Extinction: Are Your Genes Out to Get You?

Species today are at a higher level of extinction risk than ever before. One of the main goals of conservation biology is to determine which species are at a higher risk for extinction in order to become more efficient at protecting and conserving the world’s biodiversity. One of the biggest questions faced in such a task is whether or not having certain biological traits predisposes a species to extinction. Understanding the aforementioned question can aid in the development of a powerful explanatory framework to identify those attributes which predispose a species to extinction or survival in the face of human disturbances. This can also aid in the development of a predictive framework in order to forecast the outcomes of future scenarios and help minimize the impending human impact on biodiversity (Jones et al. 2000). This is crucial because studies show that present rates of extinction are possibly on the order of 1000 to 10000 times greater than in the rest of geological history (Jones et al. 2000).

Five major periods of extinction have long been established by scientists as part of the Earth’s history, and estimates suggest that Earth may be in the midst of its sixth mass extinction. The only difference is that the current crisis, unlike previous mass extinctions, is being driven by human transformation of the global environment rather than natural, geological phenomena (Duffy et al. 2009). Scientists refer to the main processes driving current extinction as the “evil quartet” (habitat loss, over-exploitation, introduced species, and chains of extinction) (Purvis et al. 2000), all of which are purely a function of the human race’s interaction with the natural environment (Bennet and Owens 1997). For this reason, conditions for, and causes of, extinction are completely different now than they have been in past geological history. Of the past extinctions, all five were very highly selective, hitting some groups much harder than others (Jones et al. 2000) and...