Chapter 03: The Original Penguin

                     
                        

The third chapter of The Sixth Extinction explores a possible cause for most extinctions and that’s natural selection. As we go through the chapter we follow William Lyell and Charles Darwin, important figures in science, who both believed that changes were constantly happening everywhere. However, Charles Darwin would add that natural selection would be “rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good” (p. 54) alluding to how many species had vanished. An example of their principle was the great auk which was largely influenced by people hunting the auks through various places and then eventually, “the last people to see great auks alive were around a dozen icelanders” (p. 65). This shows the theme of how humans can alter natural laws since the hunters who went after the auks pushed them to extinction and possibly caused them to evolve if they could. A prediction for the future is that instances like this will appear more due to the lack of empathy many hunters have for the animals they kill, and this could possibly cause more unwanted extinctions for animals people might have an interest in [P].