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Comment by matthewmarkus | Hacker News Reader

It needs to be noted that the Sumatran rhino has been on the decline for thousands of years now:

https://news.mongabay.com/2017/12/dna-analysis-shows-sumatra...

While humans have no doubt accelerated their demise, the overall problem stems from "rising sea levels that submerged the land bridges connecting the islands of Borneo, Java, and Sumatra to the Malay Peninsula and mainland Asia, subsequently fragmenting suitable habitats for the rhino."

Finally, Sumatran rhino populations are so small, remote, and fragmented that poaching is less of a concern for this species than issues like land use.

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Important context from that article:

Payne also noted that the findings reinforced the importance of supporting efforts to prevent the species from going extinct.

“Animal species do come and go over periods that can be most conveniently measured in units of tens of thousands of years,” he said, but added, “To say that we should just let some species go extinct because it is ‘natural’ is nonsense.”

Why is it nonsense? It is natural.

It is nonsense that we should accept any negative outcomes simply because they are natural. If we accepted this form of argument, we'd still have people dying from smallpox and polio, both of which are "natural". The whole point of technological civilization is to be the masters of our own fates and not to meekly accept whatever happens to be "natural".

Ok, but why do we need to do anything to keep certain animal species around? It might be nice to have Sumatran rhinos around so you could see something new and cool, but there are hundreds of thousands of cool species to see. I would guess that the Sumatran rhino does not hold a crucial position in any ecosystem. It's certainly not the same to us as having people die out because of smallpox etc. People mean much more to us than animals. If we have the money, the means, and the time to preserve the Sumatran rhino, then let's save it. If we have better things to do, let's do that instead.

> Ok, but why do we need to do anything to keep certain animal species around?

For the same reason the Internet Archive is worth keeping: Sumatran Rhinos (and all other species) contain irreplaceable information accumulated over millions of years of evolution. You never know when or how some of that information might turn out to be useful. But once the last backup is gone, it's gone forever.

Unlikely, but possible, so fair. Again though, not really comparable (for us) to human loss. And I'm fine sacrificing "you never know" if we end up using that time and effort for something more pressing, as alluded to by BurningFrog below.

"You never know" is an argument usually applied selectively. It has the advantage that it is always true.

Yeah, we don't know what terrible unforeseen consequence letting this species go will have.

But we don't know what good consequence it might have either.

We can make some pretty good guesses. We make this kind of judgement call about species all the time. Like it or not, we pick the winners and losers in this world. That's why there are lots of dogs, cows, and chickens, and no smallpox viruses (at least not in the wild). It's because we've decided that dogs, cows and chickens deserve to live because they make our lives better, and smallpox viruses don't deserve to live because they make our lives worse.

It seems to me that a Sumatran Rhino is a lot more like a dog or a cow or a chicken than it is like a smallpox virus. It's true that we can't eat them or keep them as pets, but just the ability to go see one in the wild has value IMHO.

> just the ability to go see one in the wild has value IMHO.

Two thoughts:

1. A common mistake is to think that just because something has value, it's good to do. This reasoning ignores cost! Only by comparing cost and benefits can we make informed choices.

2. This value is specific to you. Others assign less or more value for this.

True. But...

3. Causing a species to go extinct eliminates all possibility of anyone extracting any value from it now or in the future. That has an unknown and potentially enormous cost in the long run.

If you take on the perspective of holding the world as temporary ward, preserving it for the use and pleasure of future generations, then that easily dismissed single person missing experiencing something becomes an uncountable number of humans no longer able to do so. While there is certainly a balance to be struck between using our resources for our current needs or amusements and using them to safeguard the needs and amusements of those to come after, your perspective of dismissing it out of hand veers far too much to the side of disregarding those that will come after us entirely.

I guess if you try to quantify a species’ value by looking at its utility, either to the ecosystem or for our amusement, you may arrive at the conclusion that some species are not worth saving. Reasonable even if a little cold.

I tend to take the view that life — all life — is extremely rare in the universe, and that alone is enough to warrant as much action as realistically possible to preserve it. A species might never be useful for anything, but it is the unique product of countless generations before it; a story of complexity and beauty that, it could be argued, dwarfs any of humanity’s greatest achievements.

>I guess if you try to quantify a species’ value by looking at its utility, either to the ecosystem or for our amusement, you may arrive at the conclusion that some species are not worth saving.

If you included our own species in that evaluation you may reasonably conclude that ours is not worth saving, above all others.

What would one reasonably label a species that hyper-populates, spreads itself spatially, destroys the other species and their habitations in the spaces it expands to, consumes at a rate far above utility, hordes whatever resources it can gather and spends its efforts calculating how to increase these efforts?

Unless the intelligence we evolved with is used to benefit the rest of life which flourished with our own, then it is hard to call it a virtue, or even deem us any more worthwhile, or worth preserving, more than any other life form.

Unless all species naturally end up at that stage and the only way to the next stage of evolution is to rise above it.

Or if every animal life is net more pain than enjoyment.

Or if it's the only way to have any lifeform exist into perpetuity. Then we're net beneficial to all other life on the planet as long as any of it survives along with us; disregarding that we're perpetuating a boatload of genes just by continuing to exist.

Any individual animal has a survival instinct. We have a survival instinct that encompasses much larger groups than that of any animal.

It’s a survival instinct when there’s two mouths to feed, and one meal to do it.

When there’s enough for everyone and more, and we take enough resources for 50 because then we get it faster, cheaper, and shinier... well, I wouldn’t personally describe that as survival instinct.

There are some days I definitely don’t disagree with you. For all our intelligence, we spend an awful lot of it being senselessly destructive. Hard to argue that’s worth keeping around.

This is fair. I would say though that I am not suggesting that "species are not worth saving". Rather I would define my view as "all species are worth saving, but as human actors, and not gods, we need to pick and choose".

Again, I would love to see nothing go extinct. Only reason I left my first comment is that I think it is unfair to classify the extinction of species during our lifetimes as "meekly accept[ing]" as opposed to "sad but rational given our limitations".

I hear you, and FWIW, I didn’t construe your meaning negatively.

I am Malaysian. I wish I could say that despite our best conservation efforts, we just couldn’t save the Sumatran rhino. Instead, both within Malaysia and without, we hardly give even a moment’s thought to the damage we do as we do it.

If only our quandary was, “which species won’t we be able to save?” instead of “what species are we going to sacrifice so we don’t have to change our lifestyle?”

It's an act of extraordinary hubris to view the global ecosystem through the lens of human entertainment. If there is one lesson we should learn from the last 100 years it's that our species understands very little about the complexity and healthy functioning of ecosystem upon which we depend.

But if you’re trying to limit the impact of humans, by saving a species that would naturally go extinct, you’re interfering with nature.

Limiting the impact of humans is a means, not an end.

So what’s the end goal? Save every possible species despite them not being viable?

Sure something like that, although I'd say it's to save every species that's practical to save rather than merely possible. Whether or not they're "viable" seems irrelevant.

Why? What’s the rationale?

If more species is best, should we bread or genetically engineer new ones? Is that “better”?

I don't think it's purely rational. It's probably the case that loss aversion[0] or some combination of psychological phenomena play a huge role. But I suppose the rational component is: If it's practical to save a species, and that species may provide some useful knowledge or inspiration in the future, why not save it?

> If more species is best, should we bread or genetically engineer new ones? Is that “better”?

I get what you're saying, but you have to draw the line somewhere. For example, if more money is better, why not work 3 jobs?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion

I don't have a problem with valuing human life over pretty much anything, while being neutral about which animals live or die.

I suppose I agree that just calling something "natural" isn't a great argument on its own.

My main disagreement here is the arbitrary decision that this is a "negative outcome".

> I don't have a problem with valuing human life over pretty much anything

OK, but then you still have to decide whether you value quantity over quality. Is it better to have N people living comfortable fulfilled lives, or 10N people living in poverty and misery?

Even if you decide to cast your lot with quantity over quality, you have to decide whether the quantity you're going to value is head-count of person-years: is it better to have N people with a life expectancy of 100 years, or 10N people with a life expectancy of 20 years?

Well, I have a hard time seeing how to ethically influence any of those things.

I assume we're not talking about killing 90% of the population if it happens to be 10N...

So I'll happily just defer to accepting any people who happen to exist.

OK, but then you still have the problem of how to balance the needs of the people who already exist. For example, I really like animals. I place a very high value on the possibility that I might some day see a Sumatran rhino in the wild. If Sumatran rhinos go extinct then I, a human who already exists, will be very sad and have a lower quality of life. How do you balance that against the needs and desires of others who don't value Sumatran rhinos as much as I do?

One also has the question the impact. Sure it’s a separate species of rhino. But it’s a separate species because humans designated it as such. Sometimes the difference between species is pretty marginal and one might wonder what the impact is of losing it.

The definition of a species is the interbreeding barrier. Animals who cannot produce fertile offspring are different species.

By that flawed logic we should let all diseases kill everything and everyone because death by disease is natural.

Not at all. I think humanity engineering things for its own benefit, including biology, is good. But evolution as a force of nature has been proceeding uninterrupted for millions of years and many species have gone extinct when their niches disappear, or their adaptations become less advantageous. Humanity has evolved to be able to create technology beneficial for us. I don't necessarily see how it immediately follows that using that technology to preserve other species is beneficial.

That niche specie that we let go extinct because of 'naturality' could have evolution advantages over humans that would prove very useful in biological research. They could be especially hardened against cancer for example, but end up being wiped out by disease and famine rather than old age.

Not to mention humanity has a global effect on species population, it would be hubris to assume a species going extinct nowadays is separate from that, even if they have been in a steady decline for quite some time.

> the islands of Borneo, Java, and Sumatra

Those are some of the largest islands on earth. The problen for rhinos in the case of Java is that it's 100% farmed, not submerged land bridges.

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