A) What is an endangered species?
1. According to Wikipedia, an endangered species is a species which has been categorized as very likely to become extinct in the near future. Endangered (EN), as categorized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, is the second most severe conservation status for wild populations in the IUCN’s schema after Critically Endangered (CR). In 2012, the IUCN Red List featured 3,079 animal and 2,655 plant species as endangered (EN) worldwide. [1]
2. In the United States, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (‘FWS’) is the federal agency in charge of ‘listing’ most species under the Endangered Species Act (‘ESA’). This legislation was passed in 1973 and explicitly stated its goal was to protect critically imperiled species from extinction as a consequence of economic growth and development untempered by adequate concern and conservation.... [2]
3. Furthermore, one million of the planet’s eight million species are threatened with extinction by humans, scientists warned. Their landmark report paints a bleak picture of a planet ravaged by an ever-growing human population, whose insatiable consumption is destroying the natural world. The global rate of species extinction is already tens to hundreds of times higher than it has been, on average, over the last 10 million years. [3]
B) Are humans an endangered species?
4. Researchers have long known that modern humans lack the genetic variation found in other living primates, such as chimpanzees or gorillas, even though our current population size is so much larger. One explanation for this lack of variation is that our species underwent recent bottlenecks- events where a significant percentage were killed or otherwise prevented from reproducing. Some researchers proposed that the lack of variation in our maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA suggested these bottlenecks took place as our ancestors spread out of Africa relatively recently.
One possibility occurred 70,000 years ago, when the Toba super-volcano erupted in Indonesia and triggered a nuclear winter that fewer than 15,000 individuals survived. Studies of diversity in other regions of the human genome, however, attributed low genetic variation to chronically low numbers, with as few as 10,000 breeding humans at different times during the past 2 million years. [4]
5. Of all the problems Sir David Attenborough has witnessed throughout the natural world, he sees none so pressing as the one facing our own species, which he believes could die out if we don’t tackle booming populations. [5]
C) How many people can the planet support?
6. Modern Homo sapiens (that is, people who were roughly like we are now) first walked the Earth about 50,000 years ago. Since then, more than 108 billion members of our species have ever been born, according to estimates by Population Reference Bureau (PRB). [6]
7. Many scientists think Earth has a maximum carrying capacity of 9 billion to 10 billion people. One such scientist, the eminent Harvard University sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, bases his estimate on calculations of the Earth’s available resources. [7]
8. However, according to the following article, “It is not the number of people on the planet that is the issue- but the number of consumers and the scale and nature of their consumption,” says David Satterthwaite, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London. He quotes Gandhi: “The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.” [8]
D) Will future humans become a new species?
9. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published 150 years ago, opened the book on our evolutionary past, which has since been traced by scientists back to fossil apes. But where is evolution taking us? Will our descendants hurtle through space as relatively unchanged as the humans on the starship Enterprise? Will they be muscle-bound cyborgs? Or will they chose to digitize their consciousnesses- becoming electronic immortals?
10. When you ask for opinions about what future humans might look like, you typically get one of two answers. Some people trot out the old science-fiction vision of a big-brained human with a high forehead and higher intellect. Others say humans are no longer evolving physically- that technology has put an end to the brutal logic of natural selection and that evolution is now purely cultural. [9]
E) Cultural preservation is more important
11. Although technology rapidly advances, we haven’t lost our natural features at all as a species. Thus even if some of our physical features may change in the future (e.g. slimmer bodies and more pronounced foreheads), we will never become cyborgs.
12. As far as the aspect of genetic bottleneck is concerned, it is possible that it is not due to few survivors of our species at different time intervals, but to the mere fact that few ancestral genes survive after many generations.
13. With respect to the problem of the Anthropocene extinction, it is likely that few species will finally survive, those who can be domesticated and live with us (dogs, cats, farm animals, canaries and parrots, city sparrows and pigeons, circus seals and dolphins, etc.).
14. I believe that more important than growing in numbers is the preservation of our cultural identity as a species. Thus instead of achieving immortality on a personal level, we had better preserve our history (e.g. Socrates’ philosophy, Einstein’s theory of relativity, Buddha’s teachings, etc.)
15. Conclusively, it may take a long time before our planet recovers from the destruction we have already caused, but, given that from now on we will do our best, our extinction or ‘transmutation’ will never take place, and the Earth will be a better and more biodiverse place to be in the future, while our current era will be remembered as a (bad) intermediate stage.
[2]: [https://www.businessinsider.com/humans-fit-all-of-the-government-criteria-for-endangered-species-2012-5]
[3]: [https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/06/world/one-million-species-threatened-extinction-humans-scn-intl/index.html]
[4]: [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2010/01/human-ancestors-were-endangered-species]
[5]: [https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/sir-david-attenborough-humans-may-be-an-endangered-species- 9950523.html]
[6]: [https://www.prb.org/howmanypeoplehaveeverlivedonearth/]
[7]: [https://www.livescience.com/16493-people-planet-earth-support.html]
[8]: [http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160311-how-many-people-can-our-planet-really-support]
[9]: [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/11/future-humans-four-ways-we-may-or-may-not-evolve/]
8/28/2019
Image: [http://datazone.birdlife.org/species/factsheet/alagoas-foliage-gleaner-philydor-novaesi]
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