Posted by
Andrews on Monday, January 05, 2009 12:25:10 PM
I wrote before that an increase in the amount of information we have available has managed to mislead us. For example, because we now have good biological data about frogs, we
notice more mutations and thus think there are more mutations. Or, because we can now measure
parts per trillion, we now find chemicals where they were once invisible, yet we assume they are spreading and infiltrating new places. Or finally, because human habitation has spread,
"natural disasters" have increased, because where a hurricane in an uninhabited region is not a disaster, once you put a city there, it is. It seems so obvious, and something for which science should control, yet again and again, I see this same error repeated.
And once more, in my favorite source of errors (
Wikipedia for those who don't
follow the blog), I found
an article claiming that we are experiencing an "increasing cycle of anthropogenic extinctions".
This is just absurd. The small subspecies we today call species for purposes of extinctions, cannot be identified in the past simply because the fossil record makes such fine distinctions impossible. We distinguish between coloration or even song patters or mating habits when we talk of species for purpose of extinction. Can we see these things in even century old remains, much less fossils? And the fossil record, as should be clear from the many arguments about evolution, is far form complete. We are fortunate to have as much of it as we do, but how can we possibly extrapolate from that to estimate anything about the number of species which went extinct at any period in history? Any numbers we generate would be a guess at best.
Even in more recent times, our records are far from ideal. We had little record keeping even a century ago, and much of the world had not been touched. Though we assume the rate of extinctions is increasing due to man, we have no idea what the rate of extinctions was in any region prior to the introduction of man. For that matter, we do not know what the rate of extinctions would be today without man, nor do we even know the rate
WITH man, as the rate we use is still just an estimate.
So, what this article says is, having better information, knowing much more about the world, and watching things more closely, we can see more extinctions than we once did, so we now estimate that the number of extinctions is greater than in the past because we are seeing more extinctions.
All of which is fine so long as the highly tentative nature of the numbers is made clear, but that is rarely the case. Far more often, these numbers are presented as if they had been established with some degree of certainty, and, as should be obvious, there is nothing even close to certainty. And that is what makes such spurious arguments so dangerous. Passing off such assumptions as fact allows one to make a "factual" argument for almost anything at all, without any worry about the validity of one's point.