According to Claude, the documented extinctions that may be attributable to global warming since 1981 can be counted on one hand. Hardly a mass extinction!
Good that the warming is expected to all suddenly stop next year, right?
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And good that there isn’t any exponential knock-on effect, whereby a small group of species at risk (e.g. coral at risk due to bleaching) could effect large numbers of species that rely on them, right?
Current estimates suggest about 10% of species are at risk. That they haven’t gone extinct yet is hardly cause for celebration.
IUCN estimates 900 extinct species, and 80 extinct in the wild.
How many fingers does Claude have?
According to a random gibberish generator.
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Due to what?
What is the difference between extinct species and extinct species in the wild?
And regarding the number of extinct species estimated by IUCN, do we know the cause?
Possibly two.
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Being eaten by Bigfoot.
No, wait: it’s due to climate change, because that’s what you were talking about
If you don’t know, and can’t work it out or look it up, your ability to make useful comments is severely limited.
The main problem with looking at species recently declared extinct is that the IUCN etc usually wait decades after the last sighting of a species before declaring it extinct, especially for small animals or plants, simply because of the possibility of isolated pockets having survived. Most of their recent extinction declarations are of organisms not seen since the 1950s or earlier. So species going extinct now won’t necessarily be recognised for several decades.
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No Paul.
@Nesslig20 stated that the populations were “the same species” (i.e. they can successfully interbreed), not that these populations are identical.
Regardless of whether you consider this to be an “inherent absurdity”, this is a real phenomenon:
Your statement could therefore be interpreted as:
Paul thinks reality is absurd.
The core of this phenomenon, and the reason your understanding of biology and species is flawed, is contained in the following from the Wikipedia article:
Formally, the issue is that interfertility (ability to interbreed) is not a transitive relation; if A breeds with B, and B breeds with C, it does not mean that A breeds with C, and therefore does not define an equivalence relation. A ring species is a species with a counterexample to the transitivity of interbreeding.[3]
This in turn requires a more robust understanding of the concept of “species”, in terms of ability to interbreed, rather than an essentialist view involving some arbitrary definition of the species.
In the same way, language comprehensibility is not a transitive function, and the French language can be understood as mutual comprehensibility with other French speakers, and thus a continuous spectrum of speakers, each of which are comprehensible to their immediate intermediates, but with two mutually-incomprehensible, and thus separate languages, Latin and Modern French, at the end-points.
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The article itself provides an explanation without needing to invoke the phantom of pervasive fitness declines:
Harmful mutations like these are predicted to build up in small, isolated populations that become inbred, a phenomenon called genomic meltdown, according to most evolutionary biologists. If your options for a mate are limited, you can’t be too choosy about undesirable genetic traits, so those don’t get weeded out. The Wrangel Island mammoths provide a rare opportunity to see that theory play out in a real population, Rogers says.
To provide evidence of a more pervasive pattern of declines, Paul would need to provide an example that is not from “small, isolated populations” that may be subject to inbreeding.
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And explain why, if those mammoths succumbed to GE, all other animals with similar relevant characteristics (mutation rate, genome size, generation time) didn’t go extinct.
Why do we still have elephants, rhinos and hippos? Why are whales still around?
P.s. the mutations described in that article on the Wrangel Island mammoths are not the nearly-neutral invisible-to-selection mutation that accumulate under GE.
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But Roy, you must remember that Paul @UncensoredPilgrims is “holding [his] own, actually” – we know this because he himself told us – so it must be true.
Therefore the fact that he cannot point to evidence that genetic declines are pervasive, or that involve the right sort of mutations, like the fact that he cannot comprehend that the existence of phenotypic traits is objective (it’s just the labels that are subjective), or that for a robust (i.e. population and interfertility-based) understanding of species, species don’t have a first member, or that freezing is something that happens between water molecules, not to individual water molecules, may, to the uninitiated, indicate that he has a fundamentally malformed understanding of biology in particular, and science in general, but actually means nothing of the sort.
It’s all part of his cunning plan to lull us into a false sense of security.
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At first, he seemed rather like Baldrick in the first series of Blackadder, but more and more he seems like Baldrick in the third series.
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