Extinction

From CreationWiki, the encyclopedia of creation science

Extinct animals: Plesiosaurs, Pterosaurs, Wooly Mammoths, and Dimetrodon.

Extinction may result from natural selection: "survival of the fittest" means that variations of organisms develop less-competitive attributes in a population causing a sub-population to decrease until extinct. Extinction is also the result of catastrophic environmental effects (such as the global disaster of the flood of Noah) that can destroy life in some or all ecological niches. In modern times, however, many extinctions have been caused by human activities.

When a global disaster destroys all members of one or more species, it is called mass extinction.

Extinction and Evolution

The significance of extinction for the general theory of evolution is that an enormous number of kinds of organisms must be imagined in the past, in order to make believable universal common ancestry: a much greater number of kinds of organisms than are now living, and a much greater number than are represented as fossils. Careful consideration reveals that universal common ancestry demands a great number, even an astronomical number, of transitional forms of life, and that the species which became extinct must be replaced by new varieties. The credibility issue with this kind of evolution, however, is with what happens after the extinction of one or more species: New forms of life do not emerge simply because a different variety became extinct; in other words, an environment devoid of life does not cause life to arise.

Dinosaur Extinction

Main Article: Dinosaur extinction

The mass extinction of dinosaur's seems to many to be a puzzling scientific mystery. Within standard-model evolutionary thought, dinosaur's became extinct by some type of catastrophe around 50 to 65 million years ago. One problem with massive extinction, recognized by Darwin, is the abundance of living fossils.