Explanations of Species Extinction in Nineteenth-Century China and Europe
This essay compares the articulation of the idea of species extinction in Europe and China. The idea of species extinction is usually assumed to have arisen first in late –eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Europe, contributing to Darwin’s formulation of his theory of natural selection as the basis for the evolution of species. This essay begins by citing Deng Qi’nan, a Chinese official writing in 1811, who also discussed species extinction—but who attributed the causes of species extinction to human action—and then explores the long-term historical context of changes to China’s environment that informed both the observation of species extinction in China and its attribution to human agency. The chapter concludes by considering whether a theory of species extinction that is grounded in science and “the natural archive” is more true than one grounded in research into the written records found in “the human archive.”