Chapter 5 - Admir Basic

In Chapter 5 of The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert introduced a famous experiment in which Harvard psychologists tampered with playing cards to record the responses of human perception. Most of the playing cards were ordinary except for a card of black hearts and a card red spades. These cards were shown quickly to a couple dozen students to see if they would match the color to the figure. The students watched the cards with a naked eye and did not catch the inverted colors. The students approached this obstacle of naming the cards using previous knowledge of playing cards. This is a conflict that goes on anytime a scientist introduces a new way of thinking about the world. Most scientists attempt to explain phenomena using conventional knowledge while a small portion of them go outside the box seeking answers. When Alvarez first published his idea that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, scientists initially did not support it. However, Alvarez contributed to a paradigm shift that explains why there are fossil gaps in geologic times. With this new paradigm in place, scientists were able to justify why species became extinct in the masses during the end of the Ordovician era due to glaciation. Scientists also argued that a mass extinction occurred 252 million years ago due to global warming utilizing the new paradigm. The author of the book learned from Zalasiewicz about the idea that rats are amongst the most resilient animals that would most likely survive the next mass extinction. Ironically, the next mass extinction is occurring because of human influence and that humans have created a new period of geologic time known as Anthropocene. The rate of this current mass extinction is unprecedented in geologic history. Zalasiewicz had made a case about the Anthropocene Period in which humans had unprecedentedly impacted the planet more than any other geologic period at a greater speed. According to page 110, “If he’s [Zalasiewicz] successful and the Anthropocene is adapted as a new epoch, every geology textbook in the world immediately will become obsolete.” [(R) It’s funny to see how science advances fast enough to quickly render older science material as outdated information. It also outlines how significant this epoch is for geological times and how powerful our influence has been on the planet since humanity began. This connects to the theme that science is a process since new information and knowledge quickly replaces old, obsolete information about science.]