Mass extinction; on Darwin, Adam Smith, Newton (and Parfit)

Every so often the significance of extinction to Darwinian natural selection is rediscovered. (The present post is triggered by Mary Pickard Winsor's (2023) "Darwin’s dark matter: utter extinction" Annals of Science which landed in my mailbox because I try to keep informed on trends in scholarship in the history of science.) During the mid 1990s, when …