Beyond the Sixth Extinction

It has been pretty well established there have been 5 mass extinction events in the earth’s past.  They were:

1. 445 Million Years Ago – End of the Ordovician Period – 57% of all genera – most likely culprit: climate change.
2. 370 Million Years Ago – Late Devonian Period – 70% of all marine species died off – oxygen depletion and global cooling.
3. 250 Million Years Ago – End of the Permian Period – the worst, some estimate 96% of all species died out – super volcanos in Siberia the main cause.
4. 200 Million Years Ago – End of the Triassic Period – 1/5th of all families of marine life were killed – most likely cause the eruption of the Central Atlantic magmatic province.
5. 66 Million Years Ago – End of the Cretaceous Period – 76% of all living things on Earth- big rock from space and/or super volcanos in India.

Many scientists think we are in, or at the start of, the sixth extinction; this one man made.  Even aside from climate change, some 322 species have gone extinct in the last 500 years due to man, with two-thirds of those occurring in the last two centuries due to habitat loss or over-hunting/fishing.  According to a review published on May 29 in the journal Science, current extinction rates are up to a thousand times higher than they would be if people weren’t in the picture.

There is a new book about this possible man-made extinction event reviewed in LiveScience titled, “Beyond the Sixth Extinction: A Post-Apocalyptic Pop-Up” by Shawn Sheehy, which LiveScience says; “artfully imagines the grotesque creatures that could live in a possible future — one reshaped by disasters so destructive that 75 to 80 percent of life on Earth went extinct.”  Again from the article:

Set in the year 4847, “Beyond the Sixth Extinction” is a bestiary representing inhabitants of nightmarish ecosystems of the future, and Sheehy uses intricately crafted 3D paper pop-ups to introduce a host of highly unusual animals. At first glance, they somewhat resemble wildlife alive today. However, the newly imagined species sport highly unusual adaptations that help them survive in harsh and extreme environments, Sheehy told Live Science… In “Beyond the Sixth Extinction,” eight imagined species of the future are the end product of thousands of years of evolution after a human-driven global-extinction event. Over millennia, they adapted to withstand high levels of harmful radiation, and they are capable of absorbing nutrients from whatever is available, even objects that their ancestors would have found inedible, Sheehy explained.

For example, the book’s “rex roach” is about the size of a puppy, with a stretchy shell that allows it to expand and contract its body like a bellows, taking in more oxygen and enabling them to grow bigger than insects today.  Or the “clam fungus” that clusters atop landfills and breathes methane, the “mudmop,” a bottom-dwelling fish with a face full of tentacles, and the “rotrap,” a rat-like animal that lives its adult life permanently attached to walls in flooded nuclear reaction chambers.

Sheehy says even though such a future world seems bleak, the supreme adaptability of life means once the problem species is out of the way, life would bounce back.

Well, over the Thanksgiving Holiday, my daughter, grandson, and great-grandson were visiting for a few days, and we were doing what most modern families do these days for entertainment; streaming and binge-watching series on Hulu.  They talked me into watching some episodes of “The Walking Dead”, a show about a “zombie apocalypse”.  I am not normally a fan of zombie shows (Shaun of the Dead a notable exception).  I tend to get hyper-critical in a nerdy sort of way and instead of suspending disbelief and “going with the flow” of the show, I start picking apart the holes in the plot lines.  Like where do they get all the bazillions of bullets they fire off each show if production is no longer occurring?  And speaking of production, where is all the gasoline coming from they use to endlessly drive around?  Why do dead people need to eat, anyway?

Anyway, after reading the LiveScience article noted above and watching the show, I was in an apocalyptic state of mind and came across this LiveScience article about post-zombie apocalypse.  The article asserts there are 9 keys to rebuilding civilization after a zombie, or presumably, any other type of apocalypse occurs.  They are:

1. Power in numbers. A civilization is impossible without people — that much seems obvious. But the key is having enough people, and the right mix of people.
2. Protect yourself. Protection from the elements, and zombies in the case of “The Walking Dead,” is a basic need for human survival. Without shelter, there would be no hope of building a civilization.
3. Food and water. Besides shelter, a community needs a reliable food and water supply to survive.
4. Shared goals. The communities that own something together are going to do better than those that don’t have a sense of sharedness.
5. Fair consequences. One of the more challenging aspects of building and sustaining a civilization is deciding on punishment for intolerable actions. More specifically, what to do with the cheaters, because civilization can’t sustain itself if it’s based on a “winner takes all” structure.
6. Document and share knowledge. All of the experts Live Science spoke with mentioned the importance of inheriting information and sharing knowledge.
7. Technology and manufacturing. Someone has to make the clothing, tools, weapons.  There needs to be some sort of manufacturing of just basic commodities.
8. Health care. Perhaps the most daunting enemies of ancient civilizations were the diseases they contracted from outsiders.
9. The biggest problem in building civilizations is when the lack of sharing resources creates divisions and then forces communities to compete with one another.

So here are some questions for discussion.  Could we rebuild civilization after it crashed?  Are there other factors besides these 9 that would be necessary?  If we can rebuild civilization, why can’t we prevent it from crashing in the first place?  Many of us are familiar with the apocalyptic scenarios presented by premillennial dispensationalism and the “Left Behind” books.  Do you agree with that position, or is there another position you think the Bible presents?  Or do you think the Bible presents an explicit scenario at all?

Nature Red In Tooth and Claw?

Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life;

That I, considering everywhere
Her secret meaning in her deeds,
And finding that of fifty seeds
She often brings but one to bear,

I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world’s altar-stairs
That slope thro’ darkness up to God,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope…

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed

From In Memoriam, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Canto 55 and 56, 1849

• • •

In the comment discussion of the post from November 8^th, “Did Birds Get Their Colorful, Speckled Eggs From Dinosaurs?” commenter Robert F offered the following observation:

I agree with the sentiment about dinosaurs and birds being creatures. I also believe, and have since I was a child, the biological evolution is the way that all living things have developed. But I don’t find it “intellectually satisfying that God preserved these animals through the creative process of evolving them….”. Don’t misunderstand me: I accept intellectually that this is the way these animals developed, but I don’t find any satisfaction in it. It makes me wonder why God, long before humans came on the scene, would create a world with processes in which the strong and fit, those few with adaptive characteristics, were selected to survive and thrive in all their multiplicity and beauty, while the weak, broken, and maladapted perished in prodigious numbers far outstripping the few surviving forms. What kind of a God, what kind of character, does he have? He seems more like a God born out of Social Darwinists theory than the loving and self-giving God revealed in the crucified Jesus Christ, who chose the weak and the poor, the losers and powerless, as his followers, friends, and even his form. It just doesn’t add up to me; no bridge seems to exist between the scientific reality and the theological inheritance. I can’t be satisfied with that, much as I have to accept it, as the state of the matter.

In counterpoint, I offered the view that recent research has tended to overturn the Darwinian/Spencer paradigm of “survival of the fittest” and that vicious competition for resources is not the main driver of evolution.  Instead, as the article puts it, “This research points out the importance of avoidance of competition, biological history, endogenosymbiosis (endo-geno-symbiosis describes the capacity of endogenous ‘gene carriers’ to share parts of their genome in a symbiotic relationship with their hosts, after the idea of ‘endosymbiosis.’)  The idea is not new, as shown by this Stephen Jay Gould essay from 1997, which indicates the idea dates back at least to 1902 and Petr Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, published in response to T.H. Huxley’s “gladiatorial” view of natural selection propounded in a series of famous essays about ethics.

Elizabet Sahtouris, is an American evolutionary biologist who is well known for questioning some of Darwin´s most basic assumptions about the evolution of life. Sahtouris says that “Darwin was right about species competing for resources but he never saw beyond it as just one stage in the maturation cycle. Evolution proceeded when crises created by species forced them to go beyond “survival of the fittest” and find cooperative strategies for survival.”

The survival of the fittest competition, then, is but one stage of a larger evolutionary cycle. Sahtouris mentions the example of how the very first bacteria that began life over 4 billion years ago spent billions of years in the competitive stage of their evolution. This competitive drive allowed them to colonize large areas of the earth and advance life itself, but had they continued with their purely selfish and competitive drive, they would have eventually died out.  Her description of microbial communities likens them to complex and cooperative cityscapes that rival Manhattan.  She believes the evolutionary process is “God-directed” to mature to a more cooperative and sustainable level and that humans learning to cooperate, reject Social Darwinism, and develop sustainable lifestyles are on this maturing evolutionary path.

Her viewpoint, which she lectures and teaches on, is interesting (if not a little New-Agey) and I think she probably puts the best face on the issue as can be done.  This is the theodicy issue, again, with respect to natural evil, or as Chaplain Mike calls it surd evil .  Christians who tend to identify with conservative evangelicalism attribute natural evil as a result of Adam’s literal fall.  If they are Young Earth Creationists, then all of the “nature red in tooth and claw” did not occur until after the fall occurred.  Predation, parasitism, even death itself was not present on the entire Earth, much less in Eden.  This certainly tidies up the theological problems, but has the disadvantage of not comporting with reality.

It is manifestly obvious death and predation has been around for a looooong time before man showed up on this planet, despite YEC contortions to devise some alternate interpretations of the fossil record.  Here’s Ken Ham’s explanation:

Genesis chapter 1 tells us that, originally, people and animals were created vegetarian. God gave them the plants to eat. This means that T. rex would have been snacking on fruit and plants.

But what about those huge teeth?

Just because something has big teeth doesn’t mean it eats meat. We see that today: fruit bats and monkeys eat grass.

It wasn’t until after sin that many animals ate meat.

I get the sentiment.  Looking strictly at Genesis 9:3 – “Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything” – would seem to imply there was no meat eating before even Noah.  This isn’t a post refuting YEC, and YEC, although theologically tempting to solve the problem, just doesn’t hold up to reality.

Sahtouris’ idea that the evolutionary process is “God-directed” to mature to a more cooperative and sustainable level and that humans learning to cooperate, reject Social Darwinism, and develop sustainable lifestyles are on this maturing evolutionary path, is probably the best scientifically defendable answer to the theodicy.  But it is not entirely satisfactory.  As frequent commenter Stephen noted:

Which is why the folks who say that evolution is merely the way God chose to create life on earth really haven’t thought it through. Evolutionary cooperation is fine but the history of life is nevertheless a bloodbath. Life is that thing which survives by consuming itself. Death and suffering are not the result of some primordial tragedy (certainly not OUR fault) but are inherent in the process. In many ways an appalling vision. The sensitive soul recoils from this vision and attempts by various and sundry means to accommodate itself to this reality. (Including that classic strategy – denial.)  There are no easy answers, but why should there be?

Commenter Dana Ames, in attempting to answer the question quoted N.T. Wright:

“Reality as we know it is the result of a creator god bringing into being a world that is other than himself, and yet which is full of his glory.  It was always the intention of this god that creation should one day be flooded with his own life, in a way for which it was prepared from the beginning.  As part of the means to this end, the creator brought into being a creature which, by bearing the creator’s image, would bring his wise and loving care to bear upon this creation.  By a tragic irony, the creature in question rebelled against this intention.  But the creator has solved this problem in principle in an entirely appropriate way, and as a result is now moving the creation once more toward its originally intended goal.  The implementation of this solution now involves the indwelling of this god within his human creatures and ultimately within the whole creation, transforming it into that for which it was made in the beginning.” N.T. Wright, “The New Testament and the People of God” 97-98.

Considering the long, long history of the interplay between competition and cooperation in the development of life on this planet, it seems there is a strong emotional component to this issue.  After all, it’s considerably harder to feel sorry for bacteria and algae than it is for a cute fawn having its throat ripped out by a leopard.  Yet it is in essence the same process.  How does that play into the purposes of God as reflected in the life of Jesus?  I think we have to have that eschatological hope that, in Jesus, death does not have the final word.  Tennyson, despite the despair in the early stanzas of In Memoriam, maintained his childlike faith in a loving Father.  Let’s let him have the last words:

If e’er when faith had fallen asleep,
I hear a voice ‘believe no more’
And heard an ever-breaking shore
That tumbled in the Godless deep;

A warmth within the breast would melt
The freezing reason’s colder part,
And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer’d ‘I have felt.’

No, like a child in doubt and fear:
But that blind clamour made me wise;
Then was I as a child that cries,
But, crying knows his father near;