Extinction Studies at Boggle Hole

 

Last week was the inaugural field trip of the Leverhulme Extinction Studies Doctoral Training Program at Leeds. Students and supervisors headed to Boggle Hole, a beautiful cove just south of Robin Hood's Bay on the Yorkshire coast.

It's a gorgeous stretch, and on day one we were really lucky with the weather while Ana Cowie from the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust led us on a rockpooling session.

We found a bunch of cool stuff, including ragworms, a devil crab, a butterfish, beadlet anemones, blennies and loads of other crabs and molluscs. 

The next day we walked across the cliffs, through some more-standard freezing rain, to Ravenscar.

At Ravenscar, we stumbled upon a colony of seals! A mixture of grey seals and harbour seals, at least 50 of them, lounging around, play fighting and lolloping about in the water. 

Once we were able to tear our eyes away, Dr Alex Dunhill, one of the project's supervisors, led us back along the beach on a fossil-hunting session.

Here we were treated to ammonites, belemnites, corals, crinoid stems and all sorts of bivalves.

Let's face it, philosophers don't often get to go on field trips, so to get three days of nature, naturalism, and enthusiastic conservation students - not mention stunning beaches, sunshine, tasty meals and a quiet hotel room - I was in heaven. Even if I did suck at bananagrams.

But what was I even doing there, I hear you ask? And isn't a bit twisted to get so happy about extinction?!

The project gathers faculty from a bunch of disciplines - Biology, English, History, Geology, Philosophy, Geography, Social Science,  Linguistics and more - to supervise doctoral projects that explore the meaning, histories and legacies of extinction, in different ways. Some of the students are looking at the extinction of languages. Others are looking at what extinction looks like in the fossil record. 

My own angle stems from my interest in biological ontology - ie how we conceptualise contested objects in biology, such as 'species', 'ecosystem' and 'organism'. I explore questions about the objectivity and boundaries of such objects. 

Extinction is usually understood as the loss of a species, but conservationists also make extensive use of biodiversity measures, which are notoriously  controversial, because there are so many different possible measures - a count of organisms or of species; a measure of genetic diversity; a count of ecosystem types - and so on. Biodiversity measures are important because they typically guide conservation interventions and narratives, and different measures can foster different conclusions about conservation priorities. So how do we decide which to use? Practical constraints are often important, but I'm interested in the assumptions that are made about what the different measures reveal. For example, we might be interested in choosing the measure that gives the best estimate of the extent to which a particular set of living things is likely to be resilient to ecological perturbations, which may or may not be reducible to its evolutionary potential or evolvability. 

I'm also interested in the normative foundations of conservation work. In particular, we might think its reasonable to say that extinction is a bad thing. But, plausibly, some extinction is morally neutral, or even good. The extinction of smallpox is celebrated in the strongest terms, and most people would like to see the coronavirus go extinct. We might also think about something like the great oxygenation event, and struggle to feel any sadness, given that the event cleared the way for complex life forms, including ourselves, to evolve.  Is it a shame that the dinosaurs went extinct, given that we probably wouldn't be here, if they hadn't? What can we say about the right way to distinguish bad from good or neutral extinctions?

We weren't really being happy about extinction, of course.  The project is very much anti-extinction is spirit. But its nonetheless well worth digging into the details of what *exactly* is bad about it, and how the badness covaries with different features of the species or era or speed or what-not of the extinction.

And even though this bit of coast yielded a surprising about of nature to my city-girl senses, Ana explained that marine pollution remains a severe threat.

By the way, do let me know if you like the idea of exploring these questions further......the program will begin recruiting its next cohort of doctoral students soon!