To reply to a digest, insert the relevant message header; don't reply to the digest header
-------------------------------------------------------------

Well, here's a mind-blowing book: Michael Boulter's "Extinction: Evolution
and the End of Man"

Some people will find Boulter's proposition repulsive, so please read no
further if you don't want to have your fundamental beliefs challenged.

___________________
I have just today completed Michael Boulter's book Extinction: Evolution
and the End of Man (Fourth Estate, 2002).  I'm trepidacious about posting
my take on the book anywhere as I might be classed as a nutcase from the
Earth Liberation Front!  Nevertheless, the book has a challenging theme
which deserves to be considered widely.

Boulter works up to his outrageous proposition over the first 184 of his
193 pages, but it still shocked me when I reached it.  It is so outrageous
that, when I read it, I could see why he never has the courage to spell it
out explicitly.

From the beginning, I enjoyed the book because, as a non-mathematician, I
always welcome effective popular expositions of power laws, self
organization, pink noise (first time I have come across this term), etc.,
especially in the context of human evolution.  Boulter does this well and
he keeps three threads going throughout: the theory, the applications and
expository tools of Bak and Kauffman and the unfolding of his own ideas.

My interest received an extra fillip when I saw that he chose 40,000 years
ago as a key date.  Other authors have selected 40,000 ya as a threshold,
but each depicts its distinguishing features differently.  Boulter tells
us that H. sapiens came out of Africa 42,000 ya and had thinly populated
most of Europe by 40,000 ya.  The chronological precision is not
important; it is his choice of how he depicts 40,000 ya that intrigues me.

I also appreciated the way Boulter wove in the relevant ideas of
Aristotle, Agassiz, Lyall, Darwin, Gould & Eldridge, Dawkins, and
Flannery.  Changing paradigms and hegemonies have always fascinated me.

Moving on from 40,000 ya, Boulter tells us that the megafauna extinctions
began at around the time that H. sapiens sapiens wiped out H.
neanderthalensis some 30,000 ya and progressed through till about 15,000
ya by which time it had exterminated half the planet's megafauna species.

By now you may have guessed Boulter's proposition.  It is that (a) we have
been using the wrong time scale to measure the human impact on the
environment.  It is not since the introduction of agriculture; it is not
since the Industrial Revolution; it is not since the introduction of the
fossil-fuel burning motor car or since we moved into an environmental
deficit in the 1970s.  (b) If we go back 40,000 years we can see that the
sixth great extinction began globally then - when modern humans settled
beyond Africa.  The destruction has been in one clear and unmistakable
direction since that time: Homo sapiens sapiens is demonstrably the plague
species that is part way through achieving the sixth extinction it began
30,000 ya and will destroy itself - or radically alter its ecology (as all
plague species do) in the process.  Boulter proposes the development of
sophisticated language by H. sapiens sapiens 30,000 ya as the feature that
enabled them to take on and exterminate the less linguistically able
neanderthals.

Boulter's view stands in marked contrast with the Paul Shepard / Art De
Vany / Daniel Quinn idea that there were some wholly admirable
characteristics of human development in the late Pleistocene.  Set it at
40,000 ya if you like; the year is not vital to the argument.  Michael
Boulter turns this on its head, putting forward the notion that it was
40,000 ya that human life began its reckless, uncontrollable hurtle
towards self-destruction!

Now I should add that this popularly-written book shows signs of being
rushed and, although it depicts patterns, the absence of a common cause
for the cycles he describes leaves me unsatisfied.  Nevertheless, the book
presents a great challenge, showing that there are alternative
perspectives on the phenomena I have come to value and which we draw upon
for our understanding of our place in the world.  And for that reason
alone, Boulter's thesis made a deep impact upon me.
_____________________

Keith

-----------------------------------------------------------------
The FAQ for Evolutionary Fitness is at http://www.evfit.com/faq.htm
To unsubscribe from the list send an e-mail to [log in to unmask]
with the words SIGNOFF EVOLUTIONARY-FITNESS in the _body_ of the e-mail.