A book that describes in great detail a search in a far-off land for a creature that ends up being extinct is like a carefully cooked meal brought to a meticulously set table for a guest who never appears. The antecedent drama and preparation work up to a crescendo of glumness and confusion, leading to a sharp feeling of tragedy and loss—the feeling we all experience, in other words, on the death of someone we love. In this case, however, the loss is of a large, flightless, aquatic species of penguin.A professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Iceland, Pálsson details a journey made in 1858 to Eldey Island, just off the southwest coast of Iceland, by two Englishmen obsessed with birds, and especially bird eggs. John Wolley and Alfred Newton were hoping against hope to find garefowl—instances of the once-abundant species known to us as great auks. In the decade preceding Wolley and Newton's expedition, sightings of the species had dwindled. The great auk had been hunted for its meat, skin, oil, and feathers for ages, but Victorians could not imagine a reality in which any of God's creations might be wiped out forever by human hands. The Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus believed that extinction itself was impossible, and Charles Darwin, who published On the Origin of Species the year after Wolley and Newton returned—argued that in the long process of life's evolution, natural selection, not human intervention, favors survival of the fittest species and varieties––and the demise of all the rest.But this prejudice of biologists was about to change. For Wolley and Newton, despite their great efforts, came up short. There were people still around whom they interviewed who had hunted and traded the great auk, there were eggs here and there to be procured, and auks stuffed and mounted. There were fisherman's tales, and auk bones, and plenty of lore. But there was not one living great auk to be found. All had been hunted to oblivion.Extinction was the name that Victorians, as late as the late 1880s, would finally fasten to this sad phenomenon. The word had been used previously to describe the history of landed families: When a line became extinct, the name and succession of property and practices went with it. Pálsson shows how this new conceptual coupling was influenced directly by Wolley and Newton's expedition. Hence the meticulously prepared meal, at which the guest of honor never appears. It was these two egg collectors who introduced the concept of unnatural extinction into modern language and thought.Extinction itself was recognized, in the early nineteenth century, by Europe's conservative doyen of natural history, the Frenchman Georges Cuvier. He opposed the evolutionism of Lamarck, his countryman, but floods and chaos, or even the whims of God, might explain the flamboyant Ichthyosaurs and Plesiosaurs then being unearthed (including by Mary Anning, an unsung female paleontologist). Pushing a species off the cliff with human hands was another thing altogether. In line with this sentiment, when hunters in Europe, North America, and Greenland had found the breeding grounds of the great auk empty, they assumed that the birds had simply gone elsewhere to breed for a time. Now, as the two disappointed naturalists morphed from ornithologists into anthropologists, the veil of ignorance had been lifted. What did the slaughter of these animals say of us? What did their disappearance mean for the natural order? And could such tragedies be reversed? These were questions that had never before been asked.Wolley died in 1859, and it would be left to the younger Newton to become the champion of unnatural extinction (he called it “Newtonian extinction”), arguing for human complicity and responsibility and urging politicians in Britain to place bird protection, and wild game protection more broadly, on the agenda. While Victorians, including Darwin, generally believed that extinction was consistent with a balance of nature, Newton had exposed the lie involved in this assumption. The boundaries between science and sentiment were being redrawn, and Newton, who had a lame leg and walked all his life with a stick, began to demand the authority to speak for what was right. Hunting for human purposes was all right, he argued against “mere sentimentalists,” but it needed experts to determine under what conditions population replacement could be safeguarded. Newton's campaign, until this very day, raises questions of the human relation to nature. Are we a part of creation, or above it, or beside it? Do we carry special responsibility for other creatures, and if so, why? These are conundrums each modern generation faces, and as a recent book by David Sepkoski argues, each generation deserves the extinction story that it begets.However human behavior and legislation transiently resolve around questions of biodiversity and the inherent value of life, endlings—the name given to the last of their kind—are special. They touch people, and their stories—famous ones like those of dodos and carrier pigeons, and less famous ones like those of golden toads and Steller's sea cows—are told and retold. Perhaps they remind us humans of our own evanescence. For its part, the last great auk, with its waddling gait, large beak, and useless stubby wings, remains precious to us, as does the knowledge that despite its terrestrial awkwardness, it once flew with its wings in the sea “as swiftly as flying birds in the air.” The great auk, and the story of how it went extinct, matter. Whatever our views of extinction, they hold a mirror up to ourselves.
Oren Harman (Mon,) studied this question.