The Sixth Extinction Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind by Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin C1995
Reference id: nzRoyMfY7Gc 487
Hardcover book "The Sixth Extinction - Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind" by Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, copyright 1995.
With plastic protected dust jacket, excellent shape.
Contents
acknowledgements
a personal perspective
time and change
lifes salient mystery
the mainspring of evolution
the big five
extinction: bad genes or bad luck?
the engine of evolution
homo sapiens, the pinnacle of evolution?
endless forms most beautiful
value in diversity
the balance of nature?
stability and chaos in ecology
human impacts of the past
the modern elephant story
the future
an accident of history
the sixth extinction
does it matter?
Notes
Index
In their bestselling books Origins and Origins Reconsidered, world renowned paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey and science writer Roger Lewin offered a profound examination of lifes past, of humankinds beginnings. Here, in The Sixth Extinction, they turn their penetrating intelligences to lifes future, a future not so distant, which presages an ending.
There have been five great extinctions in the long history of life on earth, the most recent 65 million years ago, when all dinosaur species perished in an astonishingly brief period of time. Each of these great extinctions was unimaginably catastrophic - at least 65 percent of all species living vanished in a geological instant; in the permian extinction, nearly 95 percent of all species were obliterated. The agency for these extinctions, the why, is hotly debated - sudden climate change, asteroids, evolutionary inadequacy - but the patterns are remarkably consistent.
Now, as Leakey, and Lewin show with inarguable logic based on irrefutable scientific evidence, the sixth great extinction is underway. And this time the cause is beyond dispute: By the lowest estimate, thirty thousand species are wiped out by human agency every year - a rate that matches the patterns of the other five great extinctions with frightening exactitude.
As the authors show, such dramatic and overwhelming extinction threatens the entire complex fabric of life on earth, including the species at fault, homo sapiens. Unless we come to realize the devastating consequence of our rapacious behavior, we will follow the mastadon, the great auk, the carrier pigeon, and our other victims into the oblivion of extinction.
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