Common Sense Article Counters Extinction Hysteria… in the Washington Post!

Amazing. This piece by biology professor R. Alexander Pyron actually appeared in the Washington Post:

Mass extinctions periodically wipe out up to 95 percent of all species in one fell swoop; these come every 50 million to 100 million years, and scientists agree that we are now in the middle of the sixth such extinction, this one caused primarily by humans and our effects on animal habitats.

This causes moonbats to shriek that draconian solutions must be imposed to prevent us from encroaching upon the biosphere.

But the impulse to conserve for conservation’s sake has taken on an unthinking, unsupported, unnecessary urgency. Extinction is the engine of evolution, the mechanism by which natural selection prunes the poorly adapted and allows the hardiest to flourish. Species constantly go extinct, and every species that is alive today will one day follow suit. There is no such thing as an “endangered species,” except for all species. The only reason we should conserve biodiversity is for ourselves, to create a stable future for human beings. Yes, we have altered the environment and, in doing so, hurt other species. This seems artificial because we, unlike other life forms, use sentience and agriculture and industry. But we are a part of the biosphere just like every other creature, and our actions are just as volitional, their consequences just as natural. … [U]nless we somehow destroy every living cell on Earth, the sixth extinction will be followed by a recovery, and later a seventh extinction, and so on.

As for global warming hysteria,

The Paris Accords aim to hold the temperature to under two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, even though the temperature has been at least eight degrees Celsius warmer within the past 65 million years. Twenty-one thousand years ago, Boston was under an ice sheet a kilometer thick. We are near all-time lows for temperature and sea level; whatever effort we make to maintain the current climate will eventually be overrun by the inexorable forces of space and geology.

That is assuming that tyrannical nonsense like the Paris Accords would have any effect on the temperature or sea levels whatsoever — which I doubt.

Getting back to extinction, Pyron makes some good points:

Within a few million years of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, the post-apocalyptic void had been filled by an explosion of diversity — modern mammals, birds and amphibians of all shapes and sizes. …

Conserving biodiversity should not be an end in itself; diversity can even be hazardous to human health.

The only end in itself in the physical realm is humanity.

Humans should feel less shame about molding their environment to suit their survival needs. … If this means fewer dazzling species, fewer unspoiled forests, less untamed wilderness, so be it. They will return in time. The Tree of Life will continue branching, even if we prune it back. The question is: How will we live in the meantime?

The thought crime being committed here is anthropocentrism. To judge by the comments on the article, most WaPo readers are ready to form a lynch mob.