The Sixth Extinction Chapter 3 - Elyonni Tordesillas

     Elizabeth Kolbert opens chapter 3 by talking about William Whewell, president of the Geological Society of London in 1832, who coined an important word: “catastrophist.” While this word has taken on some new meanings since 1832,  To Whewell, a catastrophist  was a scientist who believed that the history of the planet was characterized by sudden, global catastrophes that caused large numbers of species to go extinct. Whewell had an associate, a geologist named Charles Lyell.  Lyell was an Oxford-educated scientist who’d been friendly with Cuvier. Lyell studied the rocks of Paris, Italy, and England, and found no evidence that there had been a global catastrophe that caused species to go extinct, all the evidence pointed to a slow, gradual process of erosion in the planet’s geological structure. Lyell concluded that, while some species certainly went extinct, extinction was a slow, gradual process, not a sudden, catastrophic mass death.  Lyell then became a well known author, famous for his research and ideas. One of his most prestigious readers happened to be a young Charles Darwin. He was incredibly inspired by Lyell, and often shared his research and ideas with him. In the book Elizabeth Kolbert states "Without Lyell there would have been no Darwin." Although Lyell was an important inspiration to Darwin, he believed that the geological world was changing in small, almost immeasurable ways, he didn’t believe in any theory of evolution. Darwin argued that there could be no extinction without the origin of new species. Life forms on Earth, he argued, were constantly in competition for the limited resources of food, water, and shelter. Species went extinct because other species had qualities that made them superior at finding food and shelter and reproducing. By the same logic, new species must appear over time, either surviving because of their superior qualities or dying out. This connects to the idea of "Natural Selection" which is the process that organisms better adapted to their environment tend to survive and produce more offspring.