Extinction
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Hello, and welcome to Overthink. The podcast where two friends who are also philosophers put ideas in dialogue with everyday life. I'm Ellie Anderson. And I'm David Peña-Guzman. David, what do you know about the dodo? The bird, I assume you're talking about. I mean, I know that it was and is no longer...

Yeah, because it has gone extinct, like the name of this episode. So I feel like the dodo, of course, has become a poster child for extinction. And that's something that the philosopher Tom Van Doren talks about in his book, Flightways. And the idea is like, yeah, we know the dodo went extinct to the extent that we even have phrases like dead as a dodo. But I learned a lot more about the dodo from Van Doren's book.

Okay, I haven't read this book, but I do want to know what you learned, Ellie. Okay. The dodos are large, flightless birds who made their homes exclusively on the beautiful island of Mauritius, a tropical island in East Africa.

And prior to human settlement of Mauritius, they would have had ample fruit to eat and had no other terrestrial animals to compete with, let alone any predators. Like life was sweet for the dodo on the island of Mauritius. But then in 1598, the Dutch East India Company started using the beautiful island of Mauritius as a pasture and breeding ground for livestock. And they also started using the native meat that they found there, including the dodos, but also tortoises, other local birds, etc.

So we've got a situation where the dodos suddenly have these humans arrive. I mean, also like the Dutch East India Company in 1598, already a very yikes situation. Nothing good came from that when we're thinking about long-term colonialism. Yeah.

But so the dodos got decimated in addition to being eaten by the humans by the other animals that the Dutch introduced to the island. And the other animals were actually even worse for the dodo than the humans were because suddenly they had predators and competitors for food such as macaques, goats, deer, cattle, and pigs. Worst of all, the black rat. Oh my gosh. I know. Like life got really rough for the dodos in a very short amount of time. The black rat snatched dodo eggs up and small chicks. And so the black rat

And within a hundred years of the Dutch arrival on the island, the dodo was gone. Oh no, this is such a sad story. And it's only one of countless examples of how we humans lead to the extinction of so many other animals.

We are like a really shitty King Midas that just brings destruction to the environment and the life forms that we touch. And I think you see this directly and indirectly in the case of the dodo based on the description that you gave us, Ellie, because directly we were eating the dodos, right? We were consuming them and contributing to their demise, right?

but also indirectly because we introduced other animals that were not native to the island, to the beautiful island of Mauritius, and who ended up making things even worse for this animal in its natural ecological niche. Yeah, and Van Doren mentions that according to Beverly and Stephen Stearns, the dodo has the dubious honor of being, quote, the first species whose extinction was conceded in writing to have been caused by humans, end quote.

And this is a particularly stark case of extinction, not only being caused by humans, but also this entire species being wiped out within 100 years. And that, I think, is related to the fact that the dodo is the poster child for extinction. But Vandoren's main argument is that we shouldn't just think about extinction in these really stark cases, because in contrast to a sort of simple black and white notion of extinction, like the dodo's there and then it's gone,

especially if we're thinking about the last dodo who died, that a species goes extinct only when the last member of its lineage dies. Extinction is for him a far more diffuse and complex phenomenon. It's something that happens in a slow unraveling of complex ways of life for particular species. And he calls this in his book, the dull edge of extinction, and uses this concept

to refocus the lens of studying extinction away from just like the last living member of a species and to thinking about the complex ways that species go extinct over long periods of time through a changing of their patterns, ecosystems, relationships with other species.

I think this is a really good point to emphasize that we need to move away from what I would call the peekaboo theory of extinction. Like it's there and suddenly it's not there. Only because there are live debates, for example, in the philosophy of biology about what it takes for there to actually be a species.

So when you just have that last member of a species, which is called an endling, is that enough for there to be a species? It's really unclear. You could have maybe even 30 members of a species, but that's still not enough genetic material for it to be viable in the long term. So you can have many members and still not a species. And so I really like thinking of extinction as this protracted process that involves the slow disappearing and passing away of species.

Darwinian population. And this notion that extinction should be conceptualized as a drawn-out process reminds me of the doomsday clock, which imagines how close we are to a human-made global catastrophe. And it currently puts us at 90 seconds to midnight, you know, like right there at the edge of

The clock was set up in 1947 by atomic scientists, including people who were working at the time on the Manhattan Project. And it's been updated forward and backward ever since as people tweak it to match current estimates of where we are. But like, on the one hand, 90 seconds to midnight seems really, really soon. 1158 and a half. Yeah.

Yeah, like we're there basically. But on the other hand, it's also just a metaphor because obviously we're not talking about seconds. And I feel like deep down in our bones, most of us do not feel like we're living that close to the bell tolling. Today, we're talking about extinction. Are we humans heading directly into the sixth mass extinction in the history of the Earth?

How should we cope with the prospect of our own extinction? And what happens when, thanks to scientific progress, extinction is no longer forever? We tend to take for granted the possibility of extinction.

That is to say that we could go extinct and that other species could go extinct and in fact are already doing so. But this idea, the idea of extinction, is a relatively new concept in the history of ideas.

For much of the history of human thought, we didn't really think about species as things that can go extinct. For example, Aristotle has a whole book on the history of animals that never mentions the fact that species have lived and passed away.

And the reason for that is because neither the ancients nor down the road the medievals ever considered the possibility of extinction. In fact, that possibility was unthinkable for them. Yeah, this idea that species come to be and pass away and never to return again is something new. I learned in one of my favorite books in recent years, which is The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Colbert.

Colbert notes that the idea of extinction really emerged around the time of the French Revolution. It all starts a few decades earlier, when Charles Lemoyne, the Baron de Longueuil, was traveling down the Ohio River with other Frenchmen and Algonquin and Iroquois troops in 1739. Some of the Native Americans in the group were hunting when they found a giant femur bone, tusk, and several huge teeth. Like, each of the teeth weighed nearly 10 pounds.

Lungoy, as the leader of this troop, took the bones from the Native Americans who found them and shipped them back to France, as one does, where they were given to Louis XV and thought to be elephant bones. But their teeth looked really different from elephant teeth. And so this led to all sorts of weird theories about what this animal could be.

Then at the end of the 18th century, the French naturalist Georges Cuvier came up with a hypothesis. They belonged to an animal that no longer roamed the earth. And Cuvier presented evidence suggesting that other animal bones found elsewhere also came from extinct animals. Thus, the hypothesis of extinction was put forth.

And Cuvier was also the founder of comparative anatomy. And he's putting forth this theory at the beginning of the 19th century at a time when there are all these debates that I often teach my students about whenever I teach the history of biology and evolutionary theory about the very nature of fossils, about the essence of deep time of thinking about the earth as having a deeper history than biblical accounts suggest.

And in this particular case, also about the fact that nature suffers from large scale catastrophes that leave certain traces behind for humans to then interpret.

And it's important to point out that even though Cuvier wasn't taken seriously by many when he first put forth these ideas, the very fact that he could present such a hypothesis was only possible because of the decreasing hold of Christianity over French society after the revolution. There is a recent and quite long, if I may say, book by the philosopher Emil Torres called Human Extinction that has some really interesting impressions in this regard.

Also, let me point out that Torres very helpfully wrote a short summary of their book that you can read for free on their Medium page, especially because the book itself is really expensive because it was priced by the publisher primarily for libraries. So it's a really helpful resource. Classic academic move. Yes. On the part of the publishers. Oh, yeah. It's really great that Torres provided like a shorter summary. Yeah.

I know, I think more academics should do that, to be honest. But be that as it may, Torres is writing about human extinction specifically, but I think the point really extends to other animals as well.

They write that Christianity is what really rendered human extinction an unintelligible impossibility after its rise in the fourth and fifth centuries of the Common Era, CE. And so it was only the secularization of Western civilization, i.e. the decline of Christianity, that then made human extinction something that we could think about and talk about like Cuvier did.

Yeah, and specifically, Torres talks about how there was the loss of this Christian idea of the great chain of being, which is this hierarchical model where God is at the top, then you have angels. Below the angels, you have humans. Under humans, you have animals, and so on and so forth. And in addition to the loss of this great chain of being theory, there's also a loss of ontological and

eschatological ideas about humanity, namely that we have immortal souls and that God has a plan for us, you know, that all will be well in the future. And Torres says that the decline of Christianity, which involves the loss of this great chain of being and these ontological and eschatological ideas about humanity, has brought about a variety of existential moods toward human extinction over the course of the past couple of centuries in particular.

We've gone from having an unwavering faith in the indestructibility of humanity to a defeatist sense that we will definitely go extinct at some point, to worries about how we might be the ones to make ourselves go extinct through, say, nuclear catastrophe or AI.

And Torres thinks that the most recent existential mood, which is our current mood, is marked by a disturbing suspicion that even though the 20th century was highly perilous, the 21st century will be even more perilous due to things like climate change, biodiversity loss, rise of AI, other technologies, and the sixth mass extinction event.

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Subscribe to Modem Futura wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you there. See you then. Yeah, and so let's talk about this idea of the sixth extinction, which is a term that was coined by scientists to refer to the idea that human-made changes to our environment are likely to lead to...

or in fact are already causing a mass extinction event, one of those catastrophes that people in the 19th century began to be really worried about. And the reason that it's referred to as the sixth extinction is because there have been five mass extinctions in the past that we know of. The last of those, the fifth one, is the one that wiped out the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period around 65 million years ago when an asteroid crashed into the Earth.

And the story of the discovery of that extinction is also really fascinating because it caused a lot of worries about extinction in its own right. Right.

The asteroid hypothesis was posited by a father-son scientist duo, these two guys by the name of Walter and Luis Alvarez in the 1980s. And then the crater where the asteroid hit was discovered in 1991. This was in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, you know, basically my backyard. And the discovery of that crater was,

set off an immense worry in the 1990s because after all, and this is something that Torres points out,

that crater proved that a global catastrophe had happened in the past. And so it implied that it could happen again in the future. And so that future one would be the sixth extinction. Yes. And of course, that discovery leading to this idea that it could possibly happen in the future changes the existential mood, right, around the possibility of our own extinction. And the fact is,

hate to break it to the climate deniers, that humans have caused significant changes to the Earth's climate. And this is a point that was put particularly strongly by the Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen, who coined the term Anthropocene. The Anthropocene refers to the current geological epoch that we're living in, which is human-dominated.

Humans have transformed a third to a half of the land surface of the planet. We've diverted or dammed most of the world's major rivers. And we've altered the very composition of the atmosphere through fossil fuel combustion and deforestation. And this leads to much higher concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane than two centuries ago.

Yeah, I mean, it's undeniable that we have become a geological force that has led to a mass die-off of species. And again, I feel like I'm repeating this point over and over again, but it's worth mentioning, we are continuing to do so into the future. And as Colbert puts it, one weedy species, us, is...

is leading to the extinction of many species. And it's important to distinguish here between background extinction and mass extinction. Colbert discusses how in ordinary times, like ordinary times considered on the massive scale of geological epochs, extinction takes place only very rarely. It actually happens even more rarely than speciation, right? So species are getting eliminated less than they're being born, right?

And here extinction occurs at the background extinction rate, which she describes as sort of a hum of extinctions. But mass extinctions, on the other hand, involve a sudden crash where a significant proportion of the world's biota. Do you say biota? Yeah, biota. Okay. Disappear. These biota disappear in a geologically insignificant amount of time.

And that leads to severe transformations on how life on Earth looks. Like, for instance, the dinosaurs came to dominate in the wake of the fourth extinction 210 million years ago because many other vertebrate species were wiped out in that extinction. So it, like,

paved the way for dinosaur domination. And then the dinosaurs themselves met their demise in the next extinction event, that fifth one, paving the way for humans to then dominate in the Anthropocene. Human domination doesn't have the same ring to it. I know, it just sounds really pathetic, honestly. Yeah.

But now, of course, we are also facing the prospect that we too might go the way of the dodo because extinction is not something that only happens in the past or only to non-human animals.

It happens to all species, ours included. And so the question I think that we should pose with all the severity that it warrants is what is the event that is most likely to bring about human annihilation? This is something that Torres and Todd May, whose book we're going to be talking about very soon, his book, Should We Go Extinct? A Philosophical Dilemma for Our Unbearable Times, both discuss a bit. And

One of the things that comes up in discussions of possible human extinction is a virus. Like, what if there's a virus that ends up annihilating us all? So that would be a form of human extinction that would not be...

directly caused by us. It wouldn't be intentional, right? It would be accidental, of course. Yeah, it would be accidental like an asteroid, except really tiny. Unless it was created in a lab and purposefully unleashed on humans. I guess it wouldn't necessarily be accidental.

Yeah, and so there are those scenarios that are accidental. There are also scenarios that have to do with human extinction brought about by nuclear war, obviously by climate change. And I'm also thinking here about the movie Children of Men by Alfonso Cuarón, which presents also this picture of human infertility being the cause for humans disappearing from the earth, where eventually there will be a human endling.

the last youngest human who will die off.

And Todd May mentions that that infertility scenario is more far-fetched than virus or asteroid possibility, but is still probably a more live possibility than some other ones. Like, for instance, mass human suicide is one that he briefly considers. I think the most likely one is us being invaded by an alien species. Alien domination! Oh my god. David, I feel like we're

I feel like we're having a hard time figuring out how jokey to be in this episode because it's an episode on extinction. And so like some of your jokes have just like really not hit for me so far, if I'm being honest. But I think that's because it's like hard to figure out how jovial to be in an episode on human extinction. ♪

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David, it's time to talk about this recent book by philosopher Todd May called Should We Go Extinct? Todd May, fun fact, was a consultant for the TV show The Good Place, the fun philosophy TV show, which is also about like...

intense scenarios in its own right. No spoilers for the few of our listeners who might not have seen it. But this is like a short, pithy book about whether we should go extinct. And so I think you and I, we both read this book. Now we're coming in to share our impressions of it. I will just say that, yeah, I mean, the title is kind of self-explanatory. The book is about whether we should go extinct. And

And rather than considering the kinds of scenarios that might lead to our extinction, May is really interested in the moral question of whether it would be right for humans to go extinct, whatever that scenario looked like. And the idea is that humans bring a lot of joy and happiness into the world, but we also bring an immense amount of suffering, especially suffering to other animals. For instance, he says an average American over the course of their lifetime suffers

consumes nearly two dozen pigs, more than 1,500 chickens, and over five dozen cows. That's a lot of suffering to stack up against experiences that we have, right? Humans do lots of amazing things like create art,

create community, love each other. But that's a lot of animals to be sacrificing for our lives, not to mention that the actual living conditions of these animals are in most cases horrendous because of the factory farming industry.

Yeah, and that's only the case of the harms that we bring to non-human animals in the case of factory farming. But what May does in this book is he creates a philosophical ledger where he puts on one side all the good things that humans add to the world, right? And those include, as you mentioned, Ellie, the fact that we pursue truth, and so we have science, the fact that we create art, and so we appreciate beauty, the fact that we have a certain kind of

high order reasoning that allows us to appreciate our own future. And then on the other side of the ledger, you certainly have all these horrendous facts about our treatment of non-human animals, but it goes really beyond that. There is the myriad ways in which we destroy natural ecosystems through things like deforestation, through pollution, through

The fact that we also harm animals in other ways than just eating them, for instance, by subjecting them to medical and technological experimentation. And so he looks at these two things. And what he's asking the reader to do is to consider whether what we add is really worth it and what it would take for us, as he says at the very end of his book, to earn our place in this universe.

Yeah. And we can also consider, so there's also ecosystem destruction and the suffering of future animals and future humans to consider too. So there's like the way that within our current lifetimes, each of us sort of statistically on average,

is alive because of the sacrifice of many animals. Of course, like there are vegetarians and things like that, but like just on average, statistically speaking, and he says that the wealthier a country becomes, the more its inhabitants on average consume animals. But then there's also questions of the future, both the future of other non-human animals and the future of other humans. And I think it's a really well-known fact by now that humans in the future are going to suffer far more from climate change than humans already are, which is

already a significant amount. And so there's that question, does future human happiness outweigh future human suffering?

Yeah, and I like that he considers the present and the future and also the way in which our relation to ourselves is kind of like a plus because, as you said, we love each other, we have a sense of community, but it's also a con because we carry out wars, we carry out genocides. There is also a lot of human on human violence. And so it's a really complex landscape that he's painting and asking us to look at with the eyes of an ethicist.

in terms of whether we can justify all these bad things by virtue of what we add to existence. And in coming at this from the perspective of ethics...

May in particular is interested in thinking about the prospect of human extinction from two different ethical points of view. The first is utilitarianism and the second is deontology. Now, if you know anything about philosophical ethics, which I know many of our listeners do, you will know that those are two of the most well-known schools of ethics. And I think utilitarianism in particular has been...

an attractive framework for many people in thinking about the prospect of human extinction. And the basic idea there would be

what we already articulated, which is like on balance, do humans bring more good into the world than they bring bad? That good and bad is often thought of in terms of pleasure and suffering, although not always from a utilitarian perspective. But that utilitarian framework is in terms of what are the consequences of human life and are they on balance better than not?

And on the other side, we have the deontological approach that rather than looking at this, let's say, calculus of happiness versus suffering, really emphasizes questions of rights and duties. What are individuals entitled to expect? And how do individuals discharge their obligations in light of those entitlements? So here it's a question about things that you absolutely cannot do to particular individuals as moral agents or subjects.

Even if doing so, would it on that utilitarian cost benefit analysis be good for the whole?

And also generally speaking, we can say that utilitarianism, it's a version of consequentialism. So it's concerned with the consequences of a given action, whereas deontology is more concerned with the intentions or motivations of an action, like the reasons you have for doing something. And those reasons have to do with rights and duties. Right.

So he gives an example, a hypothetical example, that's like a little bit silly, but philosophers often test our intuitions based on silly examples. And so the example is this. Let's say a bunch of farm animals are in the Louvre and there is a fire. Either the paintings can be saved, the Mona Lisa, or the farm animals can be saved.

Should we save the Mona Lisa or should we save the farm animals? And from a utilitarian point of view, you're going to be thinking about, OK, well, the animals have the capacity for suffering. And so there's really good reasons to save them. But one could also argue that the future happiness that the Mona Lisa is going to bring to millions and millions of humans outweighs the couple of dozen farm animals who would die in this fire situation.

And so utilitarianism wouldn't necessarily give you a clear answer on which of those two options to take, but those are the sorts of things that you would be thinking about.

Whereas from a deontological perspective, the value or dignity of life comes first. And so you have a duty to save the farm animals rather than the Mona Lisa. Maybe you could say there's a deontological argument for saving the Mona Lisa too, but he doesn't really seem to consider that one. And I think it's fair to say that deontology generally considers the value of life pretty highly. Yeah, there is no deontological version of the argument where the Mona Lisa is

has more rights than living beings. I don't know. I was like leaving that possibility open, but yeah, maybe that doesn't work. And I have to say, this is a place where I was unsure about May's own philosophical and ethical alignment exactly, because although he talks about utilitarianism and he talks about deontology, he's also talking about

He calls himself a pluralist, especially because extinction is one of these topics that is just so tricky because you're thinking about existence and non-existence and the individual and the social present, past, future, that no ethical framework is going to be super satisfying. But I found when he was thinking through this silly example of the, you know, who do you save in a fire?

I got the sense that he really is a utilitarian. And this is a part of his argument where, to be honest, I kind of fell off the bandwagon a little bit. And I just didn't share his intuitions about what we ought to do because he says...

If I have to save some animals over some works of art, I'll do that. But then he says, well, it really kind of depends on which work of art we're talking about. So if I'm choosing between some animals and like the only copy of Hamlet, I'll choose the animals still.

But if it's the last copy of King Lear, oh, I'm not really sure. That didn't sit super well with me. Wait, wait, wait. I think you got that backwards.

I think it was that he would save Hamlet, right? But maybe not. And he would still save King Lear, but it would be a harder decision. No, it is the other way. I'm right because I really took notes on this part of the book, Ellie. Maybe I just let my basic sense that Hamlet would be preferable to King Lear overtake my reading of this part. But he does say that if you ask me whether I would be willing to allow a single cow or pig to suffer to save all of Shakespeare, I would likely say yes.

But I could let Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet go to save the creature. But all of Shakespeare would be a pretty big ask. And if you asked me about King Lear, I would have more trouble, but would in the end still probably agree to saving the animal. Yeah, so this is where I feel like you cannot let aesthetic control

preferences guide your morality. It's like, oh, well, one play, yeah, I'll let that go, but not the better one, and certainly not multiple plays. And so I think if he was adopting, let's say, a deontological perspective, which we rarely adopt in connection to non-human animals, I think most humans are deontologists about humans, but then strategically utilitarian about animals. And so we are kind of inconsistent about that.

If you were to adopt a deontological approach, you would have to begin from the assumption that life trumps inanimate objects that have no moral status. And so I really just didn't know what to make of this claim that...

Hamlet is not as good as a pig, but King Lear is. Okay, so yeah, let's try and get a little bit clearer on some of his claims because I think this book is successful at laying out the sorts of things we should consider when asking the question, should we go extinct?

I will just say it doesn't have a clear answer to the question, should we go extinct? And so I think especially because it's like a short book that is written for a more public audience, I was expecting it to be more polemical or at least aiming to persuade. And instead it has a lot of considerations, but like doesn't really, at least on my reading, I'm curious if you read it differently, David, come down strongly on one side or the other. Like there's no answer to should we go extinct according to him that he gives at least. Yeah.

So I agree with you. I think there is a kind of answer that is conditional where he says we should change aspects of ourselves. And if we do those things, then we can earn our keep in the universe or in nature. But he also says that it's really unlikely that we will actually change. So I don't know what to make of that.

And also, I feel like when I was reading the book, my main impression, honestly, was that the case for human existence, which he's kind of trying to defend, is shockingly weak.

Not any failure on his part, but just we do so much bad that the fact that we create scientific theories and create beautiful art just doesn't seem to even come close to the colossal damage that we do to other life forms and to nature. And I felt like.

The argument as he presented it really leads to a conclusion that he doesn't want to embrace, which is that maybe we should go extinct.

Okay, yeah. So I want to think a little bit more here, because I was really curious what your perspective was as somebody who works in animal ethics. Like, what did you think about the way that he talked about non-human animals? I mean, I think he's taking, I would say, like, a relatively humanist perspective, but not one that, like, is rejecting the importance of animal life.

But the reason I say relatively humanist is because I think, you know, he is acknowledging that humans create all sorts of amazing things in the world, including sports, including art, including, you know, like these cultural achievements. We have a unique kind of culture, community and love. Although he doesn't say like, I'm sure that non-human animals can't love, but he is calling attention to the importance of human love. Did you feel like this was an

okay form of humanism? Or did you, were you, did you have concerns as an animal ethicist about this treatment of non-human animals? We'll talk about like what he actually proposes because the world that he envisions is one with like a smaller population so that we're not as bad. But in the world that he envisions, just to be clear, animals still don't have fundamental rights, which is why I say that he's not a deontologist. I think

take him to be proposing that humans should have a smaller population, though, just saying that that's a possibility that could end up mitigating some of our deleterious effects on the world. Yeah, so the things that he proposes that would help and that would justify us include a smaller population, bringing down humanity to like around 1 billion at one point, he says. He talks about deforestation, about ending some kinds of research, about ending factory farming. But then I traced all those proposals and put them together.

And the kind of world that you end up with is, yes, a smaller population, but on his view, we're still a capitalist society.

There is no critique of capitalism here. We're still doing scientific research and dominating nature to an extent. We are still eating animals. This is really important. He doesn't say that we don't have the right to kill animals. He just doesn't want us to kill them horrifically under conditions of factory farming. And so I actually don't see this happening.

world that he says might justify our existence as really justifying it. It's just what we do on a slightly smaller scale. But if we keep in mind the fact that science has a tendency internal to itself of wanting more and more domination of nature, that capitalism has a tendency toward increasing accumulation and asymmetrical distribution of wealth, then

You know, it seems like that is only going to bring us back to where we are now in the future. That's interesting because I think you do a really nice job of reconstructing the possible proposals that he offers in the book. But I was not reading it so much as proposals, but rather as considerations, which I think

if that's right, then he could defend himself against the charges that you're bringing by being like, no, no, it's not that I'm saying capitalism and science, big science should exist as they are, but rather just that like, those are some things that people have brought up. Like people have brought up ways to mitigate factory farming and I'm sort of sharing those. And if that's the case, then, you know, why,

one could say, well, actually, that's still a problem because the book is not offering a clear proposal or conclusion. I think one thing that was relatively clear to me about his beliefs was not so much about our relation to non-human animals. So he does give like really, I think, instructive ways of thinking about how to weigh on balance. Like

human joy and suffering versus animal joy and suffering. And he says, like, we can't offer a perfectly like mathematical calculation there. But here are some considerations that we should bear in mind. But he definitely comes at least as far as I understood it, down more on the side of human life on balance, just considering human life.

is better than the absence of human life. And that does mean that he rejects the position of antinatalism of David Benatar. We talked about this a number of years ago now on our antinatalism episode, but there's a prominent view among some philosophers, the most notable of whom is David Benatar, saying that human life involves more suffering than it does pleasure. And so actually human life is,

is not valuable enough in and of itself to be preserved. I'm doing not a great job of reconstructing the argument because it's actually quite technical. Check back in our antinatalism episode if you want to hear more. But May definitely seems to think that Benatar is wrong about that. And he says that there are some reasons why we might want to continue humanity in the future. First, it would add happiness to the world. So he does think that human life on balance adds more happiness than suffering to the world.

Second, it would continue the existence of important experiences that only human beings are capable of having or having to a degree of richness with the world. There I take him to be talking about things like the cultural achievements we mentioned. Finally, it would help sustain the sense of significance of people who currently exist. If those of us who are currently living think that we're

all going to go extinct or should go extinct in the near future, it becomes really hard for us to make meaning in our own lives. Yeah. So this last point I want to talk about a little bit more because he does say that

One drawback of human extinction would be that those of us who are already alive would kind of suffer from the thought that there are no future humans. So it's not that future humans will suffer because they don't exist yet. So you get into that identity problem. It's just that we would feel depressed and we would feel like the meaning has been taken out of our lives if there is no longevity.

And in page 112, for those interested, in case they have the book, he makes this claim that I just could not handle, really, where he says...

Of course, there is no scale on which to weigh this. But also, as with the experiences of truth, beauty, and the good life, it seems to me very much a life question whether the suffering we cause is worth the meaningfulness provided by human continuity. So if we were to put on that ledger, on one side, all the harm that we cause, everything that we've described,

And on the other side, just the fact that we should exist because we would be sad if we thought we didn't have descendants. The fact that he says that's a life question to me was really difficult to process because he's comparing, again, a colossal harm to nature and to animals against the value of a thought for our present happiness and saying that, well, you know, I don't really know how to weigh those two.

Whereas I think it's a very clear decision on the side of human non-existence if we're just focusing on this question of meaningfulness.

Okay, so given all of that, David, and the fact that at least as far as I understood, it didn't seem like May was answering the question himself directly. Do you think that in his book, you can pull out an answer to the question, should we go extinct? Like, do you think he has a view on that? And also, like,

Having read the book, what is your view? Should we go extinct? Yeah, so I think his view is, as I said, a conditional statement. If we make these changes, which I do take him to be proposing or endorsing in one way or another, then yes. But I actually think... Then no. Then we shouldn't go extinct. Oh, yeah. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, if we make these changes, we get to stay.

But I actually don't think the changes that he proposes are sufficient to justify our continued existence. And so I feel as if the force of the argument actually leads to a negative conclusion. It's just that he doesn't land there himself. And in general, to be honest, it's a morbid thought, but I do think...

life on Earth would be better off if humans were not around. So you think we should go extinct? Yeah, should in the sense of like, it would be better, not necessarily in the sense that we who are currently alive deserve to die. That's a different question. So what about you, Ellie? Do you think we should go extinct?

Okay, this is probably a cop-out, but I just feel like I really don't have the answer to this. Like, it's not my area of expertise, even though I did read the book. And I think I came away from the book having a lot more ideas about the pros and cons of going extinct than I did before. But I guess at the end of the day, I just feel like I'm not going to have any say over whether humans go extinct. Yeah.

And so it's not a worthy thing for me to spend much time thinking about, which I am totally aware is like a completely defeatist, cynical, and bad faith, most likely, kind of attitude. At least you recognize that. You're like, well, I don't get to kill everybody or save everybody, so I don't get to have an opinion on this. So who then does have to have an opinion on this? Greta Thunberg. Yeah.

About a decade ago, a team of scientists in Australia that go by the collective name the Lazarus Project used a scientific technique known as somatic cell nuclear transfer to bring back an animal that went extinct in 1983. Oh my God. What kind of animal was it?

It is called the gastric brooding frog. Scientific name, Rheobatricus silus. Oh my God. Okay, I asked so many questions about how they chose the gastric brooding frog to be like the first animal to come back to life. But I will let you continue. Well, actually, no, that is connected because the reason they chose it is because they had tissue. It went extinct, but we still had tissue because it only went extinct in the 1980s.

And so for this technology, the way it works is you have to have tissue from the animal. You take the nucleus out of a cell with its DNA, and then you take the ovum of a female of a related species. You take the nucleus out of the ovum, and then you deposit the nucleus of the extinct animal in the ovum.

of the female. And then you hope that the pregnancy holds. And because it has the DNA of the other animal, if the female gives birth, it will give birth to the already extinct animal. Oh my God. So if we had like Neanderthal tissue, I could conceivably give birth to a Neanderthal.

Exactly. I love that you just went full-blown, like, how can I use this technology? As somebody who doesn't know whether or not I want to have kids, that just made the option a lot more attractive.

And, you know, this is one example of what is known as de-extinction technology, which refers to a whole set of technologies for bringing back members of species that have gone extinct for decades, for centuries, or in the case of the Neanderthals, for millennia. And, you know, you mentioned the dodo at the very beginning of our episode, and scientists working on de-extinction are also trying to bring back the dodo.

Oh, my God. Okay. Restore it to its land on Mauritius. Like, that is what we call reparations, David. Okay. So, did the gastric... Okay. I'm thinking about this, like, gastric bypass frog. What was it called again? Gastric brooding. Okay. Honestly, not that different. Okay. But it's so amazing that it's also brooding. It's just, like, such an incredible name. Okay. Did the gastric brooding frog come back to life? Did the pregnancy hold? No.

Sadly, no. In this case, the pregnancy held for a little bit. The fertilized egg started multiplying and growing into an embryo, but it eventually failed. And so that tells us that the technology is highly experimental and we don't really control the results.

In fact, even though there are a lot of researchers working on different species in different countries, you know, like there are people in Russia trying to bring back the woolly mammoth. There are people, yeah, I know people in the U.S. trying to bring back the passenger pigeon. I didn't even know the passenger pigeon went extinct. Yeah, it passed on to the past. Okay. Another point where we're not sure how humorous we should be in this episode. I know, I know. Pour one out for the passenger pigeon. Yeah.

But anyways, the point here is that even though there's been all this research on de-extinction across the world, there has been only one case of a successful de-extinction experiment where the pregnancy actually led to a successful birth. And that happened in Spain. And the animal that was brought back is the Pyrenean ibex, which is a kind of wild goat.

And, you know, they did this technology, the fetus was born, and it lived for 10 minutes, and then it died of respiratory failure. Okay, so this de-extinction technology doesn't have the most impressive success rate. But I suppose the mere fact that the Ibex was brought to term and born does suggest that this technology is viable. It's just like it needs more development, right? Yeah.

Or more luck? I don't know. I don't know how science works. I'm just kidding. I feel like sometimes a single success story is all the confirmation that scientists need to keep working on a particular research program, especially one that's as high stakes as this one. And also very appealing from a fantasy perspective, too. It's an alluring idea to work on de-extinction because it taps into all kinds of fantasies about creating life, about recreating the past, about

Also maybe about mitigating our awful effects on the environment and like leading to the extinction of so many non-human species. Yeah, yeah, definitely fantasies about dominating nature. As you said about reversing time, especially when we keep in mind that the goal of the extinction is often presented as humans suddenly having the power to restore something that has been lost or

or something that we have caused to go away. So earlier you joked about reparations, but some scientists do defend the extinction as a kind of natural reparation. Yeah. Especially when it comes to animals that we drove into disappearance. And,

I could imagine one concern that people might have about this technology being that it amounts to scientists playing God, whether we're giving ourselves the right to intervene at a level that we should not intervene at at all, and also whether that level of intervention is different either in degree and or in kind from the way that the environmental devastation that we have wreaked on the Earth has led to the extinction of so many species.

Yeah.

Yeah, a very common argument when dealing with these biological and medical technologies, because it's also something that appears a lot in contemporary debates about synthetic biology, which is not about bringing back extinct species, but straight up creating new life forms that have never existed. Oh, yeah.

You know, that argument of playing God is not an argument that I find particularly compelling since, you know, it presupposes that there are these domains that are reserved for the divine, which maybe requires belief in the existence of God at a cultural level. Like you have to believe in God to believe that humans can play God. Yeah, yeah. Point taken.

And more importantly, I think it also hinges on a very strong nature artifice distinction that is ultimately very tricky, right? Because especially when you're talking about extinction, the value fact distinction kind of collapses a little bit because, of course, extinctions are practical.

are bad, but they're also natural. They're one of the most natural things in the world. 99% of species that have ever existed have gone extinct, right? It's a fact of evolution. And so the idea that humans intervening here is beyond the pale, just seems somewhat arbitrary. And, you know, think about other ways in which we do intervene into natural processes, like

like agriculture, like medicine, you know? Yeah, or even the attempt to conserve species, right? Like to prevent a species from going extinct, maybe you could also say that's like, quote, playing God just as much as bringing one back as in the case of the Lazarus Project. Also, we have to...

have a moment for the Name the Lazarus project because like Lazarus, of course, the guy that Jesus miraculously brought back from the dead. So yeah, I think that's, I actually think that name is great, but it's like, it's like really intense. It's, it's giving supervillain in like a children of men style movie. Yeah. The scientists are not really helping against this charge that they're playing God when they choose names like this. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. I'm wondering what other names other research teams have and if they're equally like biblical and pretentious. Yeah. Okay, but I'm curious about your take on de-extinction because...

Even though I'm not super familiar with the ins and outs, I think it's mostly presented as a conservation tool, like this way for us to help protect ecosystems that we are contributing to the death of, like to maintain the biodiversity that is being lost by our practices of deforestation, farming, etc. Right. So that would make it seem pretty appealing. Yeah.

Exactly. You're right that it is presented as a way for us to conserve and bring back animals that we have driven to extinction. But I am just not really sold by this technology. I think there are a lot of unresolved questions, and those questions cut across legal and ethical issues.

For starters, let me say that although it is billed to the public as this environmentally friendly conservationist technology, I actually don't think there is much evidence for that because, as I mentioned, we've never really truly de-extincted any animal and reintroduced them into the wild.

To really see what effects that would have on conservation. We just have that one goat that lived for 10 minutes and never left the laboratory. And I think the real appeal of this technology is that it offers a vast new space for new forms of genetic research and genetic engineering.

for people who work in genetics. And there's an article that I read called What If Extinction Is Not Forever by Jacob Sherko and Henry Greeley, where they say, yeah, the biggest appeal of these technologies is the coolness factor. And I'm very critical of the technology partly for that reason. Okay, so tell us a little bit about your...

criticisms of the technology? So the criticisms of the technology for me, maybe we'll divide them into like the legal and then the ethical issue. So let's assume that we do create a de-extinct animal that is born and that matures and becomes an adult organism.

The legal status of that animal is highly ambiguous. For example, would they count as an endangered species and therefore be protected by the Endangered Species Act? Well, we don't really know because they're not a member of an endangered species. They're not even members of any species whatsoever. If anything, they're kind of moving away from danger since they're going from non-existence to existence. Yeah.

And also, I didn't mention this, but there are some techniques for de-extinction that produce what are technically hybrids, where they have some genetic material of a contemporary species and some genetic material of an extinct species.

And so in the cases of those de-extinct organisms, it's really unclear whether they would even have any legal protections at all because in their case, they literally don't belong to any recognized species.

species. So the status is nebulous, not to mention that we don't know if these organisms, because they're produced by technology, whether they would be patented by the organizations and the corporations that fund that research. And that's the legal side of things, but it's connected to the ethical dimension, because let's think about what the fate of these organisms would be.

If their future is to just exist in a laboratory as subjects of endless genetic tinkering, I think that's a really sad existence that is hard to justify. But

On the other hand, if we do try to rewild them, they might actually not really fit into the environments that they used to be native to because the environments have changed. Oh, yeah, that's a great point. You know, so like all these animals might be invasive species. And a good example of this is the passenger pigeon. The passenger pigeon in the U.S. had a very close relationship to chestnut trees.

But after it went extinct, the chestnut trees mostly disappeared. So it would then have to find a new niche. It would have to compete with other organisms and maybe become a pest. Yeah, there was that tragic die-off of the chestnut trees due to, I think, some fungus. I read about it in Richard Power's novel, The Overstory. Yes, yeah. And so the animal doesn't have its niche anymore anymore.

Often what is forgotten is also the ethical concerns that we should express about the harm to the pregnant females that are undergoing these like weird, unnatural pregnancies. Like me offering to carry a Neanderthal child. Yeah, I mean, in this case, it was consensual. So you're on your own, Ellie, with your Neanderthal babe. Yeah.

Yeah, it's like by virtue of being a human, I could actually consent to it, as opposed to the frog that carried the gastric brooding frog. Okay, so yeah, and I also want to mention a possible negative impact that this could have. So this is less directly about the technology, but as a philosophical concern about a possible consequence. And I think if we start seeing extinction as non-final, it

it might suddenly make us more cavalier about our treatment of other species because we now have the conviction that we can relatively easily correct our mistake and return back to zero. Yeah, like hitting the undo button on Microsoft Word. Yeah, exactly. It's like, oh, accidentally. No, or...

Or more like, I accidentally deleted, now I'm going to bring it back. Like, I'm just undoing it, right? And this, interestingly, would be sort of a return to something we saw in antiquity, because we mentioned at the beginning of the episode that the ancients and medievals didn't consider the possibility of permanent extinction. Right.

But Torres mentions that some ancient philosophers very much considered the possibility of human extinction in a temporary way. But they thought that humans would disappear entirely and then they would reappear. So they never really considered the possibility that humans would forever go extinct, but that there would be like temporary demographic extinction. I think that's sort of what we're seeing here in this conversation about de-extinction of other animals. Yeah.

Yeah, de-extinction is bringing us back to antiquity. But I really like your point about what happens when we see life as something that we reset. Because if life really is indestructible, I think we would change our relationship to it. And not just life in terms of the lives of other people, but also our own life as human beings. You know, how could we not change our relationship to that? Right.

And in a world where we no longer see life as essentially finite, at least at the level of the species,

I actually wonder whether this could lead to the emergence of new moral codes and moral values that suddenly deify the species and put it over the individual because only the species is eternal. Only the species can be brought back. And in those cases, we might see some pretty unethical things carried out against individuals in the name of the protection of the species.

And Taurus has a really interesting concept in this vein, where they suggest that it's possible that we as humans could disappear, but human creations like cyborgs might continue humanity into the future. And so maybe it could be that what continues humanity into the future are not cyborgs as much as de-extinctified human creations. Oh my gosh, it's giving Planet of the Apes, but with de-extinctified frogs and goats.

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