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On 2/6/13 8:46 AM, Andrew Pollack wrote:
Today's Google doodle says it's the centenary of Mary Leakey's birth.
I don't know much at all about her and when I mentioned it to a
friend she said the Leakeys are part of a backward anthropological
tradition.
Anyone know details?
I guess that this is a reference to Louis Leakey's opposition to the Mau
Mau. His son Richard ran for office in Kenya against the entrenched
corrupt party in power. As far as I know, the label "reactionary"
applied to them as anthropologists is a bit puzzling because most of
their work is as archaeologists rather than anthropologists. Studying
bones hardly strikes me as the sort of thing that might led to
reactionary conclusions.
I do have a copy of Richard Leakey's "Sixth Extinction". Here's the sort
of thing that he argues:
http://www.mysterium.com/sixthextinction.html
Homo sapiens is not the first living creature to have a dramatic impact
on Earth's biota, of course. The advent of photosynthetic microorganisms
some three billion years ago began to transform the atmosphere from one
of low oxygen content to one of relatively high levels, reaching close
to modern levels within the last billion years. With the change, very
different life forms were possible, including multicellular organisms,
and previously abundant forms that thrived in a low oxygen environment
were consigned to marginal habitats of the Earth. But that change was
wrought not by a single, sentient species consciously pursuing its own
material goals, but by countless, non-sentient species, collectively and
unconsciously operating new metabolic pathways. The reason and insight
that emerged during our evolutionary history bestowed a behavioral
flexibility on our species that allows us to multiply bounteously in
virtually every environment on Earth. The evolution of human
intelligence therefore opened a vast potential for population expansion
and growth, so that collectively the almost six billion humans alive
today represent the greatest proportion of protoplasm on our planet.
We suck our sustenance from the rest of nature in a way never before
seen in the world, reducing its bounty as ours grows. We are, as Edward
Wilson has put it, "an environmental abnormality." Abnormalities cannot
persist forever; they eventually disappear. "It is possible that
intelligence in the wrong kind of species was foreordained to be a fatal
combination for the biosphere," ventures Wilson. "Perhaps a law of
evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself"' If not a
"law," then perhaps a common consequence. Our concern is: Can such a
fate be avoided?
When I talk about reducing nature's bounty, I'm referring to the
extinction of species that is currently occurring as a result of human
activities of various kinds. In chapter 10 I described the trail of
biotic destruction humans left in their wake as they swept into new
environments in the prehistoric and historic past: settlers of new lands
extirpated huge numbers of species, through hunting and clearing of
habitats. Some modern scholars argue that this was but a passing episode
in the human career and that, despite massive population expansion
today, talk of continued species extinction is fallacious. It should be
obvious from the tone of the preceding few paragraphs that I am not
among their number. I believe that human-driven extinction is continuing
today, and accelerating to alarming levels.
In the remainder of the chapter I will develop the argument for my
concern. In the final chapter I will ask whether or not it matters to us
and our children that as much as 50 percent of the Earth's species may
disappear by the end of the next century. I will also address the
longer-term future, which puts our species in a larger geological
context with the rest of the world's inhabitants. And I will suggest
that the insights we have gained from the current intellectual
revolution I formulated in the previous chapter demand that we adopt a
certain ethical position on the impact of Homo sapiens on the
biodiversity of which we are a part.
Humans endanger the existence of species in three principal ways. The
first is through direct exploitation, such as hunting. From butterflies,
to song birds, to elephants, the human appetite for collecting or eating
parts of wild creatures puts many species at risk of extinction. Second
is the biological havoc that is occasionally wreaked following the
introduction of alien species to new ecosystems, whether deliberately or
accidentally. I talked earlier about the biological convulsion
experienced by the Hawaiian archipelago through countless species of
birds and plants taken there by the early Polynesians and later by
European settlers. A devastation of equal magnitude is currently under
way in Africa's Lake Victoria, where more than two-hundred species of
fish have disappeared within the past decade. The Boston University
ecologist Les Kaufman, who has studied the event in great detail, calls
it "the Hiroshima of the biological apocalypse, the demonstration, the
warning that more is on the way.' 12 Several interacting factors are
involved, such as overfishing and pollution, but the major culprit is
the voracious Nile perch, which was introduced to the lake for
commercial fishing some four decades ago.
The third, and by far the most important, mode of human-driven
extinction is the destruction and fragmentation of habitat, especially
the inexorable cutting of tropical rainforests. The forests, which cover
just 7 percent of the world's land surface, are a cauldron of
evolutionary innovation and are home to half of the world's species. The
continued growth of human populations in all parts of the world daily
encroaches on wild habitats, whether through the expansion of
agricultural land, the building of towns and cities, or the transport
infrastructure that joins them. As the habitats shrink, so too does the
Earth's capacity to sustain its biological heritage.
The Oxford University ecologist Norman Myers was the first to call wide
attention to the impending catastrophe of deforestation, in his 1979
book, The Sinking Ark. If the rate of tree felling continued at its
prevailing rate, which Myers estimated to be as much as 2 percent a
year, the world would "lose one-quarter of all species by the year
2000," he wrote. A further century would add a third of the remaining
species to the death toll. The decade and a half since The Sinking Ark's
publication has witnessed roiling debate over the reality of the
numbers. Are the forests disappearing at the rate claimed? Even if they
are, would 50 percent of the world's species really disappear?
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