This appears to be a pretty dramatically unfounded statement. I would be interested in your evidence for this claim, however.

ORF (Open Reading Frame) is typically used for the case you described, and has been for some time now.

the "damn good reason" mammoths went extinct seems to be that we ate them.

http://deliveringforamerica.com/infographic-the-truth-about-postal-finances/

as of 2006, the USPS has been required to pre-finance retiree benefits for the next 75 years. The govt as a whole uses the USPS as a profit center, while making it look like the USPS is in debt.

you've missed a teaching moment here.

It is called tobacco.

http://www.ukcia.org/research/cancer2.php

If that is the learning you get out of a bachelor in bio, you've done college wrong.

No, he's saying that the North has been holding the South hostage to get what they want. They might threaten to bomb the South if Japan knocks down one of their 'peaceful test' missiles.

As someone going through a PhD program in biology you don't know what the hell you're talking about. The only institutional line that matters is, "Bring in grant money!".

The rest of it is pretty much spot-on, but not really any different than in business or anywhere else. You've got to convince your bosses to keep from firing you, after all.

Pressure bothers us because we have internal air spaces, which get compressed. If you were full of nigh-incompressible water, the depth isn't so much of a problem.

Academic jobs are rarely describable as 'cushy' and require lots of work all the time to simply justify their existence. This doesn't mean there are no crackpots, but it does mean your general perspective on academic life as depicted here is flawed.

Biology grad students get paid to get their degrees. They may not be paid well, but they are not paid badly either.

You do realize that you're full of shit here, right? I'm not entirely sure you realize this because you're not posting as AC.

There have been many successful reintroductions, but the general criteria for them is that the habitat has to exist. In the case of black rhinos, the habitat is still being abused by poaching/etc, so reintroducing the animals won't help the population. The successful reintroductions tend to be with smaller species that never got the attention of poachers/collectors, but that were harmed incidentally through our actions.

The reason we care about extinction is that we probably caused them. The reason the police care about the death of a person you were arguing with is because you probably caused it.

A reason we care about extinctions that we cause is that interesting and potentially valuable species are casually discarded. We don't care about the extinction of the smallpox virus because it was an intentional process because of the incredible harm it caused us. If the Sumatran Rhino had a habit of killing everyone in any village it came across, we would be less concerned about their extinction. Instead the rhino peaceably goes about its life and we humans kill it out of spite, or to make our erections bigger, or other stupid short-sighted selfish reasons.