Ironic DNA
The author locates a sense of irony as an essential part of the human DNA. We are a species capable of defying logic to the degree of absurdist theater when we put our collective minds to it:
“Somewhere in our DNA must lie the key mutation (or, more probably, mutations) that set us apart—the mutations that make us the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome.”
The Great Barrier Reef
A trip to the Great Barrier Reef is undertaken with the intent of gathering more information how human contribution to global climate change. They don’t call it the Great Barrier Reef for nothing, however, and ultimately humanity’s role in the future of the planet is put into ironic perspective:
“I was struck again by the extraordinary stars and the lightless horizon. I also felt, as I had several times at One Tree, the incongruity of my position. The reason I’d come to the Great Barrier Reef was to write about the scale of human influence. And yet Schneider and I seemed very, very small in the unbroken dark.”
The Hall of Irony
A trip through the Hall of Biodiversity reveals a sign featuring a quote from noted bio-ecologist Paul Ehrlich. In its irony, however, lies not so much the familiar form of sarcastic humor as a terrifyingly truthful warning about the direction we all seemed headed toward with worrying too much about the fact that the brakes don’t work too well:
“IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.”
And the Nobel for Funny Goes To
Scientists really are funny guys, though not necessarily the same kind of funny as presented in The Big Bang Theory. Paul Crutzen is one of the chemists who would eventually share a Nobel Prize for discovering the effects of ozone depletion. One of his fellow Nobel laureates:
“reportedly came home from his lab one night and told his wife, `The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.’”
“Helping a Species Go Extinct”
Perilously close to extinction, a concerted effort was undertaken to preserve the Sumatran Rhino which revolve around a captive breeding program. Rhinos were captured with several sent to zoos in the U.S. in order to prevent the species from going out of business in the wild native habitat in Southeast Asia. Of the forty rhinos captured, many died and none had successfully mated. An academic study was published in 1995 in a journal titled Conservation Biology featuring the corrosively ironic title listed above.
