![]() Journalist Elizabeth Kolbert ponders this very question in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.” Scientists as far back as Charles Darwin have long considered the idea that humans have been impacting the very balance of life on earth, though Darwin believed that extinction followed the same slow march of evolution - except during mass extinction events, when even he accepted that “the changes that had caused extinctions must therefore have been of a much greater magnitude, so great that animals had been unable to cope with them.”īased on cumulative studies of Earth’s geological record, it is understood that there have been five times in the planet’s history when environmental changes were so extreme that “the diversity of life” collapsed. ![]()
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