Dinosaurs, mammoths, ibexes, frogs: a great deal of animals have gone the way of the dodo. Are we next? And would the world be better off without us? In Episode 116 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk about extinction, from Christian eschatology, to the perils of Anthropocene, to cutting-edge de-extinction technology. They turn to animal ethics and scientific dilemmas in search of the ethical approaches that might equip us to think about the extinction of animals, and perhaps even our own. Plu...
Hello and welcome to Overthink, the podcast.
Where two friends who are also philosophers put ideas in dialogue with everyday life.
I'm Ellie Anderson.
And I'm David Pena Guzman.
David, what do you know about the dodo?
Um, the bird I assume you were talking about.
I mean, I know that it was and is no longer.
Yeah, because it has gone extinct, like the name of this episode.
So I feel like the dodo, of course, has become a poster child for extinction.
And that's something that the philosopher Tom Van Doren talks about in his book Flightways.
And the idea is like, you know, yeah,
we know the dodo went extinct to the extent that we even have phrases like dead as a dodo.
But I learned a lot more about the dodo from Van Doren's book.
Okay, I haven't read this book, but I do want to know what you learned, Ellie.
Okay.
The dodos are large, flightless birds who made their homes exclusively on the beautiful island of Mauritius,
a tropical island in East Africa.
And prior to human settlement of Mauritius,
they would have had ample fruit to eat and had no other terrestrial animals to compete with, let alone any predators.
Like, life was sweet for the dodo on the island of Mauritius.