November 1, 2025 • 47 mins
Scientists believe that 99% of the estimated 50 billion species that have ever lived on Earth have disappeared through extinction. This is a natural process typically, but it can also be cataclysmic and it's becoming clear we are amid a massive one. Find out more with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello friends, It's Josh and I'm back with the Select
and this week I've selected our twenty fourteen episode on extinction.
In this episode, we go over all the big extinctions
and what probably caused them, including the one we're most
likely in right now, which was probably caused by humans.
And if you pay attention, you can start to notice
(00:22):
a little glimmers, a little beginnings of what would become
my side podcast, The End of the World with Josh Clark.
And although we don't talk about any movies, I'm betting
there's some glimmers of Chuck's long running side podcast movie
Crush in here too. Hope you enjoy this episode. It's
a good one.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's
Charles W. Chuckers Bryant. Jerry is over there. I'mosa said
your last name, Jerry, how weird. And then today we
have a fourth character in the in the studio with
this Chuck. This a cent, yeah, scent coming together to
make like a tangible human being. So you are wearing Petuli,
(01:18):
uh not wearing well, you have Petulia on you as
a result of one of Emily's sugar scrubs right from Mama. Yeah,
and it's love Yourmama dot Com. Yeah, okay, and then
Jerry is contributing to that with an enchilada. So all
of them combined, I would say, there's like there's an
extra person in the seat right here. Uh, what kind
(01:41):
of person is that? Just another person? Okay, a viable
living organism, one that when we leave the studio will
probably become extinct. That's a good one. Did you like that? Yeah,
I've had that plan since probably two weeks ago. Nice.
(02:01):
How are you doing, man, I'm good.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
I've been thinking of Buster Rhymes all day.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Why did he have a song about extinction?
Speaker 2 (02:08):
He had an album called Extinction Level Event. Oh yeah, yeah,
and that was in one of the songs.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
That sounds super nineties.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Well it's Buster Rhymes, it has to be nineties.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
But I mean even those words extinction level Event. People
were worried about stuff because of like the Turn of
the Millennium, you remember, is a huge hit. Sure, Deep
Impact and Armageddon came out like on the same day basically,
and both were hits. Like people were just nervous. Yeah,
(02:38):
And as a result, Buster Rhymes was very popular. That's right.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Although he's not anymore, he's still good though he hadn't
been doing much.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
No, but his body of work is oh for sure. Yeah,
leaders in the New School and his early work with
Trip Call Quest.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Oh yeah, he guessed it on one of my favorite songs.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Yeah, what's the scenario? Was that the one? I think? So?
I mean, it was definitely on that one. Yeah, but
they that was the one also where I think, Yeah,
he makes fun of people with saggy pants because it
was so new. Apparently Buster Rhymes wasn't down with it yet, yeah,
which is pretty ironic because he got hardcore into that.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
That was like a dungeon dragon, right right, right, that's
pretty awesome.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
It's a good song. Yeah. So extinction is clearly what
we're talking about today. Uh and uh, I guess we
should probably give a shout out to some of the
extra reading material. Yeah, man, we picked up on There's
a woman named Elizabeth Colbert or Colbert depending on what
(03:45):
if you watch The Colbert Apoor and she is basically
a leading expert as far as journalists go on extinction.
She wrote a book called The Sixth Extinction. That's it's
a good article. Yeah, and like they she wrote an
article in the New York or she's a New Yorker
journalist that was basically the predecessor to the book, you
(04:05):
know how they do. Sure, They're like, oh, I need
an extra twenty grand, so I'll just write a synopsis
of the book I'm writing. Yeah, And it's a good article,
and we work from that. There's another one from the
New York Review of Books called They're taking Over about
the explosion of jellyfish. On How Stuff Works, there's one
that I wrote years back called will We Soon Be Extinct?
(04:26):
And there's another House Stuff Works one that we've done
an episode on called why is Biodiversity Important? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (04:32):
And I found one in an Io nine h huh
for animals that we thought were extinct but miraculously pop.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Back up nice. Which it's always a good story. Oh yeah,
it's a heartwarming story of triumph of diversity and coming
back when everybody thought you were down.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Yeah, some of them like basically rocky, hundreds of millions
of years later. Even Yeah, it's crazy, like the silicamt
I think that's when it was at the Big Fish. Yeah,
they just caught that thing one day. Yeah, and said, hey,
wait a minute, Yeah, this thing's extinct.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
It's supposed to be, and we'll talk about how and
why things fall off. But things do fall off, and
it seems that there is a that the whole thing
is a very natural process. Extinction is. But for a
very long time, I guess, scientists believe that the God
(05:33):
created all of the animals yeah on Earth, and that
his will was too perfect, his creation was too divine
to even allow for extinction. So because they were aware
of the fossil record, they rationalized these huge bones of
animals they didn't see anywhere as we just haven't found
them yet.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Well yeah, and this was all the way up and
you know, into the nineteenth century, and some really smart
people like Thomas Jefferson thought, for instance, when he sent
Lewis and Clark out west, that they might come across
the great Mastodon. Right, He's like, it's found to be
out there somewhere, guys, to be careful. But there were
some other smarter people like George Cuvier in eighteen twelve,
(06:14):
he was pretty ahead of his time. In fact, in
eighteen twelve he was way ahead of his time because
he published an essay called revolutions on the surface of
the globe, and he kind of asserted that now things
can go extinct, and he called them a species perduce
lost species and basically hypothesize that there have been cataclysmic
(06:37):
events that have caused extinctions.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Right. In so many words, this is basically flew in
the face of this that not only was their extinction,
but there were huge events that caused it. And so
the religious thinkers of the day said, okay, wait, wait, wait,
we can work with this, because buddy, what you're talking
about is like Noah's flood. So you, my friend, just
the Bible correct using science.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Yeah, Darwin wasn't on board though, although he did believe
in extinction, he thought it was the only way it
could happen is the gradual extinction.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Right, That is also true, and we'll talk about that
as well. And of course Darwin is this huge hero
of biology, so everybody's like, well, Darwin's right about just
about everything. So literally, until the nineteen nineties, Darwin's view
that extinction happens extremely slowly, slower than speciation events, so
(07:30):
ultimately you should always have more species new species coming
up than you have going extinct. Until the nineteen nineties.
That's the way that it was, That's the way it seemed. Yeah,
So Chuck, like I said, all of this stayed around
until nineteen ninety one. Yeah, and it was a result
of like, think about it, think about how you think
(07:51):
of mass extinctions. Now, you think of an asteroid hitting Earth,
destroying everything. And it wasn't until nineteen ninety one that
that view became widely accepted. And it was because of
this dude named Alvarez. He was a geologist, I believe,
Walter Alvarez, and in the seventies he started studying this
(08:13):
clay layer that was basically in the fossil record right
at the time the dinosaur suddenly died out right, and
no one could quite explain what was going on here.
They just knew that this must have happened gradually, so
it must be a problem with the actual fossil record,
not our way of thinking.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Yeah, and there are plenty of problems with the fossil record,
which we'll get into as.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
Well, right, But Walter Alvarez said, let me look at
this in a little more detail, and he looked at
the iridium and found that the iridium levels were off
the charts. Which shouldn't be because it's very very rare,
and we associate iridium on Earth as being brought here by, say,
like an asteroid or whatever.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Yeah, it's superabundant asteroids.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
So all of a sudden, this guy goes, oh, wait
a minute, maybe we can explain this dying out of
dinosaurs where the dinosaurs went sixty five million years ago
by an asteroid. And that was in nineteen eighty that
they proposed a hypothesis, and they ran into a lot
of resistance, and then finally in nineteen ninety one, a
(09:15):
year after a crater was discovered under the Yucatan Peninsula
in Mexico, they dated it and said, yeah, it just
so happens that this crater was formed just at the
moment the dinosaurs died out. So yeah, the Alvarez hypothesis
is probably right, and extinction can happen on a mass
sudden scale, just as it can also happen on a
(09:37):
very long term scale too.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Yeah, that crater was one hundred and twelve miles wide,
so it fit the profile and basically ended the Cretaceous
period in the Mesozoic era, and for a while they
called it the Cretaceous Tertiary event. But now they call
it the Cretaceous Paleogene event.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
And did you notice that thing KPg right, they noticed that.
Did you notice the Cretaceous, which is spelled with the
sea is denoted with a K? Yeah? Did you see why?
It's just German? It's just a German translation for it.
I figured it was something like that. Yeah, it was
just bugging me.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
So now we now believe an asteroid brought us into
the Cinazoic era that we that we enjoyed today.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
Love the Sinazoic. It's pretty good, pretty awesome. It's a
good era. I mean, it's our era. Yeah, you gotta
love it. You gotta love it. So Chuck, like I said,
the extinction, extinction can happen, and it does happen, and
it's a natural process. If you talk to people about
extinction today, though, they say, yeah, we're kind of in
(10:44):
a huge extinction event.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Yeah, and it makes sense. I mean when you look
at our past. They estimate maybe up to five billion
species have lived on Earth, and more than ninety nine
percent of those are gone.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
And I love how the New Yorker put it.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
I think that there's an old joke that all of
life on Earth today could be accounted for with a
simple rounding error.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Yeah, like everything we know.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
So, yeah, we've lost ninety nine percent of things that
have ever lived on this planet due to extinction.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
Right, which again is like it has such a terrible
connotation these days, extinction, extinction, but it happens naturally. Apparently.
What they've found from looking at the fossil record from
studying life on Earth is that a species tends to
have about a ten million year lifespan, and the a
speciation event occurs where it branches off from one specie
(11:37):
and produces an entirely new species, and that species on
average will stick around for about ten million years and
then something happens and it dies out and other species
take its place. This is the natural course of life
from what we can tell. The thing is, it normally
happens on a very slow time scale, like when it's
(12:00):
so what it's called background extinction, right.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Yeah, the background rate is supposed to be between one
and five species per year, but they think that now
it could be like one hundred times that.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
I've seen up to a thousand times the normal rate,
And I saw another study from twenty fourteen, so it's
fresh and it said that they these researchers calculated the
normal rates and they found that there's between point zero
two to three and point one three five extinct species
per million species per year. That doesn't really mean much.
(12:35):
It means so much that it boggles the mind. Yeah,
you know, like that's a really strange way of putting it.
But basically they're saying, like, for every million species on
Earth at any given point in time during a year,
as low as point zero two three species will die out.
So in a year you shouldn't necessarily have that main
species in current times though, like you said, between a
(13:00):
one hundred and a thousand times that rate is what
we're seeing right now, which is you could say, alarming.
It is alarming.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
The reason they don't have hard numbers on this stuff
is because, like we said, it's a tough thing to study,
because the fossil record is well, there's a lot of problems.
One is it's incomplete. We don't really know how many
fossor species have been on Earth since the beginning of Earth.
It's just impossible to tell fossil's forum under really specific conditions.
(13:30):
So you may think something is gone because it has
disappeared from the fossil record. But all that means is
there wasn't a fossil. It doesn't necessarily mean it's gone right,
So that's why things will pop back up that they'll think, hey,
we haven't seen a fossil of this guy in two
thousand years, but here it is all of a sudden.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
And even if it has gone extinct, just where it
stopped showing up in the fossil record doesn't mean, like
you said, that's when it went extinct, right, then it
could have been millions of years later.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Well, because then you're supposed that the last thing of
that species happened to make a fossil.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Yes, which is just silly. Yeah, and also it makes
you wonder how many species have lived and died on
Earth that just never showed up in the fossil record. Yeah,
just weren't fossils at all. Right.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
Yeah, Well, if it never crawled into amber or you know,
was buried by ash or something, that's luck.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
Or got trapped in Bronosaurus poop. I don't know if
that's good luck or bad luck. It's just it is
what it is. It's nature.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
So because of all these gaps in the fossil record,
these Researchers that love this topic tend to do a
lot of math, right, and a lot of speculating with
algorithms and mathematical formulas.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
They love this stuff out, sure, and that's.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
The only way to do it, really, to speculate with numbers.
It also helps them define things like the minimum viable population,
which if you go below that, then it's bad news
for the species. It's the minimum amount you can have
to still be considered to have a bright future.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Right as a thing, or to just survive as a species.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Right, Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah, dim future if
you're not surviving.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Yeah, math is pretty grim. It can be in this
case for sure. So we'll talk about exactly what makes
an extinction and then what makes up mass extinctions. But
first let's do a little breakage. Huh okay, So, Chuck,
(15:38):
you've been talking about animals, animal species going extinct and
then showing up again like the Sela cant Yeah, or
at least disappearing right from the record, But we as
humans assumed they were extinct. Like again, the Sela cant
is this fish that they caught off the coast of
South Africa. When did we talk about it? Was it
end of this day in history. I don't remember. We
(15:59):
definitely hit on that though. I think it was because
it's huge, right, Yeah, it's a big, ugly fish. Yeah,
and it looks like an old dinosaur. But they thought
it had died out like like fifty sixty million years ago.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Actually way longer. They thought it disappeared four hundred million
years ago.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Even more impressive. Yeah. So then they caught one off
the coast of South Africa in the thirties. Then they
caught another one a couple decades later in Madagascar or
Mauritius or something, and that made the selacanth a Lazarus species,
even though it hadn't really gone anywhere. We just thought
it did. So we humans having the most important perspective
(16:38):
on the entire planet, possibly in the entire universe. Yeah,
it was a Lazarus species to us.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Yeah, Lazarus from the Bible, right, raised from the dead. Yeah,
like the Seila cant.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Again with the Biblical connotations with extinction. Yeah, there's a
lot at stake here, that's true.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
Another way something might disappear and you might think it's
gone is if it actually evolves into a new species.
That's called pseudo extinction, and that's a great success story
as well.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
It is, but it also I don't understand why that's
not just a speciation event. I mean, why is that
pseudo extinction? Why is that any different from regular extinction?
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Yeah, maybe just because it's didn't die out, it actually
just changed and evolved.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Those are two different things. Yeah, it seems like a
gray area to me. Yeah. But for the most part,
when an animal just disappears, and we should say, like
even today, we're still finding things that we thought were extinct,
so called Lazarus species, which goes to make the point
we have no idea how many living species there are
(17:45):
on the planet today, Yeah, or have been. It's all
just a good guess it is using math, yeah, grim,
grim math. But for the most part, we understand that
when a species goes away, suddenly it went extinct. And
as we've been saying again and again, extinction is kind
of this natural process, or it is a very natural process,
(18:08):
and it typically results from a change in the habitat yeah,
of a species, and it's inability to adapt so it
dies out.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Yeah, competition with other species, hunting by humans, or perhaps
the environment has been tainted by humans.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Humans or a new bacteria or a new virus. The
thing is, though, is so these these big factors, habitat loss,
competition with new species, hunting, and contaminous in the environment.
Those are the big four reasons that something goes extinct, right, Yeah,
Humans can and are responsible for all four of those.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Yeah, and the and these are This is the extinction
that happens over time. Obviously not a big asteroid hit
in the planet.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
No, but it can't happen pretty quickly. In this this
is a Tracy Wilson joint and in the introduction she
mentions the stellar sea cow, which was an Arctic resident.
It was a big old manatee basically. Yeah, and they
were first described by Arctic explorers in seventeen forty one.
(19:14):
By seventeen sixty eight they were extinct. So it can't
happen on a pretty rapid scale, Yeah, especially when you
introduce humans.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Yeah, and it you know, it has a domino effect too,
because we talked about and everyone knows about the dangers
of losing bees. It's not just like, oh, well they're
no more bees. That's going to affect pollination and plants,
and those plants are being fed on by other animals
and it.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Tends to have a snowball effect.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Like for example, at the end of the last Ice age, mammals,
small mammals started to go extinct and because of that,
large animals started to go extinct because they like to
eat the small animals exactly.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
Which is the answer to the question why is biodiversity important? Well,
because ecosystems thrive and survive on a wide number of
species that exist pretty much naturally in balance. Yeah. You know,
a pretty good example of that stuff falling out of
balance is the passenger pigeon. Are you familiar.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Yeah, they're trying to de extinct that thing.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Yeah, you want to talk about de extinction.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Yeah, Well, the extinction is exactly what it sounds like.
It is sort of Jurassic parky it is. In two
thousand and three, some scientists revived the Bercardo Bucardo and
that's a Spanish mountain goat, and they did it just
sort of like Jurassic Park from DNA that was frozen
in time. Unfortunately, although it did work initially, the DNA
(20:45):
only survived a matter of minutes, but they did it
did count as a de extinction.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
I think there was a live birth that survived a
few minutes, wasn't it.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Yeah, the animal itself only survived a few minutes.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Though, right, It was like, I should not be.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
That's true, And I mean they basically said, it's happening now,
and we have the capabilities, and we may not be
able to bring the wooly mammoth back, but we might
be able to bring back something.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Kind of close, right. So, and that raises in this
article that you sent, just this moral question, like should
we be doing this just because we can? Does that
mean we should? And so like, if you bring back
an animal that has been extinct for so long that
its habitat is now gone, you know where they gonna live,
exactly where you're gonna put it a zoo, that doesn't
seem like a good reason to bring an animal back.
(21:37):
So we could put it in a zoo.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
Yeah, And just like maybe this is my opinion here,
which we don't do a lot of, but it seems
like concentrating on the problems we face now with the
extinction rates is something that we should concentrate on, not
bringing back the wily mammoth.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Right, And that also kind of details of the point
that if we have this ability and routinely exercise it.
We may be less inclined to protect the stuff we
have now for like, oh it's important enough, we'll just
genetically re engineer it and bring it back later. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
I think they in the CNN article they like in
it to just thinking we have an undue.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Button right on the world controls Z. Yeah, no, good, No,
it's funny because the author doesn't realize that control Z
works outside of Microsoft Word too. I don't know he
specifically mentioned control Z and Microsoft word, oh word, specifically
Microsoft word. He said, Yeah, that's a little weird. He
(22:35):
could be a shill and he was just working it
in maybe you know, well.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
On max though it's not control Maybe he just meant
Microsoft and awkwardly put in word maybe, or maybe.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
That's the only program he knows. Maybe you know, how
do I work this? So you were saying that they're
trying to bring back the passenger pigeon, right, Yeah, so
the passenger pigeon? Is this really neat example of what
happens when you have a lack of biodiversity. There were
(23:08):
when European settlers came to the New World. Apparently, like
one out of every four birds in North America was
a passenger pigeon. A quarter of the entire bird population
was passenger pigeons. It's a lot of pigeons. There's a
ton of pigeons. There are so many that you could
just like shoot into like a flock, and you would
(23:29):
kill a couple hundred. Literally, it was there were that many.
The thing is is, if you read fourteen ninety three
or fourteen ninety one, I can't remember which one it is,
but both are excellent books by Charles C. Mann. He
talks about the passenger pigeon and how they've recently realized
that there were so many passenger pigeons because a century before,
(23:51):
one of their great predators, the native American, had been
wiped out by disease that had been introduced to the
continent about a century before that. So by the time
the Europeans got here and really started to settle an
encounter the passenger pigeon, they're like, God, look at all
these pigeons, and didn't realize that the pigeon population had
exploded because their natural predator had died off right, and
(24:14):
so we in turn hunted them into extinction. So because
of one near extinction, another species was allowed to thrive
and explode, and then that when they were faced with
their their predator again, humans, they were eventually wiped out
and went extinct.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Yeah, the American Buffalo. We almost sunned them out of existence.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Yeah, were it not for Ted Turner.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
Yeah, we tried our best too. They were just shooting
those things for fun.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
Yeah at one point, man, that's disgusting. It is disgusting.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
You hear about the trains, Yeah, just going through the
West and just shooting out the windows at the Buffalo
for no reason.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Yeah, and doing nothing, just leaving them there to rot. Unbelievable.
Remember we did an episode on the Buffalo that was
a good one.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
So sad, No, it was good. Well it was sad, dude.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
So if you want to talk about extinction level events,
that's a whole different deal.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
You want to talk buster rhymes.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
That's not a slow gradual extinction. That is some big
thing that happens that wipes out a lot of living
things all at once. And they estimate there's been more
than twenty of these in the history of the world, but.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
Five of them.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
They call them the Big Five, right for a reason,
for good reason. And we'll just go through those kind
of quickly. Now, the Ordo Vissian extinction. It's about four
hundred and ninety million years ago, and that wiped out
about half of all animal families.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
And the reason it wiped out about half was because
at the time, most of the stuff on Earth still
lived in the sea. Glaciers formed at this time, lowering
sea levels, which meant that animals that lived in a
certain depth of the sea, usually toward the surface, lost
their habitat boiled yeah maybe yeah, or were brought down
(26:01):
to the level where their predators like to hang out
and we're eaten on mass. But that accounted for that extinction,
which is kind of rare because, as you'll see when
we're talking about the Big Five or mass extinctions in general,
it's very difficult to pinpoint exactly what happened. So that's
one of the rare ones that were like, pretty sure,
this is why all these all this life went extinct
all of a sudden. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
And one reason it's difficult it is because it was
almost five hundred million years ago.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
That's another reason it's kind of tough.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
Here in twenty fourteen, number two, I feel like Letterman
number two on the top five extinction, the Late Devonian extinction.
They're still debating about that, and about a quarter of
the marine families. And by the way, we should mention
when they research these things, they home in on family
and genera in the big classification group.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Right.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
They don't say, like, oh, look at these kingdoms that
have disappeared or these phylum. They go down to the
smaller levels.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
Right, and family and jena are just above species as
far as the taxonomy is concerned, exactly.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
So what I say about half of the marine genera
and that was three hundred and sixty million years.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Ago, right, No idea what caused that one? No idea?
At least you and I have no idea.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Yeah, I don't think they care about that one too much.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
The Permian Triassic extinction, this is a This is a
pretty big one. This is the biggest one ever. This
is the one they call the great Dying, right, I
think so. I've seen estimates of as much as ninety
five to ninety six percent of all life that's crazy
died off during this this extinction event. In this article,
(27:40):
it says eighty five percent of marine genera and seventy
percent of land species when extinct, And that was two
hundred and fifty million years ago. There's a lot of
people who have different ideas about what did it, but
they think it's possible as volcanic activity creating acid rain. Yeah,
that's a big one that possibly happened more than once.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Was that the one where I don't know, I think
that was the the KPg event was the one where
they think they're not exactly how it happened, but they
might have been.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Just broiled and then awesome broiled on the face of
the Earth. Yeah, which would have happened pretty quickly too, actually.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
And I think that one is if because they think
it may have burst through the atmosphere, right, Yeah, so
just rained hot debris everywhere.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
That's the one that got rid of the dinosaurs. Yeah,
sixty five million years ago. What is it called the
k hyphen PG.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Yeah, the Cretaceous Paleogene event now.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
And that's the one where they are pretty sure that
an asteroid hit Central America, Yeah, and sent all of
this rock yeah, like basically vaporized rock with away from
Earth with so much force that this stuff made it
out of the atmosphere yeah, and then started to come
back down and as it did, it generated thermal heat
(28:54):
enough to bring the broil down on Earth.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
Yeah, and that's the one of two sub explanations. The
other is that the old familiar ash basically kept photosynthesis
from it, like it blacked out the sun.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Yeah, like a nuclear winner. Yeah, yeah, pretty nuts. But
we skipped number four. Yeah, for no good reason.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
The end Triassic extinction killed about twenty percent of marine families,
about half of marine genera, and that was two hundred
million years ago.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Yeah. And again, like with a mass extinction, there's there's
no real definition for it. I found I was looking
to see, Okay, who's the body that says, like, okay,
a mass extinction event took place. It's again, the fossil
record is incomplete enough, and we're making guesses in mathematical guesses,
but still guesses to the extent that we don't have
(29:48):
a real definition for what constitutes a mass extinction. But
those five were so massive, yeah, that there's virtually no
debate whatsoever that those account for mass extinction events. Yeah,
it's kind of like you know it when you see
it kind of thing. But there's no agreement on how
(30:10):
paragraphy pretty much, Yeah, there's no agreement on how fast
it happened. It has to happen, or how widespread it
has to happen. But typically it's like a large percentage
of all of the animals alive. Yeah, something like twenty percent, say,
of all living animal species, not just animals. Animal species
just die off. Yeah, and it's worldwide. That's another that
(30:33):
seems to be another factor in defining a massive stec.
How widespread. Yeah, sure, so these events were pretty big. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
And one of the I think one of the researchers
in the article you sent made a pretty good point
that the current mass extinct extinction that we're in now,
which we're going to talk about in depth here in
a minute, he said, these are way more dangerous because
in the event of an asteroid, let's say, while it
might really it's one bad event, and right afterward, the
(31:04):
world starts to try and recoup. It may take a
million years, but it tries its best to start reforming
life and get going again. Where in now there's no
stress relief, it's just a constant. There's no recuperation because
it's not over.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
Right, or the recuperation will come, but we won't be
around to see it, because the breaking point will be
us wiping ourselves out. By wiping out the biodiversity, and
there is a kind of this whole moralistic thing to
the idea of extinction. There's this whole human guilt. But
if you just kind of take a step back and
(31:38):
look at mass extinction intellectually, it doesn't wipe out life.
It just changes everything. Right, So for one species it
might be a boom time. For everybody else it's a
dying off time. But it's all in your perspective.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
Well, yeah, this beautiful Earth that we know and love
now isn't anything like it was one hundred million years.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Ago exactly, And there's not necessarily a set level that
or a baseline that Earth is supposed to be at.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Right, because nature doesn't care, right, and nature's not like,
oh well, we got all these people here now and
things seem pretty modern and they got smartphones, so maybe
we should just protect this version.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
They're like, what, what's the cycle? Every what? Ten million
years for a species? For species? Okay, it's a life
span of a species on average.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
So basically every what ten thousand, ten million years? The
Earth it just doesn't care.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
No, The point is is, for a species, it's lifespan
is ten million years, and the Earth is not caring
every day of that. Yeah, it doesn't care.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
It's just stumbling toward the next event, basically exactly that
will one day probably happen.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
The thing is is all of this is not to
say that humans are off the hook. All evidence that's
coming in now is showing that we are doing a
lot to speed up extinction events and create a mass extinction,
so much so that the Big Five is possibly the
Big six, and we may be in the very beginning
stages of the sixth one. And we'll talk about that
(33:14):
right after this. So, Chuckers, we've been talking about mass
extinction events. There's a Big five, and a lot of
people are saying, now there's six, and the six to
(33:35):
one is human caused, so much so that geologists are
proposing that we call our current epoch the anthropos scene,
because humans are having such an impact on Earth that
they imagine ten thousand years from now, geologists will be
able to look and point to this layer and say,
here's where humans started. Yeah, let's get in the way
(33:58):
back machine. Oh yeah, let's crank this pace up. Does
it have enough charisine?
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Oh, it's got enough kerosene, buddy, Because we're going back
about fifty thousand years Well.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
You got okay, and we're bringing spiritual.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
And we're going to go to Australia even because it's
just nice down there. And what I see around me
are these huge wombat like things that are.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
As big as hippos. Huge.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
And I see a tortoise over there that's the size
of a VW beetle, and this weird short faced kangaroo
and it's ten feet tall.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
Ten foot tall kangaro. Look at the size of that thing.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
And everything is crazy. But let's just unpack here and
let's start propagating you and me.
Speaker 1 (34:37):
Okay, I'm going to make a boy beer just for safety,
all right, it sounds like I need to defend you
off too.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
And you know what, it's weird. Things are starting to
disappear around us as we grow and as we expand,
and and scene.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
That was nice. Can we get out of here because
that ten foot tall kangaroo's eyeing us, Well not anymore,
but he's dead.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
Oh, because they'd believe a lot of people think that
around fifty thousand years ago, when human started expanding their footprint,
that it was a very inconvenient correlation with species dying
out as we've spread about the Earth.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Yeah, this sixth mass extinction. I apologize for not being
able to say sixth correctly. That's right, But there's a
huge debate and it's still it's not settled. Both sides
are like, we're right, right, another one is like, we're right.
The thing is both sides agree like, yeah, we're in
the midst of a sixth extinction, and isn't that what matters?
(35:46):
But is it human caused or is the result of
climate change? And just because it's the result of climate
change doesn't mean that if you take the trail back
far enough, it isn't necessarily human cause. Yeah, but these
are the two debates. So one is the theory of overkill,
which is the one you were just describing.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Yeah, and that was describing Australia fifty thousand years ago.
If we want to get back in the way back
machine and go to North America eleven thousand years ago,
three quarters of our largest animals started to die out,
like the mastodon and the wooly mammoth and the giant beaver,
sabertooth tiger, and not coincidentally, probably that's right around the
(36:24):
time where we first walked over the bearing land Bridge
and set up shop here in North America.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
Yeah. The thing is is you can also say, well
that kind of gives or takes a few thousand years,
and yeah, you can. That's definitely stretchable, but it's just
not been proven. So there is a huge correlation between
the spread of humans and the death of what are
called MegaFon a huge land animals. Yeah, and they say
that that theory of overkill says that we came along
(36:50):
with our smart little toolkits, which included like spearheads and
arrows and axes and clubs and domesticated dogs after a
certain point in time, sure, and over hunted either these
huge like hippo sized marsupials, yeah, or we hunted things
that were slightly smaller that the huge hippo sized marsupials. Eight.
(37:14):
Either way, we contributed directly to their mass extinction. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
And they think generally that overhunting isn't the very least,
it's not the sole cause, because you probably just can't
hunt enough. The amount of people that we had, especially
in a place like Australia which wasn't super heavily founded.
You know, it wasn't like ten million people moved to
Australia overnight, you know, right, So they say overhunting is
(37:40):
probably not the sole cause, but maybe a factor. But
other things humans did, like maybe in Australia they started
burning shrubs to clear land, and maybe those shrubs were
eaten by a certain species, right, and then that caused
that domino effect.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
Again. Another the other camp that basically says, no, it's
climate change and it's fairly natural. Other people might say
it's human caused climate change. But for the most part,
if you are a climate change extinction proponent, you're probably
just believe that this is a natural process that the
Earth is undergoing and humans didn't have enough of an
(38:16):
impact early on to account for the loss of a
lot of these species. Yeah. This one study pointed to
a place called Sahul, which was Australia, New Guinea and
Tasmania all joined together in this mega continent. That was
a crazy place. There was several tens of thousands of
years ago, and they were saying that by the time
humans arrived in Sahul or Australia, most of the megaphone
(38:41):
was already gone. It was gone as a result of
climate change, and there's no evidence that we had a
toolkit capable of killing these animals, you know at this time. Yeah. True,
So the debate still rages on.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
Yeah, and you know, there's been several ice ages that
didn't make things go extinct, right, People point to that
as maybe another counter argument. But the researchers you sent
along did this pretty cool thing. They did the first
global analysis of mapping large animals during this period one
hundred and thirty two thousand to one thousand years ago,
(39:17):
and it was the first time they were able to
really get a fine point on this geographical variation and
species loss. And they did find that one hundred and
seventy seven species of large mammals disappeared during that period
where we were starting to spread out as a species.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
Which apparently is, as it's put in this article, a
massive loss. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
And they said, you know, they expect these kind of
things to happen on an island, like if you go
to Hawaii or you know, any island. They say that
survival is the exception when humans invade an island exactly,
but to happen on like a continent, it's pretty it's
pretty amazing to think about the human.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
Impact still an island. Well, yeah, I guess that's a
good point. But the jury is still out though, and
exactly what's causing this. Most scientists agree that we are
in an mass extinction event, and it's happening pretty quickly.
Something like I think a third of all coral reefs
(40:18):
are in danger of extinction, a third of amphibians, I believe.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
Yeah, and a quarter of all mammals and an eighth
of all birds are all classified as threatened with extinction.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
And this is happening around the world, So it's fitting
the criteria for a mass extinction.
Speaker 2 (40:34):
Yeah, they're basically chalking up to the pace of human expansion.
And you know, if you consider that farming and logging
and building roads and buildings, and most of the world's
waterways have been diverted or damned at this point or
manipulated somehow. Only two percent of rivers in the United
States run unimpeded. Two percent everything else has been altered
(40:56):
in some way. Chemical plants affecting CO two in the atmosphere,
it's having an effect.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
And that CO two actually in the atmosphere is having
another effect called ocean acidification, which has been described as
global warming's evil twin. As more and more CO two
gets released in the atmosphere. The oceans scramble to keep
up by absorbing more and more, and it stores some
(41:24):
of that by turning some of it into acid, which
lowers the pH of the ocean, which is making the
ocean unfit for a lot of life. But as to
kind of demonstrate how mass extinctions is bad for one
species great for another, jellyfish populations are booming really so
(41:45):
probably because they like the lower pH. Yeah, they like
it more acidic, and they're like seriously starting to cause
some real problems. And we're just seeing the beginning of this.
So it's entirely possible that the next thousand years will
see the rise of the jellyfishes the rest of the
life on Earth starts to die off.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
Well, here's a staggering stat the drop in ocean pH
levels that have occurred in the past fifty years. They
think might exceed what has happened in the past previous
fifty million years.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Wow, So in the past fifty years.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
They've changed the basically changed the chemical makeup of the
ocean more than the past fifty million.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
And speaking of fifty years, apparently in the next fifty
years and estimated half half of all species on Earth
could be extinct.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
Sucks, man, I want to see a sloth as big
as an elephant.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
Hey, get into de extinction. Well here you just saw
and we were in sahul Well yeah it was nice.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
But I want to, like, I want it to come
in the way back machine and bring it to Atlanta.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
No, I don't think that's a good idea, man. That
thing looked like it would go berserk.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
And finally, unless you have anything else.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
I don't think so. I'm looking at everything.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
We have a few highlights of extinct animals that have
been rediscovered, which is not the same thing as.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
Being re engineered. What was this an io nine?
Speaker 2 (43:08):
Iine, And some of those are pretty good. The Bermuda
petrel and disappeared. They fought in the sixteen hundreds, but
rediscovered nineteen fifty one. There's about one hundred and eighty
of those alive today. Let me see here what else
is good? Well, we also we already talked about the
Cela camp. The Cuban solan don Solenodon excuse me, discovered
(43:30):
in eighteen sixty one, has only been caught thirty seven
times in the history of the world. In nineteen seventy
they thought it was extinct. It's like a weird rat
like species. But then they found one in the seventies,
and then another one in two thousand and three. Huh,
So like welcome back Cuban Solenodon.
Speaker 1 (43:49):
So it was like caught during the seventies and then
during the period of the seventies revival in the early
two thousands.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
That's right, nice Gilbert's poach turu man.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
These have weird names. That's why they went extinct because
you couldn't say, ye, sloth, you know that we should
save the the what Gilbert, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
In eighteen forty one, this is a rabbit size marsupial
in Australia and it last appeared in eighteen seventy nine,
and they thought, well, this thing's gone up until nineteen
ninety four. Came back out and poked his head around
and got caught in a few traps. But currently less
than one hundred of those in the world. So those
are just a few of the ten, and there's more
than ten, obviously, But it's always a good story.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
Sure, it is heartwarming. We think this thing's dead. It's like, yeah,
welcome back to the mass extinction exactly. So going on.
If you want to know more about extinction, you should
read each and every one of the articles we cited.
And you can also read this article on HowStuffWorks dot
com by typing extinction into the handy search bar. And
(44:54):
since I said that it's time for a listener mail,
I'm going to call this police interrogation follow up.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
Okay from Matt Pope a in Victoria, British Columbia. All right,
thank you to Vancouver, by the way, for two great shows.
Yeah after our great shows in Toronto.
Speaker 1 (45:12):
Yepkay in Toronto and Vancouver. Very supportive people.
Speaker 2 (45:16):
And boy that second crowd Vancouver was drunk and rowdy. Hey, guys,
just listen to police interrogation. I thought i'd share a
couple of quick personal stories that illustrate the pitfalls of
relying on nonverbal cues to see if someone's guilty. I've
never been in trouble with a law myself, but several
years ago I witnessed a crime, called nine to one
one to report it. The cop snabbed the perpetrator and
(45:36):
a few days later asked me to come down to
provide a witness statement. When I arrived, an officer led
me into a tiny room that was every bit as
bleak as the ones you see on TV. It was
a weird experience, even though I wasn't accused of a
crime and the cop was polite and is questioning. The
interrogation room setting and the power differential between the uniform
cop with a gun and my unarmed self made me
feel really nervous. I started sweating, my voice shook, and
(45:59):
if you been watching my body language through the one
way mirror, you would have thought I was guilty.
Speaker 1 (46:03):
Wow, and he was just a witness. Yeah. The second
story is very similar.
Speaker 2 (46:07):
Every year, our local courthouse as a public event where
they give tours and put on a mock trial and
actually hang someone.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
Kidding. I made up that part. That was pretty good.
It's supposed to be educational and fun.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
My father is a lawyer and one year asked me
I'd like to play the defendant in the trial. I'm
no actor, but I said sure. My character was accused
of a minor drug offense, and I went through the
whole ordeal, being on trial and testifying my own defense.
I'll spare you the details, but afterward my mom said, wow,
you looked really guilty up there.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
I hope you never.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
Actually are on trial for anything, because they'll lock you
up and throw away the key. I learned from these
situations the very act of treating someone like a criminal
and make him appear guilty. Yeah, reminds me of the
Stanford prison study that we've talked about.
Speaker 1 (46:50):
And there's a Psychology's Nuts about that Psychology's Nuts video
on our YouTube channel about the Stanford prison experiment. Yeah,
that's a good one. You should check that out.
Speaker 2 (46:59):
I hope you guys never have to find out the
hard way you'll react to police interrogation.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
If you do, I hope you find a good lawyer.
Speaker 2 (47:06):
That's from Matt Pope once again in Victoria, BC.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
H Well, thanks a lot, Matt. That's kooky about your
town doing mock trials and stuff like that. Yeah, like
hanging a guy, Yeah crazy, he said, it's fun. The
only thing that's okay about is they make the guy
look like Hitler, right, So it's like hanging Hitler every year,
which everybody can get behind. Yeah, they call it the
Hitler hang. If you want to send us an email
(47:32):
that Chuck feels the need to make up stuff about
you can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com Stuff you Should Know is a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hello friends, It's Josh and I'm back with the Select
and this week I've selected our twenty fourteen episode on extinction.
In this episode, we go over all the big extinctions
and what probably caused them, including the one we're most
likely in right now, which was probably caused by humans.
And if you pay attention, you can start to notice
(00:22):
a little glimmers, a little beginnings of what would become
my side podcast, The End of the World with Josh Clark.
And although we don't talk about any movies, I'm betting
there's some glimmers of Chuck's long running side podcast movie
Crush in here too. Hope you enjoy this episode. It's
a good one.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's
Charles W. Chuckers Bryant. Jerry is over there. I'mosa said
your last name, Jerry, how weird. And then today we
have a fourth character in the in the studio with
this Chuck. This a cent, yeah, scent coming together to
make like a tangible human being. So you are wearing Petuli,
(01:18):
uh not wearing well, you have Petulia on you as
a result of one of Emily's sugar scrubs right from Mama. Yeah,
and it's love Yourmama dot Com. Yeah, okay, and then
Jerry is contributing to that with an enchilada. So all
of them combined, I would say, there's like there's an
extra person in the seat right here. Uh, what kind
(01:41):
of person is that? Just another person? Okay, a viable
living organism, one that when we leave the studio will
probably become extinct. That's a good one. Did you like that? Yeah,
I've had that plan since probably two weeks ago. Nice.
(02:01):
How are you doing, man, I'm good.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
I've been thinking of Buster Rhymes all day.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Why did he have a song about extinction?
Speaker 2 (02:08):
He had an album called Extinction Level Event. Oh yeah, yeah,
and that was in one of the songs.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
That sounds super nineties.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Well it's Buster Rhymes, it has to be nineties.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
But I mean even those words extinction level Event. People
were worried about stuff because of like the Turn of
the Millennium, you remember, is a huge hit. Sure, Deep
Impact and Armageddon came out like on the same day basically,
and both were hits. Like people were just nervous. Yeah,
(02:38):
And as a result, Buster Rhymes was very popular. That's right.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Although he's not anymore, he's still good though he hadn't
been doing much.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
No, but his body of work is oh for sure. Yeah,
leaders in the New School and his early work with
Trip Call Quest.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Oh yeah, he guessed it on one of my favorite songs.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Yeah, what's the scenario? Was that the one? I think? So?
I mean, it was definitely on that one. Yeah, but
they that was the one also where I think, Yeah,
he makes fun of people with saggy pants because it
was so new. Apparently Buster Rhymes wasn't down with it yet, yeah,
which is pretty ironic because he got hardcore into that.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
That was like a dungeon dragon, right right, right, that's
pretty awesome.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
It's a good song. Yeah. So extinction is clearly what
we're talking about today. Uh and uh, I guess we
should probably give a shout out to some of the
extra reading material. Yeah, man, we picked up on There's
a woman named Elizabeth Colbert or Colbert depending on what
(03:45):
if you watch The Colbert Apoor and she is basically
a leading expert as far as journalists go on extinction.
She wrote a book called The Sixth Extinction. That's it's
a good article. Yeah, and like they she wrote an
article in the New York or she's a New Yorker
journalist that was basically the predecessor to the book, you
(04:05):
know how they do. Sure, They're like, oh, I need
an extra twenty grand, so I'll just write a synopsis
of the book I'm writing. Yeah, And it's a good article,
and we work from that. There's another one from the
New York Review of Books called They're taking Over about
the explosion of jellyfish. On How Stuff Works, there's one
that I wrote years back called will We Soon Be Extinct?
(04:26):
And there's another House Stuff Works one that we've done
an episode on called why is Biodiversity Important? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (04:32):
And I found one in an Io nine h huh
for animals that we thought were extinct but miraculously pop.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Back up nice. Which it's always a good story. Oh yeah,
it's a heartwarming story of triumph of diversity and coming
back when everybody thought you were down.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Yeah, some of them like basically rocky, hundreds of millions
of years later. Even Yeah, it's crazy, like the silicamt
I think that's when it was at the Big Fish. Yeah,
they just caught that thing one day. Yeah, and said, hey,
wait a minute, Yeah, this thing's extinct.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
It's supposed to be, and we'll talk about how and
why things fall off. But things do fall off, and
it seems that there is a that the whole thing
is a very natural process. Extinction is. But for a
very long time, I guess, scientists believe that the God
(05:33):
created all of the animals yeah on Earth, and that
his will was too perfect, his creation was too divine
to even allow for extinction. So because they were aware
of the fossil record, they rationalized these huge bones of
animals they didn't see anywhere as we just haven't found
them yet.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Well yeah, and this was all the way up and
you know, into the nineteenth century, and some really smart
people like Thomas Jefferson thought, for instance, when he sent
Lewis and Clark out west, that they might come across
the great Mastodon. Right, He's like, it's found to be
out there somewhere, guys, to be careful. But there were
some other smarter people like George Cuvier in eighteen twelve,
(06:14):
he was pretty ahead of his time. In fact, in
eighteen twelve he was way ahead of his time because
he published an essay called revolutions on the surface of
the globe, and he kind of asserted that now things
can go extinct, and he called them a species perduce
lost species and basically hypothesize that there have been cataclysmic
(06:37):
events that have caused extinctions.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Right. In so many words, this is basically flew in
the face of this that not only was their extinction,
but there were huge events that caused it. And so
the religious thinkers of the day said, okay, wait, wait, wait,
we can work with this, because buddy, what you're talking
about is like Noah's flood. So you, my friend, just
the Bible correct using science.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Yeah, Darwin wasn't on board though, although he did believe
in extinction, he thought it was the only way it
could happen is the gradual extinction.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Right, That is also true, and we'll talk about that
as well. And of course Darwin is this huge hero
of biology, so everybody's like, well, Darwin's right about just
about everything. So literally, until the nineteen nineties, Darwin's view
that extinction happens extremely slowly, slower than speciation events, so
(07:30):
ultimately you should always have more species new species coming
up than you have going extinct. Until the nineteen nineties.
That's the way that it was, That's the way it seemed. Yeah,
So Chuck, like I said, all of this stayed around
until nineteen ninety one. Yeah, and it was a result
of like, think about it, think about how you think
(07:51):
of mass extinctions. Now, you think of an asteroid hitting Earth,
destroying everything. And it wasn't until nineteen ninety one that
that view became widely accepted. And it was because of
this dude named Alvarez. He was a geologist, I believe,
Walter Alvarez, and in the seventies he started studying this
(08:13):
clay layer that was basically in the fossil record right
at the time the dinosaur suddenly died out right, and
no one could quite explain what was going on here.
They just knew that this must have happened gradually, so
it must be a problem with the actual fossil record,
not our way of thinking.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Yeah, and there are plenty of problems with the fossil record,
which we'll get into as.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
Well, right, But Walter Alvarez said, let me look at
this in a little more detail, and he looked at
the iridium and found that the iridium levels were off
the charts. Which shouldn't be because it's very very rare,
and we associate iridium on Earth as being brought here by, say,
like an asteroid or whatever.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Yeah, it's superabundant asteroids.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
So all of a sudden, this guy goes, oh, wait
a minute, maybe we can explain this dying out of
dinosaurs where the dinosaurs went sixty five million years ago
by an asteroid. And that was in nineteen eighty that
they proposed a hypothesis, and they ran into a lot
of resistance, and then finally in nineteen ninety one, a
(09:15):
year after a crater was discovered under the Yucatan Peninsula
in Mexico, they dated it and said, yeah, it just
so happens that this crater was formed just at the
moment the dinosaurs died out. So yeah, the Alvarez hypothesis
is probably right, and extinction can happen on a mass
sudden scale, just as it can also happen on a
(09:37):
very long term scale too.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Yeah, that crater was one hundred and twelve miles wide,
so it fit the profile and basically ended the Cretaceous
period in the Mesozoic era, and for a while they
called it the Cretaceous Tertiary event. But now they call
it the Cretaceous Paleogene event.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
And did you notice that thing KPg right, they noticed that.
Did you notice the Cretaceous, which is spelled with the
sea is denoted with a K? Yeah? Did you see why?
It's just German? It's just a German translation for it.
I figured it was something like that. Yeah, it was
just bugging me.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
So now we now believe an asteroid brought us into
the Cinazoic era that we that we enjoyed today.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
Love the Sinazoic. It's pretty good, pretty awesome. It's a
good era. I mean, it's our era. Yeah, you gotta
love it. You gotta love it. So Chuck, like I said,
the extinction, extinction can happen, and it does happen, and
it's a natural process. If you talk to people about
extinction today, though, they say, yeah, we're kind of in
(10:44):
a huge extinction event.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Yeah, and it makes sense. I mean when you look
at our past. They estimate maybe up to five billion
species have lived on Earth, and more than ninety nine
percent of those are gone.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
And I love how the New Yorker put it.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
I think that there's an old joke that all of
life on Earth today could be accounted for with a
simple rounding error.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Yeah, like everything we know.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
So, yeah, we've lost ninety nine percent of things that
have ever lived on this planet due to extinction.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
Right, which again is like it has such a terrible
connotation these days, extinction, extinction, but it happens naturally. Apparently.
What they've found from looking at the fossil record from
studying life on Earth is that a species tends to
have about a ten million year lifespan, and the a
speciation event occurs where it branches off from one specie
(11:37):
and produces an entirely new species, and that species on
average will stick around for about ten million years and
then something happens and it dies out and other species
take its place. This is the natural course of life
from what we can tell. The thing is, it normally
happens on a very slow time scale, like when it's
(12:00):
so what it's called background extinction, right.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Yeah, the background rate is supposed to be between one
and five species per year, but they think that now
it could be like one hundred times that.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
I've seen up to a thousand times the normal rate,
And I saw another study from twenty fourteen, so it's
fresh and it said that they these researchers calculated the
normal rates and they found that there's between point zero
two to three and point one three five extinct species
per million species per year. That doesn't really mean much.
(12:35):
It means so much that it boggles the mind. Yeah,
you know, like that's a really strange way of putting it.
But basically they're saying, like, for every million species on
Earth at any given point in time during a year,
as low as point zero two three species will die out.
So in a year you shouldn't necessarily have that main
species in current times though, like you said, between a
(13:00):
one hundred and a thousand times that rate is what
we're seeing right now, which is you could say, alarming.
It is alarming.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
The reason they don't have hard numbers on this stuff
is because, like we said, it's a tough thing to study,
because the fossil record is well, there's a lot of problems.
One is it's incomplete. We don't really know how many
fossor species have been on Earth since the beginning of Earth.
It's just impossible to tell fossil's forum under really specific conditions.
(13:30):
So you may think something is gone because it has
disappeared from the fossil record. But all that means is
there wasn't a fossil. It doesn't necessarily mean it's gone right,
So that's why things will pop back up that they'll think, hey,
we haven't seen a fossil of this guy in two
thousand years, but here it is all of a sudden.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
And even if it has gone extinct, just where it
stopped showing up in the fossil record doesn't mean, like
you said, that's when it went extinct, right, then it
could have been millions of years later.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Well, because then you're supposed that the last thing of
that species happened to make a fossil.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Yes, which is just silly. Yeah, and also it makes
you wonder how many species have lived and died on
Earth that just never showed up in the fossil record. Yeah,
just weren't fossils at all. Right.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
Yeah, Well, if it never crawled into amber or you know,
was buried by ash or something, that's luck.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
Or got trapped in Bronosaurus poop. I don't know if
that's good luck or bad luck. It's just it is
what it is. It's nature.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
So because of all these gaps in the fossil record,
these Researchers that love this topic tend to do a
lot of math, right, and a lot of speculating with
algorithms and mathematical formulas.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
They love this stuff out, sure, and that's.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
The only way to do it, really, to speculate with numbers.
It also helps them define things like the minimum viable population,
which if you go below that, then it's bad news
for the species. It's the minimum amount you can have
to still be considered to have a bright future.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Right as a thing, or to just survive as a species.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Right, Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah, dim future if
you're not surviving.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Yeah, math is pretty grim. It can be in this
case for sure. So we'll talk about exactly what makes
an extinction and then what makes up mass extinctions. But
first let's do a little breakage. Huh okay, So, Chuck,
(15:38):
you've been talking about animals, animal species going extinct and
then showing up again like the Sela cant Yeah, or
at least disappearing right from the record, But we as
humans assumed they were extinct. Like again, the Sela cant
is this fish that they caught off the coast of
South Africa. When did we talk about it? Was it
end of this day in history. I don't remember. We
(15:59):
definitely hit on that though. I think it was because
it's huge, right, Yeah, it's a big, ugly fish. Yeah,
and it looks like an old dinosaur. But they thought
it had died out like like fifty sixty million years ago.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Actually way longer. They thought it disappeared four hundred million
years ago.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Even more impressive. Yeah. So then they caught one off
the coast of South Africa in the thirties. Then they
caught another one a couple decades later in Madagascar or
Mauritius or something, and that made the selacanth a Lazarus species,
even though it hadn't really gone anywhere. We just thought
it did. So we humans having the most important perspective
(16:38):
on the entire planet, possibly in the entire universe. Yeah,
it was a Lazarus species to us.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Yeah, Lazarus from the Bible, right, raised from the dead. Yeah,
like the Seila cant.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Again with the Biblical connotations with extinction. Yeah, there's a
lot at stake here, that's true.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
Another way something might disappear and you might think it's
gone is if it actually evolves into a new species.
That's called pseudo extinction, and that's a great success story
as well.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
It is, but it also I don't understand why that's
not just a speciation event. I mean, why is that
pseudo extinction? Why is that any different from regular extinction?
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Yeah, maybe just because it's didn't die out, it actually
just changed and evolved.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Those are two different things. Yeah, it seems like a
gray area to me. Yeah. But for the most part,
when an animal just disappears, and we should say, like
even today, we're still finding things that we thought were extinct,
so called Lazarus species, which goes to make the point
we have no idea how many living species there are
(17:45):
on the planet today, Yeah, or have been. It's all
just a good guess it is using math, yeah, grim,
grim math. But for the most part, we understand that
when a species goes away, suddenly it went extinct. And
as we've been saying again and again, extinction is kind
of this natural process, or it is a very natural process,
(18:08):
and it typically results from a change in the habitat yeah,
of a species, and it's inability to adapt so it
dies out.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Yeah, competition with other species, hunting by humans, or perhaps
the environment has been tainted by humans.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Humans or a new bacteria or a new virus. The
thing is, though, is so these these big factors, habitat loss,
competition with new species, hunting, and contaminous in the environment.
Those are the big four reasons that something goes extinct, right, Yeah,
Humans can and are responsible for all four of those.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Yeah, and the and these are This is the extinction
that happens over time. Obviously not a big asteroid hit
in the planet.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
No, but it can't happen pretty quickly. In this this
is a Tracy Wilson joint and in the introduction she
mentions the stellar sea cow, which was an Arctic resident.
It was a big old manatee basically. Yeah, and they
were first described by Arctic explorers in seventeen forty one.
(19:14):
By seventeen sixty eight they were extinct. So it can't
happen on a pretty rapid scale, Yeah, especially when you
introduce humans.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Yeah, and it you know, it has a domino effect too,
because we talked about and everyone knows about the dangers
of losing bees. It's not just like, oh, well they're
no more bees. That's going to affect pollination and plants,
and those plants are being fed on by other animals
and it.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Tends to have a snowball effect.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Like for example, at the end of the last Ice age, mammals,
small mammals started to go extinct and because of that,
large animals started to go extinct because they like to
eat the small animals exactly.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
Which is the answer to the question why is biodiversity important? Well,
because ecosystems thrive and survive on a wide number of
species that exist pretty much naturally in balance. Yeah. You know,
a pretty good example of that stuff falling out of
balance is the passenger pigeon. Are you familiar.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Yeah, they're trying to de extinct that thing.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Yeah, you want to talk about de extinction.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Yeah, Well, the extinction is exactly what it sounds like.
It is sort of Jurassic parky it is. In two
thousand and three, some scientists revived the Bercardo Bucardo and
that's a Spanish mountain goat, and they did it just
sort of like Jurassic Park from DNA that was frozen
in time. Unfortunately, although it did work initially, the DNA
(20:45):
only survived a matter of minutes, but they did it
did count as a de extinction.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
I think there was a live birth that survived a
few minutes, wasn't it.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Yeah, the animal itself only survived a few minutes.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Though, right, It was like, I should not be.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
That's true, And I mean they basically said, it's happening now,
and we have the capabilities, and we may not be
able to bring the wooly mammoth back, but we might
be able to bring back something.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Kind of close, right. So, and that raises in this
article that you sent, just this moral question, like should
we be doing this just because we can? Does that
mean we should? And so like, if you bring back
an animal that has been extinct for so long that
its habitat is now gone, you know where they gonna live,
exactly where you're gonna put it a zoo, that doesn't
seem like a good reason to bring an animal back.
(21:37):
So we could put it in a zoo.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
Yeah, And just like maybe this is my opinion here,
which we don't do a lot of, but it seems
like concentrating on the problems we face now with the
extinction rates is something that we should concentrate on, not
bringing back the wily mammoth.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Right, And that also kind of details of the point
that if we have this ability and routinely exercise it.
We may be less inclined to protect the stuff we
have now for like, oh it's important enough, we'll just
genetically re engineer it and bring it back later. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
I think they in the CNN article they like in
it to just thinking we have an undue.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Button right on the world controls Z. Yeah, no, good, No,
it's funny because the author doesn't realize that control Z
works outside of Microsoft Word too. I don't know he
specifically mentioned control Z and Microsoft word, oh word, specifically
Microsoft word. He said, Yeah, that's a little weird. He
(22:35):
could be a shill and he was just working it
in maybe you know, well.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
On max though it's not control Maybe he just meant
Microsoft and awkwardly put in word maybe, or maybe.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
That's the only program he knows. Maybe you know, how
do I work this? So you were saying that they're
trying to bring back the passenger pigeon, right, Yeah, so
the passenger pigeon? Is this really neat example of what
happens when you have a lack of biodiversity. There were
(23:08):
when European settlers came to the New World. Apparently, like
one out of every four birds in North America was
a passenger pigeon. A quarter of the entire bird population
was passenger pigeons. It's a lot of pigeons. There's a
ton of pigeons. There are so many that you could
just like shoot into like a flock, and you would
(23:29):
kill a couple hundred. Literally, it was there were that many.
The thing is is, if you read fourteen ninety three
or fourteen ninety one, I can't remember which one it is,
but both are excellent books by Charles C. Mann. He
talks about the passenger pigeon and how they've recently realized
that there were so many passenger pigeons because a century before,
(23:51):
one of their great predators, the native American, had been
wiped out by disease that had been introduced to the
continent about a century before that. So by the time
the Europeans got here and really started to settle an
encounter the passenger pigeon, they're like, God, look at all
these pigeons, and didn't realize that the pigeon population had
exploded because their natural predator had died off right, and
(24:14):
so we in turn hunted them into extinction. So because
of one near extinction, another species was allowed to thrive
and explode, and then that when they were faced with
their their predator again, humans, they were eventually wiped out
and went extinct.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Yeah, the American Buffalo. We almost sunned them out of existence.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Yeah, were it not for Ted Turner.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
Yeah, we tried our best too. They were just shooting
those things for fun.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
Yeah at one point, man, that's disgusting. It is disgusting.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
You hear about the trains, Yeah, just going through the
West and just shooting out the windows at the Buffalo
for no reason.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Yeah, and doing nothing, just leaving them there to rot. Unbelievable.
Remember we did an episode on the Buffalo that was
a good one.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
So sad, No, it was good. Well it was sad, dude.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
So if you want to talk about extinction level events,
that's a whole different deal.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
You want to talk buster rhymes.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
That's not a slow gradual extinction. That is some big
thing that happens that wipes out a lot of living
things all at once. And they estimate there's been more
than twenty of these in the history of the world, but.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
Five of them.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
They call them the Big Five, right for a reason,
for good reason. And we'll just go through those kind
of quickly. Now, the Ordo Vissian extinction. It's about four
hundred and ninety million years ago, and that wiped out
about half of all animal families.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
And the reason it wiped out about half was because
at the time, most of the stuff on Earth still
lived in the sea. Glaciers formed at this time, lowering
sea levels, which meant that animals that lived in a
certain depth of the sea, usually toward the surface, lost
their habitat boiled yeah maybe yeah, or were brought down
(26:01):
to the level where their predators like to hang out
and we're eaten on mass. But that accounted for that extinction,
which is kind of rare because, as you'll see when
we're talking about the Big Five or mass extinctions in general,
it's very difficult to pinpoint exactly what happened. So that's
one of the rare ones that were like, pretty sure,
this is why all these all this life went extinct
all of a sudden. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
And one reason it's difficult it is because it was
almost five hundred million years ago.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
That's another reason it's kind of tough.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
Here in twenty fourteen, number two, I feel like Letterman
number two on the top five extinction, the Late Devonian extinction.
They're still debating about that, and about a quarter of
the marine families. And by the way, we should mention
when they research these things, they home in on family
and genera in the big classification group.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Right.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
They don't say, like, oh, look at these kingdoms that
have disappeared or these phylum. They go down to the
smaller levels.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
Right, and family and jena are just above species as
far as the taxonomy is concerned, exactly.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
So what I say about half of the marine genera
and that was three hundred and sixty million years.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Ago, right, No idea what caused that one? No idea?
At least you and I have no idea.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Yeah, I don't think they care about that one too much.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
The Permian Triassic extinction, this is a This is a
pretty big one. This is the biggest one ever. This
is the one they call the great Dying, right, I
think so. I've seen estimates of as much as ninety
five to ninety six percent of all life that's crazy
died off during this this extinction event. In this article,
(27:40):
it says eighty five percent of marine genera and seventy
percent of land species when extinct, And that was two
hundred and fifty million years ago. There's a lot of
people who have different ideas about what did it, but
they think it's possible as volcanic activity creating acid rain. Yeah,
that's a big one that possibly happened more than once.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Was that the one where I don't know, I think
that was the the KPg event was the one where
they think they're not exactly how it happened, but they
might have been.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Just broiled and then awesome broiled on the face of
the Earth. Yeah, which would have happened pretty quickly too, actually.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
And I think that one is if because they think
it may have burst through the atmosphere, right, Yeah, so
just rained hot debris everywhere.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
That's the one that got rid of the dinosaurs. Yeah,
sixty five million years ago. What is it called the
k hyphen PG.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Yeah, the Cretaceous Paleogene event now.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
And that's the one where they are pretty sure that
an asteroid hit Central America, Yeah, and sent all of
this rock yeah, like basically vaporized rock with away from
Earth with so much force that this stuff made it
out of the atmosphere yeah, and then started to come
back down and as it did, it generated thermal heat
(28:54):
enough to bring the broil down on Earth.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
Yeah, and that's the one of two sub explanations. The
other is that the old familiar ash basically kept photosynthesis
from it, like it blacked out the sun.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Yeah, like a nuclear winner. Yeah, yeah, pretty nuts. But
we skipped number four. Yeah, for no good reason.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
The end Triassic extinction killed about twenty percent of marine families,
about half of marine genera, and that was two hundred
million years ago.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Yeah. And again, like with a mass extinction, there's there's
no real definition for it. I found I was looking
to see, Okay, who's the body that says, like, okay,
a mass extinction event took place. It's again, the fossil
record is incomplete enough, and we're making guesses in mathematical guesses,
but still guesses to the extent that we don't have
(29:48):
a real definition for what constitutes a mass extinction. But
those five were so massive, yeah, that there's virtually no
debate whatsoever that those account for mass extinction events. Yeah,
it's kind of like you know it when you see
it kind of thing. But there's no agreement on how
(30:10):
paragraphy pretty much, Yeah, there's no agreement on how fast
it happened. It has to happen, or how widespread it
has to happen. But typically it's like a large percentage
of all of the animals alive. Yeah, something like twenty percent, say,
of all living animal species, not just animals. Animal species
just die off. Yeah, and it's worldwide. That's another that
(30:33):
seems to be another factor in defining a massive stec.
How widespread. Yeah, sure, so these events were pretty big. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
And one of the I think one of the researchers
in the article you sent made a pretty good point
that the current mass extinct extinction that we're in now,
which we're going to talk about in depth here in
a minute, he said, these are way more dangerous because
in the event of an asteroid, let's say, while it
might really it's one bad event, and right afterward, the
(31:04):
world starts to try and recoup. It may take a
million years, but it tries its best to start reforming
life and get going again. Where in now there's no
stress relief, it's just a constant. There's no recuperation because
it's not over.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
Right, or the recuperation will come, but we won't be
around to see it, because the breaking point will be
us wiping ourselves out. By wiping out the biodiversity, and
there is a kind of this whole moralistic thing to
the idea of extinction. There's this whole human guilt. But
if you just kind of take a step back and
(31:38):
look at mass extinction intellectually, it doesn't wipe out life.
It just changes everything. Right, So for one species it
might be a boom time. For everybody else it's a
dying off time. But it's all in your perspective.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
Well, yeah, this beautiful Earth that we know and love
now isn't anything like it was one hundred million years.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Ago exactly, And there's not necessarily a set level that
or a baseline that Earth is supposed to be at.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Right, because nature doesn't care, right, and nature's not like,
oh well, we got all these people here now and
things seem pretty modern and they got smartphones, so maybe
we should just protect this version.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
They're like, what, what's the cycle? Every what? Ten million
years for a species? For species? Okay, it's a life
span of a species on average.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
So basically every what ten thousand, ten million years? The
Earth it just doesn't care.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
No, The point is is, for a species, it's lifespan
is ten million years, and the Earth is not caring
every day of that. Yeah, it doesn't care.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
It's just stumbling toward the next event, basically exactly that
will one day probably happen.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
The thing is is all of this is not to
say that humans are off the hook. All evidence that's
coming in now is showing that we are doing a
lot to speed up extinction events and create a mass extinction,
so much so that the Big Five is possibly the
Big six, and we may be in the very beginning
stages of the sixth one. And we'll talk about that
(33:14):
right after this. So, Chuckers, we've been talking about mass
extinction events. There's a Big five, and a lot of
people are saying, now there's six, and the six to
(33:35):
one is human caused, so much so that geologists are
proposing that we call our current epoch the anthropos scene,
because humans are having such an impact on Earth that
they imagine ten thousand years from now, geologists will be
able to look and point to this layer and say,
here's where humans started. Yeah, let's get in the way
(33:58):
back machine. Oh yeah, let's crank this pace up. Does
it have enough charisine?
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Oh, it's got enough kerosene, buddy, Because we're going back
about fifty thousand years Well.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
You got okay, and we're bringing spiritual.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
And we're going to go to Australia even because it's
just nice down there. And what I see around me
are these huge wombat like things that are.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
As big as hippos. Huge.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
And I see a tortoise over there that's the size
of a VW beetle, and this weird short faced kangaroo
and it's ten feet tall.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
Ten foot tall kangaro. Look at the size of that thing.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
And everything is crazy. But let's just unpack here and
let's start propagating you and me.
Speaker 1 (34:37):
Okay, I'm going to make a boy beer just for safety,
all right, it sounds like I need to defend you
off too.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
And you know what, it's weird. Things are starting to
disappear around us as we grow and as we expand,
and and scene.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
That was nice. Can we get out of here because
that ten foot tall kangaroo's eyeing us, Well not anymore,
but he's dead.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
Oh, because they'd believe a lot of people think that
around fifty thousand years ago, when human started expanding their footprint,
that it was a very inconvenient correlation with species dying
out as we've spread about the Earth.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Yeah, this sixth mass extinction. I apologize for not being
able to say sixth correctly. That's right, But there's a
huge debate and it's still it's not settled. Both sides
are like, we're right, right, another one is like, we're right.
The thing is both sides agree like, yeah, we're in
the midst of a sixth extinction, and isn't that what matters?
(35:46):
But is it human caused or is the result of
climate change? And just because it's the result of climate
change doesn't mean that if you take the trail back
far enough, it isn't necessarily human cause. Yeah, but these
are the two debates. So one is the theory of overkill,
which is the one you were just describing.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Yeah, and that was describing Australia fifty thousand years ago.
If we want to get back in the way back
machine and go to North America eleven thousand years ago,
three quarters of our largest animals started to die out,
like the mastodon and the wooly mammoth and the giant beaver,
sabertooth tiger, and not coincidentally, probably that's right around the
(36:24):
time where we first walked over the bearing land Bridge
and set up shop here in North America.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
Yeah. The thing is is you can also say, well
that kind of gives or takes a few thousand years,
and yeah, you can. That's definitely stretchable, but it's just
not been proven. So there is a huge correlation between
the spread of humans and the death of what are
called MegaFon a huge land animals. Yeah, and they say
that that theory of overkill says that we came along
(36:50):
with our smart little toolkits, which included like spearheads and
arrows and axes and clubs and domesticated dogs after a
certain point in time, sure, and over hunted either these
huge like hippo sized marsupials, yeah, or we hunted things
that were slightly smaller that the huge hippo sized marsupials. Eight.
(37:14):
Either way, we contributed directly to their mass extinction. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
And they think generally that overhunting isn't the very least,
it's not the sole cause, because you probably just can't
hunt enough. The amount of people that we had, especially
in a place like Australia which wasn't super heavily founded.
You know, it wasn't like ten million people moved to
Australia overnight, you know, right, So they say overhunting is
(37:40):
probably not the sole cause, but maybe a factor. But
other things humans did, like maybe in Australia they started
burning shrubs to clear land, and maybe those shrubs were
eaten by a certain species, right, and then that caused
that domino effect.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
Again. Another the other camp that basically says, no, it's
climate change and it's fairly natural. Other people might say
it's human caused climate change. But for the most part,
if you are a climate change extinction proponent, you're probably
just believe that this is a natural process that the
Earth is undergoing and humans didn't have enough of an
(38:16):
impact early on to account for the loss of a
lot of these species. Yeah. This one study pointed to
a place called Sahul, which was Australia, New Guinea and
Tasmania all joined together in this mega continent. That was
a crazy place. There was several tens of thousands of
years ago, and they were saying that by the time
humans arrived in Sahul or Australia, most of the megaphone
(38:41):
was already gone. It was gone as a result of
climate change, and there's no evidence that we had a
toolkit capable of killing these animals, you know at this time. Yeah. True,
So the debate still rages on.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
Yeah, and you know, there's been several ice ages that
didn't make things go extinct, right, People point to that
as maybe another counter argument. But the researchers you sent
along did this pretty cool thing. They did the first
global analysis of mapping large animals during this period one
hundred and thirty two thousand to one thousand years ago,
(39:17):
and it was the first time they were able to
really get a fine point on this geographical variation and
species loss. And they did find that one hundred and
seventy seven species of large mammals disappeared during that period
where we were starting to spread out as a species.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
Which apparently is, as it's put in this article, a
massive loss. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
And they said, you know, they expect these kind of
things to happen on an island, like if you go
to Hawaii or you know, any island. They say that
survival is the exception when humans invade an island exactly,
but to happen on like a continent, it's pretty it's
pretty amazing to think about the human.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
Impact still an island. Well, yeah, I guess that's a
good point. But the jury is still out though, and
exactly what's causing this. Most scientists agree that we are
in an mass extinction event, and it's happening pretty quickly.
Something like I think a third of all coral reefs
(40:18):
are in danger of extinction, a third of amphibians, I believe.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
Yeah, and a quarter of all mammals and an eighth
of all birds are all classified as threatened with extinction.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
And this is happening around the world, So it's fitting
the criteria for a mass extinction.
Speaker 2 (40:34):
Yeah, they're basically chalking up to the pace of human expansion.
And you know, if you consider that farming and logging
and building roads and buildings, and most of the world's
waterways have been diverted or damned at this point or
manipulated somehow. Only two percent of rivers in the United
States run unimpeded. Two percent everything else has been altered
(40:56):
in some way. Chemical plants affecting CO two in the atmosphere,
it's having an effect.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
And that CO two actually in the atmosphere is having
another effect called ocean acidification, which has been described as
global warming's evil twin. As more and more CO two
gets released in the atmosphere. The oceans scramble to keep
up by absorbing more and more, and it stores some
(41:24):
of that by turning some of it into acid, which
lowers the pH of the ocean, which is making the
ocean unfit for a lot of life. But as to
kind of demonstrate how mass extinctions is bad for one
species great for another, jellyfish populations are booming really so
(41:45):
probably because they like the lower pH. Yeah, they like
it more acidic, and they're like seriously starting to cause
some real problems. And we're just seeing the beginning of this.
So it's entirely possible that the next thousand years will
see the rise of the jellyfishes the rest of the
life on Earth starts to die off.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
Well, here's a staggering stat the drop in ocean pH
levels that have occurred in the past fifty years. They
think might exceed what has happened in the past previous
fifty million years.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Wow, So in the past fifty years.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
They've changed the basically changed the chemical makeup of the
ocean more than the past fifty million.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
And speaking of fifty years, apparently in the next fifty
years and estimated half half of all species on Earth
could be extinct.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
Sucks, man, I want to see a sloth as big
as an elephant.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
Hey, get into de extinction. Well here you just saw
and we were in sahul Well yeah it was nice.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
But I want to, like, I want it to come
in the way back machine and bring it to Atlanta.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
No, I don't think that's a good idea, man. That
thing looked like it would go berserk.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
And finally, unless you have anything else.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
I don't think so. I'm looking at everything.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
We have a few highlights of extinct animals that have
been rediscovered, which is not the same thing as.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
Being re engineered. What was this an io nine?
Speaker 2 (43:08):
Iine, And some of those are pretty good. The Bermuda
petrel and disappeared. They fought in the sixteen hundreds, but
rediscovered nineteen fifty one. There's about one hundred and eighty
of those alive today. Let me see here what else
is good? Well, we also we already talked about the
Cela camp. The Cuban solan don Solenodon excuse me, discovered
(43:30):
in eighteen sixty one, has only been caught thirty seven
times in the history of the world. In nineteen seventy
they thought it was extinct. It's like a weird rat
like species. But then they found one in the seventies,
and then another one in two thousand and three. Huh,
So like welcome back Cuban Solenodon.
Speaker 1 (43:49):
So it was like caught during the seventies and then
during the period of the seventies revival in the early
two thousands.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
That's right, nice Gilbert's poach turu man.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
These have weird names. That's why they went extinct because
you couldn't say, ye, sloth, you know that we should
save the the what Gilbert, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
In eighteen forty one, this is a rabbit size marsupial
in Australia and it last appeared in eighteen seventy nine,
and they thought, well, this thing's gone up until nineteen
ninety four. Came back out and poked his head around
and got caught in a few traps. But currently less
than one hundred of those in the world. So those
are just a few of the ten, and there's more
than ten, obviously, But it's always a good story.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
Sure, it is heartwarming. We think this thing's dead. It's like, yeah,
welcome back to the mass extinction exactly. So going on.
If you want to know more about extinction, you should
read each and every one of the articles we cited.
And you can also read this article on HowStuffWorks dot
com by typing extinction into the handy search bar. And
(44:54):
since I said that it's time for a listener mail,
I'm going to call this police interrogation follow up.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
Okay from Matt Pope a in Victoria, British Columbia. All right,
thank you to Vancouver, by the way, for two great shows.
Yeah after our great shows in Toronto.
Speaker 1 (45:12):
Yepkay in Toronto and Vancouver. Very supportive people.
Speaker 2 (45:16):
And boy that second crowd Vancouver was drunk and rowdy. Hey, guys,
just listen to police interrogation. I thought i'd share a
couple of quick personal stories that illustrate the pitfalls of
relying on nonverbal cues to see if someone's guilty. I've
never been in trouble with a law myself, but several
years ago I witnessed a crime, called nine to one
one to report it. The cop snabbed the perpetrator and
(45:36):
a few days later asked me to come down to
provide a witness statement. When I arrived, an officer led
me into a tiny room that was every bit as
bleak as the ones you see on TV. It was
a weird experience, even though I wasn't accused of a
crime and the cop was polite and is questioning. The
interrogation room setting and the power differential between the uniform
cop with a gun and my unarmed self made me
feel really nervous. I started sweating, my voice shook, and
(45:59):
if you been watching my body language through the one
way mirror, you would have thought I was guilty.
Speaker 1 (46:03):
Wow, and he was just a witness. Yeah. The second
story is very similar.
Speaker 2 (46:07):
Every year, our local courthouse as a public event where
they give tours and put on a mock trial and
actually hang someone.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
Kidding. I made up that part. That was pretty good.
It's supposed to be educational and fun.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
My father is a lawyer and one year asked me
I'd like to play the defendant in the trial. I'm
no actor, but I said sure. My character was accused
of a minor drug offense, and I went through the
whole ordeal, being on trial and testifying my own defense.
I'll spare you the details, but afterward my mom said, wow,
you looked really guilty up there.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
I hope you never.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
Actually are on trial for anything, because they'll lock you
up and throw away the key. I learned from these
situations the very act of treating someone like a criminal
and make him appear guilty. Yeah, reminds me of the
Stanford prison study that we've talked about.
Speaker 1 (46:50):
And there's a Psychology's Nuts about that Psychology's Nuts video
on our YouTube channel about the Stanford prison experiment. Yeah,
that's a good one. You should check that out.
Speaker 2 (46:59):
I hope you guys never have to find out the
hard way you'll react to police interrogation.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
If you do, I hope you find a good lawyer.
Speaker 2 (47:06):
That's from Matt Pope once again in Victoria, BC.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
H Well, thanks a lot, Matt. That's kooky about your
town doing mock trials and stuff like that. Yeah, like
hanging a guy, Yeah crazy, he said, it's fun. The
only thing that's okay about is they make the guy
look like Hitler, right, So it's like hanging Hitler every year,
which everybody can get behind. Yeah, they call it the
Hitler hang. If you want to send us an email
(47:32):
that Chuck feels the need to make up stuff about
you can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com Stuff you Should Know is a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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