Disappearing Species

I read an article today about manatees and how their numbers are thinning. We humans seem to spend a lot of time worrying about species going extinct. We probably feel responsible, since many of the species that do disappear are destroyed due to human activity such as farming or hunting.

How many species have gone extinct over the last 10,000 years, which is more or less the time span human civilization has existed? Probalby hundreds of thousands. Many other millions of species have disappeared before humans even evolved. It is a cycle, with new ones showing up on an ongoing basis, and others going extinct. Our scientific community has not been around long enough to observe the process, but I doubt anyone can dismiss the fact species are appearing and disappearing continuously.

While we should certainly pay attention to what we do to our environment and how much change we introduce in it, I think we need to take a step back and assess what we are doing with some of the animals we suspect will go extinct. In the case of manatees for example, we breed them in captivity and later release them into the wild. This looks a lot more like genetical engineering and population control to me that many of the stuff that goes on inside labs and about which there is always a lot of public uproar. Are we not playing god? Are we not introducing change where we should perhaps not interfere? Protecting the environment and keeping our virus-like species from invading the planet host is one thing, but attempting to control it and decide which species should survive and which not is another. It is a fine, blurry line that may well be too easy to cross.