Chapter 3:

The chapter starts with the real meaning of catastrophic, a term coined by William Whewell was actually used to describe a scientist that believed the world was founded on natural catastrophes. The opposite of this term is uniformitarian. One uniformitarian was geologist Charles Lyell,  who studied the rocks of Paris, Italy, and London, only to find out that there was no catastrophic event that made animals extinct. Therefore, extinction is a process rather than an event. Charles Darwin was was one of his admires as Darwin really did love Lyell’s work on extinction. Lyell believed that the world is always changing in small ways and, unlike Darwin, did not believe in the theory of evolution, “ there is no foundation in geological facts for the popular theory of the successive development of the animal and vegetable world”( pg 48). Darwin believed in the survival of the fittest, or natural selection. All life forms are constantly at war with each other for basic needs such as food and water, meaning, only those who win the battle get to live which is what leads to evolution. Kolbert visited the Icelandic Institute of Natural History to see and learn about the extinct great auk. The great auk is considered to be the original penguin as it had the same features as a penguin yet they come from different animal groups. The great auk population used to be in the millions and were normally found in Iceland. Just like penguins, they were fast swimmers and were usually in the water. Sadly, the great auk went extinct because of humans. Native Americans and Europeans hunted the great auks to extinction. Another example of rapid extinction were the tortoises from the Galapagos, this was witnessed by Darwin himself. He was writing a paper on natural selection when he came across Charles island in which the population of tortoises was rapidly decreasing. Both the great auks and the tortoise went extinct during Darwin’s lifetime which just shows how much human interference a mess with the balance of nature, "Either there had to be a separate category for human-caused extinction(...) or space in the natural order had to be made for cataclysm, in which case, Cuvier--distressingly--was right" (pg 69). Humans are causing the extinction of so many animals and it just shows that we are the reason why the environment is in danger.