Chapter 5: Welcome To The Anthropocene

The fifth chapter starts out by explaining an experiment that was made by Harvard psychologists, where students were shown altered playing cards and were asked to identify them. When the cards were shown quickly, the students tended to ignore the differences and connected them to something familiar. This experiment was the basis of historian Thomas Kuhn’s work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He argues that this concept was so simple but it shaped scientific processes. Kuhn made the term paradigm shifts popular which is a change in the way things are seen or done overtime. This can be seen throughout science history when fossils were emerging over the years and scientists were trying to find out where they came from. The author states, “When Cuvier arrived in Paris, he saw that the mastodon’s molars could not be fit into the established framework, a ‘My God’ moment that led him to propose a whole new way of seeing them.”(93) This demonstrates how the understanding of the concept of extinction has progressed as people continued to make observations. 

Kolbert went to Dobb’s Linn and there were rocks that date back to the Ordovician period. During this period, there was an “explosion” of new life forms. This was prominent in oceans where the first coral reefs appeared. At the end of this period, a majority of these new species would go extinct.  Graptolites were marine organisms that were abundant during the Orodician period. Because of Walter Alvarez’s theory that an asteroid wiped out all populations, scientists believed that this explained the mass extinction that occurred at the end of the ordovician period. Another theory emerged that the asteroid probably produced aftershocks the created lesser extinctions. “If an asteroid had produced one chasm in the fossil record, it seemed reasonable to expect that impacts had caused all of them.” (101) The author explains how human activity has impacted the natural environment. Paul Crutzen invented the word “Anthropocene” which represents the scientific period in which the use of ozone depleting chemicals is leading to a new type of mass extinction.