Will Humans Go Extinct?

The short answer, according to palaeontologist evolutionary biologist and Nicholas Longrich, is yes.

Everything goes extinct eventually. Fossil records prove that.

Longrich, a senior lecturer at the University of Bath, studies dinosaur fossils for a living. He’s curious about how and why the world is the way it. His specialty is macro-evolution — evolutionary patterns and processes, and the way they play out on a big-picture scale.

Longrich is intrigued by the idea that macro-evolution is more than just a series of micro-evolutions. The more complex evolution is, the longer it takes to evolve. The process of evolution itself has evolved, Longrich insists.

Despite headlines warning of imminent extinction for Homo sapiens, the truth is human beings will survive long after most other species have vanished, he believes.

There’s just one catch, he noted in an op-ed piece for The Conversation late last year.

Imminent extinction, whether by asteroid, climate catastrophe or any other means,, is not going to happen.

Or, if it does, it won’t play out the way most people expect.

Human beings are a strange species, Longrich says. Organisms that adapt to different climates fare better than specialized organisms during (relatively) localized catastrophes like hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods and droughts.

Highly specialized mammals — mammals uniquely adapted to their habitat, like polar bears, penguins and pandas — are vulnerable to disruptions in the food chain.

Red foxes, which have adapted to different habitats and have expansive, and expanding, home ranges, are doing well. Arctic foxes, which are specifically suited to Arctic conditions, are not faring so well. Red foxes are bigger and stronger than Arctic foxes, and kill them when they can, because evolution has conditioned predators to see other predators as competition for food.

Humans are generalists when it comes to food. We’re carnivores, herbivores, piscivores and omnivores, depending on opportunity and circumstance.

Just because an academic makes a speculative, if reasoned, argument based on a lifelong study of biological evolution doesn’t make it true, but Longrich makes some intriguing points.

“Natural selection has created an animal capable of intelligent design, one that doesn’t blindly adapt to the environment, but constantly reshapes it to its needs,” he wrote.

Climate change can — and already is — affecting the entire planet, but Homo sapiens may yet find a way to adapt that doesn’t involve, say, Elon Musk spiriting who he considers the best and brightest into space, like something out of a 1950s science-fiction film.

So far, Longrich says, we’ve escaped every trap we’ve set for ourselves. For now.

‘I have seen the future, but I have no ideas what it looks like.’

https://theconversation.com/will-humans-go-extinct-for-all-the-existential-threats-well-likely-be-here-for-a-very-long-time-135327

Turning the Page on Where Time Began

“Newts are such primitive creatures that watching them was like looking into time itself.”

— Tim Flannery

From that seemingly innocuous — and hardly earth-shaking — observation, Australian palaeontologist Tim Flannery began a 30-year long study of Europe’s natural history. 

In his just-published book Europe: The First 100 Million Years (Penguin paperbacks), Flannery opens our eyes onto a bold and rich panorama of Europe’s pre-history, 100 million years distilled into 300 pages of mesmerizing fact and detail — not exactly beach reading, perhaps, but the perfect antidote for society’s deadly affliction of short-term memory loss.

Natural histories encompass both the natural and the human worlds, Flannery writes, and this one seeks to answer three defining questions: How was Europe formed? How was its prehistory unearthed? And why did Europe, of all the continents, play such a key role in our present-day civilization?

“For those like me, seeking answers, it is fortunate that Europe has a great abundance of bones — layer upon layer of them, buried in rocks and sediment that extend all the way back to the beginning of bony animals.”

That may not be the ideal visual image to rival Jurassic Park, but then Europe: The First 100 Million Years is not fiction.

Flannery’s account of Earth’s origins opens some 100 million years in the past, give or take a millennium here or there, at that moment in time when the first distinctly European organisms evolved during a time of imperceptibly shifting tectonic plates moving across the Earth’s surface, upon which the continents ride. Most continents originated as so-called supercontinents that split into smaller pieces: Europe, on the other hand, began as an island archipelago, long before Britain — and Brexit — threatened to tear the continent apart.

Europe, as it happened, would be a place where evolution developed rapidly by prehistoric standards — a place in the vanguard of change from the very beginning. From the time of the dinosaurs, Flannery writes, Europe displayed unique signature marks that shaped the evolution of its animal — and human —  inhabitants. Europe’s diversity, evolutionary history and ever-changing boundaries, geological and political, “make the place almost protean” — and yet, the continent is instantly recognizable. “With its distinctive human landscapes,”
 Flannery writes, “once-great forests, Mediterranean coasts and alpine vistas, we all know Europe when we see it.”

Not quite like this, though. Flannery paints a portrait of a zoo-geographic region with “groves of palms and ferns overtopped by ginkgoes,” or maidenhead trees, a terra nova populated by newts, salamanders and midwife toads. Today’s newts and salamanders are living fossils of that past time.

Europe is “where the investigation of the deep past began,” which is why this book is such an illuminating, eye-opening journey.

It’s full of revelations and surprises, too, that stand up to the scrutiny of time and are relevant — and fascinating — to this day. There’s the amazing revelation, for example, that there are today more wolves in Europe than in the US. Wildlife species are constantly arriving and adapting, helping make Europe, if not great again, “make Europe anew.”

Worth reading.

©Adrian Malec-Pixabay

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