May 12, 2025 04:55 AM
https://www.forbes.com/sites/grrlscienti...---review/
EXCERPTS: Most people hold the romantic notion that the human species will go on forever and ever, amen [...] It’s an appealing fantasy, but we don’t have to look far to see how silly this notion is in reality. Not only have all our closest evolutionary cousins gone extinct, but so has a significant amount of the planet’s biodiversity, from the smallest to the biggest of beings.
In his latest book, The Decline and Fall of The Human Empire (Pan Macmillan / St Martin’s Press, 2025), British paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Henry Gee, who is a senior editor for the top-notch scientific journal, Nature, and who (full disclosure) has been my friend for many years, writes: “Homo sapiens will disappear from the Earth within the next 10,000 years.”
In my opinion, Dr Gee is an optimist. Personally, I think humanity will go extinct within 1,000 years or, considering our self destructiveness, sooner. Not only is Dr Gee a prolific writer, but he is a scientist, so he builds his argument using the tools he knows best: science.
In the first part of the book, entitled "Rise", Dr Gee sets the stage for his argument by sharing the latest information known about our evolutionary origins that began when the first bipedal apes popped up in Africa and moved out into the larger world about two million years ago, evolving new species along the way. Despite our extremely patchy fossil record, we know that Homo sapiens are just one of many distinct hominin species that appeared during the last 315,000 years...
[...] In the second part of his book, entitled "Fall", Dr Gee examines aspects of our more recent history that threaten our long-term future, particularly intensive agriculture...
[...] our innovations have not necessarily served us well: Recent studies have found that humans are experiencing a sharp drop in fertility rates. This is partially due to increasing levels of education for women, who discover meaning in their lives by pursuing activities other than motherhood, and also due to dramatically falling sperm counts – why? No one knows. Tellingly, our once-runaway population growth is now slowing. According to Dr Gee: “The human population will sink to a level that is ultimately unsustainable, and extinction will beckon.”
[...] But in the third part of this book, entitled "Escape", Dr Gee proposes a rather bizarre solution to our impending demise: establish colonies in space. The spatial isolation of these colonies would aid humanity’s survival, argues Dr Gee, by allowing genetically distinct human communities to develop that could interbreed with people still living on Earth or elsewhere in space to produce offspring with the best qualities of both groups.
But that said, this argument is undermined by the problematic reality confronting conservation biologists (and monarchists): small, isolated gene pools rarely recover their former diversity. Further... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: Most people hold the romantic notion that the human species will go on forever and ever, amen [...] It’s an appealing fantasy, but we don’t have to look far to see how silly this notion is in reality. Not only have all our closest evolutionary cousins gone extinct, but so has a significant amount of the planet’s biodiversity, from the smallest to the biggest of beings.
In his latest book, The Decline and Fall of The Human Empire (Pan Macmillan / St Martin’s Press, 2025), British paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Henry Gee, who is a senior editor for the top-notch scientific journal, Nature, and who (full disclosure) has been my friend for many years, writes: “Homo sapiens will disappear from the Earth within the next 10,000 years.”
In my opinion, Dr Gee is an optimist. Personally, I think humanity will go extinct within 1,000 years or, considering our self destructiveness, sooner. Not only is Dr Gee a prolific writer, but he is a scientist, so he builds his argument using the tools he knows best: science.
In the first part of the book, entitled "Rise", Dr Gee sets the stage for his argument by sharing the latest information known about our evolutionary origins that began when the first bipedal apes popped up in Africa and moved out into the larger world about two million years ago, evolving new species along the way. Despite our extremely patchy fossil record, we know that Homo sapiens are just one of many distinct hominin species that appeared during the last 315,000 years...
[...] In the second part of his book, entitled "Fall", Dr Gee examines aspects of our more recent history that threaten our long-term future, particularly intensive agriculture...
[...] our innovations have not necessarily served us well: Recent studies have found that humans are experiencing a sharp drop in fertility rates. This is partially due to increasing levels of education for women, who discover meaning in their lives by pursuing activities other than motherhood, and also due to dramatically falling sperm counts – why? No one knows. Tellingly, our once-runaway population growth is now slowing. According to Dr Gee: “The human population will sink to a level that is ultimately unsustainable, and extinction will beckon.”
[...] But in the third part of this book, entitled "Escape", Dr Gee proposes a rather bizarre solution to our impending demise: establish colonies in space. The spatial isolation of these colonies would aid humanity’s survival, argues Dr Gee, by allowing genetically distinct human communities to develop that could interbreed with people still living on Earth or elsewhere in space to produce offspring with the best qualities of both groups.
But that said, this argument is undermined by the problematic reality confronting conservation biologists (and monarchists): small, isolated gene pools rarely recover their former diversity. Further... (MORE - missing details)