gwern comments on Mini advent calendar of Xrisks: Pandemics - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 06 December 2012 01:44PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (20)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: gwern 06 December 2012 09:41:41PM *  3 points [-]

And extirpation of a connected population from its (substantial) range is an OK proxy.

I'm not a paleontologist, but don't we see species suddenly vanish from their ranges all the time even excluding the mass extinction events? How do we know that some of these extirpations are not pandemics?