Adams was an amazingly humorous fellow, but it can be easy to forget that the source of his humor is always surreal profundity. It's as if he sees a completely different world than the rest of us, but one which looks precisely the same. In this book (out-of-print when I found an editor's proof copy) Adams takes that hilariously disparate view and directs it like a spastic and noodly laser at the mis-management of our natural world. There is a reason that Richard Dawkins recalls Adams so fondly a

Adams was an amazingly humorous fellow, but it can be easy to forget that the source of his humor is always surreal profundity. It's as if he sees a completely different world than the rest of us, but one which looks precisely the same. In this book (out-of-print when I found an editor's proof copy) Adams takes that hilariously disparate view and directs it like a spastic and noodly laser at the mis-management of our natural world. There is a reason that Richard Dawkins recalls Adams so fondly as a compatriot in the fight for reason. Adams is as honest, sublime, and disarming as ever.



I personally don't believe in a static view of nature. Extinction--even mass-extinction--has been a constant theme throughout prehistory. Humanity isn't even the first single species to cause the mass extinction of a huge variety of animals: algae did it millions of years before humans even existed.



Animals compete for the same resources, and whenever there are changes in the environment, be they geographical or climatic, there are going to be extinctions as different species come into contact in new ways. Despite what a lot of badly-researched sci fi might tell you, evolution is not a process of improvement: no species is any more evolved than any other species, each species has simply evolved in different ways to meet the requirements of a different ecological niche.



The coelecanth was a fish that first crawled out of the water hundreds of millions of years ago, and which we assumed had gone extinct until one was caught in 1975. That fish's descendents eventually produced the first lizards, which produced the first mammals, which produced the first primates, which eventually produced human beings. Yet, just because we evolved from the lowly coelecanth does not mean that we are 'more highly evolved'--stick a human being and a coelecanth in the middle of the ocean for a few days and it should be clear that we are just evolved to do different sorts of things.



Part of the reason we're experiencing high rates of extinction right now is that there are more species now than at any other point, and a huge number of those species are extremely specialized to a certain type of lifestyle, meaning even a small adjustment in their environment is likely to drive them to extinction. Mr. Tibbles was a naughty cat: he hunted an entire species to extinction by himself. This was the Stephens Island Wren, a flightless bird which had evolved to live on nothing but the algae that accumulated on the rocky island.



This is not evidence that Mr. Tibbles was more evolved than the wren, because Mr. Tibbles, left alone on the island, couldn't do what the wren did: survive off the island's resources. The reason cats, goats, rabbits, and pigs have been successful when introduced in new areas is because they are generalists, not specialists. They can survive in a wide variety of environments even when they are not the animal best-suited to that environment, because in times of change and upheaval, generalists outperform specialists.



A group of scientists were testing the behavior of flies and discovered that if the flies entered an area and there was no food there, almost none of the flies would ever return to that area. Then, the scientists began to wait until the flies had checked an area, and then put food there after they left. Within a few generations, the flies who returned had been much more successful, and so their offspring predominated. Now nearly all the flies would return to the same areas, again and again.



Yet, when the scientists reset the test to the original conditions, the specialized behavior died out, after only a few generations, because spending the time and energy and brain space on that behavior was just not worth it. It's the same reason that isolated bird populations tend to become flightless: flight is great for moving around and escaping enemies, but it takes a lot of energy to maintain, so if all you have to sustain you is algae, and there are no predators to flee, you might as well drop the showy flight thing and use those calories to keep your body warm and alive.



One of the great benefits of this process to humans is that all of those horrible, terrifying treatment-resistant diseases we have produced by overuse (and misuse) of antibiotics are highly specialized, and so, if we just drastically reduce antibiotic use, normal, generalist strains of e. coli will drastically outperform specialist, antibiotic resistant strains and drive them out of the ecosystem, which is exactly what has happened in Scandinavia where antibiotic treatment reduction is already in place.



No matter what humans do, we won't wipe out life, and we won't 'destroy the environment', we'll just change it. There are bacteria that live on radioactive rods in the middle of nuclear power plants, and on boiling, magma-fed vents at the lightless bottom of the sea, and there are even bacteria that can live in a sterile, sealed container eating nothing but solar radiation. Sure, we could change the environment so much that we would kill off all the large animals, including ourselves, and most plants, but something else will just survive and take over. The Chernobyl site is now one of the most lush and wild natural preserves in all of Russia.



There is no single, static way for the world to be--the environment and the animals that live in it are always changing, and to some degree, humans complaining about the extinction of certain specialized animals is like an old person complaining that the world isn't 'like it used to be'. Just because the environment was the way it was when humans evolved, that doesn't mean it is the only way for the environment to be, or that it won't change, or that change is bad, or that we should or could stop that change.



But we should ask whether we want to destroy ourselves, whether we want to set up an environmental system that favors superbacteria and destructively invasive species, because in the end, it's not about the world, it's about us and what we have to live with. The world will get along fine without us, after all.