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.