeting, “no less a person
than [the Nobel Pize– winning economist] Milton Fiedman rose to say
that tropical deforestation should now be regarded as a global problem
comparable to the threat o nuclear war. Now that is a piece o tangible
progress, enough to keep me going.”
The Sixth Extinction
Just a few months aer the exchange between Wilson and Raven de-
scibed above, the two sat together onstage duing the national tele-
conference following the BioDiversity Foum, when the biological di-
versity cisis was proclaimed to be “a threat to civilization, second only
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
264 CHAPTER SIX
to the threat o themonuclear war.” It is impossible to know whether
Fiedman’s comment inspired Wilson to make this claim in such a pub-
lic foum, but evidently, despite their empiical disagreements, Wilson
and Raven could agree on the general magnitude o the cisis. Indeed,
following the foum, the biodiversity movement gained rapid momen-
tum. Most o the papers delivered at the Washington meeting were
published two years later in a hey volume sponsored by the National
Academy Press, and in the jounal Science—probably the most
widely read and respected general scientic jounal in the world—made
space for a special issue on biodiversity featuing articles by Ehrlich and
Wilson, Soulé, Ewin, and Jablonski (who provided a paleontological
perspective). On the political front, the movement had a stunning suc-
cess in with the adoption o the UN Convention on Biological Di-
versity, which asserted “the intinsic value o the ecological, genetic,
social, economic, scientic, educational, cultural, recreational and aes-
thetic values o biological diversity and its components.” Underlining
the success o the rhetoical and scientic arguments made by Wilson
and his colleagues duing the previous decade, the convention further
acknowledged “the importance o biological diversity for evolution and
for maintaining life systems o the biosphere” and amed that “the
consevation o biological diversity is a common concen for human-
kind” (United Nations ).
As successful as Wilson and others had been in establishing bio-
diversity as a central scientic concen, they still needed to reach the
public with their message. As we have seen in examples such as “mutu-
ally assured destuction,” the “population bomb,” and “nuclear winter,”
it helped to have a catchy slogan to attract widespread attention, and
to galvanize popular interest and political action. For the biodiversity
movement, that slogan would be “the sixth mass extinction,” or just
“the sixth extinction”—a tem that by the early s would become
thoroughly entrenched in both the popular and the scientic discourse
around biodiversity. e vey rst published instance o the exact
phrase seems to have been in Wilson’s e Diversity o Life, where at
the conclusion o a chapter outlining the scope o the biodiversity cisis
he opined, “Humanity has initiated the sixth great extinction, ushing
to etenity a large fraction o our fellow species in a single generation”
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 265
(Wilson , ). O course, as we have seen, a number o obsevers,
including Wilson, had made explicit reference to past mass extinctions
when discussing current biodiversity depletion over the previous de-
cade. And in a essay for a special publication sponsored by the
National Geographic Society titled Earth ’: Changing Geographic Per-
spectives, Wilson noted, “Virtually all students o the extinction process
agree that biological diversity is in the midst o its sixth great cisis, this
time precipitated entirely by Man” (Wilson , ).
But I argue that the notion o a “sixth extinction,” more than acting
as a catchy slogan, represents an important development in the concep-
tualization o extinction as an ecological process, as well as a major shi
in the wider cultural discourse linking the science o mass extinction to
broader concens and anxieties around the fate o humanity. As a mode
o “extinction discourse” or “catastrophic thinking,” the sixth extinc-
tion is the nal stage in the main narrative o this book; and analyzing
its emergence sheds light on the way many obsevers have come to see
our own current moment as a distinct stage in geological histoy. I late
Cold War culture was characteized by a set o fears tied to the threat
o sudden, catastrophic annihilation through nuclear Amageddon—
a kind o secular apocalypticism that resonated deeply with the linear,
progressive narrative o Judeo- Chistian sacred histoy—then the sixth
extinction and the Anthropocene concept signify something new about
Westen culture’s imaginay o deep time. Mass extinctions, now under-
stood to be a regular feature o the histoy o life, suggest an altenative
to a narrative in which the emergence o human civilization is the alpha,
and its potential, perhaps even inevitable self- destuction is the omega.
As discussed in the last chapter, many paleontologists obseved that
the so- called “new catastrophism” o the s was also a kind o “new
unifomitaianism”: viewed from the perspective o geological time, the
histoy o life resolves itsel into a seies o cises, spaced fairly regu-
larly, that imply an element o cyclicity underlying the more directional
trends seen at lower levels o temporal resolution. e perspective im
-
plicit in the sixth extinction and Anthropocene concepts likewise situ-
ates the directional, contingent human stoy within the broader cycles
o geological time. Humanity may have cast itsel in the unusual role o
both “asteroid” and “dinosaur” in the impending environmental cisis,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
266 CHAPTER SIX
but it now does so with a resigned awareness that even the most cata-
strophic result in the short tem will be subsumed into the deeper cycli-
cal pattens o natural histoy.
O course, this does not necessaily mean acceptance o a sixth mass
extinction as a foregone conclusion, nor do I mean to imply that bi-
ologists and paleontologists regard humanity’s destuctive impact on
the earth as a “natural” or excusable phenomenon. But i an implicit
assumption in framing the biodiversity cisis as a sixth extinction is that
the current depletion o biological diversity can best be understood
in—and its consequences extrapolated from—the context o the “Big
Five” mass extinctions o the past, there is a sense in which anxieties
about humanmade catastrophe have become naturalized by association
with broader natural cycles o deep time. Indeed, while this has been
a persistent feature o biodiversity rhetoic since the mid- s, it has
also been a relatively underexamined one. e route from biological di-
versity cisis to sixth mass extinction appears, as discussed above, as a
fairly unproblematic syllogism in the witings o Myers, Ehrlich, Wil-
son, and other biologists through the s and into the s. Esti-
mates o current biodiversity loss suggest a far greater extinction rate
than the nomal “background” rate o extinction in geological time; i
allowed to proceed unchecked for decades, the quantitative species loss
could ival the total estimated loss duing the Cretaceous- Tertiay mass
extinction. e biodiversity cisis is therefore a “mass extinction,” and
can best be understood by compaing its dynamics to those mass ex-
tinctions that have been studied in the deep histoy o life.
ere is nothing inherently objectionable about this logic, aside
from the fact that its empiical evidence relies on some debatable g-
ures, such as Ewin’s estimates o tropical invertebrate endemism. But it
does require some closer examination, particularly in its conclusion. It
is a virtual certainty that humans are causing extinctions at a rate much
higher than would nomally obtain duing peiods o environmental
calm; this is tue whether or not we accept Ewin’s estimates or Wil-
son’s extrapolations. But it is not necessaily the same thing to obseve
that we are expeiencing short- tem species loss in particular ecologi-
cal niches and among specic groups o organisms, and to claim that a
“mass extinction” is taking place—particularly in the vey specic sense
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 267
in which paleontologists developed the understanding o mass extinc-
tions (and their ecological and evolutionay consequences) duing the
s. Again, my point here is not to deny that the biodiversity cisis is
real and demands action. Rather, it is to unpack some o the histoical
circumstances in which the sixth extinction concept was framed, to ex-
amine the relationship between the claims made by biodiversity pro-
ponents and the views o the scientists on whom these claims oen de-
pended, and to suggest some potentially unexamined and unintended
consequences o the rhetoical and conceptual move from “cisis” to
“mass extinction.”
In the rst place, it should be stressed that the sixth extinction con-
cept underlines how closely the biodiversity movement depended on
new understandings o extinction and diversication developed by
paleontologists over the previous few decades. is is a fact that has
not been fully appreciated by the literature on the biodiversity cisis,
but it is central to understanding how and why biological diversity be-
came a topic o such central concen when it did. While ecologists and
consevationists had expressed long- standing concen about the fate
o specic endangered species, it was the paleontological perspective
on coordinated mass extinctions that emerged duing the s which
shied the focus to the potential loss o entire ecosystems and the pro-
tection o biological diversity per se. Pior to the late s, many—
i not most—biologists doubted whether mass extinctions could take
place at all, such was the assumed resilience o the “balance o nature.”
Paleontological studies demonstrated, via detailed empiical investiga-
tions o particular stratigraphic breaks as well as broad statistical analy-
sis, not only that mass extinctions have been a regular feature o the his-
toy o life, but also that they had long- tem ecological and evolutionay
consequences for the future diversication o life. In a sense, the vey
idea o “mass extinction” was constucted by paleontologists such as
Raup, Sepkoski, and Jablonski duing the s.
Secondly, paleontological mass extinction studies—and in particu-
lar the Alvarez team’s hypothesis o the asteroid impact that wiped
out the dinosaurs—stoked public interest in mass extinction and cre-
ated a receptive environment for appeals by biologists and ecologists
to present arguments about the current biodiversity cisis. Despite de-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
268 CHAPTER SIX
cades o environmental activism, by the late s consevation orga-
nizations like the WWF and the Sierra Club had un into signicant
public apathy and political pushback around endangered species pro-
tection. e election o Ronald Reagan to the US presidency in ,
and his appointment o divisive gures such as Inteior Secretay James
Watt, caused genuine concen that gains made over the previous decade
in environmental policy and legislation could be rolled back. Indeed, in
and the US Senate conducted a seies o heaings to detemine
whether the Endangered Species Act, set to expire in , should be re-
authoized, thus causing a signicant public stir. As the New York Times
reported at the time, many govenment scientists were concened that
the Reagan Administration had failed to support the provisions o the
ESA, and had in fact gone so far as to remove a number o threatened
species from protected status. Citing the hamful inuence o Watt as
inteior secretay, one anonymously quoted scientist complained, “Not
one new species has been listed since Reagan came in. Nothing” (New
York Times ). e article went on to note environmentalists’ oppo-
sition to “a new pioity system” that “concentrates resources for saving
the most endangered species among the higher orders o life, such as
mammals and birds,” noting Environmental Defense Fund activist
Michael J. Bean’s concen “that the presevation o the earth’s genetic
diversity required that the protection o the act be extended to all life.”
In fact, Bean was in correspondence with E. O. Wilson at the time, en-
couraging Wilson to testify before the Senate subcommittee (he did)
and requesting Wilson’s endorsement o a statement on biological di-
versity cosigned by G. Evelyn Hutchinson, Peter Raven, and omas
Lovejoy.
e point here is that by the early s, the political landscape
around environmental protection in the United States had changed
quite dramatically from the previous environment- fiendly administra-
tions o Carter and Nixon duing the s. (e bipartisan nature o
environmental concen duing the s also highlights the dramatic
political shi that took place duing the s in the United States.)
Ultimately, while the ESA was reauthoized, Wilson and others realized
that in order to guarantee continued public and political support for en-
dangered species protection, the focus would have to shi away from
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 269
the individual species (the infamous “snail darter” episode underlined
the danger o relying on public enthusiasm for protecting endangered
species that were not “chaismatic”) and toward economic and envi-
ronmental arguments for protecting biological diversity itself. But con-
vincing a skeptical audience that the depletion o diversity could have
seious consequences required presenting that threat in concrete tems.
Fortunately, the Alvarez hypothesis and related paleontological studies
o mass extinction provided a ready- to- hand and highly visible scenaio
for conveying these consequences to a wide public. Rather than having
to explain in detail the complex ecological basis for ecosystem inter-
dependencies, Wilson and others could, i necessay, simply draw an
analogy with the spectacular mass extinction events o the past. And,
given the close association at the time between the presentation o the
dinosaur extinction and nuclear winter scenaios, mass extinction was
a potent threat indeed.
e role o paleontologists themselves in the biodiversity move-
ment is a somewhat complicated stoy. A number o paleontologists—
including most prominently David Jablonski, Jack Sepkoski, and Niles
Eldredge—were early proponents o linking histoical studies o mass
extinction to the present cisis, and since the s a number o other
paleontologists have endorsed the notion that current biodiversity loss
is contibuting to a sixth mass extinction. At the same time, some
extinction experts—most notably Dave Raup—have questioned the
analogy between past and present extinction rates; and even those gen-
erally supportive o the claim that we are expeiencing a mass extinc-
tion event have expressed resevations about some o the ways in which
paleontological data have been used in these arguments. At the heart
o the issue is a question about whether estimates o extinction rates
in the geological past are a valid basis for extrapolation to the present.
Nearly all calculations o the magnitude o the current cisis by Wilson,
Ehrlich, Myers, and other biologists depend on Raup’s estimate that the
nomal “background” rate for extinction—that is, the nomal extinc-
tion rate outside o times o mass extinction—is between one and four
species per year. e problem, however—as Raup himsel has been
quick to point out—is that paleontologists have vey little condence
in that number for a vaiety o reasons, mostly related to sampling. e
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
270 CHAPTER SIX
fossil record is ovewhelmingly biased toward maine invertebrates
with easily fossilizable hard parts (e.g., shells), which almost certainly
means that the record o large vertebrates, insects, plants, and other or-
ganisms that are rarely preseved is drastically underrepresented. And
it is precisely these kinds o organisms—for which the fossil record is
incredibly poor—that are most aected in the current cisis.
A related problem is that, as discussed in chapter , paleontologi-
cal studies o mass extinctions tend to focus on the extinction o higher
taxonomic units—genera and families—for the simple reason that fos-
sil data at the resolution o individual species is extremely spotty. ere
are good reasons for justifying some extrapolation from these higher
taxonomic levels to the species level, but always with the proviso that
exact calculations o species extinctions duing mass extinctions—or,
for that matter, duing “background” times—are essentially impossible.
What this means is that, in order to more faithfully compare geological
and current extinction rates—to compare apples with apples, in other
words—scientists should really estimate the current extinction rate
not o species, but o genera or families. Unfortunately, as Raup put
it to me, “is would be virtually impossible because we have almost
no record o [current] extinction o higher taxa, [since] it doesn’t hap-
pen oen enough to be obsevable on human time scales” (Raup ).
So, while we can be fairly certain that we are currently expeiencing
higher than nomal rates o species extinction, we really have no idea—
within perhaps several orders o magnitude—whether the current rate
approaches those seen duing events like the Cretaceous- Tertiay ex-
tinction, since (a) we don’t have reliable estimates o species extinctions
duing those past events, and (b) we have no idea what the “nomal”
rate o species extinction is for the kinds o localized, endemic terres-
tial invertebrates being aected today. Combine this with the fact that,
as discussed above, even current species extinction rate estimates (e.g.,
the “seventy- four species per day” claim) may be o by orders o mag-
nitude, and one begins to perceive the scope o the problem.
I feel compelled, once again, to point out that the diculties in-
volved in estimating rates o extinction in no way invalidate the con-
cens o biodiversity proponents or suggest that we are not expeienc-
ing a cisis o some kind. But is it a mass extinction? My sense is that,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 271
these days, most paleontologists would cautiously allow that yes, we
either are expeiencing or are in grave danger o tiggeing a mass ex-
tinction o terrestial invertebrates, plants, and some vertebrate species
(e.g., maine mammals, terrestial megafauna, sh, and birds). Whether
this is a “sixth extinction,” though, is quite a bit more problematic. Mass
extinctions have occurred many times in the histoy o life; while there
is currently debate about the exact number (owing to disagreements
about data intepretation and to conicting denitions for what con-
stitutes a “mass extinction”), life may have expeienced at least twenty
major extinction events over the past half- billion years. e so- called
“big ve” extinctions are simply the most spectacular o these events,
and there is still considerable paleontological debate about their causes,
duration, and magnitudes. We simply have little way o knowing
whether the biodiversity cisis will reach the proportions expeienced
in these past events, and sadly it will only be possible to see the tue
picture thousands or millions o years from now, when it may be far
too late for our own species. at fact in itsel militates against inaction.
On the other hand, claims that we are expeiencing a sixth mass
extinction are not “merely” rhetoical; the analogy between past and
present mass extinctions is meant to highlight the seious ecological
and evolutionay consequences o extinction events—a subject that
has received signicant attention from paleontologists since the s.
Noman Myers, in particular, was an important early proponent o this
analogy, and in several articles beginning in the mid- s he drew at-
tention to how the work o paleontologists might inuence the way we
understand the current biodiversity cisis. In an essay published in the
magazine Natural History in , Myers was one o the rst biologists
to suggest that the current cisis might have seious, lasting evolution-
ay consequences. He compared the current depletion o biodiversity
with extinction events o the past, noting that the present cisis devi-
ated from earlier events in that species losses were taking place in a time
frame o decades, rather than the millions o years obseved in the geo-
logical past. He also argued, drawing on recent paleontological studies
o extinction and diversication by Jablonski and others, that the steep
losses in tropical regions were especially worying, since paleontolo-
gists had suggested that the tropics are vital sources for the emergence
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
272 CHAPTER SIX
o new species—“powerhouses,” as Myers put it—on which evolution-
ay processes depend. Ultimately, Myers argued, perhaps the most sig-
nicant outcome o the biodiversity cisis would be not merely be the
loss o existing diversity but “the hiatus in evolutionay processes that
they will cause”—a loss o creative potential that could set evolution
back tens o millions o years (Myers , ). Here he quoted a line
from an inuential anthology by Soulé and Bian Wilcox (which
Myers would repeat in several future essays): “‘Death in one thing, an
end to birth is something else’” (Soulé and Wilcox , –). Myers
predicted that when all was said and done, “the impending upheaval in
evolution’s course could rank as one o the greatest revolutions o pa-
leontological time,” perhaps even ivaling “the development o aerobic
respiration, the emergence o oweing plants, and the arival o limbed
animals” (Myers ).
Five years later, Myers reiterated these arguments in a more pro-
fessional jounal, where he also expanded and updated the paleonto-
logical basis for his claims. Noting that the compaison between past
and present extinctions had “hardly been touched upon in the profes-
sional literature” (a somewhat hyperbolic i generally accurate state-
ment, at least from a technical perspective), Myers summaized studies
by Jablonski, Raup, and Sepkoski on the selectivity and recovey dy-
namics duing mass extinctions, highlighting the long- tem evolution-
ay consequences o extinction events. Here he considered both the
factors that appeared to have enabled species to suvive extinction
events, and the eect o mass extinctions on “the subsequent course o
evolution,” echoing Raup’s and Jablonski’s conclusion that while mass
extinctions had generally been “selective” (in that dierential suvival
can be correlated with adaptive features o species), they were “not
necessaily ‘constuctive’ in a Dawinian sense” (meaning that they did
not “reward” adaptations which had been successful in the past, or pro-
mote enhanced tness in suvivors; Myers , ). e moral o this
stoy for Myers was that the evolutionay consequences o mass extinc-
tion are unpredictable, and that paleontological studies suggest that
suvivors tend to “contain a disproportionate number o opportunistic
species”—or, in other words, that “our descendants could shortly nd
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 273
themselves living in a world with a ‘pest and weed’ ecology” (Myers
, –). Repeating the dire predictions o his earlier essay, Myers
concluded: “We—or rather, our direct descendants—may well nd that
many evolutionay developments that have persisted throughout the
Phanerozoic could be suspended i not teminated” (Myers , ).
What did paleontologists themselves think o these arguments?
Myers was an important intemediay between the paleontological and
consevation communities, since his engagement with paleontologists
and their literature was much more seious and sustained than had been
those o his colleagues Wilson, Ehrlich, Raven, and others. In his jour-
nal articles, Myers thanked Jablonski, Raup, and Sepkoski vaiously for
“numerous discussions” and “many illuminating discussions over the
years,” and his summaies o paleontological evidence were generally
careful and accurate. Myers’s discussions o the evolutionay conse-
quences o mass extinction were extremely inuential in shaping the
early biodiversity cisis discourse—especially for Wilson, who regu-
larly tuned to Myers’s articles to substantiate empiical claims. is in-
uence was a two- way street: Jablonski, who was a graduate student
at Yale in the late s when e Sinking Ark was published, recalls
that Myers’s environmental wanings were a signicant inspiration for
his own early studies o extinction in the geological past, and paleon-
tologists including Jablonski and Sepkoski cited Myers appreciatively
in their own articles on the relationship between past and present ex-
tinctions.
At the same time, paleontologists tended to take a more conseva-
tive view than Myers and other biodiversity proponents toward drawing
lessons from the past. Raup, who was an important early source o in-
fomation for consevationists, later had something o a falling- out with
Wilson and others over the use o his estimates o background rates for
projecting current biodiversity loss as a “mass extinction.” Recalling his
involvement many years later, Raup remembered reading portions o
the manuscipt o Wilson’s Diversity o Life and debating Wilson’s “use
o extinction rate estimates from the fossil record to evaluate present-
day extinctions and the possibility o a ‘sixth’ extinction” (Raup, personal
communication ). He and Wilson maintained a cordial relationship
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
274 CHAPTER SIX
but, he said, “Soon, other people got involved in the correspondence,
probably including [the prominent ecologist] Stuart Pimm, and I felt
most uncomfortable. ey wanted me to back o and I guess I did.”
No record o this exchange suvives in Wilson’s correspondence
(though Wilson thanked Raup for commenting on his Diversity o Life
manuscipt), but Wilson and Raup did exchange letters regarding some
o Wilson’s earlier publications. For example, in his comments on an
article Wilson was prepaing for a meeting at the Ameican Philosophi-
cal Society in , Raup raised several concens related to compar-
ing past and present extinction data. In the rst place, he suggested,
“I suspect that your estimate that the loss rate now is several orders o
magnitude greater than is typical for geologic rates is a bit high.” He
added that the fossil record was “highly ight- skewed” due to a phe-
nomenon known as the “pull o the Recent” (Raup to Wilson June ,
). What this meant is that because o biasing factors like the vol-
ume o fossil- beaing sediment and the exposure o outcrops, more re-
cent geological peiods tend to be much better represented in the fossil
record than earlier ones are, thus contibuting to the misleading ap-
pearance o greater taxonomic diversity and longer species durations
in the more recent eras o the histoy o life (and hence appeaing as
an uptick o diversity on the ight- hand side o a diversication graph).
Extinction rates may also appear to be articially higher in earlier pei-
ods, since there is a much greater likelihood that representative fossils
would either not be preseved or not be discovered, potentially tuncat-
ing the suvivorship durations o particular groups. As a related point,
Raup noted, “We can rarely, i ever, work with small (and presumably
short- lived) endemic species,” by which he meant that “estimates o
species longevity that come from the fossil record are probably high by
one or more orders o magnitude.” In other words, average extinction
rates for geological time are probably much too low, since many species
come and go without ever leaving a trace in the fossil record.
In his reply, Wilson acknowledged that Raup’s remarks were “are all
on target . . . they emphasize the key diculty o which we are aware:
the birth and death o species is one o the least worked and most im-
portant subjects o biology” (Wilson to Raup, June , ). None-
theless, Wilson defended his estimates for the simple reason that actual
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 275
extinction rates were unknown. As he put it to Raup: “We don’t know
whether species ‘hidden’ in the geological record, that is, rare, local,
or sibling, have dierent longevities from the ones recovered. I they
do, what you say is correct. I not, my vey cude estimate is defen-
sible. I wouldn’t put bets on either side.” Despite that disclaimer, this
issue tuned up again a few years later, when Raup commented on Wil-
son and Ehrlich’s article for the special “Biodiversity” issue o Science.
Again Raup cautioned against reading too much into the appearance
o higher diversity levels in the present: “is is vey dicult to prove
because the Pull o the Recent exerts such a strong bias in the same di-
rection.” He also argued that comparative diversity estimates based on
rainforest biotas were especially ticky (Raup to Wilson, September ,
). Here Raup pointed to recent studies suggesting that “extensive
tropical rain forests are geologically unusual,” which presented an addi-
tional complication: i the current global biota was not representative
o the average distibution o species in geological tems, then making
compaisons between past and present could be highly misleading. As
Raup put it, “Because so much biodiversity is tied up in the rain forests,
global diversity may have uctuated rather wildly.” Finally, Raup re-
ported on “some new analyses o Jack Sepkoski’s data [that] show that
the (ve) big mass extinctions are simply the tail o an asymmetical
distibution o extinction intensities.” Raup explained that he had come
to believe that extinctions are generally clumped fairly closely in time,
and that “typical time intevals up to about , years expeience
essentially no extinction. us, the mean rates o extinction we obseve
in the fossil record are made up o a lot o widely- spaced events o non-
zero extinction rate—with the mass extinctions merely being the rarest
and most intense.” In other words, there might eectively be no such
thing as “background” extinction, since Raup suspected that all extinc-
tions took place in coordinated bursts, some simply larger than others.
Raup’s citicisms did not suggest that he discounted the eects o
human activity on current species extinctions. ey did reveal, how-
ever, that Wilson and other colleagues were presented with infomation
that complicated the tidy “sixth extinction” analogy, which for reasons
best known to themselves they had chosen to essentially ignore, par-
ticularly in popular witings. By the early s, paleontologists them-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
276 CHAPTER SIX
selves began to actively take part in discussions about the biodiversity
cisis, and in general their appeals stuck a balance between gim wan-
ings about the lessons o past mass extinctions and cautious disclaim-
ers about the need for better understanding o biodiversity cises in
both the past and the present. Raup himsel framed his own book
Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? (discussed in the previous chap-
ter) with the obsevation that his subject bore on “the contemporay
problems o endangered species, losses o biodiversity, and extinctions
caused by human activities.” He remarked, “e histoy o species ex-
tinction provides valuable perspective on global ecology o the present
and the future” (Raup , xi– xii). However, he made little further ref-
erence to the current cisis in the book, focusing instead on the evolu-
tionay dynamics o mass extinctions in the past.
At the other end o the spectum, in that same year the AMNH pale-
ontologist Niles Eldredge published an urgent appeal provocatively
titled e Miner’s Canary, which combined a suvey o mass extinction
research with wanings about the potential future impact o biodiver-
sity loss. In the opening o the book, Eldredge addressed the issue in
tems that neatly summaized some o the central links between pale-
ontology and biodiversity consevation:
I have come to realize that these two separate threads—the remote past
and the moden world—really have much to reveal to one another. ey
are simply strands o the same rope. Extinction—tuly massive, global
extinction—is indeed a fact o the histoy o life. anks especially to the
demise o the dinosaurs . . . the public at large is at least passingly famil-
iar with the idea o mass extinction. We are also more or less aware that
species are disappeaing at an alaming rate ight now: Extinction is a fact
o life in the moden world (Eldredge , xvii).
Eldredge went on to dene extinction in precisely the same way as pio-
neeing paleontologists like Raup and Sepkoski—as “the loss o bio-
logical diversity, that is, the number o species”—and he argued for the
need for “a general theoy o extinction that relates past to present, and
perhaps helps us see a bit more clearly the nature o our own present-
day situation” (Eldredge , xviii). As he developed the outlines for
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 277
such a general theoy, Eldredge drew heavily on the work o Raup and
Jablonski, stressing both the role that mass extinctions had played in
opening new evolutionay opportunities (its “creative” role), and also
the tendency for extinction to “inhibit further evolution, as it removes
genetic infomation that is essential for future evolution to occur”
(Eldredge , ).
On the surface, Eldredge’s argument would seem to support claims
made by Myers and others that biodiversity loss presented a threat to
the future course o evolution and, because o our dependency on global
ecosystems, to the suvival o the human species. But here Eldredge
introduced a winkle, which he associated with a misunderstanding o
evolution tied to a “Dawinian” view: “the mistake o thinking o evo-
lution as a good thing.” He explained that evolution itsel is essentially
neutral; it oers no guarantee o progress or improvement, but is simply
the process that “has given us life’s histoy (with a major role played by
extinction); it will give us life’s future, whatever fom that happens to
take.” e fallacy, in other words, lay in thinking that in preseving bio-
diversity we were doing something noble for the future o the earth,
or that we could escape anthropocentism in addressing questions o
human suvival. e “ironic” fact, as Eldredge noted, was that “i we
manage to suvive . . . that will throw a damper on evolution more than
will our or any species’ extinction.” He said our best course o action
was simply to “conseve genetic diversity—ours and other species’—to
maintain the status quo, and not because o some imagined eect this
will have on the evolutionay future” (Eldredge , ).
In a sense, Eldredge was urging a practical anthropocentism—“e
bottom line is that the species that we must conseve is our own”—as
an antidote to a more hubistic, philosophical anthropocentism that
endowed humans with a godlike power to stand outside o nature,
controlling the future course o evolution. He may have been target-
ing claims like those advanced two years earlier by the environmen-
talist Bill McKibben, who in his bestselling e End o Nature argued
that, through our industial and agicultural footpint and technologies
like nuclear weapons, humans had developed “the capacity to over-
master nature,” and had “depived nature o its independence” (McKib-
ben , , ). It was tue, Eldredge acknowledged, that “sedentay,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
278 CHAPTER SIX
agiculture- based extinction is to the moden world what that aster-
oid . . . was to ecosystems at the end o the Cretaceous,” but this hardly
meant that the human species now existed apart from nature (Eldredge
, ). Rather, the increasing scope o human activities had only
underlined our inexticable relationship with the natural world:
We have stepped beyond local ecosystems only to nd ourselves as a part
o the grand global ecosystem. We have not escaped nature—we only
think we have, because we have stepped beyond the usual role o integra-
tion into local ecosystems (Eldredge , ).
Instead o focusing on arguments based in the misguided belie that we
can transcend or control natural and evolutionay processes, we should
accept that we cannot help having an impact on the world around us,
and focus on the “purely selsh” goal o preseving “enough o the natu-
ral ecosystems intact so that the global system remains recognizably
what it has been throughout the histoy o our species so that we as a
species can suvive” (Eldredge , ). Ultimately, Eldredge argued,
we can save ourselves only “by realizing that, though the ules have
changed, we will never escape intimate relations with the rest o the
biosphere” (Eldredge , ).
Biologists like Wilson and Myers seemed to realize that, to make the
important argument that biodiversity loss threatened to alter the course
o evolution pemanently and irreversibly (thus elevating the cisis to
genuinely catastrophic proportions, on a par with themonuclear war),
the cooperation o paleontologists was essential. Myers had been nag-
ging Wilson to highlight these evolutionay consequences since the
mid- s, arguing in a letter that “a basic impoveishment o
many processes o evolution” could be even more signicant than the
“gross diminishment in the array o lifefoms on the planet,” and urg-
ing him a year later to discuss the “impoveishing impact” o mass ex-
tinction aer reading a dra o Wilson’s major analysis o the cisis for
Bioscience (Myers to Wilson, October , ). By , Myers had
apparently grown fustrated that these consequences had been insu-
ciently promoted, and he lobbied Wilson (unsuccessfully) to intevene
with the editors o Science to include his own article on the subject in
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 279
the special issue on biodiversity planned for later that year. In his letter
to Wilson, Myers conded that he had been discussing the possibility o
coauthoing such a paper with Jablonski, but had leaned that Jablon-
ski would be contibuting his own article to the issue. Myers asked
for the opportunity to “take a crack at it” himself, since he felt the topic
was especially important “in light o the poo- pooing attitude o certain
organization [sic] . . . pimaily IUCN but increasingly WWF Intena-
tional too.”
ree years later, Myers wrote to Wilson again, this time with a
more urgent tone. Myers had persisted in his eorts to secure a promi-
nent coauthor for an article on “the impact o the present biotic cisis
on the future course o evolution (no less!),” with little success (Myers
to Wilson, July , ). He reported that both Ehrlich and Raven had
claimed to be “too busy” to participate, and that Raup had declined be-
cause “he still doubts whether there is tuly a biotic cisis undeway.”
He confessed to Wilson:
I am really at a loss on this one. . . . I think the paper should be witten,
since it will address an almost entirely neglected dimension o the biotic
cisis. When I un a computer check in the libray, I nd not a single paper
has tackled this mega- issue. Folks like Richard Dawkins and Steve Gould
are completely retrospective in their approach. I am looking for some-
body who will be pioneeing and exploratoy with me, even speculative
(Myers to Wilson, July , ).
Unfortunately for Myers, Wilson provided little assistance, so he next
tuned to Jablonski, whom he solicited for “a lengthy look at the notion
o a joint paper for a Science- calibre publication” (Myers to Jablonski,
July , ). Aer outlining the proposed argument, Myers stressed
the need for a coauthor “because I do not have the expeience myself,
nor the scientic insights and the professional expeience— certainly
not the palaeontological clout—to go it alone.” What Myers had in
mind, however, seems to have been something closer to an endorse-
ment from Jablonski than to a genuine collaboration. Enclosing a
manuscipt with his letter, Myers explained: “What I have in mind—i
you consider the enclosed dra is more or less on target—is that you ex-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
280 CHAPTER SIX
pand it, re- jig it, re- oient parts o it i need be, and generally make it a
paper to which you would be glad to append your name.”
In the end, though, Myers was unsuccessful with Jablonski as well.
He resorted to publishing a nal, lengthy article on the topic for the
jounal e Environmentalist—a respectable publication, but hardly the
“Science- calibre” jounal he had hoped for. is essay largely reiterated
the points he had made in his and articles on the same sub-
ject, even duplicating some o the language o the nal paragraphs in
the Natural History essay; but it also updated some o the discus-
sion o the “longer- tem consequences” o biodiversity loss, particularly
drawing on Jablonski’s recent studies o the importance o tropical en-
vironments as the “cradle” o diversication.
Some o Jablonski’s reluctance to coauthor with Myers may have
been due to the fact that he was already in the process o publishing
his own statement on the relationship between past and present ex-
tinction cises, which appeared in Apil o as an essay titled “Ex-
tinctions in the Fossil Record.” Jablonski’s article was adapted from a
paper presented at “Estimating Extinction Rates,” a symposium
largely composed o biologists and ecologists, and sponsored by the
Royal Society o London. It oered a bie oveview o paleontological
analysis o mass extinctions, with an eye toward discussing “some impli-
cations for today’s biota” (Jablonski , ). Overall, Jablonski’s mes-
sage was cautiously optimistic about the application o paleontological
studies to the present cisis, concluding that “the fossil record provides
our only empiical data on what happens when biological communities
collapse or disassemble, when increased extinction rates impinge on
taxa o dierent relative vulnerabilities, when global waming or cool-
ing occurs faster than species can adjust to local conditions, when eco-
logical stresses ameliorate aer prolonged or severe episodes, and so
on” (Jablonski , ).
At the same time, however, Jablonski raised a number o concens
about compaisons between past and present rates, including a discus-
sion o the inherent problems with paleontological data (as discussed
above), the limitations o statistical analysis, and diculties estimating
species- level extinction from data for higher taxa. He acknowledged
that the fossil record could “provide useful insights for consevation,”
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 281
but cautioned, “Palaeontological extinction data are extremely dicult
to compare to present- day extinction rates” (Jablonski , ). In fact,
he argued, rather than looking to paleontological analysis o mass ex-
tinctions, the more useful compaison might be with “palaeontologi-
cal analyses o background extinction as a tool in assessing present- day
extinction”—a suggestion he admitted might “be supising.” e key
question was whether the current cisis really reected the obseved
dynamics o mass extinctions; while Jablonski stressed, “I am not belit-
tling the magnitude o today’s problems,” he nonetheless contended, “It
is not clear that present- day disturbances, although extensive relative to
the quietest times o Earth histoy, are on par with those that dive the
major mass extinctions” (Jablonski , ).
In particular, Jablonski noted that whether or not the current biodi-
versity cisis equaled past mass extinctions in tems o an absolute num-
ber o species lost, the real issue was whether “the qualitative change
in suvivorship such as seen at the Cretaceous- Tertiay bounday has
occurred today”—in other words, whether the durations o higher taxa
had been articially tuncated with respect to their average durations
over geological histoy. is was a claim for which he found “little evi-
dence”:
So far as they are known, today’s extinction pattens confom mainly
to intensied versions o background expectations, with losses concen-
trated in endemic species and subspecies. e major mass extinctions
operated on a dierent scale: genera endemic to single subcontinental
provinces were lost preferentially, regardless o the geographic ranges o
their constituent species (Jablonski , ).
Furthemore, and echoing Raup’s pivate citicisms to Wilson nearly
a decade earlier, Jablonski obseved that it was oen extremely di-
cult to neatly distinguish episodes o “mass extinction” from “back-
ground” rates in the fossil record, since “extinction magnitudes for the
stratigraphic stages o the Phanerozoic fom a continuous distibution,”
and “many impressive extinction pulses fail to stand signicantly above
background vaiance.” In the end, what detemines the impact o an
extinction event is less a matter o how many species are removed than
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
282 CHAPTER SIX
which groups are lost. As Jablonski put it, “Mass extinctions have such
profound biological consequences because they bite deep into standing
diversity and disupt background selection regimes, not because they
account for most species teminations” (Jablonski , ).
I recently asked Jablonski whether in the decades since he wrote
this paper he has been given any reason to revise his assessment. Would
he now acknowledge that we are in the midst o a “sixth extinction”?
His response was careful and somewhat guarded, but it summaized
the distance between the rhetoic o proponents o the sixth extinction
concept and the paleontological analysis on which it is ostensibly based:
“I would not say that we are in the middle o a mass extinction” (Jablon-
ski inteview, Febuay , ). Jablonski was neither challenging
the reality o the biological diversity cisis nor arguing that paleonto-
logical analysis o extinction is not useful for understanding the current
problem. Indeed, even in his article he refused to “deny the poten-
tial for long- tem losses o similar scope and evolutionay impact to the
major mass extinctions o the fossil record.” Rather, Jablonski’s point—
similar to arguments made by Raup, Sepkoski, and other paleontolo-
gists over the past several decades—was that these kinds o compai-
sons can be made, and can only be useful, i the data they compare are
commensurable—in other words, i we are compaing apples to apples.
Paleontologists are consevative by nature about making broad
claims based on data from the fossil record because o its notoious “in-
completeness,” and I suspect that this consevatism ubs uncomfortably
against the rather opposite tendency for consevation biologists to ex-
trapolate wildly from equally incomplete infomation. is is perhaps
natural: paleontologists, aer all, deal with the deep past and are rarely
called on to address current political problems, whereas consevation-
ists, who deal with much shorter peiods o time and with ckle politi-
cians and public interest, must o necessity, as Soulé put it, “act before
knowing all the facts.” Indeed, over the past twenty years or so many
paleontologists have deliberately moved toward advocacy positions re-
garding biodiversity, and in doing so they have reconsidered their roles
as intepreters o the past. In his presidential address to the Pale-
ontological Society, for example, Jack Sepkoski argued, “We can ex-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 283
pand our role beyond infoming other scientists and the public about
life in the past [to] help infom scientists and the public about life in the
future” (Sepkoski , ). As Sepkoski noted, paleontologists “are
the only scientists who have ever seen biodiversity cises to their end,
know consistent characteistics o species at isk, and have some idea o
what happens in the aemath” (Sepkoski , ).
Extinction, Diversity, and Culture
Are we, then, in the midst o a mass extinction? Does it matter what
labels we use? From one perspective, to speak o a biodiversity “cisis”
versus a “sixth mass extinction” is to make a distinction without a dif-
ference: as consevation biologists and paleontologists agree, we are
expeiencing a peiod o unusually high extinction rates, and even i we
were somehow able to magically prevent even one more species from
becoming extinct beginning tomorrow, the consequences for global
ecology will still be profound in the future. Moreover, human beings
bear the bunt o responsibility for this cisis, though we can and do
debate whether this extinction event should be dated to the beginning
o the Industial Revolution o the early nineteenth centuy, to the ad-
vent o agiculture ten thousand years ago, or all the way back to the
Pleistocene extinctions o Ice Age megafauna that may have been tig-
gered by our remote ancestors more than , years in the distant
past. In any event, as Eldredge put it in e Miner’s Canary, for late th
and st late- twentieth- and twenty- rst- centuy society, “extinction is
a fact o life in the moden world,” and one that, like anthropogenic
climate change, may make the lives o our children and grandchildren
considerably more dicult than our own, despite our best eorts today.
On the other hand, some would argue that when scientic debates
become part o political discourse—and vice versa, since it is never pos-
sible to cleanly separate these cultural domains—it is important that
the tems we use are precise, that our data analysis is accurate, and that
our projections are not willfully exaggerated. In conversation with me
several years ago (before his death in at the age o eighty- two),
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
284 CHAPTER SIX
Dave Raup reacted strongly to my suggestion that “a little exaggeration”
about biodiversity was OK i it motivated the public and politicians to
take action. He said:
Here I object strenuously. Global climate people are in seious hot water
because they have been caught out so oen in exaggerations. To be sure,
some o the charges are merely the result o extreme advocates on the
other side, but I think enough o them are real to have seiously degraded
the climate change message. e same sort o thing has gotten evolution-
ay biologists in a lot o trouble for exaggerating the strength o the Dar-
winian model (Raup, personal communication ).
Raup was by his own admission a bit o a contraian, so perhaps his
analogy between biodiversity rhetoic and debates around global
waming or creationism is slightly overblown. On the other hand, in
compaison to the two cases he cited, biodiversity estimates are argu-
ably signicantly more fuzzy and uncertain than are climate models or
evolutionay theoy. ese other topics certainly do not see the orders
o magnitude o disagreement about basic facts that have been ad-
vanced in biodiversity discourse over just a few decades. Recall, for
example, that in Wilson claimed, “e rate o extinction is now
about times that recorded through recent geological time.” In just
a decade that gure ballooned to “, times above background,” in
Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin’s popular book e Sixth Extinction:
Patterns o Life and the Future o Humankind (Wilson , ; Leakey
and Lewin , ).
It is important to note that these upward revisions are not due to any
renement o geological extinction rates or signicant improvement in
taxonomic knowledge o current species. Indeed, despite the eorts o
people like Wilson to initiate a massive global biodiversity cataloging
program, scientists have still identied only about . million species o
eukayotes in total (all organisms excluding bacteia). Rather, extinc-
tion gures have grown through a process o repetition and incremen-
tal modication o those vey rst estimates—by Tery Ewin and Wil-
son—that produced the “seventy- four species per day” number, with
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 285
remarkably little additional empiical justication. Is it not reasonable
to wonder whether a public mobilized by claims that we are losing as
many as y thousand species per year might at least lose interest, i
not faith in scientic expertise, i that number were revised signicantly
downward aer we improve our taxonomic knowledge? What might
happen i our “sixth extinction” tuns out more closely to resemble a
peiod o accelerated “background” extinction, as Raup and Jablonski
have suggested? Especially in matters o science and technology, the
public and politicians have become conditioned to reacting to events
only when they achieve economies o scale that are “super- sized.” To
compete for attention in the news cycle, viral outbreaks must be in-
cipient pandemics; earthquakes must register at the upper limits o the
Richter scale; data leaks must be on the scale o petabytes. is men-
tality has oen and ightly been connected both to the competitive atti-
tude o late Cold War “big science” and to a state o twenty- rst- centuy
infomation overload in which so much o the “infomation” we con-
sume is just noise. But I think the stoy presented in this book also plays
a role. Westen culture’s addiction to superlatives is in part a product o
a catastrophic mentality that has seen the scope o the projected apoca-
lypse magnify exponentially in little more than a hundred years. At the
tun o the twentieth centuy, the wory was that Westen society was
in decline; by the s and s it was that the human species might
extinguish itself; and in our own day we hear about the potential for the
“end o nature” and an irreversible curtailing o evolution itself.
But to go back to one o the major threads in this book, the cultural
impact o this kind o “catastrophic thinking” has also manifested itsel
in some perhaps supising ways, spilling into discussions far removed
from nuclear war or endangered species, which have fundamentally af-
fected the way Westeners have looked at their own societies. Here I
am refering to the establishment o the notion that diversity itsel has
inherent value. One o the most dramatic cultural shis documented
in this book lies not in Westen society’s realization that the earth has
undergone drastic physical and biological upheavals over its histoy, or
that such “revolutions” challenge our sense o secuity in the unques-
tioned progress and suvival o human beings. Aer all, Georges Cuvier
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
286 CHAPTER SIX
presented his “catastrophic” geological theoy at the vey beginning o
the nineteenth centuy, and an unsettling sense o pre- or even post-
apocalyptic gloom hovered around many aspects o cultural discourse
from the late nineteenth centuy onward. Rather, what is stiking is how
the new appreciation o extinction in the second hal o the twentieth
centuy contibuted to a broader cultural and political reassessment o
the value o diversity, both as a biological and a cultural “resource.”
e establishment o the new valuation o diversity is particularly
clear in the biological context, as we have seen in this chapter; but it has
also translated directly to broader cultural associations with diversity,
as has been noted by a number o obsevers. As David Takacs puts it,
Some biologists who boldly assert that biodiversity is a nomative good
associate that claim with the more widely familiar one that cultural di-
versity is a nomative good. As biologists link themselves with the forces
promoting the multicultural ethic that has made nomative and political
headway in our society, dierent kinds o diversity thus become symbioti
-
cally and metaphysically linked in inherent “goodness” (Takacs , ).
I think that Takacs has this relationship exactly ight. From the stand-
point o the early twenty- rst centuy, the inescapable conclusion is
that, as he argues, “is thing called ‘diversity’ has been reied: a pre-
viously intangible or abstract concept has been made into a denable,
graspable entity” (Takacs , ). Likewise, Timothy Fanham has as-
serted that the central value associated with “keep[ing] all our options
open, preseving a greater vaiety o values by preseving the natural
vaiety o the environment,” has contibuted directly to the belie “that
with greater diversity—whether cultural or biological—comes greater
value” (Fanham , ).
While it seems intuitively obvious from our present Westen per-
spective that valuations o biological and cultural diversity are closely
associated, it is extremely ticky to ty to establish, in histoical context,
exactly how this relationship came to be. As Ursula Heise has obseved,
“Clearly, the cultural cachet that the concept o ‘diversity’ as accreted
over the past hal centuy in a vaiety o social spaces is hard to disen-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 287
tangle from scientic arguments” (Heise , ). e impossibility o
fully disentangling such discursive threads has been a major theme o
this book, and those attempting to detemine the directionality o in-
uences between explicitly biological and more broadly cultural valua-
tions o diversity are confronted with a seious chicken- and- egg prob-
lem. Nonetheless, I will conclude this book with a perhaps bold claim
that I feel is justied but probably deseves a book o its own to unpack
its complexities and ramications: A central component o late moder-
nity’s fascination with and valuation o diversity o all kinds—both bio-
logical and cultural—has been the establishment o the new extinction
imaginay discussed in the second hal o this book. at is to say, it is
not the case that biodiversity rhetoic rode the coattails o a broader
cultural diversity movement, as has been suggested by some comment-
ers, including Fanham. Nor is it the case that the current discourse
o diversity has taken its cues from values established in the biological
context (though, as I will discuss below, there is some evidence for such
a claim). Rather, this overall valuation o diversity is essentially a single
phenomenon, and its underlying logic depends on the understanding o
the threat extinction poses to the stability o complex systems, whether
natural or humanmade.
I want to be vey clear; I am not arguing that this new extinction
discourse is the only explanation for the populaity o values now as-
sociated with diversity o all kinds. ere are a vaiety o sources and
contexts that can explain the fomation o twenty- rst- centuy argu-
ments for the nomative value o cultural diversity, whether diversity
is understood as ethnic, religious, linguistic, economic, ideological, or
some other fom o dierence. is larger histoy o the idea o diver-
sity—which deseves greater attention than it has received—naturally
encompasses histoies o race, economics, law, and politics stretch-
ing back at least two centuies. I am claiming, though, that the spe-
cic understanding o diversity as a phenomenon that contibutes to the
“health” o social or biological communities comes directly from—and
would hardly make sense without—the essentially ecological perspec-
tive that has been the foundation o the moden extinction imaginay.
e eect o this shi can be seen most starkly in a compaison be-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
288 CHAPTER SIX
tween Victoian and current attitudes held by Westeners about their
ethical responsibilities toward their fellow human and nonhuman
populations around the globe. As Paul and Anne Ehrlich put it in ,
A little more than a centuy ago, many Westeners thought there was no
need to behave ethically toward certain people because, as slaves or mem
-
bers o “infeior” races, they were excluded from the in- group. Today few
Westeners—indeed, few people in any culture—would espouse such a
view (Ehrlich , ).
is statement conjures Charles Lyell’s claim that “i we wield the
sword o extemination as we advance, we have no reason to repine at
the havoc committed,” since it is only natural for the stronger group to
exteminate the weaker (Lyell –, ). e fact that we would no
longer blithely condone, as Lyell did, “the extipation o savage tibes
o men by the advancing colony o some civilized nation” certainly tes-
ties to changes in Westen views about race, shiing political ideolo-
gies, and alterations to other cultural sensibilities that lie well beyond
the scope o this book. But the way in which these altered values and
beliefs are justied—the specic reasons given for claims that diversity
has intinsic value—are deeply infomed by the way that extinction has
come to be identied as a source o threat and anxiety. In fact, I would
go so far as to claim that the emergence o the extinction imaginay
that has characteized the past several decades has been accompanied,
as a kind o essential corollay, by the invention o the concept o “di-
versity,” at least as it is now understood in both biological and cultural
contexts. Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin’s statement about changing
valuations o biological diversity, in their e Sixth Extinction, can
apply equally to discussions o cultural diversity:
ese days, whenever ecologists talk about biological diversity, they
usually feel obliged to justify its value. A quarter o a centuy ago, no
such obligation was felt, for few people bothered to talk about diversity
at all. e question o its value therefore did not aise. Earlier still, around
the tun o the [twentieth] centuy, the value o diversity wasn’t an issue
either, but for dierent reasons (Leakey and Lewin , ).
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 289
One vey specic context in which we can see this clearly is in eorts
by the United Nations and other organizations to establish a framework
for preseving and valuing cultural and “biocultural” diversity duing
the s and s. A decade following the establishment o the
UN Convention on Biological Diversity, UNESCO (the UN agency
dedicated to “Educational, Scientic and Cultural Organization”) pro-
duced its “Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity,” which framed
the presevation o global cultural diversity in precisely the same tems
in which biological diversity had been presented: “e Declaration
aims both to preseve cultural diversity as a living, and thus renew-
able[,] treasure that must not be perceived as being unchanging but as
a process guaranteeing the suvival o humanity” (UNESCO ). e
declaration made an explicit analogy between biological and cultural
diversity, stating in Article that “as a source o exchange, innovation
and creativity, cultural diversity is as necessay for humankind as bio-
diversity is for nature.”
is sense that cultural and biological diversity are not merely simi-
lar, but are in fact manifestations o the same phenomenon can be seen
in the emergence around the same time o a new concept: “biocultural
diversity.” e tem appears to have been coined at a conference
called “Endangered Languages, Endangered Knowledge, Endangered
Environments,” held in Berkeley and sponsored by UNESCO, the
WWF, and the newly founded Terralingua foundation (devoted to the
protection o endangered languages; Ma ). Papers from the con-
ference were published in a volume titled On Biocultural Diversity, and
they reect the ways in which key elements o the biological under-
standing o extinction and diversity inuenced contemporay discus-
sions o cultural and linguistic endangement. As the conference orga-
nizer Luisa Ma explained in her introduction to the volume, species,
ecosystems, and cultural and linguistic groups were “facing compa-
rable threats o radical diversity loss,” amounting, especially in the case
o languages, to “an extinction cisis” o “unprecedented” proportions
(Ma ). e strategies Ma descibed for averting this cisis were
consciously and explicitly drawn from biodiversity consevation eorts:
“Issues o linguistic and cultural diversity consevation may be fomu-
lated in the same tems as for biodiversity consevation: as a matter o
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
290 CHAPTER SIX
‘keeping options alive’ and o preventing ‘monocultures o the mind’”
(Ma ). One o the greatest perceived threats inherent in the biodi-
versity cisis is the homogenizing eect o extinction—the “depauper-
ization” o complex ecosystems in favor o the ecology o “pests and
weeds” discussed above. Ma and others used this as a clear analogy
for cultural and linguistic diversity loss.
ere are other ways in which biocultural diversity arguments drew
on the same extinction logic as the biodiversity movement. For ex-
ample, in his contibution “On the Coevolution o Cultural, Linguis-
tic, and Biological Diversity,” the linguist Eic Smith characteized cul-
tural diversity as “the vaiation in culturally heitable infomation and
its distibution across cultural lineages.” Smith drew an explicit analogy
between cultural and genetic diversity that even proposed concepts o
phylogenetic branching, “di,” and isolation as factors in linguistic di-
versication (Smith , –). Another contibution to the volume
noted the similar eects that “colonizing cultures” had on the reduc-
tion o both cultural and biological diversity. Just as colonizing soci-
eties reduce biological diversity by replacing indigenous ora and fauna
with fewer, high- yield imported species o plants and animals, so too
does globalization reduce linguistic diversity by imposing languages on
colonized peoples. In this way, “the destuction o biodiversity and lin-
guistic diversity have the same cause” (Wollock , –). Similar
analogies can be found elsewhere in the literature on biocultural di-
versity, particularly in relation to endangered languages. In their
suvey o language extinction titled Vanishing Voices, Daniel Nettle and
Suzanne Romaine stressed the value o linguistic diversity consevation
as more than just a quantitative metic: “I some horic catastrophe
wiped out all the languages o westen Europe tomorrow, we would
lose relatively little o the world’s linguistic diversity,” since a vey small
percentage o the world’s languages are spoken in Europe. More sig-
nicantly, most European languages are quite similar stucturally, so
their loss would not dramatically aect the diversity o the kinds o lan-
guages that exist. On the other hand, Nettle and Romaine argued, i a
similar number o languages were lost in South Ameica or Southeast
Asia, “the loss would be far more signicant, because the divergence be-
tween languages there uns much deeper” (Nettle and Romaine ,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 291
–). is is precisely the same logic applied to biodiversity conser-
vation arguments that framed the issue as loss o “infomation” versus
an absolute number o species—and both cases highlight the prospect
o greatest diversity loss in locations with high proportions o small,
locally endemic populations.
e conation o biological and cultural diversity—and o their in-
tinsic value—was nowhere more evident than in a UNESCO booklet
published in , titled Sharing a World o Dierence: e Earth’s Lin-
guistic, Cultural, and Biological Diversity. e booklet denes biocultural
diversity as “interlinkages between linguistic, cultural, and biological
diversity,” asserting that “the diversity o life on Earth is fomed not only
by the vaiety o plant and animal species and ecosystems found in na-
ture (biodiversity), but also by the vaiety o cultures and languages in
human society” (Skutnabb- Kangas et al. , ). Beginning with now
familiar arguments for preseving biodiversity, such as the “unforeseen
consequences” o damage to the “delicate relationships” in ecosystems,
and the endangement o the “potential for adaptation” by the reduc-
tion o genetic diversity, it goes on to argue that “diversity is the basic
condition o the natural world” (Skutnabb- Kangas et al. , –).
“However,” the booklet continues, “diversity is not only a characteistic
o the natural world. e idea o ‘diversity o life’ goes beyond biodiver-
sity. It includes cultural and linguistic diversity found among human
societies” (Skutnabb- Kangas et al. , ). is cultural component
to diversity, say the authors, can be thought o “as the totality o the
‘cultural and linguistic ichness’ present within the human species”—
a quantity analogous to the species and genetic ichness o the global
biosphere. Moreover, the argument descibes the world’s six to seven
thousand languages as “the total ‘pool o ideas’” represented in human
culture, all o which are threatened by a “linguistic and cultural extinc-
tion cisis” (Skutnabb- Kangas et al. , –). Ultimately, the view
presented in this booklet—and by a large segment o the biocultural di-
versity literature—is more than merely analogical: “Biological diversity
and linguistic diversity are not separate aspects o the diversity o life,
but rather intimately related, and indeed, mutually supporting ones. . . .
e extinction cises that are aecting these manifestations o the diver-
sity o life may be converging also” (Skutnabb- Kangas et al. , ).
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
292 CHAPTER SIX
ese examples drawn from the biocultural diversity literature are
instuctive about some o the ways that extinction discourse has pene-
trated postmillennial cultural discussions o diversity, but o course
they do not explain all o the wider valuations o diversity we see around
us. When universities encourage applications from “diverse” communi-
ties, or when employers defend their record o diversity in hiing, they
are almost certainly not consciously thinking o the value attached to
these practices in tems analogous to arguments for preseving bio-
logical diversity. Yet I would caution against therefore dismissing my
broader claim about the importance o an extinction imaginay in shap-
ing even our casual valuations o diversity. We may be unconscious, or
even unaware, o the “ecological” basis for valuing diverse communi-
ties, but I suspect that i we deeply probed our own rationales for en-
couraging diversity, we would nd that they do resolve to some version
o the arguments advanced for protecting biological diversity. Why,
aer all, should it matter whether a school or a workplace is diverse?
What benet is imagined to follow? I one were to respond that it is
a matter o ethics or fainess to allow equal opportunity, I think that
would be only a partial answer. Initiatives like the ules in the United
States and Europe supporting amative action for women and par-
ticular minoity populations are not, in the nal analysis, about ensur-
ing diversity, though they may contibute to this eect. Rather, they are
designed to redress certain histoical inequalities for specic groups.
An employer would, in theoy, be contibuting to amative action by
hiing a workforce composed o percent women or percent Afi-
can Ameicans, which would have no eect toward creating a quanti-
tatively diverse environment. is has indeed been a favoite argument
o those who oppose amative action and similar programs on ideo-
logical grounds. From this perspective, such policies can actually reduce
diversity by penalizing certain ethnic groups (especially noted in the
case o Asians), or by limiting other kinds o diversity, such as political
ideology.
No; whether we acknowledge it or not, the implicit rationale for pro-
moting cultural diversity in our workplaces, neighborhoods, schools,
and the like is that exposure to a plurality o ideas, expeiences, be-
liefs, backgrounds, traditions, abilities, and advantages will produce
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
A SIXTH EXTINCTION? 293
“healthier,” more balanced, and more readily prepared individuals and
societies. e loss o groups that make up this diverse cultural land-
scape is seen as being akin to the “extinction” o resources that can con-
tibute to the resilience o our society—to its adaptability and resis-
tance to sudden change. To be sure, there are many people who oppose
this rationale and reject cultural diversity as “identity politics.” But to
encounter some o the bitterest complaints from that side o the politi-
cal spectum—which oen argue that businesses and schools should be
compelled to promote diversity o political aliation, religious belief,
and the like (generally a code for favoing white, heterosexual, politi-
cally consevative men)—is to get a sense o just how deeply, i inconsis-
tently, these values have penetrated Westen beliefs. I our society still
has a vey long way to go in grappling with what diversity really means,
we seem remarkably certain that it is something that is good for us, and
we fear its loss.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EPILOGUE: EXTINCTION IN
THE ANTHROPOCENE
Imagine this scenaio: Over a short peiod o time, huge amounts o
carbon dioxide, methane, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen chloide, and other
gases are released into the atmosphere. e rapid dispersal o these
gases has several signicant eects, including the elevation o global
temperatures by several degrees Celsius due to a “greenhouse eect,”
and the depletion o the protective ozone layer as the result o the inter-
action o methane in the atmosphere, which reacts chemically with
hydroxyl and suppresses the production o ozone. Terrestial ecosys-
tems are bathed in hamful ultraviolet radiation, and as temperatures
ise above °C photosynthesis becomes signicantly less ecient for
plants and green algae. is creates an oxygen- depleted (hypoxic) envi-
ronment, and severely impacts the diversity o vegetation and the ani-
mals who depend on it, tiggeing cascading extinctions. At the same
time, changes to the composition o the oceans are even more dramatic.
Higher atmospheic temperatures raise the surface temperature o the
oceans, producing a devastating eect on shallow- water ecological
communities. Coral reefs die, and the complex ecosystems they sup-
port are fatally disupted, diving countless species o sh, maine in-
vertebrates, and microorganisms to the bink o extinction. Outside the
tropics where ree communities are generally found, increase in ocean
temperatures shinks the habitats o cold- water organisms by as much
as percent, leaving many species with simply nowhere to go.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
296 EPILOGUE
Nor are the oceans immune to the eects o greenhouse gasses; ab-
soption o CO, an acidic compound, along with even more toxic com-
pounds like hydrogen sulde raises the global pH, producing lethally
acidied oceans. More devastating still is the pevasive deoxygnation
o the seas, the result o a complex ecological and environmental cas-
cade. In the rst instance, oxygen becomes less soluble in wamer water,
meaning that maine animals will nd it harder to breathe. Secondaily,
wamer temperatures promote increased organic decay, a chemical
process that uses up oxygen. e oceans’ phytoplankton (microscopic
organisms that photosynthesize on the ocean surface) produce up to
percent o the world’s oxygen, but photosynthesizing phytoplankton
like green algae cannot suvive in temperatures much above °C, nor
can the zooplankton (protozoans such as radiolaians and foraminifer-
ans) that feed on ocean bacteia. Zooplankton have an important role
in maintaining maine oxygen levels, since they clear the ocean’s sur-
face o decaying algae and transfer organic matter to the sea oor, in
the fom o microscopic fecal pellets. As green algae and zooplankton
die, they are replaced by opportunistic cyanobacteia, which have much
higher temperature tolerances than phytoplankton such as radiolai-
ans. Cyanobacteia—also known as blue- green algae, though stictly
speaking they are not tue algae—are among the oldest organisms on
earth, and their photosynthesizing is thought to be responsible for the
so- called Great Oxygenation Event that paved the way for multicellular
life some . billion years ago. Unfortunately, cyanobacteia also pro-
duce a vaiety o toxins hamful to other maine life, and “algal blooms”
are considered signicant threats to maine ecosystems. Perhaps more
signicantly, zooplankton are unable to digest cyanobacteia (and, in
any event, are likely killed by ising temperatures), meaning that the
ocean’s surface becomes choked with decaying organic matter, acceler-
ating the consumption o maine oxygen. In a relatively short time, the
world’s oceans become anoxic, or nearly devoid o oxygen, and unable
to support life.
e result o these interlinked, cascading ecological disturbances is
mass extinction o a tuly global scope. Virtually no group o organisms
is spared: ising temperatures and reduced photosynthetic eciency
produces massive deforestation, hitting larger plants and trees espe-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE 297
cially hard. Whole orders o insects and other invertebrates that depend
on the vanishing ora are wiped out, as are herbivorous vertebrates and
the canivores who prey on them. In the oceans the losses are even more
widespread, and maine invertebrates with heavily calcied skeletons
or who rely on those organisms for food or ecosystem sevices (includ-
ing many groups o echinodems, mollusks, arthropods, and micro-
scopic zooplankton) suer catastrophic extinctions. And both on land
and in the water, larger animals are nearly lost; depived o food and
habitat, and especially sensitive to oxygen depletion because o their
greater metabolic requirements, a great many vertebrates are simply
unable to cope. In the course o perhaps only a few thousand years,
levels o species extinction dwar even the catastrophic event that killed
the dinosaurs: as many as percent o terrestial vertebrates are gone,
while maine species o all kinds suer a mind- boggling loss o perhaps
percent o their diversity. e resulting earth is one nearly depleted
o all life, and teeteing on the bink o total extinction.
I you have paid any attention to the literature and media coverage o
the current cisis o global waming, you might assume I am descibing
one o the more dismal projections produced by climate and ecological
modeling for the coming centuy or two. But the scenaio I have just
sketched is not a prognostication for our near future, but an account o
the deep past. It is a reconstuction o what likely happened more than
million years ago duing what paleontologists consider the greatest
mass extinction o all time, at the end o the Pemian peiod. e cul-
pit in this instance is thought to have been the massive release o gases
from a major system o “supevolcanoes” that eupted in parts o what
are now Sibeia and China, generally known as the “Sibeian raps”
(a “trap” is the geologic tem for the rock fomed by lava ows). e
end- Pemian mass extinction is distinguished from the other members
o the “Big Five” not only by its scope but by its suddenness: a recent
study suggests that the majoity o extinctions may have taken place
over just a few centuries—not even a blink o an eye in geological tems.
e parallels between the proposed end- Pemian extinction sce-
naio and our own worst fears about the impacts o global waming
and biodiversity loss are inescapable, as many have obseved. As the
geologist Lee Kump descibes it in a recent commentay in the jounal
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
298 EPILOGUE
Science, “Voluminous emissions o carbon dioxide to the atmosphere,
rapid global waming, and a decline in biodiversity—the stoyline is
moden, but the setting is ancient.” Citing the event as a possible “ana-
log for our future,” Kump wans, “Our moden- day ‘Sibeian rap’ is
fossil fuel buning, which is diving up atmospheic carbon dioxide
to concentrations that Earth has not witnessed for millions o years”
(Kump , –). e authors o the study on which Kump’s com-
ments are based—an analysis o the role o hypoxia in Pemian extinc-
tions—agree with this assessment; they conclude that global waming
and oxygen loss could “largely account” for the end- Pemian mass ex-
tinction, and forecast that their study “highlights the future extinction
isk aising from a depletion o the world’s aerobic capacity that is al-
ready undeway” (Penn et al. , ). In comments to the science
jounalist Carl Zimmer, one o the study’s authors, Curtis Deutsch,
is even more blunt, remarking that current global climate change “is
solidly in the categoy o a catastrophic extinction event,” and waning,
“Le unchecked, climate waming is putting our future on the same
scale as some o the worst events in geological histoy” (Shen et al. ,
–).
One o the central arguments o this book has been that, to para-
phrase the wonderful editoial by Ellen Goodman discussed in
chapter , evey era gets the extinction stoy it “deseves.” e optimistic
Victoians saw extinction as a gradual succession o ever tter species,
leading to inevitable “improvement” that t their view o histoy as an
essentially progressive narrative. e gloomy Modenists o the early
twentieth centuy, in contrast, found parallels between equally inevi-
table cycles o ise and decline in both natural and human histoy. With
the advent o nuclear weapons and an increasingly fightening Cold
War political and environmental backdrop, scientists, politicians, and
the public became fascinated by sudden, cataclysmic events capable o
obliterating life in the ash o an atomic blast or an asteroid impact. As
the Cold War gave way to late- twentieth- centuy globalization and the
tiumph o a neoliberal political and economic order, however, both the
immediacy and the stakes o the impending catastrophe shied. Rather
than being viewed as a sudden event, catastrophe came to be seen as a
slow- motion aair, and human agency became associated—by analogy,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE 299
at least—with the geological forces that shaped life in the past in con-
tibuting to a moden- day Sixth Extinction.
To put it another way, the scientic theoies, cultural metaphors,
and future prognostications bound up in “catastrophic thinking” collec-
tively contibute to an imaginay around extinction that infoms both
our sense o the past and our prospects for the future. I this is the case,
then what does the imaginay o our current moment (as o this witing,
in late ) signify about our hopes and fears, and about our respon-
sibility for and relation to the natural world we inhabit? Are we cur-
rently living in a continuation o the catastrophic thinking associated
with the late- twentieth- centuy anxiety over biodiversity depletion, as
descibed in this book’s nal chapter, or have we entered some new
phase? What does it mean that, as some have suggested, we have come
to see humanity not as some unpredictable extenal agent binging
death from above—an asteroid—but rather as an implacable geologi-
cal force capable o alteing the basic conditions for life on earth from
within? As the science witer Peter Brannen puts it, “Today humanity
plays the role o that pimeval Sibeian supevolcano” (Brannen ).
ere is a major line o argument in both the scientic community
and broader popular discourse that suggests we have indeed entered
just such a new phase o understanding, broadly associated with the
proposition that we are now living in a new geological age: the so- called
Anthropocene epoch. Oiginally introduced in the early s as a pro-
posed alteration to the ocial geological time scale, the Anthropocene
concept is based on the obsevation that the footpint o human ac-
tivity—atmospheic CO, radioactivity from nuclear testing, waste
from plastics and other manmade compounds, widespread species
extinctions, and other evidence o human environmental impact—is
so profound that it will appear millions o years from now as a signa-
ture in the stratigraphic record. e idea was rst widely presented by
the Nobel Pize– winning atmospheic chemist Paul Cutzen in a
article in the jounal Nature titled “e Geology o Mankind”; it has
since gained widespread notoiety and appeal in discussions ranging
from geology and environmentalism to the humanities, as a way o con-
ceptualizing the physical and psychological consequences o the un-
precedented impact our species has had on the planet.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
300 EPILOGUE
As Cutzen explained in his oiginal statement, the current desig-
nation for the geological age in which we are living—an epoch known
as the Holocene, which began at the end o the last major peiod o
glaciation some , years ago—is insucient to capture what has
been distinctive about the signature le by humans since the industial
revolution o the eighteenth centuy. Cutzen’s proposal has been taken
up by vaious professional bodies responsible for ratifying changes to
the geological timescale, including the Intenational Commission on
Stratigraphy and the Intenational Union o Geological Sciences, and
the change has been endorsed by the Anthropocene Working Group o
the ICS, although no fomal action has yet been taken. As a matter o
geology, the Anthropocene is a somewhat controversial notion; there
have been debates about when the Anthropocene should begin, with
some favoing a more recent threshold (the start o industialization, or
even the advent o nuclear testing), while others advocating an earlier
start, such as the spread o dynastic empires in Europe, Asia, and the
Ameicas some two to three thousand years ago, or even the advent o
agicultural societies six thousand years earlier (in which case the An-
thropocene would eectively replace the Holocene). Still others have
complained that geologists ought not be in the business o projecting
into the future, and that the decision should properly await whoever is
around to obseve actual geological eects centuies or millennia down
the road—i our civilization and species suvive that long.
As a matter o dating and stratigraphic nomenclature, these ques-
tions can and will be decided on empiical grounds, and there is a
possibility that the matter will be resolved even before this book is
published. But this is not the pimay function o the Anthropocene
concept in our current imaginay around extinction. e signicance
o the Anthropocene discussion is, rather, cultural, to the extent that it
signies—as Cutzen, Will Steen, and John R. McNeill argued in an
inuential article—the recognition o “a profound shi in the re-
lationship between humans and the rest o nature,” in which “human-
kind will remain a major geological force for many millennia, maybe
millions o years, to come” (Steen et al. , –). In this perspec-
tive, the Anthropocene is not merely a proposal for renaming a geologi-
cal epoch, but a recognition o a radical reoientation o the relation-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE 301
ship that humans perceive between ourselves and the rest o nature.
As Jedidiah Purdy explains in his citical analysis o the Anthropocene,
Aer Nature: “To dene the Anthropocene is to emphasize what we
think is important in that relationship, [and to recognize that] the famil-
iar divide between people and the natural world is no longer useful or
accurate” (Purdy , ). Independently o whether it is accepted as a
stratigraphic designation, the notion o the Anthropocene symbolizes
a new state o awareness about the pemanence o human intevention
in the natural world, and it cystallizes a host o new and preexisting
anxieties and ambitions relating to climate change, biodiversity preser-
vation, geoengineeing, biotechnology, human population expansion,
environmental and economic justice, and the future o humankind on
or even beyond the planet Earth.
In other words, while the legitimacy and details o the Anthropo-
cene can be debated by geologists, its relevance as a cultural touch-
stone is indisputable. A search o book and article databases retuns
thousands o results containing the tem just in titles, and at least three
scholarly jounals are currently devoted to discussions o the concept
and its consequences. is is to say nothing o the proliferation o the
tem in nonacademic discourse in newspapers, magazines, websites,
and other foms o media; a current Google search retuns nearly ve
million hits. e question is not that the Anthropocene signies some-
thing, but what it signies, particularly in the context o the narrative
about extinction and its values presented in this book. Here the picture
becomes more complicated: in tems o its message for the continua-
tion o human civilization and our role as stewards o the natural world,
there are currently at least two oen quite conicting understandings
o the Anthropocene, which eectively infom two competing ex-
tinction imaginaies. e rst recognizes the signicant threat posed
by global climate change, biodiversity loss, and other environmental
cises, but regards these threats as challenges that human ingenuity can
and will meet with technological innovations—such as geoengineeing
our atmosphere to reduce hamful greenhouse gases—that can reverse
much o the damage we’ve done and even improve the quality o life for
eveyone. e second, much darker view sees the Anthropocene as the
teminal moment for humanity, the culmination o our collective hu-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
302 EPILOGUE
bis—which will result in a dramatic reversal o our dominance o the
planet, i not the extinction o our species.
It’s worth pointing out that these twin themes—cautious optimism
and extreme pessimism—have been paired in the extinction imaginar-
ies at other moments as well. ey represent two fundamentally human
reactions to cisis—panic and doomsaying on the one hand, and re-
silient hopefulness on the other—that can and do coexist, even in the
mind o a single person. E. O. Wilson’s message about biodiversity, aer
all, has been altenately deeply pessimistic and guardedly optimistic,
and it is clear that the sometimes dire rhetoic he has used to character-
ize the biodiversity cisis has been calculated to spur people to action,
not to encourage despair and apathy. ere have been some genuinely
pessimistic extinction discourses in the past—for example, Oswald
Speng ler’s forecast for the “decline” o Westen civilization as an inevi-
table outcome, or vaious predictions o a similarly inevitable nuclear
Amageddon duing the Cold War era. Generally speaking, though,
catastrophic thinking has oen been the prelude to constuctive action.
It may simply be human nature to freak out before taking a deep breath
and attacking the problem. I we are so inclined, we might even posit
some speculative evolutionay explanation for this panic- then- recover
patten to cisis response, perhaps from our early expeience as a vul-
nerable species on the Afican savannah.
Having said this, however, it is stiking how widely separated the ex-
tremes are in the reactions to the Anthropocene. ey seem to present
not just dierent phases in the psychological absoption o a cisis, but
basically altenative visions o the future. e histoian Gregg Mitman
puts this disconnect vey well in a recent analysis o Anthropocene dis-
course:
e rst charts an environmental future o the “good Anthropocene,”
where technoscience provides the innovative tools for xing a waming
planet. e second propels us to a more dystopic environmental future, or
at least a future lled with uncertainty, loss, and mouning in the face o
accelerating species extinction and a world increasingly divided by those
who have the means to suvive and those who do not (Mitman , ).
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE 303
One o the ways that the extinction imaginay o the Anthropocene dif-
fers from some previous incanations is in its inbuilt fatalism. As pro-
ponents o the Sixth Extinction concept have frequently stressed, we
are already well into an extinction event, and the species we have lost
are irreplaceably gone. We can ty to slow the pace o extinction, but
we cannot recover what we have lost (unless we consider some o the
far- fetched proposals to “de- extinct” particular species using cloning
techniques, which will be discussed presently). Likewise, one o the
central claims o climate change activists is that we have already passed
the inection point at which certain aspects o climate are reversible;
like Huck and Jim traveling down the Mississippi in Huckleberry Finn,
we’ve passed the tuno point and there’s no going back—the iver is
going to cary us foward whether we like it or not. One o the distin-
guishing features o the Anthropocene—and an argument for consid-
eing it as being part o a distinctly new extinction imaginay—is that,
whether or not one sees the situation as redeemable, the cisis is upon
us, and is not le to the imagination o some future event. When D. H.
Lawrence wrote in , “e cataclysm has happened, we are among
the uins,” or when Jean Baudillard exclaimed in , “e explosion
has already occurred, the bomb is only a metaphor now,” the sense o
living postapocalypse was nonetheless a metaphor. Global waming and
biodiversity loss do not signify some other imagined catastrophe, or
at least they do not only do so; they are the catastrophe, and they have
most denitely already happened. ere is nothing metaphoical about
thousands o annual species extinctions or melting icecaps.
How we react to the expeience o living through a catastrophe—
whether we regard it as an apocalypse or just a challenge to be met—is
another matter, though, and the response shapes vey dierent visions
o the future. From the vey start, the optimistic view was baked into
the notion o the Anthropocene itself. In his foundational article,
Cutzen concluded that the challenges o climate change “will require
appropiate human behavior at all scales, and may well involve intena-
tionally accepted, large- scale geo- engineeing projects, for instance to
‘optimize’ climate” (Cutzen , ). Likewise, in their article
Cutzen et al. suggested that “drastic options,” such as sequesteing CO
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
304 EPILOGUE
and dispersing aerosols into the atmosphere to block sunlight, may be
required, though they did acknowledge that this strategy is “a highly
controversial topic” (Steen et al. , ).
In a similar vein, political scientist Amy Lynn Fletcher has pro-
posed that pursuing technoscientic xes for environmental and eco-
logical damage caused by humans oers a redemptive countenarrative
to the pessimistic gloom and mistust o science oen found in envi-
ronmental citique. In her book Mendel’s Ark: Biotechnology and the
Future o Extinction, Fletcher wites: “To propose that biotechnology
may someday allow us to undo the environmental damage we’ve done
is to move from the twentieth centuy’s environmental rhetoic o cisis
to a new rhetoic o hope, to create a promissoy wildeness which in-
cludes not only the species alive today but the multitude o species we
thought irretievably lost” (Fletcher , ). Specically, Fletcher—
a proponent o so- called “de- extinction,” or the resurrection o extinct
species through cloning and gene editing—argues that the use o bio-
technology presents not just a practical x to species loss (which she
grants cannot possibly be fully recouped by technology), but a kind o
pledge on the part o humanity that signals our optimistic spiit. Cloned
extinct species are “promissoy objects”—tokens o our commitment
and ability to heal as well as ham—as much as they are concrete steps
towards reversing biodiversity loss. While many o the de- extinction
proposals focus on chaismatic extinct species o little obvious eco-
logical import, their symbolic value in the popular imagination is what
matters most. She wites: “e idea o cloning a woolly mammoth is a
socio- technical imaginay that embodies our fear o the present envi-
ronmental cisis and our desire to save and create the future through
biotechnological innovation” (Fletcher , ).
Indeed, an explicit rejection o apocalyptic thinking is a central
feature o many commentaies on what Mitman called the “good An-
thropocene.” In one o the most passionate examples o this genre, the
book e Anthropocene: e Human Era and How It Shapes Our Planet,
the Geman science jounalist Chistian Schwägerl argues, “e An-
thropocene is an anti- Apocalyptic idea, par excellence; an ‘Apocalypse
No’ instead o an ‘Apocalypse Now’” (Schwägerl , ). Schwägerl,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE 305
who has collaborated with a group o histoians and cultural citics in
Berlin who have been prominently associated with the technological
inteventionist Anthropocene discourse, insists not only that climate
change is remediable, but more importantly that the Anthropocene
presents an opportunity to collectively reimagine the human future in
ways that will “help people see themselves as active, integrated partici-
pants in an emerging new nature that will make the earth more human-
ist rather than just humanized” (Schwägerl, , ). In other words,
while the current ecological cisis does indeed seem “fightening,” it
has provided an impetus to break free o the “narcissistic” tendency to
regard ourselves as being set apart from the rest o nature. In this way,
Schwägerl contends,
I we take the Anthropocene idea seiously, it can help shape our present
behavior in a positive way. Rather than dening humanity as the de
-
stroyer o nature, the Anthropocene casts people in an amative, long-
tem role. It is neither about facing an ecological apocalypse, nor harken-
ing back to the “good old days.” e Anthropocene is not a ticking time
bomb, nor is it an end- of- the- world scenaio (Schwägerl , –).
On the opposite end o the spectum are commentators who have
explicitly embraced apocalyptic thinking in their characteization o cli-
mate change and the Anthropocene. I the title o Roy Scranton’s
book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene doesn’t make his point clearly
enough, the opening sentence leaves nothing to the imagination: “We’re
fucked. e only questions are how soon and how badly” (Scranton
). Scranton—a literay scholar and jounalist who draws promi-
nently in his reections from his deployment in the Iraq War in the early
s—rejects the notion that humanity can somehow come through
its current cisis unscathed: “I Homo sapiens suvives the next millen-
nium, it will be suvival in a world unrecognizably dierent than the
one we have known for the last , years” (Scranton ). He also
dismisses the notion that the Anthropocene is merely “the latest ver-
sion o a hoay fable o annihilation” or an episode o mass “hysteia.”
Rather, he insists it is a “fact,” and says, “We have likely already passed
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
306 EPILOGUE
the point where we could have done anything about it.” e only re-
course humanity has le, he argues, is “to lean to die not as individuals,
but as a civilization.”
Supisingly, however, Scranton’s fatalism does not lead ultimately
to complete pessimism, and here we may have a clue about whether
there is, in fact, a coherent extinction imaginay that can be teased out
o competing Anthropocene discourses. While we may have “failed to
prevent unimaginable global waming,” as he argues, so that our “global
capitalist civilization as we know it is already over,” Scranton nonethe-
less holds out a glimmer o hope: humanity yet has the possibility to
“suvive and adapt to the new world o the Anthropocene, i we accept
human limits and transience as essential tuths, and work to nurture the
raity and ichness o our collective cultural heitage” (Scranton ).
One consequence o this process is an essential reimagination o West-
en values and narratives—or, as Scranton puts it, “letting go o this
particular way o life and its ideas o identity, freedom, success, and
progress” (Scranton ). e book, then, concludes in an elegiac but
cautiously optimistic tone:
Wars begin and end. Empires ise and fall. Buildings collapse, books
bun, severs break down, cities sink into the sea. Humanity can suvive
the demise o fossil- fuel civilization and it can suvive whatever despo-
tism or barbaism will aise in its uins. We may even be able to suvive in
a greenhouse world. Perhaps our descendents [sic] will build new cities
on the shores o the Arctic Sea, when the rest o the Earth is scorching
deserts and steaming jungles. I being human is to mean anything at all
in the Anthropocene, i we are going to refuse to let ourselves sink into
the futility o life without memoy, then we must not lose our few thou-
sand years o hard- won knowledge, accumulated at great cost and against
great odds. We must not abandon the memoy o the dead.
Obseving current scientic eorts to preseve archives o biological
diversity, Scranton suggests that ultimately human civilization “must
build arks: not just biological arks, to cary foward endangered ge-
netic data, but also cultural arks, to cary foward endangered wisdom”
(Scranton ).
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EXTINCTION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE 307
I there is a coherent extinction imaginay present in the Anthropo-
cene discussion, then, it is one that imagines ecological cisis as a pre-
lude to a new chapter in human histoy. We might perhaps circle back
and connect this view to the oiginal meaning o apocalypse, as a cleans-
ing re that ushers in a new age or moral order for human society. ere
is something unmistakably biblical in this line o thought, despite the
avowedly secular tone o most Anthropocene literature. Just as many
apocalyptic religious sects have imagined that they were expeienc-
ing some nal cisis predicted in scipture, Anthropocene proponents
seem drawn to a similar moral drama, in which humanity is facing a
test through which it will either emerge into a new, healthier era o pro-
ductivity, stewardship, and humanistic values, or leave the stage for the
benet o what comes next. In other words, either we will lean to ap-
preciate and protect the diversity o life that surrounds and sustains us
as a species, or—like the tilobites, dinosaurs, and mastodons before
us—we will become a statistic on some far- future graph o diversica-
tion and extinction, compiled by our hypothetical successors.
It is the outcome o that test is that remains uncertain, and this
uncertainty contibutes to the gap between optimistic and pessimis-
tic readings o the Anthropocene. In some readings, environmental
cisis is like the biblical stoy o the Garden o Eden, in which painful
change will spur our species to new technological innovations or even
a new start on other worlds. In others, it is like an angy God punish-
ing humanity for its hubis and wickedness. ere is something almost
gleeful in the way some commenters imagine this negative outcome—
as, for example, in David Wallace- Wells’s recent book e Uninhabit-
able Earth, which presents a catalog o horrors facing our species in the
coming centuy, and paints a scenaio o “a new kind o cascading vio-
lence, waterfalls and avalanches o devastation, the planet pummeled
again and again, with increasing intensity and in ways that build on each
other and undemine our ability to respond . . . subverting the prom-
ise that the world we have engineered and built for ourselves, out o
nature, will also protect us against it, rather than conspiing with dis-
aster against its makers” (Wallace- Wells , ). We might conclude
that the current cultural fascination with apocalyptic entertainment—
a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for stoies o catastrophic plagues,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
308 EPILOGUE
natural disasters, and o course zombies—is the psychological projec-
tion o our own collective guilt and fatalism about a much more real
and immediate catastrophe, both more complete and too prosaic to be
translated to ction.
I there is one Anthropocene scenaio that seems almost too pain-
ful for either end o the spectum to consider, it is a catastrophe with
no nal resolution, and with no moral message. e altenative to both
a redemptive human transfomation and an apocalyptic extinction is
that, as Purdy has suggested, humanity merely continues to stuggle
along in misey. In an article appropiately titled “Anthropocene Fever,”
Purdy wites: “For all the talk o cisis that swirls around the Anthropo-
cene, it is unlikely that a changing Earth will feel catastrophic or apoca-
lyptic. . . . Indeed, the Anthropocene will be like today, only more so”
(Purdy ). at is to say, the cisis will continue to disproportion-
ately aect the part o the world that is already most miserable, and may
largely spare the wealthiest and most developed societies, exacerbating
already profound global dispaities. As Purdy explains in Aer Nature,
“e disasters o the Anthropocene in our near future will seem to con-
m the ich counties’ resilience, exibility, entrepreneuial capacity,
and that everlasting mark o being touched by the gods, good luck,
[while] amplifying existing inequality” (Purdy , ). e result o
this version o the Anthropocene, which Purdy labels “the neoliberal
Anthropocene,” is neither a gloious new society nor an earth purged
o human interference, but a persistent dystopia o ever- widening in-
equality and economies o sueing. O all o the extinction imaginar-
ies this book has considered, and o all the imagined outcomes these
discourses have presented, this one stikes me as perhaps the most cata-
strophic and also the most plausible. In the end, it may be more palat-
able for Westen culture to imagine its own complete extinction, or to
conjure deus ex machina technological fantasies o utopian deliverance,
than it is to conceive o an existence in which concrete, reasonable sac-
ices are made by the fortunate o our species so that all human beings
can expeience a decent quality o life.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A great many people have contibuted to my thinking as it has evolved
over the several years duing which I have researched and witten this
book. I am especially indebted to my fiends and colleagues at the Max
Planck Institute for the Histoy o Science in Berlin, where I was incred-
ibly fortunate to spend six o the happiest years o my academic career.
e book’s oigin goes back to an invitation in to participate in a
“working group” there (a particular way o organizing collective intel-
lectual projects at the institute) called “Endangement and its Conse-
quences,” led by Fenando Vidal and Nelia Dias. I beneted immensely
from workshops and discussions with members o that group, which
were fomative for this project. More broadly, the intellectual atmo-
sphere provided by Department II o the Max Planck Institute—and the
model and example set by its director, Lorraine Daston—were the ideal
incubator for witing a book like this. At vaious stages o its develop-
ment I had the opportunity to discuss this project in fomal workshops
and infomal conversations with a great many o the smartest, most
generous scholars in the world. I also had the enomous good fortune
to be able to spend several years free o teaching and other obligations
to research and wite. My gratitude to Raine, to my colleagues, to visi-
tors to the Max Planck Institute, and o course to the institute’s wonder-
ful libray sta (who were able to provide any book or article I needed,
no matter how obscure, at virtually a moment’s notice) is boundless.
ere are far too many people who provided helpful suggestions, in-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
310 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
sightful citicism, and sounding boards for me to thank eveyone indi-
vidually. Nonetheless, for inspiing conversation, comments on dras
o chapters or articles, or opportunities to speak or publish about vai-
ous aspects o this project, I owe great thanks to Elena Aronova, Mark
Barrow, Jenny Bangham, Etienne Benson, Josh Berson, Dan Bouk, Paul
Binkman, Mark Borrello, Lino Campubi, John Carson, Jamie Cohen-
Cole, Heny Cowles, Angela Creager, Helen Cury, Stephanie Dick,
Sébastien Dutreuil, Sebastian Felten, Justin Garson, Michael Gordin,
Oren Haman, David Jablonski, Bois Jardine, Judy Kaplan, Philipp
Lehmann, Rebecca Lemov, Scott Lidgard, Eika Milam, Staan Müller-
Wille, Lynn Nyhart, Chistine von Oertzen, Michael Ohl, Anya Plutyn-
ski, Sadiah Qureshi, Joanna Radin, Bob Richards, Lukas Rieppel, Saho-
tra Sarkar, Alistair Sponsel, Hallam Stevens, Marco Tamboini, Paul
White, and Andrew Yang. My research assistants Julia Jägle (at the Max
Planck Institute), and Lydia Cras and Leanna Duncan (at the Univer-
sity o Illinois) have provided invaluable help in researching and pre-
paing this book. I am also grateful for my current colleagues in the De-
partment o Histoy at the University o Illinois at Urbana- Champaign;
a more welcoming and collegial group could not be hoped for.
ree people stand out as having been not only supporters o this
project but important mentors for many years, and they deseve special
recognition. Michael Ruse has encouraged and cajoled me for nearly
two decades, and has oen provided citical feedback, wam hospi-
tality, and generous fiendship at cucial moments. Martin Rudwick
has inspired me for years with the example o his peerless scholarship
and with his wam encouragement o my own work, including feedback
and conversations about this book project. And the late David M. Raup,
one o the tue giants o twentieth- centuy paleontology, infomed this
book both directly and indirectly. Dave was probably the single most
important theoist o the role o mass extinctions in the histoy o life,
and I was fortunate to have him as a wise interlocutor and a fiend. He
oered citical obsevations and suggestions at the beginning o this
project, and I dearly wish he was here to see the nal product. He is
greatly missed, and he is among those to whom this book is dedicated.
Special thanks are also due to the sta at the University o Chicago
Press, and particularly to my editor, Karen Darling, whose enthusiasm
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 311
and support for this project have been unagging. Karen and the seies
editor, Adian Johns, have provided much important encouragement
and guidance along the way, from the project’s initial conception to the
nished book. Finally, my deepest and most important gratitude is to
my family, who have always encouraged and sustained me. ank you
to my mother Maureen and my (late) father Jack; to Chistine, Ella, and
Sid; and o course to Tei, my best fiend and rst reader.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
NOTES
Introduction
. e ocial stratigraphic designation for what was for many years known as the
early “Tertiay” peiod (T) is now ocially recognized as the “Paleogene” (Pe
or Pg). e tem “Tertiay” is still widely used, however, to infomally designate
the geological peiod beginning roughly million years ago, and it will be used
thoughout this book.
. E. O. Wilson, ed. Biodiversity (Washington: National Academy Press, ), –.
. On the topic o “imagination” as a way o understanding our cultural reaction to
extinction, the literay scholar Ursula Heise’s Imagining Extinction: e Cultural
Meanings o Endangered Species (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, ) oers
an insightful and evocative meditation on the way that “narratives” o extinction,
especially in contemporay literature, have contibuted to and been inuenced by
scientic discourse.
. For interested readers, my use o the tem “extinction imaginay” is similar to histo-
ian Sarah Maza’s use o the tem “social imaginay” in her study o revolutionay-
era France, e Myth o the French Bourgeoisie. Maza denes the social imaginay
as “the cultural elements from which we constuct our understanding o the social
world,” including contemporay political and academic discourse, ction, social
commentay, and bureaucratic records. Sarah Maza, e Myth o the French Bour-
geoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, – (Cambidge, MA: Havard Uni-
versity Press, ), .
. e complex interaction between scientic literature, popular and political wit-
ing and statements, artistic and literay representations, and indeed any “semiotic”
web in which “signs” have particular meaning in relation to one another is oen re-
ferred to as “discourse,” another academic tem I will sometimes use in this book—
for example, in descibing a shiing “extinction discourse.” e tem “extinction
discourse” is central to the analysis o scientic and cultural values and beliefs sur-
rounding extinction duing the nineteenth centuy in the literay scholar Patick
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
314 NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
Brantlinger’s book Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction o Primitive Races,
– (Ithaca, NY: Conell University Press, ).
. David Sepkoski, Rereading the Fossil Record: e Growth o Paleobiology as an Evo-
lutionary Discipline (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, ).
. David Raup to omas J. M. Schopf, Januay , . omas J. M. Schop papers,
Smithsonian Institution archives.
Chapter 1
. Arthur O. Lovejoy, e Great Chain o Being: A Study o the History o an Idea (New
Bunswick, NJ: ransaction Publishers, ).
. is essay, generally attibuted to Linnaeus, rst appeared in in Latin as a dis-
sertation defended by Linnaeus’s student Isaac Biberg. However, it was common
practice at that time for dissertations to be dictated to the student by the professor
and published under the student’s name. My references to this text are to the
English translation o the essay.
. e most accessible introduction to nineteenth- centuy geological debates is
Martin J. S. Rudwick, Earth’s Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Mat-
ters (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, ). For a deeper dive into this topic,
Rudwick’s twin volumes Bursting the Limits o Time: e Reconstruction o Geo-
history in an Age o Revolution (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, ), and
Worlds before Adam: e Reconstruction o Geohistory in an Age o Reform (Chicago:
University o Chicago Press, ) are indispensable. Mark V. Barrow’s Nature’s
Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age o Jeerson to the Age o Ecology (Chi-
cago: University o Chicago Press, ) also oers an excellent oveview o the
histoy o extinction, pimaily from the perspective o North Ameica.
. François- Xavier Burtin, “Révolutions generals” (), quoted in Rudwick, Burst-
ing the Limits o Time, .
. Georges Cuvier, “A Discourse on the Revolutions o the Surface o the Globe,” re-
produced and translated in Martin J. S. Rudwick, Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and
Geological Catastrophes: New Translations & Interpretations o the Primary Texts
(Chicago: University o Chicago Press, ), .
. Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy: An Ex-
position with Regard to the Natural History o Animals (Chicago: University o Chi-
cago Press, ), ch. .
. Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy, ch. .
. Giambattista Brocchi, Subapennine Fossil Conchology (), partial trans. in Ste-
fano Dominici, “Brocchi’s Subapennine Fossil Conchology,” Evolution, Education,
and Outreach (): .
. Giamvattista Brocchi, Mineralogical Treatise (), trans. in Dominici, “Brocchi’s
Subapennine Fossil Conchology,” .
. Brocchi, Subapennine Fossil Conchology, in Dominici, “Brocchi’s Subapennine Fos-
sil Conchology,” .
. For a discussion o Brocchi’s contibution to subsequent theoies o organic change,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 315
see Niles Eldredge, Eternal Ephemera: Adaptation and the Origin o Species from the
Nineteenth Century through Punctuated Equilibria and Beyond (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, ).
. e “Scottish poet” Lyell refers to is Robert Buns, and the poem was Buns’s
“To A Mouse,” which takes the voice o a famer expressing regret for disturbing
a mouse’s home with his plow: “I’m tuly sory Man’s dominion/ Has broken Na-
ture’s social union,/ An’ justies that ill opinion,/ Which makes thee startle,/ At
me, thy poor, earth- bon companion,/ An’ fellow- mortal!” Buns’ poem also con-
tains the famous couplets “e best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men/ Gang a agley,/
An’ lea’e us nought but gie an’ pain,/ For promis’d joy!”
Chapter 2
. In “Van Diemen’s Land: Copies o All Correspondence between Lieutenant-
Govenor Arthur and His Majesty’s Secretay o State for the Colonies, on the Sub-
ject o the Militay Operations Lately Caried On against the Aboiginal Inhabi-
tants o Van Diemen’s Land” (), Bitish parliamentay papers, .
. “Papers Relative to the Condition and reatment o the Native Inhabitants o
Southen Afica, within the Colony o the Cape o Good Hope, or beyond the Fron-
tier o at Colony. Part I. Hottentots and Bosjesmen; Cares; Giquas” (),
Bitish parliamentay papers, and .
. Testimony o Archdeacon Broughton, “Report from the Select Committee on Ab-
oigines (Bitish Settlements); Together with the Minutes o Evidence, Appendix
and Index” (), Bitish parliamentay papers, –.
. e problems with the tem “social Dawinism” as a histoical categoy are nicely
and concisely summaized by Diane Paul in her essay “Dawin, Social Dawin-
ism, and Eugenics,” in e Cambridge Companion to Darwin, edited by Jonathan
Hodge and Gregoy Radick (Cambidge: Cambidge University Press, ), –
.
. For readers interested in a detailed histoy o eighteenth- and nineteenth- centuy
European ideas about race, an excellent oveview is provided in David N. Living-
stone, Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics o Human Origins (Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, ).
. See Martin S. Staum, Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race, and Empire,
– (Montreal: McGill– Queen’s University Press, ).
. Charles Dawin, “Febuay .” DAR.–. trans. and ed. John van Wyhe.
Dawin Online, http:// dawin - online .org .uk/.
. See, e.g., Niles Eldredge, “Expeimenting with Evolution: Dawin, the Beagle, and
Evolution,” Evolution, Education, and Outreach , no. (); P. D. Binkman,
“Charles Dawin’s Beagle Voyage, Fossil Vertebrate Succession, and ‘e Gradual
Birth & Death o Species,’” Journal o the History o Biology , no. (): –.
. Charles Dawin, “Red Notebook,” in Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, –: Ge-
ology, Transmutation o Species, Metaphysical Enquiries (Ithaca, NY: Conell Uni-
versity Press, ), .
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
316 NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO
. E.g., Robert J. Richards, “Dawin’s eoy o Natural Selection and Its Moral Pur-
pose,” in Michael Ruse and Robert J. Richards, eds., e Cambridge Companion to
the Origin o Species (Cambidge: Cambidge University Press, ); Peter Bowler,
“Malthus, Dawin, and the Concept o Stuggle,” Journal o the History o Ideas
(): –; revor Pearce, “‘A Great Complication o Circumstances’: Dawin
and the Economy o Nature,” Journal o the History o Biology (): –.
. omas Malthus, Essay on the Principle o Population, th edition (London: ), .
. Charles Dawin, “Essay o ,” in Francis Dawin, ed., e Foundation o the Ori-
gin o Species (Cambidge: Cambidge University Press, ), .
. Charles Dawin, “Essay o ,” in Foundation o the Origin o Species, .
. E.g., David Takacs, e Idea o Biodiversity: Philosophies o Paradise (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, ); Sahotra Sakar, Biodiversity and Environ-
mental Philosophy (Cambidge: Cambidge University Press, ); James Mac-
Lauin and Kim Sterelny, What Is Biodiversity? (Chicago: University o Chicago
Press, ).
. Charles Dawin, On the Origin o Species, oiginal rst edition, e.g., , , and .
Accessed at http:// dawin - online .org .uk /contents .html.
. Dawin, On the Origin o Species, and .
. Here Dawin is explicitly refering to Heni Milne- Edwards’s theoy o physiologi-
cal division o labor in organisms.
. George W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, ); Michael
Adas, Machines as the Measure o Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies o Western
Dominance (Ithaca, NY: Conell University Press, ).
. See Heny M. Cowles, “A Victoian Extinction: Alfred Newton and the Evolution
o Animal Protection,” British Journal for the History o Science (): –.
. E.g., “e Extinction o Animals,” Times (London), May . , ; J. Robson,
“e Extinction o Pimroses,” Times (London), Apil , , ; P. P. Fraser, “e
reatened Extinction o the Great Skua,” Times (London), Febuay , , ;
“e Extemination o the Ant- Bear,” Times (London), September , , ; H. A.
Byden, “e Extemination o the Afican Elephant,” Times (London), November
, , .
. E.g., “Extinct English Animals,” New York Times, Apil , , ; “Inuence o
Man on Animals,” New York Times, October , , ; “Entire Races Extinct: Ani-
mals at Have Disappeared in Recent Times,” New York Times, March , , ;
“Animals Exteminated by Man,” New York Times, May , , ; “Cause for the
Extinction o the Horses o the Post- Tertiay,” New York Times, Apil , , ;
“An Almost Extinct ibe: e Remnant o the Alabama Indians in Texas,” New
York Times, Febuay , , ; “e Extinction o the Beaver,” New York Times,
November , , .
. See Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African- American Illness and Suering during
the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, ).
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 317
Chapter 3
. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, ), .
. J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman, Degeneration: e Dark Side o Prog-
ress (New York: Columbia University Press, ), ix.
. Dawin, Origin o Species, (London: John Murray, ), .
. For an accessible oveview, see Sean B. Carroll, Endless Forms Most Beautiful: e
New Science o Evo Devo (New York: W. W. Norton, ).
. Cesare Lombroso, L’uomo delinquente (Milan: Ulico Hoepli, ).
. On the use o degeneration arguments in US immigration debates, see Peter
Schrag, Not Fit for Our Society: Nativism and Immigration (Berkeley: University o
Califonia Press, ).
. E. Ray Lankester, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (London: Macmillan,
), .
. e literature on the eugenics movement is vast. For the canonical view, see
Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name o Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses o Human Heredity,
(Cambidge, MA: Havard University Press, ).
. Modis Eksteins, “Histoy and Degeneration: O Birds and Cages,” in Chamberlin
and Gilman, Degeneration, . See also John Rodeick Hinde, Jacob Burckhardt and
the Crisis o Modernity, (Montreal: McGill- Queen’s University Press, ), .
. Georges Cuvier, quoted in Ignatius Donnelly, Ragnarok: e Age o Fire and Gravel
(New York: D. Appleton and Company, ), title page.
. Martin Rudwick, Earth’s Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters
(Chicago: University o Chicago Press, ).
. See, for example, Morton Paley, “e Last Man: Apocalypse without Millennium,”
in Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor, eds., e Other Mary Shel-
ley: Beyond Frankenstein (New York: New York University Press, ).
. Literary Gazette and Journal o Belles Lettres (), ; Monthly Review (),
–; Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (), . ese reviews are cited in
Paley, “e Last Man” .
. Shiel, e Purple Cloud, .
. An older but still valuable study o this peiod in the histoy o biology is Peter J.
Bowler, e Eclipse o Darwinism: Anti- Darwinian Evolutionary eories in the De-
cades around (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ).
. See David Sepkoski, Rereading the Fossil Record: e Growth o Paleobiology as an
Evolutionary Discipline (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, ), ch. .
. roughout the rest o this book I will use the tems “taxon” (singular) and “taxa”
(plural) to refer to units o taxonomic hierarchy (e.g., species, genera, families).
is is a geneic tem, and it does not specify a particular “rank” in Linnaean hier-
archy, but rather is a shorthand tem adopted by scientists to stand for a “unit o
biodiversity” at any hierarchical level.
. Paul D. Binkman, e Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush: Museums and Paleontology in
America at the Turn o the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University o Chicago Press,
); David R. Wallace, e Bonehunters’ Revenge: Dinosaurs, Greed and the Great-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
318 NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE
est Scientic Feud o the Gilded Age (Boston: Houghton Miin, ); Mark Jae,
e Gilded Dinosaur: e Fossil War between E. D. Cope and O. C. Marsh and the Rise
o American Science (New York: Crown, ).
. Olivier Rieppel, “Karl Beurlen (–), Nature Mysticism, and Ayan Paleon-
tology,” Journal o the History o Biology (): .
. Stephen Jay Gould, foreword to Otto H. Schindewolf, Basic Questions in Paleon-
tology (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, ), ix.
. Wolf- Enst Reif, “Deutschsprachige Paläontologie im Spannungsfeld Zwischen
Makroevolutionstheoie und Neo- Dawinismus (–),” in Die Entstehung
der Synthetischen eorie: Beitruage zur Geschichte der Evolutionsbiologie in Deutsch-
land –, ed. T. Junker and E.- M. Engels (Berlin: Verlag für Wissenscha und
Bildung, ); Reif, “e Search for a Macroevolutionay eoy in Geman Pale-
ontology,” Journal o the History o Biology (); Reif, “Evolutionay eoy in
Geman Paleontology,” in Marjoie Glicksman Grene, ed., Dimensions o Darwin-
ism: emes and Counterthemes in Twentieth- Century Evolutionary eory (Cam-
bidge: Cambidge University Press, ).
Chapter 4
. is stoy has been repeated, in some version or other, in most o the literature
on the Manhattan Project. Its oigin seems to be an inteview Arthur Comp-
ton gave in . See Pearl Buck, “e Bomb: e End o the World?” American
Weekly, March , . e stoy about bets being taken rst appeared in Stephanie
Groue, Manhattan Project: e Untold Story o the Making o the Atomic Bomb
(Boston: Little, Brown, ), . In Hans Bethe gave an inteview claify-
ing the event and the actual isk associated with the test. See John Horgan, “Bethe,
Teller, inity and the End o Earth,” Scientic American (published online Au-
gust , ), https:// blogs .scienticameican .com /cross - check /bethe - teller - tin
ity - and - the - end - of - earth/.
. Oppenheimer made this statement in the television documentay e Deci-
sion to Drop the Bomb. e clip can be viewed at http:// www .atomicarchive .com
/Movies /Movie .shtml.?.
. See, for example, Paul Eickson et al., How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: e Strange
Career o Cold War Rationality (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, ).
. On apocalyptic and postapocalyptic genres, see Frank Kemode, e Sense o an
Ending: Studies in the eory o Fiction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press,
[]); and Teresa Heenan, Post- Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodern-
ism, and the Twentieth- Century Novel (Toronto: University o Toronto Press, ).
. Lyotard’s book was oiginally commissioned as a report by the University o Qué-
bec, and published in French in . It was published in translation in . Jean-
François Lyotard, e Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis:
University o Minnesota Press, ).
. e literature on Postmodenism is huge. For an oveview, see Fredic Jameson,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 319
Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic o Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, ).
. On Modenist literature, see Michael Levenson, ed., e Cambridge Companion to
Modernism (Cambidge: Cambidge University Press, ).
. On millennialism, see Fredeic J. Baumgartner, Longing for the End: A History o
Millennialism in Western Civilization (London: Palgrave Macmillan, ); and
Catheine Wessinger, ed., e Oxford Handbook o Millennialism (Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press, ).
. Weart, Nuclear Fear, –.
. Weart, Nuclear Fear, –.
. Karl Jaspers, e Future o Mankind (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, ), .
. “Television,” e World Book Encyclopedia (Chicago: World Book, ), .
. Harlow Shapley to Macmillan Company, Januay , ; http:// www .varchive
.org/.
. Michael Gordin’s e Pseudo- Science Wars also comprehensively documents the
furor around the book’s publication, including peer and publication reviews.
. e “millions” assertion comes from Stevin Shapin, “Catastrophism,” London Re-
view o Books (November , ), .
. See Gordin, Pseudo- Science Wars, , for a detailed discussion o the reception.
. Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision (New York: Macmillan, ), .
. David Sepkoski, Rereading the Fossil Record: e Growth o Paleobiology as an Evo-
lutionary Discipline (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, ), ch. .
. Sepkoski, Rereading the Fossil Record, ch. .
. Newell, “Peiodicity,” .
. M. W. de Laubenfels, “Dinosaur Extinction: One More Hypothesis,” Journal o Pale-
ontology (), –.
.
Allan O. Kelly and Frank Dachille, Target: Earth; the Role o Large Meteors in Earth
Science (Pensacola Engraving, ); René Gallant, Bombarded Earth: An Essay on the
Geological and Biological Eects o Huge Meteorite Impacts (London: J. Baker, ).
. revor Palmer, Controversy: Catastrophism and Evolution: e Ongoing Debate
(New York: Kluwer Academic/ Plenum Publishers, ), .
. e obscure publication where this translation appeared in was Catastro-
phist Geology, a heavily Velikovskian magazine published for a few years duing
the late s. It mostly featured essays by amateur geologists on the finges o aca-
demic science, but did occasionally feature seious articles such as contibutions by
Schindewol and the Bitish paleontologist Derek Ager. is article was oiginally
published as Otto H. Schindewolf, “Neokatastrophismus?” Deutsche Geologische
Gesellscha Zeitschri , no. (): –.
. James R. Beerbower, Search for the Past: An Introduction to Paleontology (Engle-
wood Clis, NJ: Prentice- Hall, ).
. On the histoy o ecology, see Gregg Mitman, e State o Nature: Ecology, Com-
munity, and American Social ought, – (Chicago: University o Chicago
Press, ); Joel Bartholemew Hagen, An Entangled Bank: e Origins o Eco-
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
320 NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR
system Ecology (New Bunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ); Sharon E.
Kingsland, e Evolution o American Ecology, – (Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins University Press, ).
. Robert E. Kohler, Lords o the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life
(Chicago: University o Chicago Press, ).
. Sharon E. Kingsland, Modeling Nature: Episodes in the History o Population Ecology
(Chicago: University o Chicago Press, ); Nancy G. Slack, G. Evelyn Hutchin-
son and the Invention o Modern Ecology (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, ).
. Sharon E. Kingsland, “e Refractoy Model: e Logistic Cuve and the Histoy
o Population Ecology,” Quarterly Review o Biology , no. (); Sepkoski, Re-
reading the Fossil Record., ch. .
. Robert A. MacArthur, “Fluctuations o Animal Populations and a Measure o Com
-
munity Stability,” Ecology (): .
. omas Robertson, e Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the
Birth o American Environmentalism (New Bunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, ), xii.
. Robertson, e Malthusian Moment, .
. Jacob Dawin Hamblin, Arming Mother Nature: e Birth o Catastrophic Environ-
mentalism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, ).
. LeRoy Stegman, “e Ecology o the Soil,” transciption o a seminar at the New
York State University College o Foresty, ; quoted in Carson, Silent Spring, .
Chapter 5
.
Figures provided by “Top Rated TV Shows O All Time,” http:// tvbythenumbers
.zapit .com /reference /top - - rated - tv - shows - of - all - time/. Accessed August ,
.
. Carl Sagan, “e Nuclear Winter: e World aer Nuclear War,” Parade, October
, ; Carl Sagan, “Nuclear War and Climatic Catastrophe: Some Policy Impli-
cations,” Foreign Aairs (), –; Richard P. urco et al., “Nuclear Winter:
Global Consequences o Multiple Nuclear Explosions, Science (): –;
Paul R. Ehrlich et al., “Long- Tem Biological Consequences o Nuclear War,” Sci-
ence (): –.
. See, e.g., Robert J. Lieber and Dan Horowitz, “Live, Die: Moot Point,” Ne w Yo rk
Times, November , .
. Luis W. Alvarez et al., “Extraterrestial Cause for the Cretaceous- Tertiay Extinc-
tion,” Science , no. (). For the puposes o brevity, I will refer to the
impact extinction scenaio developed by Luis and Walter Alvarez, along with Frank
Asaro and Helen V. Michel, as the “Alvarez hypothesis.” While it is oen referred
to as such in the literature, it is important to stress—as Walter Alvarez has himsel
insisted—that all collaborators should be credited with the discovey.
. e Cretaceous peiod is shortened to “K” because o the distinctive chalk de-
posits found in many o its geological fomations (“Kreide” is the Geman word for
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE 321
“chalk”). As mentioned in the introduction, I have opted to use the more familiar,
colloquial designation “Tertiay” to descibe the geological peiod known ocially
as the “Paleogene.”
. David M. Raup to omas J. M. Schopf, Januay, . Schop papers, box ,
folder .
. e histoy discussed in this section is a much- condensed account o developments
discussed in my previous book Rereading the Fossil Record. ose interested in the
full stoy should consult chapters and , in particular.
. See, e.g., James W. Valentine, “Pattens o Taxonomic and Ecological Stucture o
the Shel Benthos Duing Phanerozoic Time,” Palaeontology (): –.
. See J. John Sepkoski, Jr., A Compendium o Fossil Marine Families ([Milwaukee]:
Milwaukee Public Museum, ); “What I Did with My Research Career; or How
Research on Biodiversity Yielded Data on Extinction,” in e Mass- Extinction De-
bates; How Science Works in a Crisis, ed. William Glen (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, ).; Sepkoski, Rereading, chs. –.
. “A Kinetic Model o Phanerozoic Taxonomic Diversity: I. Analysis o Maine
Orders,” Paleobiology , no. (): –.
. David M. Raup, e Nemesis Aair: A Story o the Death o Dinosaurs and the Ways
o Science (New York: W. W. Norton, ), .
. Walter Sullivan, “wo New eoies Oered on Mass Extinctions in Earth’s Past,”
New York Times, June , .
. Leon T. Silver and Peter Schultz, preface to Geological Implications o Impacts o
Large Asteroids and Comets on the Earth, Geological Society o Ameica Special
Paper (), xi.
. Inteview with Walter Alvarez, June , .
. O. B. Toon et al., “Evolution o an Impact- Generated Dust Cloud and its Eects
on the Atmosphere,” in Silver and Schultz, eds., Geological Implications o Impacts
o Large Asteroids and Comets on the Earth (Geological Society o Ameica, ),
–.
. J. John Sepkoski, Jr., “Mass Extinctions in the Phanerozoic Oceans: A Review,” in
Silver and Schultz, eds., Geological Implications o Impacts, –; David M. Raup
and J John Sepkoski, Jr., “Mass Extinctions in the Maine Fossil Record,” Science
, no. (): –.
. Naomi Oreskes, e Rejection o Continental Dri: eory and Method in American
Earth Science (New York: Oxford University Press, ).
. One o the most compelling, i also most dicult to establish, features o this par-
ticular peiod in the histoy o extinction is the inuence o revolutionay politics
and countercultural protest on scientists who participated in the debates. Stephen
Jay Gould, for example, has made provocative statements implying that Max-
ism may have inuenced his evolutionay views; but, despite his well- known le-
ist politics and membership in radical groups like Science for the People, he has
staunchly denied that his science should be read through the lens o politics. Simi-
larly, paleontologists like Jack Sepkoski and David Jablonski who were instumen-
tal in revising the understanding o the role o mass extinctions in the histoy o
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
322 NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE
life had been active in protest movements and were lifelong fans o pop counter-
culture. Sepkoski, in particular, was an avid fan o punk rock music, and was even
descibed in his New York Times obituay—which othewise focused on his
scientic accomplishments—as working in an oce amid “the blaing sounds o
musical groups like the Sex Pistols.” Carol Kaesuk Yoon, “J. John Sepkoski Jr., ,
Dies; Changed Field o Paleontology,” New York Times, May , .
. e rst statement came duing Reagan’s address to the Bitish Parliament on
June , ; Reagan used the phrase “evil empire” to descibe the Soviet Union in
a number o contexts beginning in .
. Lewis omas, foreword to Paul R. Ehrlich et al., e Cold and the Dark: e World
aer Nuclear War (New York: W.W. Norton, ), xxi– xxiii.
. Donald Kennedy, introduction to Ehrlich et al., e Cold and the Dark, xxx.
. Sharon Brownlee, “e Evidence: Cycles o Extinction,” Discover, May , ;
“Did Comets Kill the Dinosaurs?,” Time, May , ; Boyce Rensberger, “Extinc-
tion Govening Force in eoy o Evolution,” Washington Post, November ,
; Derek York, “Pattens o Mass Extinctions Not Just Chance, eoists Say,”
Toronto Globe and Mail, July , .
. Raup, Nemesis Aair, .
. Elizabeth S. Clemens, “e Impact Hypothesis and Popular Science,” in William
Glen, ed., e Mass Extinction Debates, .
. David Jablonski, “Causes and Consequences o Mass Extinctions; a Comparative
Approach,” in Dynamics o Extinction, –; Daniel Simberlo, “Are We on the
Verge o a Mass Extinction In the ropics?” in Dynamics o Extinction, –.
. M. R. Rampino and R. B. Stothers, “Geological Rhythms and Cometay Impacts,”
Science (): –.
. See, e.g., “A Death- Star eoy Is Bon,” Newsweek, March , .
. “Miscasting the Dinosaurs’ Horoscope,” New York Times, Apil , .
. Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould, “Punctuated Equilibia: An Altenative to
Phyletic Gradualism,” in Models in Paleobiology (San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper
& Co., ); Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, “Punctuated Equilibia:
e Tempo and Mode o Evolution Reconsidered,” Paleobiology , no. ():
–.
. omas S. Kuhn, e Structure o Scientic Revolutions (Chicago: University o Chi-
cago Press, ).
. Jean Baudillard, “e Anorexic Ruins,” in Dietmar Kamper and Chistoph Wulf,
eds., Looking Back on the End o the World (New York: Semiotext(e), ), and
.
. Michel de Montaigne, quoted in Schell, “e Second Death,” .
Chapter 6
. Walter G. Rosen to E. O. Wilson, June , . Edward O. Wilson papers, box .
. E. O. Wilson, e Diversity o Life (Cambidge, MA: Belknap Press, ); United
Nations, “Convention on Biological Diversity,” .
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX 323
. Elizabeth Kolbert’s best- selling, Pulitzer Pize– winning book capitalized on,
but did not create, the wide currency o the “sixth extinction” label. Elizabeth Kol-
bert, e Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Heny Holt, ).
. e current concept o the “Anthropocene,” which will be discussed further in the
epilogue, argues that the human impact on the natural environment is so signi-
cant that it will be detectible in the earth’s strata millions o years from now, and
thus should be recognized as a new geological epoch. While neither the Intena-
tional Commission on Stratigraphy nor the Intenational Union o Geophysical
Sciences—the govening bodies that approve changes to stratigraphic designa-
tions—have approved this change, the tem has entered broader usage in the en-
vironmental sciences, the social sciences, and the arts and humanities to descibe
the perception that humans have crossed an irreversible threshold due to anthro-
pogenic climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss.
. E. O. Wilson, ed., Biodiversity (Washington: National Academy Press, ), v.
. is statement was reported in, for example, “Scientists See Signs o Mass Extinc-
tion,” Washington Post, September , .
. On Mayr’s role in establishing the Moden Synthesis, see, e.g., Joseph A. Cain,
“Enst Mayr as Community Architect: Launching the Society for the Study o Evo-
lution and the Jounal Evolution,” Biology and Philosophy no. (): –;
V. B. Smocovitis, “Unifying Biology: e Evolutionay Synthesis and Evolution-
ay Biology,” Journal o the History o Biology , no. (): –; Enst Mayr,
e Growth o Biological ought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambidge,
MA: Belknap Press, ).
. Enst Mayr, “e Diversity o Life,” in Hadler et al., Biology and the Future o Man,
ed. Handler Philip (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, ), .
. ere is a large scientic literature on this topic. For a short summay o the argu-
ments, see P. Balvanera, G. C. Daily, P. R. Ehrlich, T. H. Ricketts, S. Bailey, S. Kark,
C. Kremen, and H. Pereira, “Conseving Biodiversity and Ecosystem Sevices,” Sci-
ence (): .
. On the histoy o the establishment o the inuence o statistical analyses on public
aairs, see eodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: e Pursuit o Objectivity in Sci-
ence and Public Life (Pinceton, NJ: Pinceton University Press, ).
. Indeed, E. O. Wilson has witten compellingly about what he calls “biophilia,”
which he regards as an essential ingredient for pursuing the study o nature.
Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia (Cambidge, MA: Havard University Press, ). In
autobiographical accounts witten by biologists from Charles Dawin to Richard
Dawkins, similar motivations feature prominently. See David Sepkoski, “wo Lives
in Biology,” Quarterly Review o Biology (): –.
. Infomation about Myers’s career is taken from a vaiety o documents in the
Edward O. Wilson papers, including letters exchanged with Wilson and an undated
CV (most likely from the mid- s). Edward O. Wilson Papers, box .
. Myers to Wilson, October , ; Wilson to Myers, November , . Edward O.
Wilson papers, United States Libray o Congress Archives, box .
. Wilson to Myers, July , . Wilson papers, box .
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
324 NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX
. Wilson to Myers, December , . Wilson papers, box . E. O. Wilson, “Reso-
lutions for the s,” Harvard Magazine (Januay- Febuay ), .
. Wilson to Charlotte Mayerson, Febuay , . Wilson Papers, box .
. Ehrenfeld, Arrogance o Humanism, .
. Wilson to Soule, August , . Wilson papers, box .
. E. O. Wilson, “e Biological Diversity Cisis,” Bioscience (December ):
–.
. E. O. Wilson, “e Biological Diversity Cisis: A Challenge to Science,” Issues in Sci
-
ence and Technology (): –. is issue was published in the fall o .
. Wilson to Philip S. Cook, June , . Wilson papers, box .
. Wilson to Peter H. Raven, June , . Wilson papers, box .
. Wilson, “e Biological Diversity Cisis,” –.
. ese calculations are my own reconstuction o Ewin’s gures, since Ewin him-
sel does not spell them out. ey appear to be accurate, however, since they pro-
duce roughly the number o species Ewin predicts.
. Raven to Wilson, June , . Wilson papers, box .
. Wilson to Raven, June , . Wilson papers, box .
. Wilson, Biodiversity. e articles were included in Science (August , ):
.
. William A. Berggren and John A. Van Couveing, eds., Catastrophes and Earth His-
tory: e New Uniformitarianism (Pinceton, NJ: Pinceton University Press, ).
. In his book Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, Stephen Jay Gould reected at length on the
contrasting cultural understandings o time at scales o both natural and human
histoy. Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the
Discovery o Geological Time (Cambidge, MA: Havard University Press, ).
. For a more detailed examination o the histoy o extinction research duing this
peiod, see Sepkoski, Rereading the Fossil Record, ch. .
. Michael J. Bean to E. O. Wilson, December , . E. O. Wilson Papers, Box .
. See, e.g., Michael J. Benton, When Life Nearly Died: e Greatest Mass Extinction o
All Time (London and New York: ames and Hudson, ); Peter Douglas Ward,
Rivers in Time: e Search for Clues to Earth’s Mass Extinctions (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, ); Douglas H. Ewin, Extinction: How Life on Earth
Nearly Ended Million Years Ago (Pinceton, NJ, Pinceton University Press,
); Noman MacLeod, e Great Extinctions: What Causes em and How ey
Shape Life (London: Natural Histoy Museum, ).
. David M. Raup and J. John Sepkoski Jr., “Mass Extinctions in the Maine Fossil Rec-
ord,” Science , no. ().
. Raup and Sepkoski, “Mass Extinctions in the Maine Fossil Record.”; G. R. McGhee
Jr., P. M. Sheehan, D. J. Bottjer, and M. L. Droser, “Ecological Ranking o Phanero-
zoic Biodiversity Cises: Ecological and Taxonomic Seveities Are Decoupled,”
Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology (): –.
. For a good (though somewhat partisan) general oveview o these debates, see
Anthony Hallam and Paul B. Wignall, Mass Extinctions and eir Aermath (Ox-
ford, UK: Oxford Science Publications, ).
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
NOTES TO THE EPILOGUE 325
. Noman Myers, “e End o the Lines?” Natural History (Febuay ), –.
. Noman Myers, “Mass Extinctions: What Can the Past Tell Us about the Present
and Future?” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology (): .
. Inteview with David Jablonski, Febuay , . See, e.g., David Jablonski, “Ex-
tinctions: A Paleontological Perspective,” Science , no. (): ; Sepkoski,
“Biodiversity; Past, Present, and Future.” Sepkoski thanked Myers for “incisive
comments” on his article.
. David M. Raup to E. O. Wilson, June , . E. O. Wilson papers, box .
. E. O. Wilson to David M. Raup, June , . E. O. Wilson papers, box .
. David M. Raup to E. O. Wilson, September , . E. O. Wilson papers, box .
. Noman Myers to E. O. Wilson, October , ; Noman Myers to E. O. Wilson,
June , . E. O. Wilson papers, box .
. Noman Myers to E. O. Wilson, Apil , . E. O. Wilson papers, box .
. Noman Myers to E. O. Wilson, July , . E. O. Wilson papers, box .
. Myers to Wilson, July , .
. Noman Myers to David Jablonski, July , . Courtesy o David Jablonski.
. Noman Myers, “e Biodiversity Cisis and the Future o Evolution,” e Environ-
mentalist (): –. See David Jablonski, “e ropics as a Source o Evolu-
tionay Novelty through Geological Time,” Nature (London) , no. ():
–.
. Inteview with David Jablonski, Febuay , .
. For example, Fanham contends that duing the second hal o the twentieth cen-
tuy, “diversity emerged as a nomative good, and this cultural development likely
contibuted to the populaity o diversity in environmental circles.” Fanham,
Saving Nature’s Legacy, .
. To be vey clear, I am not endorsing these arguments. I am merely pointing out how
their logic bears on current valuations o diversity.
Epilogue
. Peter Wignall, e Worst o Times: How Life on Earth Survived Eighty Million Years
o Extinctions (Pinceton, NJ: Pinceton University Press, ); Michael J. Benton,
When Life Nearly Died: e Greatest Mass Extinction o All Time (London: ames
& Hudson, ).
. Shu- Zhong Shen et al., “A Sudden End Pemian Mass Extinction in South China,”
GSA Bulletin (): –.
. In fact, just as this book was being completed, the Intergovenmental Science-
Policy Platfom on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Sevices (IPBES), an independent
intergovenmental body closely associated with the United Nations, announced
a major new report on anthropogenic threats to biological diversity. e report
itself, “Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Sevices,” is
billed as “the most comprehensive ever completed,” and was composed by well
over a hundred scientists representing dozens o counties (https:// www .ipbes .net
/news /Media - Release - Global - Assessment). A central nding o the report is that
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
326 NOTES TO THE EPILOGUE
as many as a million species are currently threatened with extinction, which the
report estimates to compise an astounding percent o all well- studied living
groups. While the report presents nothing that is stikingly new to obsevers o bio-
diversity decline, it is quite noteworthy for both its comprehensiveness (the nal
document is more than , pages long and claims to synthesize the ndings o
more than , scientic sources) and the unanimity o the scientic opinion it
represents: the IPBES claims more than nations as members, and representa-
tives from more than o those counties contibuted to the report.
. It should be stressed that this idea o a “neoliberal” Anthropocene is far from the
only perspective on the impending challenges o climate change and social in-
equality. Nor are the voices in this conversation exclusively white, male, and West-
en. Indeed, a number o scholars in a vaiety o elds have explored the ways
in which the current “culture” o the Anthropocene is implicated in histoies o
capitalism, colonialism, and racism. e geographer Kathyn Yuso has, for ex-
ample, highlighted the role o “extractive economies” o slavey and colonialism
in producing the ecology o the Anthropocene in her book A Billion Black
Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University o Minnesota Press, ). Like-
wise, Jason Moore has reframed the debate around the concept o the “Capitalo-
cene,” which, in the introduction to a recent collection, he argues focuses on “ques-
tions o capitalism, power and class, anthropocentism, dualist framings o ‘nature’
and ‘society,’ and the role o states and empire,” which are “frequently bracketed
by the dominant Anthropocene perspective.” Jason Moore, ed., Anthropocene or
Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis o Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press,
), . is perspective is echoed in a collaborative project at the University o
Wisconsin organized by an interdisciplinay group o scholars around the “Planta-
tionocene”; the project’s aim is “to come to tems with the plantation as a trans-
fomational moment in human and natural histoy on a global scale that is at the
same time attentive to stuctures o power embedded in impeial and capitalist for-
mations, the erasure o certain foms o life and relationships in such fomations,
and the enduing layers o histoy and legacies o plantation capitalism that persist,
manifested in acts o racialized violence, growing land alienation, and accelerated
species loss” (https:// humanities .wisc .edu /research /plantationocene). Finally, in
an eort to account not only for a diverse array o human perspectives on envi-
ronmental change, but also for nonhuman ones, the citical theoist Donna Har-
away has proposed the tem “Chthulucene” to descibe the “mixed assemblages”
o human and nonhuman refugees o climate disaster. Donna Haraway, “Anthropo-
cene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental
Humanities (): –.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
WORKS CITED
Adams, Brooks. . e Law o Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History. New
York: Macmillan.
Adas, Michael. . Machines as the Measure o Men: Science, Technology, and Ide-
ologies o Western Dominance. Ithaca, NY: Conell University Press.
Abel, Othenio. . “Gedanken über die Ursachen der Degeneration und deren
phlogenetische Bedeutung,” Palaeontologia Hungarica .
“A Death- Star eoy is Bon.” . Newsweek, March .
Alvarez, Luis W., et al. . “Extraterrestial Cause for the Cretaceous- Tertiay Ex-
tinction.” Science , no. : –.
Alvarez, Walter. . T. Rex and the Crater o Doom. Pinceton, NJ: Pinceton Uni-
versity Press.
. . Inteview with Walter Alvarez, June.
Amine, Michael. . “What the Atomic Age Has Done to Us.” New York Times,
August .
“An Almost Extinct ibe: e Remnant o the Alabama Indians in Texas.” .
New York Times, Febuay .
“Animals Exteminated by Man.” . New York Times, May .
Balvanera, Paticia, et al. . “Conseving Biodiversity and Ecosystem Sevices.”
Science , no. : .
Barrow, Mark V. . Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age o Jeer-
son to the Age o Ecology. Chicago: University o Chicago Press.
Baudillard, Jean. . “e Anorexic Ruins.” In Looking Back on the End o the
World, eds. Dietmar Kamper and Chistoph Wulf. New York: Semiotext(e).
Baumgartner, Fredeic J. . Longing for the End: A History o Millennialism in
Western Civilization. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Beck, Ulich. []. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage
Publications.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
328 WORKS CITED
Beerbower, James R. . Search for the Past: An Introduction to Paleontology.
Englewood Clis, NJ: Prentice- Hall.
Benton, Michael J. . When Life Nearly Died: e Greatest Mass Extinction o All
Time. London and New York: ames and Hudson.
Berggren, William A. and John A Van Couveing, eds. . Catastrophes and Earth
History: e New Uniformitarianism. Pinceton, NJ: Pinceton University Press.
Beurlen, Karl. . “Funktion und Fom in der organischen Entwicklung.” Die
Naturwissenschaen , no. : –.
. . Die Stammesgeschichtlichen Grundlagen der Abstammungslehre. Jena:
Fischer.
Bowler, Peter J. . “Malthus, Dawin, and the Concept o Stuggle.” Journal o
the History o Ideas –.
. . e Eclipse o Darwinism: Anti- Darwinian Evolutionary eories in the
Decades around . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
. . Life’s Splendid Drama: Evolutionary Biology and the Reconstruction o
Life’s Ancestry, –. University o Chicago Press.
Brannen, Peter. . “When Life on Earth was Nearly Extinguished.” N e w Yo rk
Times, July .
Brantlinger, Patick. . Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction o Primitive
Races, –. Ithaca, NY: Conell University Press.
Binkman, Paul D. a. “Charles Dawin’s Beagle Voyage, Fossil Vertebrate Suc-
cession, and “e Gradual Birth & Death o Species.” Journal o the History o
Biology , no. : –.
. b. e Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush: Museums and Paleontology in
America at the Turn o the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University o Chicago
Press.
Broughton, Archdeacon. . “Report from the Select Committee on Aboigines.”
Bitish Parliamentay Papers, .
Brownlee, Sharon. . “e Evidence: Cycles o Extinction.” Discover, May.
Byden, H. A. . “e Extemination o the Afican Elephant.” Times (London),
November .
Büchner, Fredich Karl Chistian Ludwig. . Man in the Past, Present, and Future.
London: Asher & Co.
Buck, Pearl. . “e Bomb: e End o the World?” American Weekly, March .
Byron, Lord. . “Darkness.”
Cain, Joseph A. . “Enst Mayr as Community Architect: Launching the Society
for the Study o Evolution and the Jounal Evolution.” Biology and Philosophy ,
no. : –.
Campbell, omas. . “e Last Man.”
Carroll, Sean B. . Endless Forms Most Beautiful: e New Science o Evo Devo.
New York: W. W. Norton.
Carson, Rachel. . Silent Spring. Cambidge MA: Riverside Press.
Carter, Jimmy. . “Preface to Council on Environmental Quality.” In e Eleventh
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
WORKS CITED 329
Annual Report o the Council on Environmental Quality. Washington: Executive
Oce o the President, Council on Environmental Quality.
Cassirer, Enst. . e Myth o the State. New Haven: Yale University Press.
“Cause for the Extinction o the Horses o the Post- Tertiay.” . New York Times,
Apil .
Chamberlin, J. Edward, and Sander L. Gilman. . Degeneration: e Dark Side o
Progress. New York: Columbia University Press.
Clemens, Elizabeth S. . “e Impact Hypothesis and Popular Science.” in e
Mass Extinction Debates: How Science Works in a Crisis, edited by William Glen.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Congressional Research Sevice. . A Legislative History o the Endangered
Species Act o , as amended in , , , , and . Washington:
Govenment Publishing Oce.
Corson, Eugene Rollin. . e Future o the Colored Race in the U.S. Ithaca, NY:
Wilder Quarter Centuy Book.
Cottrell, Leonard S., and Sylvia Eberhart. []. American Opinion on World
Aairs in the Atomic Age. New York: Greenwood Press.
Council o Environmental Quality. . Eleventh Annual Report o the Council on
Environmental Quality. Washington: Executive Oce o the President, Council
on Environmental Quality.
Cousins, Noman. . “Moden Man is Obsolete.” Saturday Review, August .
Cowles, Heny M. . “A Victoian Extinction: Alfred Newton and the Evolu-
tion o Animal Protection.” British Journal for the History o Science –.
Cutzen, Paul J. . “Geology o Mankind.” Nature , no. : .
Cuvier, Georges. . “Revolutions o the Surface o the Globe.” In Georges Cuvier,
Fossil Bones and Geological Catastrophes, translated and edited by Martin J. S.
Rudwick. Chicago: University o Chicago Press.
Damuth, John. . “Extinction.” In Keywords in Evolutionary Biology, edited by
Evelyn Fox Keller and Elisabeth A. Lloyd. Cambidge, MA: Havard Univer-
sity Press.
Dawin, Charles. N.d. “Febuay .” DAR.–. ranscibed and edited by
John van Wyhe. Dawin Online, http:// dawin - online .org .uk/.
. . Journal o Researches. London: John Murray.
. . Journal o Researches. London: John Murray.
. . Origin o Species. London: John Murray.
. . e Descent o Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John
Murray.
. . On the Origin o Species, th edition. London: John Murray.
. . “Autobiography.” In e Life and Letters o Charles Darwin, edited by
Francis Dawin London: John Murray.
. . “Essay o ” and “Essay o .” In e Foundation o the Origin
o Species, edited by Francis Dawin. Cambidge: Cambidge University Press.
. . e Voyage o the Beagle. New York: P. F. Collier & Son.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
330 WORKS CITED
. . Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, –: Geology, Transmutation
o Species, Metaphysical Enquiries. London and Ithaca, NY: Bitish Museum
(Natural Histoy) and Conell University Press.
Davis, Doug. . ‘“A Hundred Million Hydrogen Bombs’: Total War in the Fossil
Record.” Congurations , no. : –.
Davis, Marc, Piet Hut, and Richard A. Muller. . “Extinction o Species by Pei-
odic Comet Showers.” Nature –.
“e Decision to Drop the Bomb.” . National Broadcasting Company.
“Did Comets Kill the Dinosaurs?” . Time, May .
Dobzhansky, eodosius. . Genetics and the Origin o Species. New York: Colum-
bia University Press.
. . Mankind Evolving: e Evolution o the Human Species. New Haven
and London: Yale University Press.
Dominici, Stefano. . “Brocchi’s Subapennine Fossil Conchology.” Evolution:
Education, and Outreach , no. : –.
Donnelly, Ignatius. . Ragnarok: e Age o Fire and Gravel. New York: D. Apple-
ton and Company.
Downs, Jim. . Sick from Freedom: African- American Illness and Suering during
the Civil War and Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ehrenfeld, David W. . Conserving Life on Earth. . Oxford, UK: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
. . e Arrogance o Humanism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Ehrlich, Paul. . e Population Bomb. New York: Ballantine Books.
. . “Extinction: What is Happening Now and What Needs to Be Done.”
in Dynamics o Extinction, edited by David K. Elliot. New York: John Wiley and
Sons.
Ehrlich, Paul, and L. C. Birch. . “e ‘Balance o Nature’ and ‘Population Con-
trol.’” e American Naturalist , no. (March- Apil): –.
Ehrlich, Paul R., and Anne Ehrlich. . Population, Resources, Environment: Issues
in Human Ecology. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.
. . e Causes and Consequences o the Disappearance o Species. New
York: Random House.
Ehrlich, Paul, et al. . “Long- Tem Biological Consequences o Nuclear War.”
Science –.
. . e Cold and the Dark: e World Aer Nuclear War. New York: W. W.
Norton.
Eksteins, Modis. . “Histoy and Degeneration: O Birds and Cages.” In De-
generation: e Dark Side o Progress, edited by J. Edward Chamberlain and
Sander L. Gilman. New York: Columbia University Press.
Eldredge, Niles. . e Miner’s Canary: Unraveling the Mysteries o Extinction, st
ed. New York: Prentice Hall.
. . “Punctuated Equilibia: e Tempo and Mode o Evolution Recon-
sidered.” Paleobiology , no. : –.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
WORKS CITED 331
. . “Expeimenting with Evolution: Dawin, the Beagle, and Evolution.”
Evolution: Education, and Outreach , no. : –.
Eldredge, Niles, and Stephen Jay Gould. . “Punctuated Equilibia: An Alter-
native to Phyletic Gradualism.” In Models in Paleobiology. San Francisco: Free-
man, Cooper & Co.
Eliot, T. S. . “e Hollow Men.” Poems –. London: Faber & Gwyer.
Elton, Charles. . Animal Ecology and Evolution. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
. . e Ecology o Invasions by Animals and Plants. London: Methuen
Publishing.
. . “Entire Races Extinct: Animals at Have Disappeared in Recent
Times.” New York Times, March .
Eikson, Kai. . “A Horror beyond Comprehension.” New York Times, Apil .
Eickson, Paul, et al. . How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: e Strange Career o
Cold War Rationality. Chicago: University o Chicago Press.
Ewin, Douglas H. . Extinction: How Life on Earth Nearly Ended Million
Years Ago. Pinceton, NJ: Pinceton University Press.
Ewin, Tery L. . “ropical Forests: eir Richness in Coleoptera and Other
Arthropod Species.” Coleopterists Bulletin , no. : –.
“e Extemination o the Ant- Bear.” . Times (London), September .“Ex-
tinct English Animals.” . New York Times, Apil .
“e Extinction o Animals.” . Times (London), May .
“e Extinction o the Beaver.” . New York Times, November , .
Fanham, Timothy J. . Saving Nature’s Legacy: Origins o the Idea o Biological
Diversity. New Haven: Yale University Press.
. . “A Conuence o Values: Histoical Roots o Concen for Biological
Diversity.” In e Routledge Handbook o Philosophy o Biodiversity, edited by
Justin Garson, Anya Plutynski, and Sahotra Sarkar. London: Routledge.
Fischer, Alfred G., and Michael A. Arthur. . “Secular Vaiations in the Pelagic
Realm.” In Society o Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists Special Publi-
cation (November): –.
Flessa, Karl W., and John Imbie. . “Evolutionay Pulsations: Evidence from
Phanerozoic Diversity Pattens.” In Implications o Continent Dri to the Earth
Sciences, Vol. , edited by D. H. Tarling and S. K. Runcon. London and New
York: Academic Press.
. . “Extinctions Are In.” Paleobiology , no. : –.
Fletcher, Amy Lynn. . Mendel’s Ark: Biotechnology and the Future o Extinction.
New York: Spinger.
Foucault, Michel. []. e Order o ings: An Archaeology o the Human
Sciences. New York: Vintage.
Fraser, P. P. . “e reatened Extinction o the Great Skua.” Times (London),
Febuay .
Fukuyama, Francis. . “e End o Histoy?” e National Interest –.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
332 WORKS CITED
Gallant, René. . Bombarded Earth: An Essay on the Geological and Biological
Eects o Huge Meteorite Impacts. London: J. Baker.
Galton, Francis. . Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences.
London: Nabu Press.
Goodman, Ellen. . “Musings o a Dinosaur Groupie.” Washington Post, Janu-
ay .
Gordin, Michael D. . e Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth
o the Modern Fringe. Chicago: University o Chicago Press.
Gould, Stephen Jay. a. “Sex, Dugs, Disasters, and the Extinction o Dinosaurs.”
Discover, May.
. b. “e Cosmic Dance o Siva.” Natural History , no. (August).
. c. “Toward the Vindication o Punctuational Change.” In Catastrophes
and Earth History: e New Uniformitarianism, edited by W. A. Berggren and
A. Van Couveing John. Pinceton, NJ: Pinceton University Press.
. . Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery o Geo-
logical Time. Cambidge, MA: Havard University Press.
. . Foreword to Basic Questions in Paleontology. By Otto H. Schindewolf.
Chicago: University o Chicago Press.
Gould, Stephen Jay, and Niles Eldredge. . “Punctuated Equilibia: e Tempo
and Mode o Evolution Reconsidered.” Paleobiology , no. : –.
Greg, William R. . “On the Failure o ‘Natural Selection’ in the Case o Man.”
Fraser’s Magazine, September.
Groue, Stephanie. . Manhattan Project: e Untold Story o the Making o the
Atomic Bomb. Boston: Little, Brown.
Groves, Craig, et al. . “Planning for Biodiversity Consevation: Putting Conser-
vation Science into Practice,” BioScience , no. : –.
Haeckel, Enst. . Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, vol. . Berlin:
G. Reimer.
Hagen, Joel. . An Entangled Bank: e Origins o Ecosystem Ecology. New
Bunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Hallam, Anthony, and Paul B. Wignall. . Mass Extinctions and eir Aermath.
Oxford, UK: Oxford Science Publications.
Haller, John S. . Outcasts from Evolution: Scientic Attitudes o Racial Inferiority,
–. Urbana: University o Illinois Press.
Hamblin, Jacob Dawin. . Arming Mother Nature: e Birth o Catastrophic En-
vironmentalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Haraway, Donna. . “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulu-
cene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities –.
Hartmann, William K., and Donald R. Davis. . “Satellite- Sized Planetesimals
and Lunar Oigin.” ICARUS –.
“Heaings Open on Endangered Species Law.” . New York Times, December .
Heenan, Teresa. . Post- Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and
the Twentieth- Century Novel. Toronto: University o Toronto Press.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
WORKS CITED 333
Heise, Ursula. . Imagining Extinction: e Cultural Meanings o Endangered
Species. Chicago: University o Chicago Press.
Hill, David L., Eugene Rabinowitch, and John A. Simpson. . “e Atomic
Scientists Speak Up.” Life, October .
Hinde, John Rodeick. . Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis o Modernity. Mon-
treal: McGill- Queen’s University Press.
Hobsbawm, E. J. . e Age o Empire, –. New York: Vintage.
Hobson, John A. . “e Scientic Basis o Impeialism.” Political Science Quar-
terly , no. : –.
Horgan, John. . “Bethe, Teller, inity and the End o Earth.” Scientic Ameri-
can, August .
Hutchinson, G. Evelyn. . “Homage to Santa Rosalia; or, Why Are ere So
Many Kinds o Animals?” American Naturalist , no. (May- June): –.
“Inuence o Man on Animals.” . New York Times, October .
Jablonski, David.
. a “Background and Mass Extinctions: e Altenation o Macroevolu-
tionay Regimes.” Science , no. : –.
. b. “Causes and Consequences o Mass Extinctions: A Comparative Ap-
proach.” In Dynamics o Extinction., edited by K. Elliott David. New York: John
Wiley and Sons.
. c. “Mass Extinction; New Answers, New Questions,” in e Last Ex-
tinction, edited by Les Kaufman and Kenneth Malloy. Cambidge: MIT Press.
. . “Extinctions: A Paleontological Perspective.” Science , no.
(August): –.
. . “e ropics as a Source o Evolutionay Novelty through Geological
Time.” Nature (London) , no. .
. . “Extinctions in the Fossil Record.” In Estimating Extinction Rates:
Sir Joseph Banks Anniversary Meeting; a Discussion, edited by J. H. Lawton
and R. M. May, Philosophical ransactions o the Royal Society o London,
Seies B: Biological Sciences. London: Royal Society o London.
. . Inteview with David Jablonski. Febuay.
Jae, Mark. . e Gilded Dinosaur: e Fossil War between E. D. Cope and O. C.
Marsh and the Rise o American Science. New York: Crown Publishing Group.
Jaher, Fredeic Cople. . Doubters and Dissenters: Cataclysmic ought in
America, –. London: Free Press o Glencoe.
Jameson, Fredic. . Postmodernism; or, e Cultural Logic o Late Capitalism.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, .
Jaspers, Karl. . e Future o Mankind. Chicago: University o Chicago Press.
Jeerson, omas. . Notes on the State o Virginia, Eighth Ameican ed. Newark:
Pennington and Gould.
Kahn, Heman. . On ermonuclear War. Pinceton, NJ: Pinceton University
Press.
Kazin, Alfred. . “On the Bink.” N e w Yo r k e r , Apil .
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
334 WORKS CITED
Kelly, Allan O., and Frank Dachille. . Target: Earth: e Role o Large Meteors in
Earth Science. Pensacola, FL: Pensacola Engraving.
Kennedy, David. . Introduction to e Cold and the Dark: e World aer
Nuclear War, by Paul R. Ehrlich. New York: W. W. Norton.
Kemode, Frank. . e Sense o an Ending: Studies in the eory o Fiction.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Kevles, Daniel J. . In the Name o Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses o Human
Heredity. Cambidge, MA: Havard University Press.
Kingsland, Sharon E. . “e Refractoy Model: e Logistic Cuve and the
Histoy o Population Ecology.” Quarterly Review o Biology , no. : –.
. . Modeling Nature: Episodes in the History o Population Ecology, Science
and Its Conceptual Foundations. Chicago: University o Chicago Press.
. . e Evolution o American Ecology, –. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Kohler, Robert E. . Lords o the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental
Life. Chicago: University o Chicago Press.
Kolbert, Elizabeth. . e Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York:
Heny Holt.
Kuhn, omas S. . e Structure o Scientic Revolutions. Chicago: University
o Chicago Press.
Kump, Lee. . “Climate Change and Maine Mass Extinction.” Science , no.
: –.
Lamarck, Jean Baptiste de, and Pierre Antoine de Monet. . Zoological Philoso-
phy: An Exposition with Regard to the Natural History o Animals. Chicago: Uni-
versity o Chicago Press.
Lankester, E. Ray. . Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism. London: Mac millan.
Larrabee, Eic. . “e Day the Sun Stood Still.” Harper’s Magazine, Januay.
Laubenfels, M. W. . “Dinosaur Extinction: One More Hypothesis.” Journal o
Paleontology –.
Lawrence, D. H. . Lady Chatterley’s Lover. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Leakey, Richard, and Roger Lewin. . e Sixth Extinction: Patterns o Life and
the Future o Humankind. New York: Doubleday.
Le Conte, Joseph. . e Race Problem in the South. New York: D. Appleton.
Levenson, Michael, ed. . e Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Cambidge
and New York: Cambidge University Press.
Lieber, Robert J. and Dan Horowitz. . “Live, Die: Moot Point.” New York Times,
November .
Linnaeus, Carolus. . “e Oeconomy o Nature.” In Miscellaneous Tracts Re-
lating to Husbandry and Physick. London: J. Dodsley.
Livingstone, David N. . Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics o
Human Origins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Lombroso, Cesar. . L’uomo delinquente. Milan: Ulico Hoepli.
London, Jack. . e Scarlet Plague. New York: Macmillan.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
WORKS CITED 335
Lovejoy, Arthur O. . e Great Chain o Being: A Study o the History o an Idea.
New Bunswick, NJ: ransaction Publishers.
Ludwig, Büchner, Fiedich Karl Chistian. . Man in the Past, Present, and
Future. London: Asher & Co.
Lull, Richard Swann. . Organic Evolution. New York: Macmillan.
Lyell, Charles. . “Review o ransactions o the Geological Society.” Quarterly
Review –.
. –. Principles o Geology; Being an Attempt to Explain the Former
Changes o the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation. Lon-
don: J. Murray.
Lyotard, Jean- François. . e Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
Minneapolis: University o Minnesota Press.
MacArthur, Robert A. . “Fluctuations o Animal Populations and a Measure o
Community Stability.” Ecology , no. (July): –.
MacLauin, James, and Kim Sterelny. . What Is Biodiversity? Chicago: Univer-
sity o Chicago Press.
MacLeod, Noman. . e Great Extinctions: What Causes em and How ey
Shape Life. London: Natural Histoy Museum.
Ma, Luisa, ed. On Biocultural Diversity: Linking Language, Knowledge, and the En-
vironment. . Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Malpas, Simon. . e Postmodern. New York: Routledge.
Malthus, omas. . Essay on the Principle o Population, th edition. London
John Murray.
Mayr, Enst. . “e Diversity o Life,” in Biology and the Future o Man, edited
by Handler Philip. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
. . e Growth o Biological ought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheri-
tance. Cambidge, MA: Belknap Press.
. . “How Many Species Are ere on Earth?” Science , no. (Sep-
tember): –.
Maza, Sarah. . e Myth o the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imagi-
nary, –. Cambidge, MA: Havard University Press.
McCausland, James. . “Scientists’ Wanings Unheeded.” Courier- Mail, Decem-
ber .
McKibben, Bill. . e End o Nature. New York: Penguin.
. . “Postscipt: Jonathan Schell.” Ne w Yo r k e r , Apil .
“Miscasting the Dinosaurs’ Horoscope.” . New York Times, Apil .
Mitman, Gregg. . e State o Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social
ought, –, Science and Its Conceptual Foundations. Chicago: Univer-
sity o Chicago Press.
. . “Hubis or Humility? Genealogies o the Anthropocene.” In Future
Remains: A Cabinet o Curiosities for the Anthropocene, edited by Gregg Mit-
man, Marco Amiero, and Robert S. Emmett, –. Chicago: University o
Chicago Press.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
336 WORKS CITED
Moore, Jason. . Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis o
Capitalism. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Mury, George, to George Arthur. . Repinted in “Van Diemen’s Land. Copies
o All Correspondence between Lieutenant- Govenor Arthur and His Maj-
esty’s Secretay o State for the Colonies, on the Subject o the Militay Opera-
tions Largely Caried on Against the Aboiginal Inhabitants o Van Diemen’s
Land,” Bitish Parliamentay Papers, .
Myers, Noman. . e Sinking Ark: A New Look at the Problem o Disappearing
Species. New York: Pergamon Press.
. . “e End o the Lines.” Natural History , no. : , , .
. . “Mass Extinctions: What Can the Past Tell Us about the Present and
Future?” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology , no. : –.
. . “e Biodiversity Cisis and the Future o Evolution.” Environmen-
talist –.
Nettle, Daniel, and Suzanne Romaine. . Vanishing Voices: e Extinction o the
World’s Languages. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Newell, Noman D. . “Peiodicity in Invertebrate Evolution.” Journal o Paleon-
tology , no. : –.
. . “Catastrophism and the Fossil Record.” Evolution , no. (March):
–.
. . “Cises in the Histoy o Life.” Scientic American , no. : –.
. . “Revolutions in the Histoy o Life,” in Uniformity and Simplicity.
Boulder, CO: Geological Society o Ameica.
Newton, Alfred. . “Mr. Gieve on the Garefowl.” Nature –.
Nordau, Max Simon. . Degeneration: Translated from the Second Edition o the
Ge r man Work. London: W. Heinemann.
Ohendorf, Pat. . “Catastrophes at Changed the World.” MacLean’s, Decem-
ber .
Oreskes, Naomi. . e Rejection o Continental Dri: eory and Method in
American Earth Science. New York: Oxford University Press.
Osbon, Heny Faireld. . Age o Mammals. London: Macmillan.
Overbye, Denis. . “e eoies: Cosmic Winter.” Discover, May.
Packard, Alpheus. . “Geological Extinction and Some o Its Apparent Causes.”
American Naturalist –.
Paley, Morton. . “e Last Man: Apocalypse without Millennium,” in e Other
Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, edited by Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor,
and Esther H. Schor. New York: New York University Press.
Palmer, revor. . Controversy: Catastrophism and Evolution, the Ongoing Debate.
New York: Kluwer Academic/ Plenum Publishers.
Parkinson, James. . An Examination o the Mineralized Remains o the Vegetables
and Animals o the Antediluvian World, vol. . London: C. Whittingham.
Paul, Diane. . “Dawin, Social Dawinism, and Eugenics.” In e Cambridge
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
WORKS CITED 337
Companion to Darwin, edited by Jonathan Hodge and Gregoy Radick. Cam-
bidge: Cambidge University Press.
Pearce, revor. . “‘‘A Great Complication o Circumstances’: Dawin and the
Economy o Nature.” Journal o the History o Biology , no. (August): –
.
Pearson, Karl. . National Life from the Standpoint o Science. Second Edition.
London: Adam and Charles Black.
Penn, Justin, et al. . “Temperature- Dependent Hypoxia Explains Biogeogra-
phy and Seveity o End- Pemian Maine Mass Extinction.” Science , no.
: .
Porter, eodore M. . Trust in Numbers: e Pursuit o Objectivity in Science and
Public Life. Pinceton, NJ: Pinceton University Press.
Pichard, James Cowles. . “On the Extinction o Human Races.” Edinburgh
New Philosophical Journal : –.
Purdy, Jedediah. . “Anthropocene Fever.” Aeon, March .
. . Aer Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. Cambidge, MA: Har-
vard University Press.
Rampino, Michael R., and Richard B. Stothers. . “Geological Rhythms and
Cometay Impacts.” Science –.
Raup, David M. . “Approaches to the Extinction Problem.” Journal o Paleon-
tology , no. : –.
. . “Species Diversity in the Phanerozoic: A Tabulation.” Paleobiology ,
no. : –.
. . “Large Body Impacts and Terrestial Evolution Meeting, October
–, .” Paleobiology , no. : –.
. . e Nemesis Aair: A Story o the Death o Dinosaurs and the Ways o
Science. New York: W. W. Norton.
. . Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? New York: W.W. Norton.
Raup, David M., and J John Sepkoski, Jr. . “Mass Extinctions in the Maine Fos-
sil Record.” Science , no. : –.
. . Peiodicity o Extinctions in the Geologic Past.” Proceedings o the
National Academy o Sciences o the United States o America , no. : –.
Reif, Wolf- Enst. . ”Evolutionay eoy in Geman Paleontology,” in Dimen-
sions o Darwinism: emes and Counterthemes in Twentieth Century Evolution-
ary eory, edited by Marjoie Glicksman Grene. Cambidge: Cambidge Uni-
versity Press.
. . “e Search for a Macroevolutionay eoy in Geman Paleon-
tology.” Journal o the History o Biology , no. : –.
. . “Deutschsprachige Paläontologie im Spannungsfeld zwischen Makro-
evolutionstheoie und Neo- Dawinismus (–).” In Die Entstehung der
Synthetischen eorie: Beitruage zur Geschichte der Evolutionsbiologie in Deutsch-
land –, edited by T. Junker and E.- M. Engels. Berlin: Verlag für Wissen-
scha und Bildung.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
338 WORKS CITED
Rensberger, Boyce. . “Extinction Govening Force in eoy o Evolution.”
Washington Post, November .
Richards, Robert J. . “Dawin’s eoy o Natural Selection and Its Moral Pur-
pose.” In e Cambridge Companion to the Origin o Species, edited by Michael
Ruse and Robert J. Richards. Cambidge: Cambidge University Press.
Rieppel, Olivier. . “Karl Beurlen (–), Nature Mysticism, and Ayan
Paleontology.” Journal o the History o Biology , no. : –.
Robertson, omas. . e Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and
the Birth o American Environmentalism. New Bunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univer-
sity Press.
Robson, J. . “e Extinction o Pimroses.” Times (London), Apil .
Rudwick, Martin J. S. . Bursting the Limits o Time: e Reconstruction o Geo-
history in the Age o Revolution. Chicago: University o Chicago Press.
. . Earth’s Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters. Chi-
cago: University o Chicago Press.
Sagan, Carl. a. “ABC News Debate.” Aired November .
. b. “Nuclear War and Climatic Catastrophe: Some Policy Implications.”
Foreign Aairs (): –.
. c. “e Nuclear Winter: e World aer Nuclear War.” Parade, Octo-
ber .
Sakar, Sahotra. . Biodiversity and Environmental Philosophy. Cambidge: Cam-
bidge University Press.
Shabeco, Philip. . “Heaings Open on Endangered Species Law,” N e w Yo rk
Times, December .
Schell, Jonathan. . “e Second Death.” N e w Yo r k e r , Febuay .
Schindewolf, Otto H. . “Neokatastrophismus?” Deutsche Geologische Gesell-
scha Zeitschri , no. : –. ranslated and repinted by V. Axel Firso,
Catastrophist Geology , no. ().
. . “Erdgeschichte und Weltgeschichte,” Akademie der Wissenschaen
und der Literatur. Abhandlungen der mathematisch- natuwissenschalichen
Klasse. Mainze: Akademie d. Wiss. u.d. Literatur: Wiesbaden: Steiner in Komm.
Schmidt, Oscar. . e Doctrine o Descent and Darwinism. London: H. S. King
& Co.
Schrag, Peter. . Not Fit for Our Society: Nativism and Immigration. Berkeley:
University o Califonia Press.
Schuchert, Charles. . A Text- Book o Geology, rd ed., New York: Wiley and
Sons.
Schwägerl, Chistian. . e Anthropocene: e Human Era and How It Shapes
Our Planet. Santa Fe: Synergistic Press.
“Scientists See Signs o Mass Extinction.” . Washington Post, September .
Scranton, Roy. . Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reections on the End o
Civilization. San Francisco: City Lights.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
WORKS CITED 339
Selous, Fredeick. . Sunshine and Storm in Rhodesia, nd ed. London: Rowland
Ward and Company.
Sepkoski, David. . Rereading the Fossil Record: e Growth o Paleobiology as an
Evolutionary Discipline. Chicago: University o Chicago Press.
. . “wo Lives in Biology.” Quarterly Review o Biology : –.
Sepkoski, J. John, Jr. . “A Kinetic Model o Phanerozoic Taxonomic Diversity I.
Analysis o Maine Orders.” Paleobiology , no. : –.
. . “A Factor Analytic Desciption o the Phanerozoic Maine Fossil Rec-
ord.” Paleobiology –.
. a. A Compendium o Fossil Marine Families. Milwaukee: Milwaukee
Public Museum.
. b. “Mass Extinctions in the Phanerozoic Oceans: A Review.” In Geo-
logical Implications o Impacts o Large Asteroids and Comets on the Earth, edited
by Leon T. Silver and Peter H. Schultz. Geological Society o Ameica.
. . “Some Implications o Mass Extinction for the Evolution o Com-
plex Life.” In e Search for Extraterrestrial Life: Recent Developments, edited
by M. D. Papagiannis. Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel.
. . “What I Did with My Research Career; or, How Research on Bio-
diversity Yielded Data on Extinction.” In e Mass- Extinction Debates; How Sci-
ence Works in a Crisis., edited by William Glen. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-
sity Press.
. . “Biodiversity; Past, Present, and Future.” Journal o Paleontology ,
no. : –.
Shapin, Stevin. . “Catastrophism.” London Review o Books, November .
Sheehan, P. M., D. J. Bottjer, and M. L. Droser. . “Ecological Ranking o
Phanerozoic Biodiversity Cises: Ecological and Taxonomic Seveities Are De-
coupled.” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology –.
Shen, Shu- Zhong. . Basic Questions in Paleontology. Chicago: University o Chi-
cago Press.
. . “A Sudden End Pemian Mass Extinction in South China.” GSA Bul-
letin –.
Shiel, M. P. . e Purple Cloud. London: Chatto & Windus.
Shils, Edward. . e Torment o Secrecy: e Background and Consequences o
American Security Policies. London: William Heinemann.
Silver, Leon T. and Peter Schultz. . Geological Implications o Impacts o Large
Asteroids and Comets on the Earth. Geological Society o Ameica.
Simberlo, Daniel. . “Are We on the Verge o a Mass Extinction in the ropics?”
PALAIOS , no. : –.
Simpson, George Gaylord. . Tempo and Mode in Evolution. New York: Colum-
bia University Press.
. . e Meaning o Evolution. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Skutnabb- Kangas, Tove, Luisa Ma, and David Hamon. . Sharing a World
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
340 WORKS CITED
o Dierence: e Earth’s Linguistic, Cultural, and Biological Diversity. Pais:
UNESCO, Terralingua, and the World Wide Fund for Nature.
Slack, Nancy G. . Evelyn Hutchinson and the Invention o Modern Ecology. New
Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Smith, Charles Hamilton. . e Natural History o the Human Species: Its Typi-
cal Forms, Primeval Distribution, Filiations, and Migrations. Boston: Gould and
Lincoln.
Smith, Eic A. . On the Coevolution o Cultural, Linguistic, and Biological Diver-
sity. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Smocovitis, V. B. . “Unifying Biology: e Evolutionay Synthesis and Evolu-
tionay Biology.” Journal o the History o Biology , no. : –.
Soddy, Fredeick. . “Some Recent Advances in Radioactivity.” Contemporary
Review : –.
Soulé, Michael. . “What Is Consevation Biology?” Bioscience , no.
(December): –.
. . “Histoy o the Society for Consevation Biology: How and Why We
Got Here.” Conservation Biology , no. : –.
Soulé, Michael, and Bian Wilcox. . “Species Diversity in the Phanerozoic: An
Intepretation.” Paleobiology , no. (Fall): –.
. . “Consevation Biology: Its Scope and Challenge.” In Conservation
Biology: An Evolutionary- Ecological Perspective, edited by Soulé and Wilcox.
Sunderland, MA: Sinauer, .
Spencer, Herbert. . Social Statistics; or, e Conditions Essential to Happiness
Specied, and the First o them Developed. London: John Chapman.
. . “A eoy o Population, Deduced from the General Law o Animal
Fertility.” Westminster Review : –.
. . e Study o Sociology. London: Heny S. King.
Spengler, Oswald. . e Decline o the West, Vol. . New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Staum, Martin S. . Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race, and Em-
pire, –. Montreal: McGill- Queen’s University Press.
Steen, Will, et al. . “e Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Ovewhelming the
Great Forces o Nature?” Ambio , no. (December): –.
Stocking, George W. . Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press.
Sullivan, Walter. . “wo New eoies Oered on Mass Extinctions in Earth’s
Past,” New York Times, June .
. . “Mass Extinctions Increasingly Blamed on Catastrophes from the
Sky.” New York Times, Januay .
Takacs, David. . e Idea o Biodiversity: Philosophies o Paradise. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
“Television.” . World Book Encyclopedia. Chicago: World Book.
omas, Lewis. . Foreword to e Cold and the Dark: e World aer Nuclear
Wa r , by Paul R. Ehrlich. New York: W. W. Norton.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
WORKS CITED 341
oreau, Heny David. . Walden. Borton: Ticknor and Fields.
Toon, O. B., et al. . “Evolution o an Impact- Generated Dust Cloud and Its
Eects on the Atmosphere.” In Geological Implications o Impacts o Large Aster-
oids and Comets on the Earth, edited by Leon T. Silver and Peter Schultz. Geo-
logical Society o Ameica.
urco, Richard P., et al. . “Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences o Multiple
Nuclear Explosions.” Science –.
UNESCO. . “UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity.” Pais.
United Nations. . “Convention on Biological Diversity.”
Valentine, James W. . “Pattens o Taxonomic and Ecological Stucture o the
Shel Benthos duing Phanerozoic Time.” Palaeontology , part : –.
Velikovsky, Immanuel. . Worlds in Collision. New York: Macmillan and Com-
pany.
. . Earth in Upheaval. New York: Doubleday.
Venadsky, Vladamir Ivanovich. . “Problems o Biogeochemisty II: On the
Fundamental Matter- Energy Dierence between the Living and Inert Bodies
o the Biosphere.” Transactions o the Connecticut Academy o Arts and Sciences
–.
Wallace, Alfred Russell. . “e Oigin o Human Races and the Antiquity o
Man Deduced from the eoy o Natural Selection.” Journal o the Anthropo-
logical Society o London –.
Wallace, David R. . e Bonehunters’ Revenge: Dinosaurs, Greed and the Greatest
Scientic Feud o the Gilded Age. Boston: Houghton Miin.
. . e Uninhabitable Earth: Life aer Warming. New York: Tim Dug-
gan Books.
Ward, Barbara, and René Dubos. . Only One Earth: e Care and Maintenance
o a Small Planet. New York: W. W. Norton.
Ward, Lester F. . Pure Sociology: A Treatise on the Origins and Spontaneous De-
velopment o Society. New York: Macmillan.
Ward, Peter Douglas. . Rivers in Time: e Search for Clues to Earth’s Mass Ex-
tinctions. New York: Columbia University Press.
Weart, Spencer. . Nuclear Fear: A History o Images. Cambidge, MA: Havard
University Press.
Wells, H. G. . e Time Machine. New York: Heny Holt.
. . Outline o History. New York: Macmillan.
Wessinger, Catheine, ed. . e Oxford Handbook o Millennialism. Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press.
Wignall, Peter. . e Worst o Times: How Life on Earth Survived Eighty Million
Years o Extinctions. Pinceton, NJ: Pinceton University Press.
Wilford, John Noble. . “Study Indicates Extinctions Stike in Regular Intevals.”
New York Times, December .
Wilson, E. O. . “Resolutions for the s.” Harvard Magazine, Januay- Febuay.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
342 WORKS CITED
. . Biophilia. Cambidge, MA: Havard University Press.
. . “e Biological Diversity Cisis: A Challenge to Science.” Issues in Sci-
ence and Technology –.
. . Biodiversity. Washington: National Academy Press.
. . “e Diversity o Life.” In Earth ’: Changing Geographic Perspec-
tives. National Geographic Society.
. . “Biodiversity.” Science (August ): .
. . e Diversity o Life. Cambidge, MA: Belknap Press.
Wollock, Jerey. . “Linguistic Diversity and Biodiversity: Some Implications
for the Language Sciences.” In On Biocultural Diversity: Linking Language,
Knowledge, and the Environment, edited by Luisa Ma. Washington: Smith-
sonian University Press.
Woodward, Arthur Smith. . “Presidential Address to Section C.” In Report o the
British Association for the Advancement o Science –.
Worster, Donald. . Nature’s Economy: A History o Ecological Ideas, nd ed.
Cambidge and New York: Cambidge University Press.
Wyndham, John. . e Chrysalids. London: Penguin Books.
Yoon, Carol Kaesuk. . “J. John Sepkoski Jr., , Dies, Changed Fields o Paleon-
tology.” New York Times, May .
York, Derek. . “Pattens o Mass Extinctions Not Just Chance, eoists Say.”
Globe and Mail (Toronto), July .
Yuso, Kathyn. . A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: Univer-
sity o Minnesota Press.
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
INDEX
Page numbers in italic indicate gures.
Abel, Othenio, –
aboiginal populations. See racial extinction;
racial hierarchies; racism, racial hier-
archies
activism, environmental, , , –,
Adams, Brooks, –,
Adams, Heny, –
Afican Ameicans, –
Alvarez, Luis W., , , –, , n
Alvarez, Walter, , , –, , , ,
, , n
Alvarez hypothesis: atmospheic model, ,
; authors of, , –, n; comet/
asteroid impact hypothesis and dinosaurs,
–, –, , , , , ; environ-
mental changes and, , ; K- T bound-
ay, , –, , , , n; mass
extinction, –, , –, , ; mass
media and, , , , , , ;
new catastrophism and, –, , , ;
nuclear weapons/war compaison, ,
, ; nuclear winter and, –; past
and present analogy and, ; peiodicity
hypothesis and, , , ; Snowbird
meeting and, , , , ,
Ameican Philosophical Society (APS), ,
,
Amine, Michael, –
ancient civilizations, , , , ,
Anthropocene epoch: about, –, –
, –, n, n, n; bio-
diversity cisis, , –, ; cli-
mate change, –, ; deep time,
–, n; extinction imaginay,
–, , , , ; fatalism, ,
, –; global future, , , ;
humans–natural world relationship, ,
–, , n; neoliberalism and,
, n; optimism, , , –;
pessimism, –, –; slow- motion
catastrophe, , ; technology and,
, , –, , . See also Sixth
Extinction
anthropocentism, , –, –, ,
n
apocalypticism: about, –, ; anxieties
about, ; entertainment and, –,
, –; religious beliefs, –, ,
, , ; secular apocalypticism, –
, –, , . See also literature,
and apocalypticism; postapocalypticism
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
344 INDEX
APS (Ameican Philosophical Society), ,
,
Arduino, Giovanni,
Arendt, Hannah,
Arthur, Michael A., –
Asaro, Frank, n
asteroid impact hypotheses: atmospheic
model, , ; dinosaurs’ extinction
and, –, –, , , –, , , ,
; literature and, –
astronomical catastrophes: Alvarez hypothe-
sis, –, –, , , , , ; histoy
o life and, , , –, , , ,
. See also comet impact hypothesis
atomic age, , , , –. See also
nuclear weapons/war; nuclear winter
background (nomal) extinctions: about, ,
, ; extraordinay extinction vs., ,
; fossil record as imperfect/incom-
plete and, –; mass extinctions vs.,
–, , , , , , , ;
Sixth Extinction vs., , , ; species
extinction statistics, , –,
“bad genes or bad luck,” –, –, ,
balance o nature: about, , –, ;
biodiversity and, , ; Brocchi, –;
catastrophic revolutions vs., , , ,
; Dawin and, , –, , , , ,
–, , , –, ; ecology and,
, , –; fatalism and, , , ,
, ; individual and species life cycles
analogy, –; Lamarck, –; Lin-
naeus, , , , –, n; Lyell, ,
–, –, –, –, , , ,
–; religious beliefs and, –, ,
–; technology, ; transmutation
theoy and, –, ; Victoian era and,
–,
Ballard, J. G., ,
Barrow, Mark V.,
Baudillard, Jean, , –, ,
Bean, Michael J.,
Beaumont, Élie de,
Beck, Ulich, –
Beerbower, James R., ,
Benjamin, Walter, ,
Beurlen, Karl, –
Biberg, Isaac, n
“big ve” mass extinctions. See ve major
mass extinctions
biocultural diversity, , , , , ,
. See also cultural diversity
biodiversity: about, , –, , –,
–; balance o nature and, , ,
–; biodiversity consevation, ,
, , , , –; BioDiversity
Foum, , , –, , , –;
Council on Environmental Quality re-
port, –; cultural diversity and, ,
–, –, , –; cultural
ideology and, , –, , , , ,
–, , ; Dawin, , –, ,
n; ecology and, , , , , –
, –; ecosystems and, , , –,
–, ; endangered species and,
; and extinction interaction, , ,
, ; genetics and, –; homoge-
neous race and, , , , , ; human
activities and, ; inherent nomative
good, , , , –, , , , ,
, , , n; interdisciplinay
conferences, , ; Lyell, , , ;
mass extinction and, , , ; new
catastrophism and, , , ; paleontology
and, , –; philosophical arguments,
–; politics/political ideology and,
, , , , ; as resource, , ,
, , –, , –, –, ,
, ; tropics and, –, ; United
Nations and, , , ; Victoian era
and, –. See also biodiversity movement
biodiversity cisis: about, , , , , , ,
–, ; Anthropocene epoch and,
, –, ; biology and, , ,
, –, , –, , –,
, ; consevation biology and, –
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
INDEX 345
, ; deforestation, , , ;
economies o scale, –; Green Revo-
lution, , ; human activities, –,
, , , , , ; impeialism,
–, –, ; inherent nomative
good, , , ; IPBES report, n;
irreversible consequences, , , ,
, , , ; nuclear war compai-
son with, , , , , , ,
–, ; paleontologists and, ,
, –, , –, , –;
plantations and, , n; politics/po-
litical ideology and, , , –. See
also biodiversity movement; selectivity
and recovey dynamics; Sixth Extinction
BioDiversity Foum (“National Foum on
BioDiversity,” Washington, DC, in ),
, , , , , –
biodiversity movement: about, , ,
–; biologists and, –, ;
ecosystems, , –, ; geology and,
; interdisciplinay conferences, , ;
mass media and, ; new catastrophism
and, ; paleontology and, –, ,
, ; scientic values vs. culture
ideology and, –, . See also bio-
diversity; biodiversity cisis
biodiversity statistics: about, , ;
data analysis projects, –, , ;
species extinction statistics, , –,
–, , –, , , –;
species statistics, , –, , ,
n; tropics, –, –. See
also biodiversity cisis; past and present
analogy
biological diversity. See biodiversity; bio-
diversity cisis; biodiversity movement;
biodiversity statistics
biology: biodiversity cisis and, , ,
, –, , –, , –,
, ; biodiversity movement and,
–, ; consevation biology, ,
, , , , –, , ;
cyclical histoy, , –; degeneration,
–, –; extinction dened, –;
Moden Evolutionay Synthesis, , ,
, , ; nonhuman life, , , ,
–, n; paleobiology, , ,
, , ; racial extinction, –,
–; romanticism and, , , , ,
, , ; speciation, , , , ;
suvival- of- the- ttest doctine, , ,
–, ; Victoian- era, , –, –.
See also cyclical histoy; genetics; racial
senility (racial senescence); and specic
theories
biosphere: about, ; biodiversity and,
, , ; ve major mass extinctions
and, , ; interconnectedness and,
; nuclear winter and, , ; self-
regulation, , , , ; species ex-
tinction statistics and, ; technosphere
and,
Birch, Louis Charles, –
Blumenbach, Johann Fiedich, ,
Boulle, Pierre,
Bowler, Peter, ,
Boyle, Robert,
Brannen, Peter,
Brantlinger, Patick,
Brocchi, Giambattista: balance o nature,
–; biography of, ; fossil record and
strata, , ; gradual cyclical change,
, ; individual and species life cycles
analogy, –, , , , , , ;
intenalism vs. extenal environment,
Brongniart, Alexandre, , , , ,
Broughton, Archdeacon, –,
Büchner, Fiedich Karl Chistian Ludwig,
Buckland, William, , , , ,
Buckley, William F., Jr.,
Burkhardt, Jacob, ,
Bunet, omas, –
Buns, Robert, , n
Burroughs, Edgar Rice,
Burtin, François- Xavier, , ,
Byron, Lord George Gordon, –
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
346 INDEX
Cambian era/extinction, , , –
Campbell, John W., Jr.,
Campbell, omas, –
Camus, Albert,
capitalism, –, n
Carson, Rachel, , , –
Carter, Jimmy, , –,
Cassirer, Enst, –
cataclysmic events. See catastrophe; cata-
strophic revolutions; catastrophic revo-
lutions, and Cuvier; catastrophism
catastrophe: about, , ; capitalism, –
, n; philosophy and, , , ,
; psychoanalytic theoy, , ; racial
senility and, –; slow- motion catastro-
phe, , , –. See also fatalism;
literature, and apocalypticism; literature,
and catastrophe; optimism; pessimism;
racial senility (racial senescence); specu-
lative catastrophic theoies
catastrophic revolutions: about, , ; bal-
ance o nature vs., , , , ; Lyell,
, –, –, ; religious beliefs,
–, . See also catastrophe; catas-
trophism
catastrophic revolutions, and Cuvier: about,
, –, , , –; citiques, , ,
, , , –; cyclical mass extinc-
tions theoy and, –; fossil record
and, ; gradual extinction vs., ; sci-
ence ction and, , –, . See also
catastrophic revolutions; Cuvier, Georges
catastrophism: dened, , –, , –;
extinction imaginay, –, ; pseudo-
science, , –, –; religious be-
liefs, ; technology, ; Victoian- era, ,
, . See also catastrophic revolutions;
catastrophic revolutions, and Cuvier; new
catastrophism
Céline, Louis- Ferdinand,
Charleton, Walter,
Clemens, Elizabeth S.,
Clemens, William,
climate change: Anthropocene epoch, –,
; anxieties and, ; dinosaur extinc-
tion and, ; global future and, , ,
–; nuclear winter, , , ; opti-
mism, –; paleontology, ; Sixth
Extinction, –
Cold War era: Alvarez hypothesis and, ,
; economies o scale, ; intercon-
nection trope, , –; mass extinc-
tion and, –, , , , , ;
nuclear weapons/war, , , , ;
postapocalypticism,
colonialism. See impeialism
comet impact hypothesis: Alvarez hypothe-
sis, –, –, , , , , ; cycli-
cal comet showers, –; Donnelly
hypothesis, –, ; literature and,
–, –; Nemesis hypothesis, ,
–; Oort comet cloud, ; Velikovsky
hypothesis, –, . See also astro-
nomical catastrophes
competition: Cuvier, ; Dawin, , , –
, , –, –, , , n;
ecology and, , –; human evolu-
tion, –, ; Lyell, , , , , ;
Malthusian pinciple, , , , ; racial
extinction, , , –, –, –;
slavey and, –, ; Spencer, –,
; suvival- of- the- ttest doctine, , ,
–, ; Victoian- era, ,
Comte, August, ,
“Conference on the Human Environment”
(United Nations), , ,
Conrad, Joseph,
consevation: biodiversity consevation, ,
, , , , –; ecosystem re-
sources/utilitaian ethos citique, –,
; endangered species, , , , ;
mass extinction and, ; paleontological
evidence and, ,
consevation biology, , , , , ,
–, ,
Convention on Biological Diversity in ,
United Nations, , ,
Cooper, James Fenimore, ,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
INDEX 347
Cope, Edward Dinker, ,
Copenicus, –,
Coulbon, R.,
Council on Environmental Quality report in
, –
Cousins, Noman, ,
Cretaceous- Tertiay (K- T) bounday: Alva-
rez hypothesis, , –, , , ;
biodiversity and extinction interaction,
; comet/asteroid impact hypothesis,
; Cretaceous (K), n; diversica-
tion data and, ; mammals’ displace-
ment o reptiles, , , , ; mass
extinction and, , , , ; species
extinction statistics, , , , .
See also Tertiay (T) peiod
Cutzen, Paul J., , , –
cultural diversity: biodiversity and, , –
, –, , –; cultural ideol-
ogy and, –, –, –, –,
, , –, n; ecosystems, ;
inherent nomative good, –, , ,
–, , n; languages, –,
, –; politics/political ideology
and, ; racial extinction, , , , ,
; as resource, , , , , , , ;
slavey and, –, ; Universal Decla-
ration on Cultural Diversity, ,
cultural ideology: about, , –, , ; bio-
diversity and, , –, , , , ,
–, , ; cultural diversity and,
–, –, –, –, , ,
–, n; cyclical histoy, ,
–, ; deep time and, , –,
n; extinction discourse and, n;
extinction imaginay, , n; greed,
–, ; mass extinction, –, , ,
–, –, n; scientic values
and, , , –, , –, n;
technology, , . See also mass media
cultural ideology, and Victoian era: about,
–, , , n; degeneration, –,
, ; racial extinction, –, –.
See also cultural ideology
Cuvier, Georges: adaption, , ; biogra-
phy of, , ; catastrophism dened, ,
; competition, ; citiques of, –,
; fossil record and strata, , , , ,
, ; geohistoy and strata, , –,
, . See also catastrophic revolutions,
and Cuvier
cyclical histoy: about, –; cultural ide-
ology and, , –, , ; environ-
mental changes and, , –, , –,
, , , , , ; humans and, –,
, –; intenalism and, –; mass
extinctions and, –; orthogenesis
and, –, ,
Dachille, Frank,
Dawin, Charles: adaption, , , , ,
; balance o nature, , –, , ,
, , –, , , –, ; compe-
tition, , –, , –, –, n;
degeneration, , ; diversity/diversi-
cation/divergence, , –, , n;
extenal environment vs. intenalism,
, –; fatalism and, , ; genetics,
; gradual extinction, , , –, ,
, , –, , ; imperfect geo-
logical record, , –; individual
and species life cycles analogy, , ;
Lyell and, , , –; neo- Dawinism,
, –; racial extinction, , , ,
–; racial hierarchies, , , , ;
scientic values and cultural ideology,
n; social Dawinism, ; speciation,
, ; transmutation theoy, –, ,
; voyage on HMS Beagle, , , –,
,
Daubenton, Louis Jean Maie,
Davis, Doug, ,
Davis, Marc, ,
Dawkins, Richard, , n
Day Aer, e (lm), –, , –, ,
,
deep time, , –, n
de- extinction, , ,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
348 INDEX
deforestation: human activities and, ;
human knowledge about consequences,
; mass extinction and catastrophe,
; politics/political ideology, ;
species extinction statistics, –, ,
,
degeneration: about, ; biology, –,
–; catastrophe and, ; cultural
ideology and, –, , ; eugenics
movement, , , ; histoy o life
and, –, , –, ; immigra-
tion threats and, , , ; intenalism,
–; literature, , –; metaphors,
–; racial hierarchies and, –;
Victoian- era, –, ,
de la Beche, Heny, ,
de Laubenfels, M. W., –
Derida, Jacques, ,
Deshayes, Paul, –
Deutsch, Curtis,
de Vies, Hugo,
dinosaurs: climate change and, ; comet/
asteroid impact hypotheses, –, –, ,
, –, , , , ; environmen-
tal changes, –; gradual extinction, ;
human suvival compaison, –, , ,
, , –, ; mammalian evolu-
tion and, , , –, , , , ,
; racial senility, –
directional evolution. See orthogenesis
diversication and extinction studies: about,
–; catastrophic revolutions and
Cuvier, ; data, , –, , ,
–, , , ; ecology and, –
, –, ; neo- Dawinism, –
diversity, biocultural, , , , , ,
. See also biodiversity movement;
cultural diversity
Dobzhansky, eodosius, , –,
Donnelly, Ignatius, , –, , ,
Dubos, René,
Dumont d’Uville, Jules- Sébastien- César,
“Earth Summit,” Rio de Janeiro in , ,
ecology: balance o nature, , , –;
biodiversity and, , , , , ,
–, –; competition and, ,
–; consevation, ; diversication
and extinction studies, –, –,
; extinction, , ; global future, ;
interconnection and, , , –,
, –, ; mass extinction, ,
–, , , ; niches, , –,
, , , –; paleontology and,
–; Sixth Extinction and, ; verte-
brate species,
economy o nature. See balance o nature
ecosystems: biodiversity and, , , –,
–, ; biodiversity movement, ,
–, ; cultural diversity, ; envi-
ronmental changes, , –; human
activities and, –; humans and, ;
interconnectedness, , –, ;
Jablonski, ; population size, ; Sep-
koski, –; utilitaian ethos and, ,
, –, , –, . See also
ecology
Ehrenfeld, David W., , –, , ,
Ehrlich, Anne, , –, ,
Ehrlich, Paul: biodiversity cisis, , ,
, –, , ; biodiversity move-
ment, –, ; biography of, ;
cultural diversity, ; ecosystem re-
sources/utilitaian ethos, –, ;
ecosystems and biodiversity, , ;
human activities and extinction, –;
nuclear winter, –, , –;
past and present analogy, , –;
population size, –, , ; species
extinction statistics, ; Wilson and,
–
Eldredge, Niles, , , , –,
Eliot, T. S., , –, –, ,
Ellul, Jacques,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
INDEX 349
Elton, Charles, , , , , –
“Endangered Languages, Endangered
Knowledge, Endangered Environments”
meeting, Berkeley, CA, in , –
endangered species: biodiversity and, ;
consevation, , , , ; ESA and,
–, , ; fossil record implica-
tions, ; humans as, –,
Endangered Species Act (ESA) in , –
, ,
environmental changes: about, –;
Alvarez hypothesis and, , ; eco-
systems, ; extinction theoies, –,
–; global waming, , , –,
, , ; gradual change, , , ,
, –, , ; human activities and,
–, n; nuclear weapons/war,
, ; paleontology and, ; volcanic
euptions, , , , ,
environmentalism: activists and, , ,
–, ; Cold War projections, –
; ecosystems and biodiversity, –;
ESA, –, ; interconnection, ,
–; politics/political ideology and,
–. See also environmental changes
Ewin, Tery, –, , , , ,
–, n
ESA (Endangered Species Act) in , –
, ,
eugenics movement, , , , , , ,
,
evolution: extenal environment vs. inter-
nalism, , –; transmutation theoy,
, –, , , , . See also human
evolution; natural selection, and Dawin;
natural selection, and human evolution;
orthogenesis; selectivity and recovey
dynamics
extinction imaginay: about, , n; An-
thropocene epoch, –, , , ,
; catastrophism, –, ; geology,
–; politics/political ideology, , ;
postmodenism, –; religious be-
liefs, –; Sixth Extinction, –;
Victoian- era, , , –
extinction theoy (mass extinction, histoy
o extinction). See background (nomal)
extinctions; ve major mass extinctions;
Sixth Extinction; Victoian era; and spe-
cic authors, scientists, and theories
Fanham, Timothy J., , , , ,
, n
fatalism: about, ; Anthropocene epoch,
, , –; balance o nature and,
, , , , ; Dawin, , ; racial
extinction and, , –, –, –;
religious beliefs, . See also pessimism
Faulkner, William,
lms: apocalypticism, , ; impact-
extinction theoies, –; nuclear
weapons/war, –, , , , –,
, , ; nuclear winter, ; popu-
lation size, ; postapocalypticism, ,
, , ; science ction, –, –
; suvival o humanity, –; WWII,
–
First World War. See World War I
Fischer, Alfred G., –
ve major mass extinctions: about, , ;
biosphere’s resilience, , ; diversi-
cation data and, , , , , ;
past and present analogy, , , ,
, . See also Sixth Extinction; and
specic ve major mass extinctions
Flagsta, AZ, conference, , ,
Fleming, John, ,
Flessa, Karl W., , –, ,
Fletcher, Amy Lynn,
fossil record: computeized database/sta-
tistical analysis, –, , , –,
, –; as imperfect/incomplete,
–, –, ; life cycles o species,
, –, , n; peiodicity hy-
pothesis, –; sampling issues, –
; strata and, , , , , , ,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
350 INDEX
–, ; taxonomic units and, , ,
–, , , , , . See also
invertebrate fossil record; maine fossil
record; vertebrate fossil record
Foucault, Michel, , ,
Fiedman, Milton, ,
Fukuyama, Francis,
future, global: Anthropocene epoch, ,
, ; catastrophic thinking, , ;
climate change and, , , –;
de- extinction, , , ; ecology and,
; imagination, –, n; Pemian
extinction as analog, –
Gallant, René,
Galton, Francis,
genetics: adaption, ; “bad genes or bad
luck,” –, –, , ; diversity
and, –; evolutionay theoies, ,
, , ; heredity, , –, –,
,
geology: Anthropocene epoch, , ;
asteroid impact hypothesis, –, ;
biodiversity movement and, ; catas-
trophism and, , , –, –,
, , –; diversication patten,
; extinction imaginay, –; geohis-
toy, –, , ; gradual change, , ,
, –, , , , , ; histoy o
life, , , –, , , , ; im-
perfect geological record, –, –;
mass media and, ; nuclear winter, ;
pseudoscientic histoical catastrophism
and, –; strata and, , –, , ,
, ; unifomitaianism and, , , .
See also catastrophic revolutions; cata-
strophic revolutions, and Cuvier; and
specic geologists
Gliddon, Francis,
global waming, , , –, , ,
. See also climate change
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, , , ,
,
Goodman, Ellen, –, –, ,
Gould, Stephen Jay: biodiversity and extinc-
tion interaction, , , ; biography
of, ; nuclear winter, –; peiod-
icity hypothesis, , ; philosophy and
paleontology, –; politics/political
ideology, n; punctuated equilibia
model, , –; time and cultural
ideology, n
Green Revolution, ,
Greg, William R.,
Ginnell, Joseph,
Habemas, Jürgen,
Haeckel, Enst, , ,
Hagen, Joel,
Hamblin, Jacob, –
Haraway, Donna, n
Hartmann, William K., , ,
Heenan, Teresa,
Hegel, G. W. F.,
Heidegger, Martin,
Heinlein, Robert A.,
Heise, Ursula, , –, n
heredity: eugenics movement, , , , ,
, , , ; Victoian era and, –,
–, , . See also genetics
Heyerdahl, or,
Hiroshima, bombing of, , , , ,
, , ,
histoy o extinction (mass extinction, ex-
tinction theoy). See background (nor-
mal) extinctions; ve major mass extinc-
tions; Sixth Extinction; Victoian era;
and specic authors, scientists, and theories
histoy o life: catastrophes and, , , –
, , , , ; degeneration and,
, , , –, ; nonhuman life, ,
, , –, n; pessimism and,
, –, , , , , , ; post-
modenism, –. See also cyclical his-
toy; peiodicity hypothesis
Hobsbawm, E. J., ,
Hobson, John A., –
fossil record (continued)
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
INDEX 351
Holocaust, ,
Holocene epoch,
homogeneous race, , , , ,
Hubbard, L. Ron,
human activities: biodiversity and, ; bio-
diversity cisis and, –, , , ,
, , ; ecosystem and, –;
mass extinction and, , –, , ,
–, , n; Sixth Extinction
and, , , –. See also humans
human evolution: Afican Ameicans and,
; competition and, –, ; homoge-
neous race and, , , , , ; natural
selection and, , –, , , , , ,
, ; racial extinction and, , –.
See also evolution
humans: cyclical histoy and, –, , –
; dinosaur extinction and fate of, –,
, , , , –, ; ecosystems
and, ; as endangered species, , –,
, , , ; immigration threats,
, , , –; metaphysical death,
–; and natural world relationship, ,
, , –, , n; population
size, , , , , ; progress of,
, . See also human activities; human
evolution
Hut, Piet, ,
Hutchinson, G. Evelyn, , , , ,
Hutton, James, , , –,
Huxley, omas Heny, ,
Hyatt, Alpheus,
imagination, –, n. See also extinction
imaginay
Imbie, John, , –,
impeialism: about, –, –, –,
n; biodiversity cisis, –, –,
; optimism, , ; racial extinction,
–, , –, , , –, , ,
–; violent forces and, , –,
inevitable extinction. See fatalism; pessimism
interconnection, and ecology, , , –
, , –,
Intergovenmental Science- Policy Platfom
on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Sevices
(IPBES), n
intenalism: biological extinction theoies,
; degeneration, –; extenal envi-
ronment vs., , , , , , , –;
natural life spans hypothesis, –;
orthogenesis, , ; racial senility, ;
transmutation theoy, –, –;
typostrophism, , ,
Intenational Commission on Stratigraphy
(ICS), , n
Intenational Union o Geological Sciences,
, n
invertebrate fossil record: about, , ;
diversication data and, –, ; pei-
odicity hypothesis, –; sampling
issues, –; species extinction statis-
tics citiques, ; strata, , , . See
also fossil record; maine fossil record;
vertebrate fossil record
IPBES (Intergovenmental Science- Policy
Platfom on Biodiversity and Ecosystem
Sevices), n
Jablonski, David: background/nomal ex-
tinction rate, , , ; biodiversity
and paleontology, ; cultural ideol-
ogy, n; diversication, , , ,
; Eldredge, –; mass extinction
concept, ; Myers and, , –;
past and present analogy, , , ,
–, , –; selectivity and re-
covey dynamics, , , , , ,
, –
Jaher, Fredeic Cople,
Jameson, Robert, , –
Jaspers, Karl, , , , , –
Jeeies, Richard,
Jeerson, omas, , ,
Joyce, James,
Kahn, Hemann, –
Kazin, Alfred,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
352 INDEX
Kelly, Allan,
Kennedy, Donald, ,
Kissinger, Heny,
Knox, Josiah,
Kolbert, Elizabeth, , n
Koppel, Ted,
Krasovskiy, V. I.,
K- T (Cretaceous- Tertiay) bounday. See
Cretaceous- Tertiay (K- T) bounday;
Tertiay (T) peiod
Kubick, Stanley, ,
Kuhn, omas S.,
Kump, Lee, –
Lamarck, Jean- Baptiste de, –, , ,
,
Lankester, E. Ray, , ,
Larrabee, Eic,
Lawrence, D. H., , , –, , ,
Lea, Homer, ,
Leakey, Richard, , ,
Le Conte, Joseph, –
Leibniz, Wilhelm Gottfied von,
Lesson, René- Pimevére,
Lewin, Roger, , ,
life cycles o species: degeneration, ; fos-
sil record, , –, , n; histoy
o life, –; individual and species life
cycles analogy, –, , , , , ,
; orthogenesis, –; racial senility,
Linnaeus, Carolus, , , , –, n
literature: Romanticism and, , , ;
Victoian- era, –, , –, , .
See also literature, and catastrophe
literature, and apocalypticism: about, ,
–, , , , ; degeneration,
, –; novels, , –, , ,
; poety, –, –; science ction,
, –, ; secular apocalypticism,
–, . See also literature
literature, and catastrophe: about, –,
–, –; asteroid impact hypothe-
ses, –; comet impact hypothesis, –
, –; metaphors, –; nuclear
weapons/war, , , , , –;
population size, , , , ; post-
apocalypticism, , , , , ;
speculative catastrophic theoies, , ,
–, , , . See also literature;
literature, and apocalypticism
Lombroso, Cesare,
London, Jack, , , –
Lorenz, Konrad,
Lovejoy, omas, ,
Luc, Jean- André de,
Lull, Richard Swann, , –
Lyell, Charles: adaption, ; balance o
nature, , –, –, –, –,
, , , –; biography of, ; cata-
strophic revolutions, , –, –, ;
competition, , , , , ; cycli-
cal environmental changes, , –, ,
–, , , , , , ; Dawin and,
, , –; extenal environment vs. in-
tenalism, , , , , ; fossil record
and strata, –; gradual geological
change, , , ; human activities and
extinction, –, n; individual and
species life cycles analogy, , , , ,
; racial extinction, , –; transmu-
tation theoy, ; unifomitaianism, ,
, –, –
Lyotard, Jean- François, , , n
MacArthur, Robert A., , , –
Mad Max lms,
Ma, Luisa, –
Malpas, Simon, ,
Malthus, omas, –, , ,
Malthusian pinciple, , , ,
mammals: balance o nature, ; dinosaur
displacement and, , , –, , ,
, ,
Manhattan Project, , , , n
maine fossil record: about, , ; balance
o nature, ; diversication, –, ,
, –; K- T bounday, ; natural
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
INDEX 353
selection, ; peiodicity hypothesis, –
; sampling issues, –
Marshall, Hary,
mass extinction (extinction theoy, histoy
o extinction), , , –. See also
background (nomal) extinctions; ve
major mass extinctions; Sixth Extinction;
Victoian era; and specic authors, scien-
tists, and theories
mass media: Alvarez hypothesis, , ,
, , , ; biodiversity move-
ment and, ; dinosaurs and human
extinction, –, –, ; mass ex-
tinction theoies, –, –, –,
; Nemesis hypothesis, –; nuclear
weapons/war and, , , –, , ,
–; nuclear winter, , –; pei-
odicity hypothesis, –, –; post-
apocalypticism and, ,
Matheson, Richard, ,
May, Robert, –, ,
Mayr, Enst, , –, –
Maza, Sarah, n
McCausland, James,
McNamara, Robert,
McNeill, John R.,
Mead, Margaret,
Medawar, Peter,
Mesozoic era, , –
Michel, Helen V., n
millenaianism, , , ,
Miller, Walter M., Jr.,
Milne- Edwards, Heni, n
Mitman, Gregg, ,
Moden Evolutionay Synthesis, , , ,
, ,
modenism, and pessimism, , , , ,
, . See also postmodenism
Moore, Jason, n
Morgan, omas Hunt, ,
Muller, Heman,
Muller, Richard A., ,
Murray, George, –
Myers, Noman: biodiversity cisis, , –
, , –; BioDiversity Foum, ;
biography of, –; Jablonski and, ,
–; paleontologists and, , ;
past and present analogy, –; selec-
tivity and recovey dynamics, –,
–, –; species extinction statis-
tics, , –, ; species statistics,
–, –; tropics, –, –;
Wilson and, , , –
Nagasaki, bombing of, , , , , ,
“National Foum on BioDiversity,” Washing-
ton, DC, in (BioDiversity Foum), ,
, , , , –
native inhabitants. See racial extinction;
racial hierarchies; racism, racial hier-
archies
natural economy. See balance o nature
natural selection, and Dawin: about, , ,
, , , ; balance o nature and,
, , –; competition, , , , ,
, ; diversity/diversication/diver-
gence, ; human evolution, , , ;
transmutation theoy vs., ,
natural selection, and human evolution, ,
–, , , , , , , . See also
natural selection, and Dawin
neo- Dawinism, , –
neoliberalism,
Nettle, Daniel, –
new catastrophism: about, ; Alvarez hy-
pothesis and, –, , , ; biodiver-
sity cisis, , ; paleontology, –, , ,
. See also catastrophism
Newell, Noman: biography of, , , ;
ecology, , , , ; mass extinc-
tion, , –, , –, , –,
; peiodicity hypothesis, –, ;
Snowbird meeting, ; unifomitaian-
ism, ,
Newton, Alfred,
niches, , –, , , , –
Niebuhr, Barthold Georg,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
354 INDEX
Nietzsche, Fiedich, , , , ,
Nixon, Richard, ,
Nordau, Max Simon, –
nomal (background) extinctions. See back-
ground (nomal) extinctions
nuclear weapons/war: about, , ; Alva-
rez hypothesis compaison, , , ;
anxieties about, –, , , , ,
, , n; biodiversity cisis com-
paison with, , , , , , ,
–, ; Cold War–era, , , ,
; environmental changes, , ;
facts/statistics, , ; lms, –, , ,
, –, , , ; literature and,
, , , , , –; Manhattan
Project, , , , n; mass extinc-
tion and, –, , , –, , ,
, , , ; mass media and, , ,
–, , , –; metaphysical
death, –; pessimism and, , ;
philosophy, , , , , –;
politics/political ideology and, , ;
postmodenism,
nuclear winter: Alvarez hypothesis and,
–; biosphere and, , ; climate
change and, , , ; facts/statistics,
, –; lms and, –, ; geohis-
toy, ; mass extinction and, ; mass
media, , –; politics/political
ideology and, ; postmodenism and,
–; Sagan, –, , –; uni-
fomitaianism,
Odum, Eugene,
On the Beach (lm), –,
Oppenheimer, Robert, ,
optimism: Anthropocene epoch, , ,
–; biodiversity and extinction inter-
action, , , , ; climate change
remediation, –; peiodicity hypothe-
sis, ; technological innovations and,
, –, , ; Victoian- era, ,
, , , –, , , . See also
fatalism; pessimism
orthogenesis: about, , –, ; cyclical
orthogenesis, –, , ; intenal-
ism, , ; life cycles o species, –;
pessimism, ; typostrophism, –,
–,
Osbon, Heny Faireld, , ,
Overbye, Denis,
Owen, Richard, ,
Packard, Alpheus, –,
paleobiology, , , , ,
Paleogene peiod, n, –n. See also
Tertiay (T) peiod
paleontology: biodiversity and, , –;
biodiversity cisis and, , , –,
, –, , –; biodiversity
movement and, –, , ; cli-
mate change, ; consevation and, ,
; diversication patten, –, –,
, ; ecology and, –; environ-
mental changes, ; extinction dened,
–; extinction hypotheses, , , ,
; interdisciplinay conferences, , ;
mass extinction, , , , –, ;
new catastrophism and, –, , , ;
Snowbird meeting and, , , , ,
; speciation, ; terrestial animals,
; unifomitaianism, . See also fossil
record; invertebrate fossil record; maine
fossil record; past and present analogy;
vertebrate fossil record
Paleozoic era, , , –
past and present analogy: about, ; Alva-
rez hypothesis, ; Ehrlich, –;
Eldredge, –; Jablonski, , ,
, –, , –; Myers, –;
Raup, –, , –, , ;
Sepkoski, , ; Sixth Extinction, ,
, , , ; tropics, –, ;
Wilson, , –, , –
Pearson, Karl, –
peiodicity hypothesis: about, –, ,
, ; Alvarez hypothesis and, ,
, ; cyclical comet showers, –
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
INDEX 355
; Fischer and Arthur, –; fossil
record, –, –; Gould, , ;
mass media, –, –; Newell, –
, ; optimism, ; Raup- Sepkoski
analysis, , , –, , –. See
also catastrophic revolutions, and Cuvier
Pemian extinction: about, , –; bio-
diversity and, , ; Newell, , ;
Raup, –, ; Sepkoski, , ;
species extinction statistics, ,
pessimism: about, , ; adaptation, ;
Anthropocene epoch, –, –;
histoy o life and, , –, , ,
, , , ; mass extinction, ,
; modenism and, , , , , ,
, ; nuclear weapons/war, , ;
post- WWI, –; post- WWII, ; sci-
ence ction, –; Sixth Extinction,
. See also catastrophe; fatalism; opti-
mism
Phanerozoic era, , –, , , ,
,
philosophy: balance o nature and, ; biodi-
versity and, –; catastrophic imagey
and, , , , ; histoy o life, –;
nuclear weapons/war/annihilation, ,
, , , –; postmodenism
and, , –; Victoian optimism,
–,
Pimm, Stuart,
plantations, , n
Pleistocene extinctions, ,
poety, and catastrophe, , –, –,
–
politics/political ideology: biodiversity, ,
–, , , , ; biodiversity
cisis, , , –; cultural diver-
sity, ; deforestation, ; economies
o scale, ; extinction imaginay, ,
; lms, ; mass extinction, –, ,
, –, n; neoliberalism, ;
nuclear weapons/war, , ; nuclear
winter and, ; racial extinction, –;
isk society, –; scientists and, , ,
–; species extinction statistics and,
; Victoian- era, –,
polygenism, ,
positivism. See optimism
postapocalypticism: about, –, , ,
; catastrophic revolution and, –;
Cold War–era, ; lms, , , , ;
literature, , , , , ; mass
media, , ; postmodenism and, ,
, , ; science ction, . See also
apocalypticism
postmodenism: about, –; biodiversity
and extinction interaction, , , ,
; extinction imaginay, –; histoy
o life and, –; instability and catas-
trophe, –; nuclear weapons/war
and, ; nuclear winter, –; philoso-
phy and, , –; postapocalypticism
and, , , , ; punctuated equi-
libia model, , –; isk society and,
–; suvival o humanity, –. See
also modenism, and pessimism
post–World War II. See atomic age; Cold
War era; modenism, and pessimism;
nuclear weapons/war; postmodenism;
World War II
Pound, Ezra,
present, global. See Anthropocene epoch;
modenism, and pessimism; Sixth
Extinction
Prévost, Constant, ,
Pichard, James Cowles, –,
psychoanalytic theoy, ,
punctuated equilibia model, , –
Purdy, Jedidiah, –, ,
Putnam, James, –
racial extinction: Afican Ameicans, –;
biology and, –, –; competition,
, , –, –, –; cultural di-
versity, , , , , ; cultural ide-
ology and, –, –; fatalism, ,
–, –, –; human evolution,
, –; impeialism and, –, ,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
356 INDEX
, , , –, , , –; individu-
als and species analogy, ; literature, ,
–, , ; politics/political ideology,
–; polygenism, , ; racism and,
–; romanticism, , , ; by violent
force, , –,
racial hierarchies, , , , , –,
–, ,
racial senility (racial senescence): biological
extinction theoies, , ; catastrophe
and, , ; cyclical process and, ;
degeneration, ; dinosaurs and, –;
intenalism, ; typostrophism, –,
racism, racial hierarchies, , , , ,
–, –, , . See also racial ex-
tinction; racial senility (racial senescence)
Rampino, Michael R.,
Raup, David: Alvarez hypothesis, , ;
background/nomal extinction rate, ,
–, , , ; “bad genes or bad
luck,” –, –, , ; biography
of, –; diversication, –, ,
, ; diversication data and, ,
–, , –, ; Eldredge, –
; fossil record sampling issues, –;
instability and catastrophe, , ;
mass extinction concept, ; optimism,
–; past and present analogy, –
, , –, , ; peiodicity
hypothesis, , –, , –; selec-
tivity and recovey dynamics, –, ,
, , , , –; Snowbird
meeting, , , ; statistics citique,
; Wilson and, –
Raven, Peter: biodiversity, ; biodiversity
cisis, –, , ; BioDiversity
Foum, , , –; nuclear winter,
–; politics/political ideology, ;
species statistics citique, –
Ray, John, –, –
Reagan, Ronald, , , n
religious beliefs: apocalypticism, –,
, , , ; balance o nature and,
–, , –, –; biodiversity,
; catastrophic revolutions, –, ;
catastrophism, –, , ; extinction
imaginay, –; fatalism and, ; mil-
lenaianism, , , , ; physico-
theology, –, –; unifomitaianism
and, ,
Robertson, omas,
Romaine, Suzanne, –
romanticism: biology and, , , , , ,
; literature and, , , ; racial
extinction and, , ,
Roosevelt, eodore,
Rosen, Walter G., ,
Royal Society o London, , ,
Rudwick, Martin J. S., –, ,
Russell, Dale,
Sagan, Carl, –, , –, , –
Schell, Jonathan, –, –,
Schindewolf, Otto H.: biography of, –;
mass extinction, , , n; racial
senility, ; typostrophism, , , ,
–,
Schmidt, Oscar, –
Schopf, omas J. M., ,
Schuchert, Charles, –
Schwägerl, Chistian, –
science ction: anxieties and, ; apocalyp-
ticism and literature, , –, ; lms,
–, ; impact- extinction theoies,
–; pessimism and literature, –;
postapocalypticism and, , ,
scientic values: cultural ideology and, ,
, –, , –, n; politics/
political ideology and, , , –
Scranton, Roy, –
Second World War. See World War II
secular apocalypticism, –, –, ,
Sedgwick, Adam,
selectivity and recovey dynamics: about,
racial extinction (continued)
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
INDEX 357
, ; Eldredge, –, ; Jablon-
ski, , , , , , , –;
Myers, –, –, –; Raup,
–, , , , , , –;
Sepkoski, , . See also evolution
Selous, Fredeick, –
senescence (senility o species). See racial
senility (racial senescence)
Sepkoski, J. John, Jr.: Alvarez hypothesis,
; biodiversity, , ; biodiversity
cisis, –; biography of, , , ; con-
stuctive role, , ; cultural ideology,
n; diversication data and, –,
, –, , , ; K- T bounday,
, ; mass extinction concept, , , ,
–, ; Myers and, ; past and
present analogy, , ; peiodicity
hypothesis, , , –, , –;
selectivity and recovey dynamics, ,
; Snowbird meeting, , , ;
species extinction statistics,
Shapley, Harlow, ,
Shatskij, N. S.,
Shelley, May, , –
Shiel, M. P., ,
Shils, Edward,
Shklovskiy, I. S.,
Silver, Leon T.,
Simberlo, Daniel, , –
Simpson, George Gaylord, , –
Sixth Extinction: about, –, , , –,
, , n; background/nomal
extinction vs., , , ; deep time,
–, n; de- extinction, , ,
; ecological process, ; extinction
imaginay, –; human activities and,
, , –; humanity’s fate/extinc-
tion and, ; past and present analogy,
, , , , ; pessimism, ;
short- tem biodiversity loss vs. mass
extinction claims, –, –; slow-
motion catastrophe, –; Wilson,
, , –. See also Anthropocene
epoch; biodiversity cisis; future, global
slavey, , –,
Smith, Adam,
Smith, Charles Hamilton, –
Smith, Eic,
Smith, William,
Snowbird, UT, meeting in , , , ,
,
Soulé, Michael, –, , ,
speciation, , , , ,
speculative catastrophic theoies: about, ,
, , –; lms, –; literature
and, , , –, , , ; mass
media, . See also specic speculative
theorists
Spencer, Herbert, –, , , ,
Spengler, Oswald: cyclical histoy, , –
, , , , ; pessimistic view o
histoy o life, , –, ,
statistics: about, ; fossil record and com-
puteized database/statistical analysis,
–, , , –, , –;
nuclear threats, , –. See also
biodiversity statistics
Steen, Will,
Stegman, LeRoy,
Steno, Nicolas, –
Stoker, Bram,
Stothers, Richard B.,
stratigraphy: about, ; fossil record and, ,
, , , , , ; geohistoy and, ,
–, ,
Sullivan, Walter, –,
suvival o humanity: about, –; An-
thropocene epoch, –, ; bio-
diversity, ; Council on Environmental
Quality report, –; dinosaurs’ fate
and, –, , , , , –, ;
ecosystems, , ; lms, –; ge-
netics and, ; literature, ; past and
present analogy, , , ; UNESCO,
, . See also humans
suvival- of- the- ttest doctine, , , –,
Szilard, Leo,
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
358 INDEX
Takacs, David, –, ,
taxonomic units, and fossil record, , ,
–, , , , ,
technology: balance o nature and, ; bio-
sphere and, ; catastrophism, ;
cultural ideology and, , ; ecological
interconnection and, –; human–
natural world relationship, ; optimism,
, –, , . See also nuclear
weapons/war
Terralingua foundation,
Tertiay (T) peiod, , , , –, ,
n, –n. See also Cretaceous-
Tertiay (K- T) bounday
omas, Lewis, , ,
oreau, Heny David, –
reads (lm), –, –
Tinbergen, Jan,
Toon, O. B., ,
Toynbee, A. J., –
transmutation theoy, , –, , , ,
iassic extinction, ,
tropics: biodiversity, –, ; mass
extinction, , , , ; past and
pres ent analogy, –, ; species
extinction statistics, , –; species
statistics, –, , –. See also
deforestation
typostrophism, –, –,
UNESCO, , ,
unifomitaianism: about, , –; geo-
histoy and, , , ; gradual change
and, , ; Lyell, , , –, –;
Newell, , ; nuclear winter, ; reli-
gious beliefs and, , ; transmutation
theoy, ; Velikovsky,
United Nations, , , , ,
United States Environmental Protection
Agency,
Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity,
,
Valentine, James W., –, ,
Velikovsky, Immanuel, –, –,
Venadsky, Vladimir Ivanovich,
vertebrate fossil record: about, , , ,
–; Cuvier, , , , ; Dawin,
, , ; Ehrlich, ; Sepkoski model,
. See also dinosaurs; fossil record;
invertebrate fossil record
Victoian era: balance o nature, –, ;
biodiversity, –; biology, , –,
–; catastrophism and, , , ;
competition, , ; extinction imagi-
nay, , , –; extinction tenets and,
, –; heredity, , –, –,
, ; optimism, , , , , –,
, , ; politics/political ideology,
–, ; racial hierarchies, , , , ,
–, , . See also cultural ideology,
and Victoian era; impeialism
volcanic euptions, , , , ,
von Daniken, Eich,
Wallace, Alfred Russell, –, , , ,
, ,
Wallace- Wells, David,
Ward, Barbara,
Ward, Lester,
Watt, James,
Weart, Spencer, , ,
Wells, H. G., , , –, , ,
Whiston, William, –,
Wiesel, Elie,
Wilcox, Bian,
Wilford, John Noble,
Wilson, E. O.: background/nomal vs.
extraordinay extinction, , ; biodiver-
sity, , , , –, , ; biodiver-
sity cisis, –, –, –, ;
BioDiversity Foum, , , –, ,
, –; biography of, ; conseva-
tion biology, ; data analysis projects,
–, , ; Ehrlich and, –;
interdisciplinay conferences, , ;
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
INDEX 359
island biogeography model, –; mass
media/magazine publications, , –
; Myers and, , , –; nuclear
weapons/war compaison, ; past and
present analogy, , –, , –;
Raup and, –; scientic values and
cultural ideology, n; Sixth Extinc-
tion, , , –; species extinction
statistics, , –, , –, ,
, –, –; species statistics,
–, –
Wittgenstein, Ludwig,
Woodward, Arthur Smith,
Woolf, Virginia, ,
World War I, –
World War II, , , , , , –,
,
World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), ,
–, ,
Worster, Donald, ,
Wyndham, John, , –
Yeats, W. B., , –, –,
Yuso, Kathyn, n
EBSCOhost - printed on 2/13/2023 6:42 AM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
