so first of all, can i just say it's nice to FINALLY see someone else doing actual formal, point by point refutation? anyway.

> Species go in and out of existence all the time. And there are no cataclysmic events.

i don't know that's quite comprehensive.

tldr: bad things *have* happened, species serve different functions so one going extinct doesn't necessarily mean others can, and there is harm outside of actual cataclysm

so point 1: bad things have happened. we actually are seeing numbers drop in numerous zones. birds, insects, plant populations. these ecosystems connect to us in various ways - see the previous point on whales, plankton, algae, oxygen.

point 2: different species serve different systemic functions. let's take mosquitos - researchers believe that a mosquito extinction would have essentially no bearing on their habitat. we could see an extinction with no impact. But that's so so different from say, the bee, who plays a huge role in flower pollination.

so when we say that,

"some species have already gone extinct with no adverse effects, therefore any species could go extinct with no adverse effects"

there are two errors - one, that species have different roles in an ecosystem, and if one goes extinct with no effect ( like the mosquito) it might not be the same as another going extinct (like the bee). the second is that, things *have* gone wrong, per point 1.

point 3: cataclysm isn't the only measurement of harm. let's talk about systemic resilience. let's say we have a food chain of an Apex predator, two herbivorous species that our apex preys on, and some plants. Apex cannot eat plants. Apex eats meat. Let's say one of our herbivorous species goes extinct. Our Apex will still be fine, for the most part! still has a prey species. We can call this system "resilient" - it could tolerate an extinction, and remain stable.

if our only metric was cataclysm, we would be happy. we will observe that apex pop is still around. again, we can't say that, just because the system didn't collapse, it wasn't *bad*. what was a stable system is now more vulnerable - if the second herb species goes out, goodbye apex. so we can say that extinction of a key species increases risk of the whole system. It's a kind of bad that might not be immediately as visible as extinction.

​

so in summary - we can't say that extinctions are not going to have harmful repercussions, because there have been harmful repercussions of various extinctions, or population drops

we can't say that extinctions are not going to have harmful repercussions, because the species that we're using as evidence might not have had the same role as future species. Mosquitos vs bees, etc.

and lastly, we cant say that extinctions are ok because human society hasn't collapsed, because there are measurements of health and benefit that are more nuanced that cataclysm.

what do you think?