Continuing on in the Scientific American series. There recently was a huge discovery in the world of ornithology. The ivory-billed woodpecker is back! This kissing cousin of the pileated woodpecker was last seen in 1944. It has been videotaped in Arkansas. This has electrified the world of bird enthusiasts.
My daughter has me hooked on birds. She is a "birder" and even runs a fine bird blog. My favorite birds are owls, hawks, and woodpeckers.
A pileated woodpecker, my favorite in the woodpecker family and the inspiration for the world's most famous woodpecker (Woody), has paid us a few backyard visits this year.
Scientific American has a nice write up on this major discovery.
"Just to think this bird made it into the 21st century gives me chills," comments team member Tim W. Gallagher of Cornell University. "It's like a funeral shroud has been pulled back, giving us a glimpse of a living bird, rising Lazarus-like from the grave."
The whole woodpecker story got me thinking about extinction ... which got me thinking about an essay I read by Wilberforce fellow Roberto Rivera called Panda Man. Rivera describes the valiant fight to preserve the Giant Panda from extinction. It is well worth reading.
Here is an excerpt.
....snip...
For those who take their Darwinism, as Thelonious Monk might’ve put it, straight, no chaser, the logical response to the plight of the Giant Panda is “tough.” Evolution is, if nothing else, unsentimental. It rewards adaptability and punishes, in the medium-to-long term, overspecialization. If your diet and habitat disappear ― and that has happened countless times in Earth’s history ― then you do, too. What’s more, I’ve read many books and watched countless hours of PBS and Discovery Channel programs on evolution and the one thing that I haven’t heard was a hint that a species felt regret or remorse about out-competing another species into extinction. Do you think that the American Bison feels bad that it is, among late- Pleistocene megafauna like the Columbian mammoth and the giant ground sloth, the only survivor? Or that the first modern humans to enter Europefelt regret about the eventual demise of the “indigenous population,” a.k.a., the Neanderthals? More to the point: I’ve never heard a modern paleontologist express such regret about such previous extinctions. As we’ve been told over and over, extinction is natural.
...snip...
Extinctions are a natural feature of life on earth. Earth's history is littered with the remains of thousands (millions?) of extinct species. In the cold calculus of evolution, the species that can't cut it are wiped from the record. Tough noogies. Dems dah berries.
Nonetheless, our "species", from among all the species on earth, is the only one that seems to think about extinctions -- much less care about them.
In fact, we worry about the suffering of other animals, and go to great lengths to preserve others from following the way of evolution. It is hard to imagine lions caring about the suffering of zebras, or Orcas, which often toss their prey back and forth like a beach ball before finally killing it, caring about the feelings of seals.
Yet here is man. Spending millions of dollars and tens of thousands of hours fighting to keep life from following its natural course. In the case of the ivory-billed woodpecker, private investors spent $ 1 million dollars and invested over 20,000 hours searching for this elusive bird. The result. Sixteen brief sightings and a videotape -- and worldwide exultation.
Think of how many third world children could have been sponsored through World Vision for $1 million. The irony is hard to ignore.
As Rivera notes in the fight to save the Giant Panda from extinction [note: the Giant Pandas do a lousy job of caring for their infants and require a lot of human intervention to keep the Panda cubs alive]
"In “Panda Nursery,” the willingness of the breeding program director to spend time away from his child to care for the Panda’s was depicted as a sign of his dedication. What wasn’t noted was the irony that the a member of the apex species would ― forgive the way I’m putting this ― sacrifice the care of its own young to care for the young of a species incapable of doing it on its own. Likewise, in purely evolutionary terms, the mark of out-competing another species is that, at the end of the day (pardon the cliché), you’re here and they’re not. Yet, humans are not only willing to surrender habitat ― i.e., create reserves ― to help preserve another species, they’re convinced it’s the right thing to do."
As Chuck Colson writes in this Breakpoint essay,
"Among the millions of species on Earth, only humans ponder their obligations to other species. As Leon Kass of the University of Chicago has written, this fact is the obvious reply to people who insist that we are “just another animal.” We intervene for animals like the panda because we instinctively know that man has a moral obligation to act as a steward of nature—an obligation that arises from a biblical, not a Darwinian, understanding of man and our place in the world."
I am sure many fights loom ahead to keep the ivory-billed woodpecker from going the way of the giant sloth and sabre-toothed tiger. Don't get me wrong -- I hope they succeed. I simply think there is a tension between a worldview that espouses we are animals trying to survive with this passion to save other animals even at the expense of our own species.
Next up: Can scientists really read minds?
What your discussion misses is our unique position, historically speaking. We are one of a small number of species that has the ability to wipe out other species, we are unprecedented in the numbers of such extinctions we can cause, and perhaps most significantly we alone know that we're doing it.
The problem we face is that we can outcompete anything, including ourselves. We have the ability to use up so many resources, to kill so many species, and to do it all in such a short time that we'll have sailed past some tipping point before we even knew it existed. I don't think saving a particular woodpecker, or a giant panda, is going to make a difference. But at some point, if we're not carefully, we're going to chop down one tree too many, or kill one animal too many, and set in motion a change of events that could decimate our species.
Of course evolution doesn't care about that; we shrink in numbers or even die out, and something else will continue. But we care, not because we deny evolution, but because we have an interest in not dying.
Posted by: Paul | May 10, 2005 at 10:28
Paul,
You have often used the "starving children" argument on my blog.
Do you personally think spending a million dollars to slog around the marshes of Arkansas with video cameras is a "good" (in the ethical sense) use of resources?
What of our own species?
Posted by: Jeff | May 10, 2005 at 11:09
There are few better uses of money than helping children, I feel. One of those rare occurences is when your actions help more children. For example, if I could spend a million dollars and create a vaccine for malaria I would consider that money better spent than the equivalent buying food for children.
So the question from that perspective becomes "Does helping this woodpecker help us as a species?" I'd be astonished if it did, at least to what we would perceive as a significant degree. The problem, of course, is that I don't know which animal will be the last one we could save before we hit some sort of tipping point.
On a practical level, of course, there's nothing to suggest that the million dollars would be spent on something more worthwhile. If it would be, then let the woodpecker die. If not, then let's save the woodpecker!
Posted by: Paul | May 10, 2005 at 19:06