Human beings and the species they introduce are not a “cancer” of Planet Earth

Abstract

In a previous study (Pereyra et al. 2024), we showed that there isan entrenched bias against introduced species, irrespective of evidence. In response, Simberloff and colleagues (2024) argued thatit is known that some introduced species can have effects considered negative by the conservation community and that, therefore,introduced species “are all, to some extent, potentially harmful.”This is precisely the negative bias our study found. Simberloff andcolleagues (2024) went so far as to analogize introduced specieswith a potentially lethal cancer to justify strategies to drive themextinct. This analogy prompts reflection on the underlying misanthropy in the foundations of invasion biology—and likely in conservation biology more broadly.