Chapter 5 opens up with an experiment about perception performed by two Harvard psychologists, which had each test subject identify cards of a deck as they flipped by, with few cards being fake, an example being a red spade. Many of the test subjects struggle to see what they were witnessing (fake card; saw the color as a purplish brown or in for a few, couldn’t comprehend at all what they were seeing) as they moved more slowly, but misidentified them as a normal heart or diamond upon regular pace. Upon reading about this experiment, historian of science Thomas Kuhn used the experiment to explain how humans were able to progress in science. When upon seeing something we can’t understand. We first try to fit it within an idea we are able to understand already, and then when we are able to see that we don’t actually know what the subject is, it suddenly becomes something so alien, we can’t comprehend it. Then after looking into it and giving complex thought, we are able to call a red spade, a red spade. This, Kuhn argued, is how we survived paradigm shifts.
Jon Zalasiewicz was a specialist in graptolites, a once common marine V-shaped species that is believed by Alverez to have been wiped out by glaciation. Towards the end of the Ordovician period, green-house climate prevailed, sea level and temperature rose, though its sudden and sharp decline in temperature and CO2 dropping created the befall of graptolites, as well as having competitors for CO2-mossy plants thriving and consuming all around them, damaging the diversity of the ocean significantly. Many scientists think we are creating that same effect, producing a greenhouse gas climate, but the unnatural transition of climate is what might lead to similar effects that the end-Ordovician saw. When seeing the effects of human activity in the world today and comparing it to similar disasters in the past, Paul Crutzen dubbed this idea the “Anthropocene”. And the one to take over our world after would be rats.
Rats were not once all over the world. Due to trade, rats found themselves every corner. On page 106, Kolbert states,“In many places, Norway rats, which are actually from China, outcompeted the earlier rat invaders and, in so doing, ravaged the bird and reptile populations the Pacific rats had missed… Meanwhile, whatever the future holds for rats, the extinction event they are helping to bring about will leave its own distinctive mark”. Because of us, rats themselves are able to damage the diversity and survival of entire ecosystems, as well as in the case of the study done in Easter Island, completely deforest habitats. This connects to the APES theme of humans alter natural systems, one of the most obvious examples in this chapter being the introduction of rats in other parts of the world have done the bidding of killing off entire species, creating an imbalance in the natural system.
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