Not everyone here is a Christian, but I’m pretty certain all of the Christians here believe in Jesus and accept that he died for them – that’s pretty central to Christianity.
I don’t know of anyone here who would claim that evolution is perfect or “the prize” to keep our eyes on – it’s just a biological process. Lots of scientific processes are flawed but also created by God (as are humans).
As for death, it depends what kind of death you are talking about. Adam and Eve were told that on the day they ate of the fruit, they would “surely die.” And yet Adam lives for over 900 years after that, according to Genesis. What does happen is that they are banished from the garden and lose the intimate relationship they had with God – a spiritual death, which is why we need Jesus. While physical death is a difficult reality, it is a part of the world that God made. Imagine a world where all people, trees, rodents, bacteria all lived forever! It would destroy itself pretty quickly. You and I wouldn’t be here without physical death, which is weird to think about sometimes. I too look forward to a new heaven and new earth where we are free from the material constraints of this world.
I have always wondered how the figure of 99 % was calculated. We are still finding many new species every year. How was the number of extinct species calculated?
Yes, only those species that can adapt to change will survive relatively large changes in the environment. That’s the problem with climate change. Although we are called to care for the earth and its living things, it’s very difficult to do so in the face of rapidly changing environments. Which of the many facing extinction do we try and save? What were the proximal factors that caused all those large mammals to go extinct? Was hunting by humans in any way involved?
Climate change is not unique to our time, but it seems that the rate and amount is, and it seems that human activity such as burning of fossil fuels is largely responsible for this.
God has given humans control over our actions, so we must make the decision whether to use this control to mitigate the results of climate change that have begun to destabilize human life on earth or reject this God-given responsibility and accept the consequences, both physical and spiritual.
One possible way would be to take the nearly-impossible-to-estimate average lifespan of species, and how long-lasting and how diverse higher groups have been and work it out. If we make the guess that it is between 200,000 and 5,000,000 years (which is probably reasonable), and assume that diversity has averaged somewhat less than current across the Phanerozoic (say, half to two thirds), then we get between 98% and 99.9% extinction rates for species overall.
For times when we have precise measurements, the rate is the highest known. There is a decent chance that the P-T boundary may have had an even higher rate, but that was associated with a mass-extinction event, so maybe not the best comparison for reassuring us. On the other hand, the Siberian Traps flood basalt igniting 20 km^3 of lignite has some definite similarities (that’s about as much as humans are burning every 5 years).
Thanks for your reply. So does that mean that somewhere between 99 million and 990 million species have become extinct already (if there are between 1 and 10 million species alive today)?
I am wondering what would a more optimal lumber spine look like - how would it be constructed in reality, even if we allow complete relaxation of evolutionary constraints but given the obvious constraints of the biological materials available?
Yes, I do agree. I was noting a possible correlation, albeit one that shouldn’t really encourage us about the current trends. A further note is that it is thought that CO2 concentration jumped (over the course of tens of thousands of years) from the earlier levels of 2000 ppm to about 8000 ppm. The current value is a bit over 400.
Isn’t the average time for a species to be around 1-2 million years? And fossilization is a rare event, so we’ve only discovered a fraction of all organisms that have ever lived.
Not to mention that the whole concept of cleanly “distinct species” is all a dubious enterprise anyway, even if one could take a “God’s eye” view and see every organism that ever lived. At what arbitrary points would one insert demarcations to say “these before are a different species than those who came after?” It could only appear to be a somewhat clear Linnaean enterprise as we look at all the present snapshot of “twig ends” that have sufficiently diverged from various common ancestors.
But your point certainly stands, that what we see could only be a tiny fraction of the whole.
Given punctuated equilibrium, we can make some distinctions based on “this one stays the same for 3,000,000 years, and then has a 200,000 year transitional period, then stays the same for another 2,000,000”-type logic
Probably, but the range is from ~20,000,000 down to ~200,000 for ones that I am familiar with, so taking a broader range probably makes sense.