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Comment by xamuel | Hacker News Reader

Hypothetical question: Suppose in the past hundred years a new species of gnat evolved to live in asbestos insulation. As asbestos is phased out, this species faces an extinction crises. Should humans intervene to preserve the species?

Daily reminder: extinction and speciation go hand-in-hand. It's not like there's a finite number of species and we're going to run out of them.

"So profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!" ~Charles Darwin

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We're the only species that can make those decisions and the only species that can consider the consequence of those actions. We've grown beyond just letting things run their course and watching what happens - it's become increasingly obvious we work against our own self interest in how we run around destroying things. I don't find the ecological equivalent of "boys will be boys" in any way satisfying.

So in that hypothetical example, what are the dire consequences of letting the asbestos-gnat go extinct? Bear in mind that if we ever suddenly need to do studies on asbestos-gnats for some reason, we can just re-create the environment they evolved in and let them re-evolve.

That's entirely flawed though - we can't for certain replicate the exact conditions, and if it's proven to be valuable, we can't know that recreating it will have the effect we require it to have.

Well then we're guilty by omission for all the trillions of species that could have evolved if we had done something different in the past. For example, maybe if we had used higher amounts of chlorine in our swimming pools all along, then that would have caused some new bacteria to evolve. Are we guilty because we never gave that poor, innocent, helpless bacteria a chance at life? (Queue images of bacterias crying into their handkerchiefs with tiny little violins playing in the background)

No, we aren't. Like I just said - you can't anticipate what's to come, but you can look at your actions right now, and if it's causing species to become extinct because of our interference, we can knock that out.

Daily Reminder:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

It's not like there are just a few 'gnats' here and there going extinct. This is an ongoing ecological collapse we are the cause of, and in the middle of.

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