Extinction

There are just two effects that you're worried about, how big the island is and how far away it is from the mainland.

Extinction is driven by area, and colonization is driven by distance.

Okay? Now all of these things that I've just written down here will be important for you to remember if you are asked how to reconstruct the equilibrium number of species on an island in a certain circumstance.

Okay?

and cornwall of course yes um

and then within sort of the 19th century they became extinct as a breeding bird in kent i was just running through a bit of a timeline before talking about the causes um so they became extinct as breeding birds in kent sussex hampshire and the isle of wight by the 1860s Extinct in Cumbria by 1865, Devon by 1910.

As we move into things like around the 20th century, in 1930s, the Cornish population had dwindled to just three to four nesting sites along the North Coast.

The last successful breeding attempt in Cornwall was in 1947.

I'm John Batchelor.

Thomas Halliday, the author of the new book, Other Lands, A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds.

Thomas is a paleontologist and an evolutionary biologist.

We go now to some part of human history that is present in the 20th century, a very famous movie called Jurassic Park.

I'm John Batchelor.

This is CBS Eye on the World.

I'm John Batchelor and I'm traveling backwards in time with Thomas Halliday, the author of Other Lands, A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds, a new book that allows you to go back and back and back and always asking yourselves, how did we get here from there? We go now to the Permian.

253 million years ago, which is right before an extinction event.

It's a massive problem, which, if we're not careful, could end up...

Extinctions are a real thing.

They've happened five times in the history of our planet.

They're always caused by a disruption of the atmosphere, ultimately, changes in pH and whatnot.

And the reason this is ranked worse than an engineered plague, and for some philosophers even worse than extinction, is the concept of permanence.

The eternal aspect of it.

Extinction is a finality.

The book closes, the pain ends.

But a digital, AI-enforced dictatorship? It could be eternal.

And that means, if we think about it, you know, Cro-Magnon man is not running around on the planet anymore.

So there are extinctions.

Extinctions.

that are underway simultaneous to evolution happening.

And so part of what we need to let go of is any attachment to things being the way they've always been.

But no, they exist.

De-Extinctions, the De-Extinction Company that announced in April 2025 it had brought back the dire wolf.

Sweet.

A predator that died out, hold on to your seats, more than 10,000 years ago.

They won't exist.

And you can look at- Instinction, yeah.

Instinction.

So you can look at South Korea right now with the fertility rate that's low, or Japan or other societies that have a very low fertility rate.

It's a real issue, and they are actually proactively investing in this space.