The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the farmers, and gives us an important perspetive on the Third Wave Extinction, which industrial activity is causing today. Don't believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving th emost plant and animmal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.
--Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, 2015, p74.
--Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, 2015, p74.
Posts from This Journal by “evolution” Tag
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The Problem with Democracy: We are Horny, Greedy and Cruel
Democracy is based on the belief that people are more good than bad, that we are more curious than controlling, more playful than violent, and more…
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Cheetahs Near Extinction
Cheetah population crashes, raising threat of extinction The world's cheetah population is crashing, leaving the world's fastest land…
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Creationism Is Not a Theory
Creationism gets treated by religious people as if it were a viable theoretical alternative to Evolution. They do this in spite of the fact that…
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Dinosaur feathers
Ninety nine million years ago a dinosaur got its tail stuck in the sap. Then, in 2016, someone noticed some interesting stuff in the amber at a…
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The Scientific Method: A Primer
Among regular people there seems to be precious little understanding of what exactly the method is, and what it does and does not accomplish. This…
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QotD: Bernie is Clueless
What's distinctive about Sanders is not (or not simply) that he's an ideological purist who refuses to think pragmatically but that he…
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Donohue-Levitt Hypothesis: Legal Abortion --> Less Crime
This hypothesis may not be as well supported as evolution but there has been a lot of research since the 1970's that supports it. DONOHUE-LEVITT…
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Childless 1
I'm a 49 year old childless woman. I might have been fertile at one time but I am not anymore. I look at people with children and think they must…
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QotD: Reality
Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it. --Lily Tomlin
Comments
I have heard of the great extinctions in which between 75 and 96 percent of all species of plant and animal life were destroyed. There were five of them according to wikipedia, the last of which occurred 66 million years ago. The "sixth great extinction" which is looming, and perhaps occurring now, may or may not be the "third wave" referred to by Yuval Noah Harari.
In any event, the "first" and "second" waves seem to not qualify as "Great" extinctions and the upcoming one is expected to qualify, and the "dominant" species can be expected to be among the victims. Foragers did live in relative harmony with nature, both because they believed in it and because they had no other choice. We don't believe in harmony with nature and we do have other choices which we insist on making.