Professor Alisa Bokulich & the Φ-Geo Group Featured in The Brink
Professor Alisa Bokulich and her research group the Φ-Geo Group had a feature article published in the Brink entitled “Are We Really in a Sixth Mass Extinction?” The article discusses how Professor Bokulich came to study Philosophy of Science and what blind spots philosophers can help scientists find in their research:
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Scientists began ringing the alarm about a sixth mass extinction decades ago. An author of one 2017 study that found billions of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians have been lost all over the planet said that, “the situation has become so bad it would not be ethical not to use strong language.” The framing of entering a sixth mass extinction has successfully gained the public’s attention, but is more likely to mislead than inform, Bokulich and the authors write. Their paper points out that conservationists and paleo scientists collect data differently, a major challenge when trying to compare the situation today to millions of years ago. Today’s biodiversity data is collected at the species level (think: tigers, leopards, jaguars, lions), Bokulich explains, but paleontological records are at the genus level (for those big cats, that’d be the Panthera genus).
“If we were in a sixth mass extinction today, we would expect hundreds of genera to be going extinct, but we hardly know of any genera being lost in modern times, so the numbers don’t quite compare—but that doesn’t mean it’s not horrible and urgent action isn’t needed,” Bokulich says. “This is more about how awful the past mass extinctions were, than a claim we don’t need to be worried about the present.”
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Click here to read the article in the Brink.
Congratulations, Professor!