David Sepkoski, Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene

Abstract

With his latest book, David Sepkoski offers the reader the opportunity to explore the emergence of a particularly critical concept—that of extinction—and the intellectual contexts it has been involved in from the nineteenth century to the present day. The author investigates the scientific, political, and cultural dimensions of the discourse from which the main ideas of extinction have emerged. This is what Sepkoski calls an ‘extinction imaginary’. From a marginal catastrophic Cuvierian concept of extinction, which appeared rather contestable in the optimism of the Victorian era, to the concepts of diversity and stability as developed in the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries, the reader is taken on a very intriguing historical journey that raises a number of philosophical considerations. For instance, the inherent normative value of diversity is highlighted by the author and thoroughly examined in the ecological context of the current biodiversity crisis. Moreover, the author focuses not only on the historical context of catastrophic thinking in Western society, but also tells a universal story common to every human being pertaining to our anxieties about the future and the fear of our demise as a species. In this regard, Sepkoski demonstrates a profound understanding of human nature, of its failures as well as of its healing abilities, as he ultimately addresses the crucial question of the current Sixth Extinction. David Sepkoski is the son of the prominent paleontologist Jack Sepkoski, who along with Dave Raup and David Jablonski developed the periodicity model of diversification in the 1980s and proposed the ‘Big-Five’ mass extinctions. Accordingly, he displays an intimate knowledge of palaeobiological mechanisms, and he describes the story behind this model, showing how it contributed to a more precise understanding of the nature of extinction, biological diversity, and diversification in the framework of Darwinian evolution. Scientifically, Catastrophic Thinking reinforces the threefold relation of extinction-diversity-evolution that constitutes a key element Accepted: 27 April 2022 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 David Sepkoski, Catastrophic thinking: extinction and the value of diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene, Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 2020