Extinction:
Evolution and the End of Man
by Michael Boulter
Columbia University Press, New York
ISBN 0-231-12836-3, 2002, 210 pp. Price: $27.00
Extinction:
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Michael Boulter's book, Extinction: Evolution and the End of Man is not merely a treatment of human-induced extinctions juxtaposed against ancient mass extinctions, but also an exposé concerning the development of the "Fossil Record 2" database for Britain. His main thesis is that Earth is a self-organized system, and his database can prove that point. Michael Boulter is an evolutionary biologist at the University of East London and the director of the "Fossil Record 2" team, analyzing one of the largest extinction databases in Britain, Biodiversity on the Internet. Quixotically, Boulter rarely mentions the history of extinction databases that started with Jack Sepkoski (University of Chicago, USA), nor the current American paleobiology database (The Paleobiology Database). Despite this glaring oversight, the reader is at first tantalized to explore the connections between humans and current extinction events. Unfortunately, this book contains so many contradictory statements and factual errors that it was difficult to draw any significant conclusions. The poor writing, inflammatory remarks, and errors distract from what potentially could have been a lively discussion on humans and how they construct and use fossil databases. At the very least, it is a Pandora's box of Panglossian parables aimed at the public, with an underlying goal of showing that scientists (that is non-British ones), are a rag-tag lot, out for their own gain. His personal anecdotes take precedence, as he reveals the nadir of his scientific grudges and the epiphany of his database discoveries. Sadly, humans and extinctions somehow get lost in his ideological shuffle. Basically, Boulter rewrites historical geology--writing a Boulterian fable by deconstructing earth history, based on his "feelings" rather than actual data. If you like to read about unexpurgated ideas that spin inside one man's mind, then this is the book for you. However, I found most of his comments distasteful and his lack of scholarship odious. He does a disservice to paleobiology by rewriting the past to fit his exponential models. I will now review each chapter of the book, pointing out the main ideas, the contradictory statements, and some of the more evident spurious details.
Evolution: Extinctions and the End of Man is composed of seven chapters. Chapter one discusses limited archaeological evidence for environmental change during the last 3000 years. Chapter two briefly reviews the Cretaceous/Tertiary (Cretaceous/Paleogene) extinction. Chapter three regresses to the violent beginning of the Earth's formation billions of years ago. Chapter four examines disastrous extinctions of the past, focusing on the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinctions again and the demise of the dinosaurs. Chapter five describes Boulter's frustrations with scientists as they wrestle with species names. Chapter six outlines more database challenges and the paucity of data regarding human-induced extinctions. The last chapter contradicts chapter six, by stating that humans have contributed heavily to extinctions, especially those of mammals. The thread running through all these chapters is that Earth is a self-organized system, and that it will rebound from any extinction. In fact, mass extinctions are good for the Earth, and human-induced extinctions are no exception.
The first chapter ("The Past is Not Over") starts out at a very good clip, as it concerns human-induced alteration of ancient landscapes. Here, Boulter deftly interweaves archaeological work with landscape alteration promulgated by early human civilizations. The ancient environmental record of England is a case in point: the fossil record of peat bogs from the British Isles describe lush, mixed deciduous forests that were, in short order, deforested by humans. Boulter adamantly states that this environmental clear-cutting for sport, accommodations, and travel would not have occurred naturally. He then sets out to present the irrevocable evidence and murderous trail of wanton environmental destruction blithely committed by humans prior to the industrial revolution. This destruction has taken place in less than 10,000 years, a mere snap of the fingers for the immense amount of time recorded in Earth’s multi-billion year history. To summarize: First, humans burned wood, then coal, and now oil, all repositories for carbon that was laid down over the millennia in what was previously an Earth in relative balance. Humans have mined these resources at an exponential rate, intrinsically faster than the thousands to millions of years it took to make these carbon-rich resources in the first place. While the humble reader may know most of this by heart, Boulter provides few reference citations for his discourse, as he prefers to rely on "…feelings and my common sense" (p. 18).
As one proceeds deeper into chapter one, Boulter's earlier coherency starts to diminish. Salient errors, obfuscatory statements, rambling diatribes, and provincial colloquialisms start to accumulate, and if I could graph the relative abundance of these "insights", I'd say they could be represented by an exponential curve. Examples of salient errors presented in chapter one include: (1) Boulter explicitly states that Sir Charles Lyell coined the maxim, "the present is the key to the past" and the term, "uniformitarianism" (p. 21, 38). However, Sir Archibald Geike coined the present is the key to the past and William Whewell coined uniformitarianism. The concepts of uniformitarianism had their roots in the work of James Hutton, a Scottish gentlemen and plutonist, in the late 1700's. Lyell is known for popularizing and extending Hutton’s uniformitarian ideology. (2) The Jurassic Saurischia "with hips like lizards…[that] stand on two legs to fight other animals in the famous Tyrannosaurus pose" (p. 26). Saurischians have, in general, variable hip morphology, ranging from a pubis bone pointed downward ("like lizard's hips") or pointed back ("like bird hips"). It would be better to put the term, "lizard-hipped" and "bird-hipped" in quotations, as birds were actually derived from the saurischian clade. (3) Another historical faux pas was that Jurassic ornithischians withstood attacks from T. rex (p. 26). Unfortunately, T. rex had not evolved until the Cretaceous. Despite our fondness for Jurassic Park and the cool T. rex depicted in it, it still is a fictional movie. (4) Adding insult to injury, figure 2.3 (p. 44) shows that ornithischians arose in the late Paleozoic, and that the saurischians evolved in the early Triassic. The fossil record doesn’t contain this evidence; rather, these groups evolved in the Middle-to-Late Triassic. (5) In the same breath that "saurischians" and "ornithischian" terms were used, Boulter shies away from naming protists. This includes the "f" word, such as foraminiferan, or the "c" word, such as coccolithophorid. Because, as he explains, these "microscopic marine plankton, [have] long names, [that are] hard to pronounce" (p. 35-36). However, long names that are hard to pronounce did not deter Boulter from waxing ecstatic about aquilapolles and normapolles described later in the chapter (p. 36). Lastly, (6) the striking description that mammals lacked fur in the Jurassic "which then would have made mammals’ bodies too hot" (p. 33) is a bit puzzling. While this is a fascinating idea, there is no evidence presented for it, especially since mammals are hirsute. If this statement were true, then why are furry mammals alive in the hottest deserts today? Why are these errors in logic and fact produced in this book? It is because Boulter prefers subjective reasoning: "...scientists need to accept life’s beauty, and work with it like a fairy story, changing the focus to fit the particular needs of the particular circumstances at different times" (p. 22).
Chapter two ("Extinction") covers a variety of topics, including a Boulterian fairy tale from the British Mesozoic, the Cretaceous-Tertiary and Permo-Triassic mass extinctions, and plate tectonics. These topics are discussed using adaptationist rhetoric and by dissing American paleontologists (e.g., Stephen Jay Gould, Jack Sepkoski, and David Raup). Fortunately, the geologist Walter Alvarez escapes Boulter’s frenzied form of Anglican imperialism, the only American scientist to survive this chapter unscathed without going verbally extinct. Boulter begins the chapter with the idea that children like fairy stories, and here, he could have reminded us that good does not always triumph over evil, especially as humans gobble up Earth’s resources. However, he fails to link chapter one and two together. The Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods, he claims in his fairy tale, were populated by predators in the sea, and by "flying monsters" in the skies. All other food groups were missing. He further explains that these periods had stable global climates and environments, and as a consequence, these periods had limited evolution or diversification of major organisms. Only in Boulter's mind were the Jurassic and Cretaceous dull, sleepy blips in the history of life. He forgets that during the Jurassic and Cretaceous, global climate and paleogeography changed dramatically, with the formation of a major ocean basin, the Atlantic ocean (PaleoMap Project). Additionally, evolution and diversification of many new types of organisms occurred during these periods (e.g., birds; marine reptiles; marine invertebrates such as scleractinian corals, rudistid clams, neogastropods; marine protists such as the global oxygen producers, diatoms and coccolithophorids; flowering plants; placental and marsupial mammals). Was the Jurassic and Cretaceous peaceful and quiet from an evolutionary standpoint? I don't think so.
A brief review provided by Boulter of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction leads one to think that only large-sized organisms went extinct. He states that size was very important in the extinction event, and gives only the example that large-sized ammonoids and dinosaurs died out. However, there were many smaller forms of these organisms, and they also died out. But why did small mammals survive the traumatic extinction? Boulter claims mammals survived by "…hiding from the heat, being protected by their own sense of exploration." I don't know about you, but when I am confronted by a conflagration, my sense of "exploration" is not the first thing that kicks in. Boulter next harangues American scientists for wanting to expect the "biggest and most dramatic, the longest and even the oldest" event. However, it is clear that Boulter does pretty well in holding his own with his personal "-est-fest." He quickly ends Chapter two by segueing back to humans (a jump of 245 million years from the Permo-Triassic extinction!), and broaches that humans are causing the worst extinction ever. He then asks "where are the extinctions?" At this point in the book, we don't know what this ending sentence means, and he certainly doesn't explain it. The reader has to wait until two chapters later, when we find out that there is little data on human-induced extinctions.
Chapter three ("A System Out of Chaos") is a chaotic mess in itself; it should have been entitled: "A chapter in chaos". The chapter begins by discussing chaos theory (with fractals), and how this concept was developed from physics, but then Boulter skips among the topics of extinctions, his database, the Galápagos Islands, punctuated equilibria, and a whole host of other free-associative ideas. The main thesis of this chapter, I think, is that nature is scalable to physical laws. But, at first, Boulter denies that this is possible. For example, he adamantly states that physics is not scalable to nature ("...biology is not quantifiable..." and life is "counter-entropic" because life is based on contingency; p. 59). However, by the end of the chapter, he obviously reverses his view because he discovers that there is a remarkable fit between his fossil data and the self-organization concepts of physics. Not only that, but his database mimics "pink noise" (a type of package chaos; not named after the rock star, "Pink," regardless of what you think of her voice).
During the rambling tussle with chaos theory, he adds the Gaia hypothesis. However, he quickly dismisses the Gaia hypothesis because self-organized criticality explains everything. He then provides a diatribe against another American scientist, this time James Kirchner, who likes to measure "big things very precisely" (p. 66) and thereby misses all the beauty in the world. Finally we find out what Boulter really wants to do with his "Fossil Record 2" data: he wants to test the theory that Earth is a self-organized system. Here, he explains that extinctions are good: they are necessary to retain life on planet Earth. If extinctions did not occur, organisms would wipe out all the space and food on the planet (p. 67; reiterated again in chapter seven). Boulter next regresses to chapter two ideas about the recovery from extinctions (p. 67), but abruptly stops practically mid-sentence and expounds on how power laws applied to the "Fossil Record 2" data mimic physical processes. He then drops that subject, and shifts to Charles Darwin voyaging in the Galápagos islands, by arguing that Darwin knew at the time that the finches were the linchpin in his evolutionary argument. This is quite contrary to what actually happened; once back in England, poor Charles was attempting to sort out his ill-labeled collections with John Gould, who recognized the importance of the finches. Boulter also implies that Darwin knew about genetic mutations (p. 70). What Darwin has to do with power laws, chaos theory, fractals and mutations is not explained.
After Darwin, Boulter uncovers the reasons why fossil databases are important for evolutionary analysis. He claims that Raup and Sepkoski were the first to challenge the slow order of evolution with their 26-million-year-old-extinction-periodicity database. He fails to mention again that Sepkoski was the first to put together a database to examine Phanerozoic extinctions. Rather, Boulter's explanation for why these two put together a fossil database was to provide evidence for Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould's theory of Punctuated Equilibrium (p. 74). While Boulter proudly claims that the theory of punctuated equilibrium debuted in a paper published in the British journal, Nature, and a follow-up paper as well, the first paper and the initial follow-up paper were actually published in Schopf's Models of Paleobiology (1972), and the journal of Paleobiology (1977), respectively.
The rest of chapter three has Boulter comfortably plugging his own database. We find out that Boulter was not granted permission to use Sepkoski’s original extinction database. Thus, Boulter had to resort to compiling his own data mined from oil companies. Boulter explains how the "Big Five" extinctions are clearly seen in his diagrams (Fig. 3.5, p. 83), but they are actually not evident. The reader must be reminded that Jack Sepkoski's data clearly show the "Big Five" extinctions. Are we witnessing database envy? Boulter next shows that his data fit physical power laws, such that the fossil record is a self-organized system. Consequently, evolution is also exponential (does that mean it's gradual and not punctuated?). He concludes that biological evolution has a fractal component: the earth is one beautiful big machine that acts like a power function. Now, what is clearly missing here is a discussion on the quality and quantity of his data: is the exponential rise in organisms because Boulter lacks data from the past when compared to the well-preserved modern record? Is there monographic bias? Is there collector or collection bias? Are there preservational discrepancies? While American scientists have scuffled with these topics (i.e., Raup’s "Pull of the Recent"), it appears that Boulter hasn't examined his data for bias.
Chapter four ("From Dinosaurs to Us") takes us back to the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary yet again, and the recovery of extinction that was previously discussed in Chapter two. In this chapter, he opines that the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction was the worst extinction: "I doubt that the Earth has ever been bleaker than during those years, when most living things survived in trauma and in hiding." How could he forget about the worst extinction of all time, the Permo-Triassic extinction? He claims the recovery from the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction was smooth, with the gradual unfolding exponentially of flora and fauna. Suddenly, Boulter states that birds may be feathered dinosaurs, but more data is needed to determine this (he fails to mention scientific papers that have settled this issue). He says, however, that he can resolve this problem with his database: if the three groups (i.e., ornithischians, saurischians, and birds, fig. 4.1, p. 92) are graphed together, you can see a "close relationship" between dinosaurs and birds. If the kind reader will ponder his graph (fig. 4.1, p. 92), and replace the "bird" data with "mammal" data, wouldn't you get a similar curve? Does that mean that mammals are closely related to dinosaurs? I don't think so. However, he likes this idea so much, he repeats it again in the next chapter (p. 154).
The chapter then limps through the Cenozoic, attempting to show that the Atlantic Ocean (called the "Atlantic River", p. 98) formed during the Cenozoic, and that the lost continent of Atlantis may have been in the Atlantic river. Boulter fails to remind us that the majority of the Atlantic Ocean actually formed during the Mesozoic Era. While the Cenozoic "Atlantic River" was forming, mammals were slowly changing through times of "deep peace". Mammals are then quickly dropped, and Boulter dispatches at length his research on the Early Tertiary (Early Paleogene) of the Isle of Mull (Scotland). From there, he jumps to the lost continent of Atlantis, using it as a metaphor for subduction (p. 111). Leaving Atlantis in the dust, he proceeds to march through the rest of the Cenozoic, where he claims that the Oligocene was the most peaceful and stable time ever during Earth's history. Because of this stability, the Oligocene's "evolutionary machine was running efficiently, in a beautifully controlled style, every gear wheel fitting snugly with perfect timing" (p. 112).
He fails to mention that the climate was deteriorating, causing major environmental and evolutionary change. Did he not know about the newly formed circum-Antarctic current that jailed frigid waters around Antarctica? Or that the warm, humid vegetation of the Eocene/Early Oligocene gave way to savannas? Did he not realize that there were extinctions in the land and the sea as the Earth began it's plunge into ice house conditions during this time? Obviously, he is making up his own historical geology. I'll let you ponder what he says about the Miocene. Finally, he ends the chapter with human-induced extinctions of large mammals in North America: "Just as the climate was warming, in the 1840s, historical records tell us that Red Indians began trading buffalo hide" implicating that these "Red Indians" exterminated the buffalo (p. 123). What Boulter fails to mention in this biased account is that the slaughter was not from native Americans, but from invading non-native Americans that slaughtered not only the buffalo but the native Americans as well. I think here, he is confusing the megafauna extinction that occurred 12,000 years ago (and Paul Martin's elegant explanation) with the more recent slaughter of buffalo in the 1800s by Westward advancement. Despite the slaughter of buffalo (by-the-way, buffalo are not yet extinct), he still claims at the end of the chapter that all species can behave as self-organized systems.
Chapter five ("What's in a Name?") begins with a celebration of his self-proclaimed breakthrough that evolution follows power laws and an exponential path. He contemplates the "hidden potential" of the techniques his group has developed. Rather than examine the types of data in his database, Boulter circumnavigates through the history of naming organisms. What's in a name, you ask? Well, species are the ultimate data point, and if scientists can not come to a consensus about what a species is, then how are species used in databases? Interspersed among his rancorous view of cladistics, he reveals his lack of appreciation for the government, journalists, and teachers while attempting to point out the difference between a classification system erected by Linnaeus to that of cladistics. Boulter next discusses natural selection, and here we find that Boulter thinks that evolution is way too messy to deal with. Therefore, Boulter is justified in using the Linnean classification system for his data, and follows the Linnean ideology of the fixity of species. Perhaps that is why he entitled one of the sections in this chapter the "Building blocks of God's nature" (p. 126). He blames America for daring to replace the Linnean hierarchy with cladistics and the PhyloCode scheme (p. 139-140, Phylocode). In fact, these new systematics are threatening to unravel Boulter's view of exponential growth because his database is built on the Linnean classification system. The reason why American's developed new systematics? He says that Americans are "more influenced by the Internet", and that somehow this has contributed to a new revolution in systematics (p. 140). My question is: don’t you think it is about time that we examine our fixation on the Linnean hierarchy?
He deconstructs Darwinian evolution by saying that there is no stated theory of natural selection (p. 130). After all, and I quote: "biologists don’t have theories the way physicists do. Instead Darwin expressed a grand idea as lots of observations and often anecdotal interpretations…" How can the British Boulter forget about Darwin's experiments? or Darwin's arduous collection of facts? Perhaps Boulter doesn't want to admit that evolution takes place; rather, he prefers to build his nest comfortably in the boughs of the Linnean hierarchical tree. Fortunately, Boulter admits that he never understood natural selection, because he said that Darwin and most biologists of the twentieth century made little connection between DNA and ecology (p. 131). Did Boulter forget that Darwin was resting comfortably in a grave at Westminster Abbey when DNA was discovered? To Boulter's credit however, he had an epiphany about natural selection (p. 131): "Then, one day, it clicked. Sex and environments are intertwined. Genes don’t copulate, individuals do, and they do it in special places: most humans have beds, some birds have special trees, fish have special currents." It's that simple! Organisms need "special environments to recombine genes." That confirms what I was told about sex from my mother: everything took place under special lettuce leaves. What his statements have to do with natural selection is left up to our imaginations.
No sooner had Boulter's epiphany on sex occurred (got to have sex to sell a book, yes?), when Darwin left on the voyage of the Beagle. Within a few sentences of Darwin's sea-sickness, Louis Agassiz was born! Boulter waxes ecstatic about Agassiz's spindle diagram of "les poissons fossiles" that appears to portray evolution, even though Agassiz believed in the fixity of species. Then, we are jerked back to Darwin, with a blathering discussion of when Darwin's and Wallace's abstracts concerning the origin of the species were read. Boulter then digs himself back to his main idea of what a species is. In fact, he tells us, it is very difficult to determine extinct species. It doesn't take much gray matter to ask the question: if Boulter doesn't know how to recognize a fossil species, then what in the world is in the database? That is, what he fails to do is discuss the species definition that he uses for his database. He next delves into the mechanism of evolutionary change by stating: "Most people have a particular explanation for the mechanism to drive evolution. The first is creationism; the second, natural selection" (p. 146). Boulter agrees with the fixity of species by accepting the Linnean system, therefore, he must think that creationism is a mechanism for driving evolution; at least one could logically come to this conclusion based on several of his statements. However, I hope that this is just an example of poor writing and editing. Otherwise, this statement would be quite unscientific.
Chapter six ("A Man-Made Extinction Event") begins by explaining that modern humans (Homo sapiens), in contrast to Neandertals (Homo neanderthalensis), were the most intelligent, most articulate, and the most selfish Homo on earth, and therefore out competed the more "peaceful" Neandertals. Boulter's view then, is that modern humans were consequently much better hunters, yet he fails to mention work on Neandertal bones that suggest Neandertals may have depended more on hunting for their food than modern humans (Gibbons, 1996). The migration story of humans is much more complicated than Boulter discusses (see Science special issue "Humans on the Move", 2001, vol. 291). Further, genetic and morphological evidence suggests that Neandertals and modern humans were quite distinct evolutionary lineages despite suggestions of interbreeding (Kahn and Gibbons, 1997; Ponce de León and Zollikofer, 2001). Language, according to Boulter, was the breakthrough that allowed modern humans ascendancy over Neandertals. Here, Boulter forgets that many animals have "language" and can "communicate" (Hauser et al., 2002), and thus Boulter has not really justified his stance that Homo sapiens is the most sophisticated organism on earth. He also claims that the tools modern humans developed were superior to Neandertals. Yet research has shown that both groups developed new types of stone tools, adornments, cave art and carvings on bones (Gibbons, 2001); albeit, Homo sapiens possessed more flare for elaborate art, according to anthropologists. Later in the chapter, Boulter implies that Neandertals were decimated by Homo sapiens (p. 165), however, there is no evidence for this statement.
Boulter next tries to show that approximately 12,000 years ago, humans may have caused the extinction of large mammals in North America, such as the horse, antelope, and buffalo. He forgets, however, that neither the buffalo nor the antelope became extinct in North America after the last ice age (p. 160). Further, the horse survived in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, contemporaneous with humans. Fortunately, he does suggest that climate change may have affected large mammal extinction, but does not go into detail on this. It is clear he favors the hypothesis that humans exterminated the large mammals after the last ice age, and spends more time on that topic. Later, he mentions that "...our species can migrate to new environments without becoming extinct" (p. 162), but he forgets that many other hominid species were migratory, but are now extinct.
He ventures back to climate change, and makes a point to say that climate extremes occurred greatly during historical times, but "humans and other organisms have tended to take them in stride" (p. 163). I hardly think that the black death, the Irish potato famine, and the massive droughts and other famines during the 1300s (and continuing up to today) were taken "in stride." He persists in saying that climate change is good, and that human ingenuity learned to "control the environment" (p. 164). Even though earlier, Boulter claimed to not understand natural selection, he invokes this mechanism for explaining the cultural evolution of humans. I profess, I was relieved that he didn't say "creationism" as the mechanism for cultural evolution in humans. He concludes by saying that there is no evidence for large-scale extinction over the last 5,000 years during these climate cycles (p. 164). Yet many species of molluscs, fish, and mammals have gone extinct directly related to over-collecting, over-fishing, or hunting, habitat destruction, and the introduction of exotic species (World Resources Institute: A History of Extinction; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: Endangered Species Bulletin).
It is indeed frustrating to read, after he harangues humans for decimating large mammals after the ice age, that the "numbers of recently extinct species are very small indeed, and the full extinction of species since the last ice age are very low." Strangely, Boulter next claims that there are extinctions related to human activities (p. 166), and that many species of animals and plants are "being brought to the edge of extinction" (p. 167). These statements directly contradict what he had said previously in this chapter. He examines extinctions related to humans contributing to habitat change during the last 200 years, rather than the last 3,000 or 12,000 years. He bemoans the demise of coral reefs and the fate of tropical rain forests. He also decries the fate of the Irish Elk and the Dodo. Fortunately, for woman, man has caused most of these extinctions (p. 168). Then, without explanation, there is the curious debate concerning house sparrows that are recently dying in London, but not in Paris, somehow connected to humans killing them off in London (p. 169). Boulter doesn't discuss whether the Urban House Sparrow Crisis (UHSC) is related to other factors, such as disease or competition with other urbanized birds. Has the domesticated, docile and well-fed house cat contributed to their demise? He also doesn't tell us that farm-associated house sparrows in the United Kingdom have achieved stable population sizes. But why the house sparrow? The funniest passage of the book has the "UK" (United Kingdom) attempting to "legislate against importers of aliens" to keep them out of the "wild." To protect the house sparrow?
The saddest and most irresponsible part of the book claims that "evolution thrives on culling." That is, it is humans predestination to destroy habitats, and thus "nature will be richer for it" (p. 170). And, "In just the same way, the planet can take advantage from the abuse we are giving it." Unfortunately, he doesn't say how nature will be richer for our abuse, as he strangely appears to celebrate the destructive tendencies of humans. Boulter's only fear is that humans will become extinct. When we become extinct, then "peace and quiet" would return. He ends chapter six with inconclusive statements such that climate change is very complex. It is impossible to make predictions about global climate change without a lot more data. Further, scientists are not willing to share ideas because they are saving them for their big grants (p., 173). New to me, Boulter says that humans will all end up migrating towards the equator in a few generations because of global warming (p. 174). I ask you: would you want to migrate to the equator and broil? Or would you flee to the polar regions and bask in balmy conditions? Despite the lack of data, Boulter still feels that "man" is selfish, that the system is in free-fall, and that there is nothing we can do to stop it (p. 176).
The last chapter (Chapter seven, "Humans and the Future") introduces Stephen Pinker and Richard Dawkins as atheists and sociobiologists, who have reduced scientific "explanations to yes-no alternatives." Boulter is more than vague here, but I think he's trying to imply that Pinker's and Dawkins' view of human behavior is reducible to genetics, and therefore, too objective; their ideas seek "fixed, logical answers" (p. 180). Boulter is disgruntled with these two genetic hooligans, not only because he couldn't get a ticket to their talk at Central Hall Westminster (p. 181), but also because he says that they are ignoring the real problem of human selfishness. He claims that the sociobiologists have focused too much on "altruism", rather than on selfishness. Obviously, he hasn't read E.O. Wilson's (1975) Sociobiology text that discusses aggression, dominance, territoriality, competition and other non-altruistic behaviors. Boulter's view, in fact, is entirely selfish: humans will continue to "burn natural gas", "use kerosene for plane flight" (what ever happened to jet fuel?), and "pump water" into a swimming pool in the desert (p. 180). He concludes that, "human-induced environmental change" is a necessary factor for a self-controlled system, like Earth (p. 183). Boulter goes so far as to say that if there were no extinctions, then life would cease (p. 184). Isn't this a tautological argument? Life would still go extinct, even if there is no extinction? Who edited this book?
Finally, we have slogged our way to the end of the book. Here, Boulter shows how the "Fossil Record 2" group tackles mammal diversity from the late Cretaceous through the Cenozoic to test the idea of "imminent human extinction" (p. 185). In actuality, they want to test whether mammalian family diversity has declined since the advent of humans, something that has already been tested by Dr. John Alroy in North America. Despite this, Boulter shows that mammalian diversity was at it's peak during the Miocene when there were "no serious predators" and "food was plentiful", but diversity has declined ever since. In the last ten million years, he claims, mammalian diversity declined at a "faster" rate, however, he provides no evidence for this statement other than a "smoothed" data curve presented in Fig. 7.1 (p. 188). If you look at his graph (based actually on Dr. John Alroy's data they downloaded from the web: North American Fossil Mammal Systematics Database), there is no apparent precipitous decline in mammalian families. If you look at the data points there appears to be a decline and then a subsequent rise in the number of families in the last million years. But, according to Boulter, during this time we have lost 36 families from the Earth. Is that a substantial loss due to humans? Boulter seems to imply that it is, albeit, most of this loss occurred before humans evolved between 30 and 5 million years (see fig. 7.1). Additionally, using fig. 7.1, only 15 families of mammals have been lost since the Miocene: is that a catastrophic decline? Finally, Boulter claims there are currently 10 families of mammals in North America (p. 187). In stark contrast, the Smithsonian Institution's database shows 28 land-dwelling mammalian families in North America (Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History: North American Mammals). In fact, Boulter's depiction of Alroy's data shows that there are approximately 35 families of mammals in North America today, but why does Boulter fail to look at his own graph? In the next breath, Boulter says that it is not climate change that caused the extinctions, rather it is humans. He states the first humans killed off big mammals in Africa, but this statement directly contradicts his earlier statements, that humans in Africa coexisted with large mammals because they shared a longer evolutionary history. And what about the end of humans? Boulter ends the chapter by saying that birds and insects will survive, but humans, "the most complex" organism on earth, will go extinct, because his exponential graph predicts this dire end.
And so ends one man's journey into deconstructing the paleobiological past. And the moral of this story is: check your facts, wash your dirty laundry in private, and get thee to a good editor before you write your next book!