Selects: How Extinction Works

It’s rare that the downfall of an empire can be chalked up to the decisions of just one person. It’s even rarer, when the empire falls over the course of a year. That’s pretty much what happened with the Soviet Union when Mikhail Gorbachev dissolved it.See omnystudio.com/listener ...  Show more

Narcolepsy is one of those amazing rare disorders that everyone thinks they understand – people just fall asleep at random times, even in the middle of doing something. But there’s a lot more to it and – even better – we actually may be able to explain it. Josh and Chuck run it d ...  Show more

When it comes to protecting the biodiversity of Planet Earth, there is no greater failure than extinction. Thankfully, only a few dozen species have been officially declared extinct by the US Fish and Wildlife Service in the half-century since the passage of the Endangered Specie ...  Show more

As the world struggles through an ongoing mass extinction, scientists across the planet are getting closer and closer to bringing entire species back from the dead -- a process known as de-extinction. Inspired by an earlier episode on the thylacine, Ben and Matt dive into the ...

One of the difficulties in thinking about extinction, as Lorraine Daston argued in her recent review of Vanished by Sadiah Qureshi, is ‘the challenge of scale: the mismatch between our decades and centuries and the Earth’s epochs and aeons’. Lorraine joins Tom to explore the ways ...  Show more

Jonathan sits down with evolutionary biologist Dr. Leryn Gorlitsky to discuss the many mass extinctions that have happened through Earth’s lifetime, why some species survive and why others die, and how humans are the primary cause of the ongoing mass extinction today. Find out w ...  Show more