Dear Phil:
How exciting---Peru! I hope you're having a great time as well as doing great things.
Yes, all dogs are one species. Because of this, theoretically a Great Dane can mate with a Chihuahua and produce viable offspring. In practice, however, the Great Dane would probably crush its beloved. The interbreeding could be achieved in a test tube. Despite their outward differences, the Great Dane and the Chihuahua are actually very similar genomically.
Probably 99% of all species that ever lived are extinct. It's an entirely plausible percentage, given that life has existed for billions of years and humans only a few millions---unless you choose to disbelieve the evidence of that after careful and unbiased studying of it. So your implication is correct: Extinctions have occurred frequently long before we ever walked the earth. But the key difference is that, while we're wiping out millions of species in a few hundred years, most extinctions in the past occurred over a very long time scale. Even the extinction of the dinosaurs took a couple million years to fully play out, I believe. Another distinction is that we are conscious agents in what we are doing. So really it's our loss---and a loss that may ultimately threaten our own existence.
I do believe that species are funneling down---to people and those organisms capable of coexisting with people. The rest are disappearing because we're destroying the places where they live and they cannot adapt to the changes.
The core of my own thesis is that in destroying nature we also destroy ourselves, either spiritually or directly.
Kindest regards,
Stephen
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Dear Stephen,
Am still in Peru, but this Sunday will be leaving the Altiplano for Lima, then Seattle.
Thanks for the explanation about dogs. My questions are probably a bit simplistic.
I did have the chance to go to the jungle of Puno for about five days. While there the regional governor bragged to us that it was, according to Guinness, the most bio-diverse area of the planet, untouched by humans except for some eco-tourists. The question I had was how much destruction of species takes place thru changes in nature beyond human control and how much can be attributed to human mismanagement. Do you know if any studies have been done on that question?
You mentioned earlier about insect species becoming extinct. Is there a list of larger animals which have disappeared in the past hundred years? I always here about the Dodo bird, but are there others?
One final question: Is the Spotted Owl a species or a subspecies (like the Chihuahua)?
Again, look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Fr. Phil Bloom