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(Guardian) Sad Humans driving species to extinction faster than new ones can evolve. Darwin facepalms   (guardian.co.uk) divider line 189
More: Sad, endangered species, extinctions, animals and plants, habitats, mass extinctions, sea creatures, invertebrates, corals  
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9560 clicks; posted to Main » on 08 Mar 2010 at 4:47 AM   |  Favorite    |   share:  Share on Twitter share via Email Share on Facebook   more»   |    Get this fabulous T-Shirt and impress the methane out of your friends! shirt it!



189 Comments   (+0 »)
   

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2010-03-07 07:14:52 PM
I was not aware that "extinct" was a verb.
 
2010-03-07 07:19:21 PM
crypticsatellite: I was not aware that "extinct" was a verb.


You can verb any word you want.
 
2010-03-07 07:36:58 PM
think critically
 
2010-03-07 07:48:04 PM
Extinct them before they extinct us, then see if they are tasty.
 
2010-03-07 07:48:40 PM
crypticsatellite: I was not aware that "extinct" was a verb.

It's a perfectly cromulent word.
 
2010-03-07 07:54:23 PM
ecmoRandomNumbers: crypticsatellite: I was not aware that "extinct" was a verb.

It's a perfectly cromulent word.


Your post embiggens us all.
 
2010-03-07 07:55:07 PM
Well I suppose it's a good thing God can just magic more into existence whenever He feels like it then.

/Evolution is the tinfoil hat atheists wear to keep God out of their brainwaves.
 
2010-03-07 08:00:47 PM
Talon: Well I suppose it's a good thing God can just magic more into existence whenever He feels like it then.

/Evolution is the tinfoil hat atheists wear to keep God out of their brainwaves.


Oh certainly, but only when He decides to do it, and we don't know what God's timetable is.
 
2010-03-07 08:02:55 PM
make me some tea: Talon: Well I suppose it's a good thing God can just magic more into existence whenever He feels like it then.

/Evolution is the tinfoil hat atheists wear to keep God out of their brainwaves.

Oh certainly, but only when He decides to do it, and we don't know what God's timetable is.


Not sure if serious?
 
2010-03-07 08:05:46 PM
img692.imageshack.us
Approves
 
2010-03-07 08:06:38 PM
APPROVES!

i256.photobucket.com
 
2010-03-07 08:07:32 PM
Talon: make me some tea: Talon: Well I suppose it's a good thing God can just magic more into existence whenever He feels like it then.

/Evolution is the tinfoil hat atheists wear to keep God out of their brainwaves.

Oh certainly, but only when He decides to do it, and we don't know what God's timetable is.

Not sure if serious?


God, I hope this goes green.
 
2010-03-07 08:20:54 PM
The English Major: Talon: make me some tea: Talon: Well I suppose it's a good thing God can just magic more into existence whenever He feels like it then.

/Evolution is the tinfoil hat atheists wear to keep God out of their brainwaves.

Oh certainly, but only when He decides to do it, and we don't know what God's timetable is.

Not sure if serious?

GodEvolution, I hope this goes green.


FTFY
 
2010-03-07 08:24:45 PM
Heh, I still remember that crap from Sunday school. Way to dodge my damn questions about why God never answers people's prayers, Miss Sunday School Teacher.
 
2010-03-07 08:25:30 PM
I don't know what kind of SUV the Extinction is, but I want one.
 
ZAZ [TotalFark]
2010-03-07 08:28:20 PM
For the first time since the dinosaurs disappeared, humans are driving animals and plants to extinction faster than new species can evolve, one of the world's experts on biodiversity has warned.

I don't believe this. I can believe the number of species is declining now. I can't believe it was continually increasing for 60 million years until Man. The world has probably been in near equilibrium much of that time with the number of species fluctuating up and down.
 
2010-03-07 08:29:12 PM
Naman: The English Major: Talon: make me some tea: Talon: Well I suppose it's a good thing God can just magic more into existence whenever He feels like it then.

/Evolution is the tinfoil hat atheists wear to keep God out of their brainwaves.

Oh certainly, but only when He decides to do it, and we don't know what God's timetable is.

Not sure if serious?

GodEvolutionIntelligent Design, I hope this goes green.

FTFY


FTFY
 
2010-03-07 08:37:20 PM
crypticsatellite: I was not aware that "extinct" was a verb.

Isn't it weird that the word "verb" is a noun?
 
2010-03-07 08:39:34 PM
make me some tea: Heh, I still remember that crap from Sunday school. Way to dodge my damn questions about why God never answers people's prayers, Miss Sunday School Teacher.

Prayer, the best illusion in the world.
 
2010-03-07 08:50:28 PM
festus: crypticsatellite: I was not aware that "extinct" was a verb.

Isn't it weird that the word "verb" is a noun?


I think you have just disproved the theory of the English language.
 
2010-03-07 08:55:41 PM
jmaster306: festus: crypticsatellite: I was not aware that "extinct" was a verb.

Isn't it weird that the word "verb" is a noun?

I think you have just disproved the theory of the English language.


It IS only a theory, after all.
 
2010-03-07 08:58:05 PM
BigSnatch: crypticsatellite: I was not aware that "extinct" was a verb.


You can verb any word you want.


And you get extra super-cool points for doing it, too!
 
2010-03-07 09:02:21 PM
make me some tea: jmaster306: festus: crypticsatellite: I was not aware that "extinct" was a verb.

Isn't it weird that the word "verb" is a noun?

I think you have just disproved the theory of the English language.

It IS only a theory, after all.


Enseñe la controversia!
Enseignez la controverse!
Unterrichten Sie die Meinungsverschiedenheit!
教争论!
 
2010-03-07 09:03:22 PM
Evolution (or God, if you prefer) put us here to test every ecosystem on the planet. If a species can survive contact with us, then it is probably damn near unkillable.
 
2010-03-07 09:08:57 PM
ZAZ: For the first time since the dinosaurs disappeared, humans are driving animals and plants to extinction faster than new species can evolve, one of the world's experts on biodiversity has warned.

I don't believe this. I can believe the number of species is declining now. I can't believe it was continually increasing for 60 million years until Man. The world has probably been in near equilibrium much of that time with the number of species fluctuating up and down.


Really? You don't think that habitat destruction, overfishing, overhunting, ocean acidification, and water pollution have had an adverse impact?

You're right in assuming it's difficult to quantify- we've only been categorizing life on this planet for a very short time. And one would expect a relatively upward trend on biodiversity over the last 60m years, since that last mass extinction event represented a pretty low point for anything over 2kg in size.

I like to think that the smart will have a higher degree of survival through this next ELE. It's the only thing that keeps me from throwing my notebook across the room when reading Fark.
 
2010-03-07 09:27:40 PM
Weaver95: Evolution (or God, if you prefer) put us here to test every ecosystem on the planet. If a species can survive contact with us, then it is probably damn near unkillable.

Heck, the smart ones are the ones we actively propagate.
 
ZAZ [TotalFark]
2010-03-07 09:50:44 PM
unyon

I said I can believe the number of species is declining now. With "now" meaning something like past century, or past few centuries. Let's even say for the sake of argument that we're in a great extinction, meaning the number is dropping fast. It's a long way from there to saying we had 60 million years of uninterrupted increase in number of species until man came along.
 
2010-03-07 10:31:00 PM
ZAZ: unyon

I said I can believe the number of species is declining now. With "now" meaning something like past century, or past few centuries. Let's even say for the sake of argument that we're in a great extinction, meaning the number is dropping fast. It's a long way from there to saying we had 60 million years of uninterrupted increase in number of species until man came along.


Not really. It's about 39 characters, including spaces and punctuation marks.
 
2010-03-07 10:55:26 PM
crypticsatellite: I was not aware that "extinct" was a verb.

I've been verbing with it for a long time.
 
2010-03-07 11:59:57 PM
I extinct, you extinct, he/she extincted, they extincteded
 
2010-03-08 12:34:47 AM
jalora: I don't know what kind of SUV the Extinction is, but I want one.

I think it's a GM, but they stopped producing it around the same time as the H2.
 
2010-03-08 01:01:04 AM
Depending on how you look at it, we're just a force of natural selection. There's certainly nothing new about a species extincting others, and we're of course a product of evolution, so our actions play into natural selection (we're certainly not supernatural), the difference is we can understand our actions and avoid causing (or intentionally cause, whatever) the extinction of a species.
 
2010-03-08 02:23:16 AM
Until the only species left are the ones that can evolve quickly enough to keep pace with us....
 
2010-03-08 03:29:52 AM
SchlingFocker: Until the only species left are the ones that can evolve quickly enough to keep pace with us....

mmm...tyrannids....
 
2010-03-08 05:06:17 AM
These guys should talk to the scientists who keep discovering "new" species at the bottom of the oceans. I'm pretty sure it evens it out.
 
2010-03-08 05:26:25 AM
Oooh, so Mother Nature now needs a favor?! Well maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys! Nature started the fight for survival, and now she wants to quit because she's losing. Well I say, hard cheese.
 
2010-03-08 05:42:25 AM
"For the first time since the dinosaurs disappeared, humans are driving animals and plants to extinction faster than new species can evolve"

Meaning humans killed lots of shiat BEFORE the dinosaur extinction?
 
2010-03-08 05:54:00 AM
A ex-stinking event happens too often.



/Divorce
 
2010-03-08 05:58:18 AM
Oh No! Something went wrong
We're much too fat and livin' too long
 
2010-03-08 07:15:32 AM
Like I told my liberal friend who believes that human's are the problem with everything, those polar bears whose ice flows are melting better evolve web paws quicker.
 
2010-03-08 08:04:59 AM
Mean Daddy: Like I told my liberal friend who believes that human's are the problem with everything, those polar bears whose ice flows are melting better evolve web paws quicker.

When all this time, it turns out that the problem with everything is the are that humans have. Apparently. And the flowing ice. And internet-accessible paws.

Or did I misread all of those attempts at English?
 
2010-03-08 08:40:10 AM
Barakku: Depending on how you look at it, we're just a force of natural selection. There's certainly nothing new about a species extincting others, and we're of course a product of evolution, so our actions play into natural selection (we're certainly not supernatural), the difference is we can understand our actions and avoid causing (or intentionally cause, whatever) the extinction of a species.

This has been my thinking since high school. If humans are simply an evolutionary output, then whatever we do is simply natures way of dealing with less resilient creation. Think of us as the equivalent of the model T-800 for the natural world.
 
2010-03-08 08:41:16 AM
I'm normally front-row center when it comes to protecting endangered species and curtailing human activity (and even *gasp* profits!) in order to make absolutely sure we don't need that last hundred species we obliterated, but this doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

It's not like species are interchangeable. Just because new species are evolving doesn't mean they'll perfectly replace the ones we've destroyed.
 
2010-03-08 09:02:42 AM
ZAZ: For the first time since the dinosaurs disappeared, humans are driving animals and plants to extinction faster than new species can evolve, one of the world's experts on biodiversity has warned.

I don't believe this. I can believe the number of species is declining now. I can't believe it was continually increasing for 60 million years until Man. The world has probably been in near equilibrium much of that time with the number of species fluctuating up and down.


60 MYA was the last Mass Extinction Event. There were four other before then, and we are apparently in the middle of a 6th one. I'm not sure exactly how biodiversity looks like between these events - there's probably some fluctuation going on, but every few hundred million years, there's one big massive crash. The bigger animals and apex predators (such as humans) tend to do the worst.
 
2010-03-08 09:03:45 AM
Good thing we are learning the language of biology. Soon we will build species at will. First they will be simple experiments, stringing together the fewest bits of genetic code it takes to produce a living thing. Like a child learning the alphabet, sounding it out as they go along.

Then, as we learn, we'll begin to design creatures with specific purposes, medical and industrial. Soon after, as our understanding of the building blocks and instruction codes of life expand, we'll move into creating full blown mammal-scale creatures. We will be able to re-create an analogue of whatever furry farknut that went extinct last year.

Soon after that, we'll be in full-scale Jumba (from Lilo & Stitch) mode. With private scientists building extreme lifeforms just to see how far they can tweak the genetic code. Just for the hell of it. Like the X-Games of creating life. Of course, by then, the singularity will have happened and it will likely be a post-human machine intelligence running things.

Extinct species? Not so worried. In fact, bring on 'The Gourmet Club'.
 
2010-03-08 09:12:35 AM
It's all part of the Monroe Doctrine, I think.
 
2010-03-08 09:20:45 AM
Obvious tag works here, too.
 
2010-03-08 09:22:05 AM
Weaver95: SchlingFocker: Until the only species left are the ones that can evolve quickly enough to keep pace with us....

mmm...tyrannids....


WAAGH
 
2010-03-08 09:23:25 AM
it's got electrolytes!

/brawndo
 
2010-03-08 09:24:25 AM
Dances-With-Lobster: It's not like species are interchangeable. Just because new species are evolving doesn't mean they'll perfectly replace the ones we've destroyed.

No, but vacant ecological niches don't stay vacant for long if there's a nearby neighbor that can spread out. Unfortunately, that's only "not long" in a geologic sense; the next megayear may get pretty boring.
 
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