Create after essay written

Questions/prompts for final essay:

Why, according to Darwin, is natural variation within species important to evolution? What would happen to a species if all of its members were born with uniform characteristics?
Why does Darwin believe that very slight advantages increase an organism’s chances to survive? What other factors make this the case?
How would natural selection operate without any directive will? What would the selection process entail?
What does Darwin mean by “man selects only for his own good”? How does such selection support Darwin’s theory?
Please look up and read this essay , paying attention to what is said about Darwin.
“The Sixth Extinction?”
Refer to this essay’s mention of Darwin in your essay.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/05/25/the-sixth-extinction? (Links to an external site.)
Of the many species that have existed on earth—estimates run as high as fifty billion—more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error.

Records of the missing can be found everywhere in the world, often in forms that are difficult to overlook. And yet extinction has been a much contested concept. Throughout the eighteenth century, even as extraordinary fossils were being unearthed and put on exhibit, the prevailing view was that species were fixed, created by God for all eternity. If the bones of a strange creature were found, it must mean that that creature was out there somewhere.

“Such is the economy of nature,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “that no instance can be produced, of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.” When, as President, he dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to the Northwest, Jefferson hoped that they would come upon live mastodons roaming the region.

The French naturalist Georges Cuvier was more skeptical. In 1812, he published an essay on the “Revolutions on the Surface of the Globe,” in which he asked, “How can we believe that the immense mastodons, the gigantic megatheriums, whose bones have been found in the earth in the two Americas, still live on this continent?” Cuvier had conducted studies of the fossils found in gypsum mines in Paris, and was convinced that many organisms once common to the area no longer existed. These he referred to as espèces perdues, or lost species. Cuvier had no way of knowing how much time had elapsed in forming the fossil record. But, as the record indicated that Paris had, at various points, been under water, he concluded that the espèces perdues had been swept away by sudden cataclysms.

“Life on this earth has often been disturbed by dreadful events,” he wrote. “Innumerable living creatures have been victims of these catastrophes.” Cuvier’s essay was translated into English in 1813 and published with an introduction by the Scottish naturalist Robert Jameson, who interpreted it as proof of Noah’s flood. It went through five editions in English and six in French before Cuvier’s death, in 1832.

Charles Darwin was well acquainted with Cuvier’s ideas and the theological spin they had been given. (He had studied natural history with Jameson at the University of Edinburgh.) In his theory of natural selection, Darwin embraced extinction; it was, he realized, essential that some species should die out as new ones were created. But he believed that this happened only slowly. Indeed, he claimed that it took place more gradually even than speciation: “The complete extinction of the species of a group is generally a slower process than their production.” In “On the Origin of Species,” published in the fall of 1859, Darwin heaped scorn on the catastrophist approach:

So profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world.
By the start of the twentieth century, this view had become dominant, and to be a scientist meant to see extinction as Darwin did. But Darwin, it turns out, was wrong.

Over the past half-billion years, there have been at least twenty mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth has suddenly and dramatically contracted. Five of these—the so-called Big Five—were so devastating that they are usually put in their own category. The first took place during the late Ordovician period, nearly four hundred and fifty million years ago, when life was still confined mainly to water. Geological records indicate that more than eighty per cent of marine species died out. The fifth occurred at the end of the Cretaceous period, sixty-five million years ago. The end-Cretaceous event exterminated not just the dinosaurs but seventy-five per cent of all species on earth.

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