The long delay between the appearance of PaulTom Martin’s 1966 article and the acceptance of his global overkill theory (which still has not, of course, taken place) is comparable, in some ways, to the half-century delay between the 1915 appearance of Alfred Wegener’s book on continental drift and the final acceptance of that notion in the 1960s.
The main reason for the delay in Wegener’s case appears to have been his inability to identify the force driving the “shifting” he was arguing for. Even after Arthur Holmes correctly identified that force in the 1920s, as convection cells in the earth’s magma created by radioactive heating, the scientific community wanted the details of this mechanism spelled out for them before they would accept the idea of moving continents. It was, therefore, only after the phenomenon of sea-floor spreading and subduction had been fully elucidated in the early nineteen-sixties, that Wegener was finally vindicated.
So what, one might ask, is holding up the full acceptance of Paul’s insights? What essential element of that theory remains undiscovered and undescribed?
Paul’s insights will undoubtfully be fleshed out with plenty of new facts and details in the coming decades, and some of his conclusions may well be modified in the process,[60] but I do not expect that any of the essential elements of his overkill theory will be called into question. Like John Alroy I believe that the overkill hypothesis has “already… been ‘proven’ as thoroughly as any historical hypothesis can be.”[61]
"All of the key evidence was available years ago, and all of it firmly refutes competing, ecologically-oriented hypotheses. The event’s timing, rapidity, selectivity and geographic pattern all make good sense according to the anthropogenic model, and no sense at all otherwise. To my eyes, this assessment is so clear that further “tests” are not really necessary."
No intellectually respectable objections are raised, nowadays, against the proposition that the arrival of our species on New Zealand during or near the 13th century AD[62] was the cause of the disappearance, within a few centuries after that arrival, of New Zealand’s avian megafauna. The approximately 38 bird species that were swept away by the first wave of human settlement on those islands included the world’s largest eagle, nine species of moa, the largest of which stood more than 10 feet tall, and two unique “adze-bill” predator/omnivores.[63]
Nor does any scientific doubt remain that the combination of human predation, human-caused habitat alteration, and human-introduced species which caused the New Zealand collapse, caused similarly sudden and catastrophic species-losses on Madagascar and on the Hawaiian Archipelago[64] after humans reached those islands some five hundred years before their arrival on New Zealand.
Astonishingly, however, the clear and undisputed fact that these Early Medieval megafaunal collapses were caused by humans, has not been used as a “Rosetta Stone” to decipher to the general satisfaction the meaning of the similarly catastrophic losses of megafauna which took place earlier in the Holocene and in the late Pleistocene; losses which took place on all the islands[65] ─ and indeed all the regions and continents ─ which were (like New Zealand, Madagascar, and Hawaii) being settled for the first time by the genus Homo.
All scientific paradigm shifts are disconcerting and uncomfortable to one degree or another. Wegener’s theory itself provoked bitter resistance, involving personal ridicule as well as threats to careers and to funding. Paul’s insights touch, however, on issues which are even more unsettling than the geomorphological truths Wegener was urging upon the scientific community: the global overkill theory implies a great many controversial things about the evolutionary history of our own species, and human evolution is a notoriously emotive subject in its own right. Paul’s insights bear directly, moreover, on the even more fraught issue of the enormous human-caused extinction our planet is presently undergoing. What effect would Paul’s new ecological history have on our attitude toward that extinction? What would result, for instance, from its collision with the ideas of someone like the Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki who believes humans can stop exterminating other species by re-establishing the “sacred balance”[66] that “pre-industrial” or “indigenous” peoples are thought to have maintained with the natural world?
Paul’s insights need not, in my opinion, replace the Rousseauian myths propagated by those who share Suzuki’s beliefs with a Hobbesian caricature of a species burdened by an aberrant level of cruelty and aggression. Humans beings — subject as they unquestionably are to the normal complement of mammalian drives — clearly do a great many things which fall foursquare into our conceptions of “cruelty” or “aggression,” but the exceptional intelligence which makes humans so much more destructive than other animals, also allows them to experience something that is literally inconceivable for other animals: concern for the survival of other species.
While I was writing this, the BBC ran an item about the survivor of an attack by a great white shark, who now campaigns for the protection of the species that nearly caused his death.[67] It’s unthinkable, of course, that a baboon which has survived an attack by a leopard, could be motivated by that attack to make efforts to protect leopards. It is only “man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends… to the humblest living creature,”[68] that could react in such a biologically anomalous way.
“Save the whales” became something of a joke among those who deride “tree huggers,” but it is momentous, of course, rather than funny that Homo sapiens has developed enough understanding to step back from the edge of wiping out the planet’s very largest megafauna.
Human erosion of the biosphere has, however, gone far beyond the overkill of large species. It has developed via agriculture — i.e. the elimination of unwanted life-forms on given tracts of land to create monocultures — into a great many other diversity-threatening activities. These include wholesale habitat destruction, the witting and unwitting introduction of alien species, and the alteration of oceanic and atmospheric chemistry by mining nitrogen from the air and fossil fuels from the earth. With the best will in the world, we may simply not be able to identify and ward off enough of the “thousand cuts” by which biodiversity is dying. It’s by no means impossible, therefore, that the anthropogenic extinction-spasm could continue, despite our best efforts, to the point where it degrades the biosphere’s ability to provide us with food, clean water and air.
* * *
The German word for despair is Verzweiflung. Maybe because it’s got Zweifel, “doubt,” as its root, it feels like the best label for the of the blend of perplexity and dismay I used to feel, before my exposure to Paul’s thinking, about the rising tide of extinctions my species is causing.
Paul’s insights didn’t lessen the dismay part of my Verzweiflung, but they did clear up some of the perplexity. On the most simplistic and emotional of levels, they brought me to the realization that my species wasn’t “bad” or “unnatural.” Homo sapiens has unquestionably had a tragic impact on the biosphere, but it, and the devastating level of its intelligence, are no less products of nature — of natural selection — than the coral-reef communities and rainforests whose existence it is currently threatening.
In order to survive on the Pliocene veld two and a half million years ago, our ancestors had to defend themselves against and compete with a formidable suite of big predators. The outcome of that struggle was by no means assured: the only weapon those hominins possessed to counter the all-too-tangible teeth, claws and horns of their antagonists was an abstract and rudimentary ability to think up useful new devices and behaviors. Today we are involved in another struggle with an uncertain outcome: to prevent that ability from making the earth unlivable for other organisms, and, indeed, for ourselves.
The only weapon available to us in this latter-day struggle is, ironically, the same one that enabled our destructiveness in the first place: the power of the human brain. But that brain cannot, of course, come to grips with the forbidding complexities of this problem if it’s not in possession of the relevant information.
The real facts of our species’ ecological history are an indispensable part of that information, and nobody has done more to make them available to us than Paul Martin.
From http://megafauna.com/
The main reason for the delay in Wegener’s case appears to have been his inability to identify the force driving the “shifting” he was arguing for. Even after Arthur Holmes correctly identified that force in the 1920s, as convection cells in the earth’s magma created by radioactive heating, the scientific community wanted the details of this mechanism spelled out for them before they would accept the idea of moving continents. It was, therefore, only after the phenomenon of sea-floor spreading and subduction had been fully elucidated in the early nineteen-sixties, that Wegener was finally vindicated.
So what, one might ask, is holding up the full acceptance of Paul’s insights? What essential element of that theory remains undiscovered and undescribed?
Paul’s insights will undoubtfully be fleshed out with plenty of new facts and details in the coming decades, and some of his conclusions may well be modified in the process,[60] but I do not expect that any of the essential elements of his overkill theory will be called into question. Like John Alroy I believe that the overkill hypothesis has “already… been ‘proven’ as thoroughly as any historical hypothesis can be.”[61]
"All of the key evidence was available years ago, and all of it firmly refutes competing, ecologically-oriented hypotheses. The event’s timing, rapidity, selectivity and geographic pattern all make good sense according to the anthropogenic model, and no sense at all otherwise. To my eyes, this assessment is so clear that further “tests” are not really necessary."
No intellectually respectable objections are raised, nowadays, against the proposition that the arrival of our species on New Zealand during or near the 13th century AD[62] was the cause of the disappearance, within a few centuries after that arrival, of New Zealand’s avian megafauna. The approximately 38 bird species that were swept away by the first wave of human settlement on those islands included the world’s largest eagle, nine species of moa, the largest of which stood more than 10 feet tall, and two unique “adze-bill” predator/omnivores.[63]
Nor does any scientific doubt remain that the combination of human predation, human-caused habitat alteration, and human-introduced species which caused the New Zealand collapse, caused similarly sudden and catastrophic species-losses on Madagascar and on the Hawaiian Archipelago[64] after humans reached those islands some five hundred years before their arrival on New Zealand.
Astonishingly, however, the clear and undisputed fact that these Early Medieval megafaunal collapses were caused by humans, has not been used as a “Rosetta Stone” to decipher to the general satisfaction the meaning of the similarly catastrophic losses of megafauna which took place earlier in the Holocene and in the late Pleistocene; losses which took place on all the islands[65] ─ and indeed all the regions and continents ─ which were (like New Zealand, Madagascar, and Hawaii) being settled for the first time by the genus Homo.
All scientific paradigm shifts are disconcerting and uncomfortable to one degree or another. Wegener’s theory itself provoked bitter resistance, involving personal ridicule as well as threats to careers and to funding. Paul’s insights touch, however, on issues which are even more unsettling than the geomorphological truths Wegener was urging upon the scientific community: the global overkill theory implies a great many controversial things about the evolutionary history of our own species, and human evolution is a notoriously emotive subject in its own right. Paul’s insights bear directly, moreover, on the even more fraught issue of the enormous human-caused extinction our planet is presently undergoing. What effect would Paul’s new ecological history have on our attitude toward that extinction? What would result, for instance, from its collision with the ideas of someone like the Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki who believes humans can stop exterminating other species by re-establishing the “sacred balance”[66] that “pre-industrial” or “indigenous” peoples are thought to have maintained with the natural world?
Paul’s insights need not, in my opinion, replace the Rousseauian myths propagated by those who share Suzuki’s beliefs with a Hobbesian caricature of a species burdened by an aberrant level of cruelty and aggression. Humans beings — subject as they unquestionably are to the normal complement of mammalian drives — clearly do a great many things which fall foursquare into our conceptions of “cruelty” or “aggression,” but the exceptional intelligence which makes humans so much more destructive than other animals, also allows them to experience something that is literally inconceivable for other animals: concern for the survival of other species.
While I was writing this, the BBC ran an item about the survivor of an attack by a great white shark, who now campaigns for the protection of the species that nearly caused his death.[67] It’s unthinkable, of course, that a baboon which has survived an attack by a leopard, could be motivated by that attack to make efforts to protect leopards. It is only “man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends… to the humblest living creature,”[68] that could react in such a biologically anomalous way.
“Save the whales” became something of a joke among those who deride “tree huggers,” but it is momentous, of course, rather than funny that Homo sapiens has developed enough understanding to step back from the edge of wiping out the planet’s very largest megafauna.
Human erosion of the biosphere has, however, gone far beyond the overkill of large species. It has developed via agriculture — i.e. the elimination of unwanted life-forms on given tracts of land to create monocultures — into a great many other diversity-threatening activities. These include wholesale habitat destruction, the witting and unwitting introduction of alien species, and the alteration of oceanic and atmospheric chemistry by mining nitrogen from the air and fossil fuels from the earth. With the best will in the world, we may simply not be able to identify and ward off enough of the “thousand cuts” by which biodiversity is dying. It’s by no means impossible, therefore, that the anthropogenic extinction-spasm could continue, despite our best efforts, to the point where it degrades the biosphere’s ability to provide us with food, clean water and air.
* * *
The German word for despair is Verzweiflung. Maybe because it’s got Zweifel, “doubt,” as its root, it feels like the best label for the of the blend of perplexity and dismay I used to feel, before my exposure to Paul’s thinking, about the rising tide of extinctions my species is causing.
Paul’s insights didn’t lessen the dismay part of my Verzweiflung, but they did clear up some of the perplexity. On the most simplistic and emotional of levels, they brought me to the realization that my species wasn’t “bad” or “unnatural.” Homo sapiens has unquestionably had a tragic impact on the biosphere, but it, and the devastating level of its intelligence, are no less products of nature — of natural selection — than the coral-reef communities and rainforests whose existence it is currently threatening.
In order to survive on the Pliocene veld two and a half million years ago, our ancestors had to defend themselves against and compete with a formidable suite of big predators. The outcome of that struggle was by no means assured: the only weapon those hominins possessed to counter the all-too-tangible teeth, claws and horns of their antagonists was an abstract and rudimentary ability to think up useful new devices and behaviors. Today we are involved in another struggle with an uncertain outcome: to prevent that ability from making the earth unlivable for other organisms, and, indeed, for ourselves.
The only weapon available to us in this latter-day struggle is, ironically, the same one that enabled our destructiveness in the first place: the power of the human brain. But that brain cannot, of course, come to grips with the forbidding complexities of this problem if it’s not in possession of the relevant information.
The real facts of our species’ ecological history are an indispensable part of that information, and nobody has done more to make them available to us than Paul Martin.
From http://megafauna.com/
