Peter D Ward, THE END OF EVOLUTION: ON MASS EXTINCTIONS AND THE PRESERVATION OF BIODIVERSITY
5 stars
In The End of Evolution: On Mass Extinctions and the Preservation of Biodiversity, Dr. Peter Douglas Ward, a renowned scientist whose specialties include the biology of mass extinctions, astrobiology, paleontology, and geology, describes the two greatest mass extinctions in the history of our planet, and compares them to the mass extinction presently occurring in our world, one which began around 100,000 years ago and has eradicated countless species ever since.
He describes for us the crystal-clear waters of the Philippine archipelago, now a marine graveyard eerily empty of sea life; a lush Hawaiian paradise whose native life has suffered a devastating depopulation and mass extinction; the great Columbia River of the Pacific Northwest, bereft of its once-abundant salmon, and now an empty series of dammed lakes; wolves, once numbering in the millions in North America, now reduced to maybe 2,000 individuals. He gives us a roll-call of the dead over a hundred thousand years, ranging from the mighty mammoths, short-faced bears, sabre-toothed cats, and other fauna indigenous to North America all of which have perished during the range of time in which Homo sapiens has lived upon the Earth.
Twice in the distant past, enormous, catastrophic extinctions have devastated the Earth, bringing about the end of evolution -- extinctions -- for vast numbers of creatures, and the beginning of new species, genera, even families, orders, and classes of organisms.The first took place a quarter of a billion years ago, closing out the Paleozoic Era and initiating the Mesozoic Era, marking the extinction of 90 percent or more of all multicellular life on Earth and opening the way for the evolution of the first true mammals and the eventual advent of Homo sapiens sapiens, modern human beings. The second took place 65 million years ago, closing out the Mesozoic Era and initiating the Cenozoic Era, entailing the extinction of at least 50 percent of all species then existing on Earth, including the last of the non-avian dinosaurs, the causes of which likely included a giant asteroid or comet impact in the area that is now the Yucatan in Mexico as well as the poisoning of Earth's atmosphere by gigantic flood basalt eruptions in the Deccan area of what would become the subcontinent India, coupled with climate change brought about by those same eruptions. Now Peter Ward searches for the clues to these horrendous events, on a journey that takes him to several continents and island archipelagos as well as far back in time, to the scenes of these two mass extinction events. His reason for doing so is urgent and terrifying, for he and many other distinguished scientists have documented strong evidence that a third, gigantic mass extinction has also begun on our world. Could the primary cause of that Third Event have begun 100,000 years ago, with the impact of another wandering, destructive, fire-bearing "asteroid" named Homo sapiens?
Ward's journey progresses from fossil hunting in the Karoo Desert of South Africa to dinosaur trails and fossils in Hell Creek, Montana, to rich fossil beds in France and New Mexico and Hawaii and the Petrified Forest of Arizona, and finally to the remote Caucasus Mountains of Soviet Georgia. At each stop along the way, he documents the rich diversity of life now endangered by climate change and the world's burgeoning human population.
The urgency and poignancy of his quest is highlighted by his own words near the end of The End of Evolution:
"I have a son. He is tall and gangly, with a face speckled by a galaxy of freckles. He is mischievous and playful, willful and happy, the normal mix of boyish hopes, dreams, and emotions. He is precious to me beyond belief.
"I keep having this vision of living with him in the Amazon rain forest, where we exist in a small hovel no different from that inhabited by a fifth of humanity. And in this dream, my son is hungry. Behind our house sits one last patch of forest, and in that pristine copse is the nest of a beautiful bird, the last nest, it so happens, of that species. This vision is a nightmare to me, because even knowing that these birds are the last of their race, I don't have the slightest doubt what my actions would be. To feed my son, to keep him alive, I would do whatever I had to do, including destroying the last of another species.
"Anyone who thinks he or she might do otherwise is probably not a parent. There are a great number of parents currently on the earth, and many more on the way." -- Peter D. Ward, The End of Evolution (1994), pp. 271-272
There are currently more than seven billion human beings alive on Earth. It has been projected that by 2050 there will be more than nine billion people on our world, and by 2100 there could be some eleven billion people in existence. Unless something happens to damp down human reproduction, as in Dan Brown's Inferno, and/or cuts the global human population down to .05 of its current size, as in Stephen King's The Stand The Stand, soon we will be living on a world populated almost entirely by human beings -- and few, if any, other living creatures. So far, Ward and many other biological scientists have stated the problem elegantly, but when it comes to solutions, all are more or less unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons. I am decidedly not in favor of applying Communist China's remedy for overpopulation to the rest of the world; indeed, I would heartily cheer if China no longer suffered the oppression of the commissars and her people could do as they Willed to do in matters of family size and everything else, a la Aleister Crowley's Liber OZ XLLVII.
On the other hand, the right to swing one's fist ends where the point of the jaw of the global life-support system that keeps us all alive begins. Maybe our best shot is to pray for a global disaster that vastly reduces Earth's human population without involving human dictators and oppressive governments. No matter what, The End of Evolution brilliantly and persuasively lays out its case that we have arrived at a point at which we either find a way to reduce our species's impact on the rest of Earth's life, or suffer a catastrophic loss of most of that life -- as well as human life, as people die of starvation, pestilence, and war over dwindling and increasingly scarce resources.