There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
Jean Baptiste de Lamarck and Thomas Huxley, two of the foremost thinkers of the 18th
and 19th centuries, believed that humanity could not cause the extinction of marine
species. Their opinions reflected a widespread belief that the seas were an inexhaustible
source of food and wealth of which people could barely use a fraction. Such views
were given weight by the abundant fisheries of the time. Additionally, the incredible
fecundity and wide distributions of marine fishes, combined with limited exploitation,
provided ample justification for optimism. The ideas of Huxley and Lamarck persist
to this day, despite a sea change in the scale and depth of our influence on the oceans.
Marine species could be at a far greater risk of extinction than we have assumed.