Love the part where he says " the simplest human whim...can fundamentally alter evolutionary fate" that is true of everything we do. Big or small every contribution to poisoning the earth and oceans with garbage and pollution...and even the tiniest measure of reuse and recycle HELPS evolution...not just for the most beautiful place in any universe...but awful humans too.
That comment "We live in a time when we are literally etching our decisions into the DNA of the species that live in, on and around us" was trully INSANE. I had never thought of it that way
Whether we are here or not the planet went through some several climactic changes and I guess that also would have spurred some type of evolutionary process whether good or bad
It's the opposite, actually. The process of evolution is the precursor of adaptation. Once natural or unnatural selection takes place, the adaptation results from that. Yes, the phenotype was already there in the DNA and genetics. However, it is the precursor to the spread of the once rarer phenotype across the population in succeeding generations, but only through replication, not adaptation. Adaptations in evolutionary biology are what we mean only when new generations inherit heritable genes and we see a rise of the reproduced phenotypes in a percentage of the population of a species.
May the Anthroprocene epoch make the Permian-Triassic extinction event seem like a minor footnote in the pages of Earths history. Here's to making scenario SSP5-8.5 of the IPCC assessment a reality.
really shocked ,by the fact that we think really alike. well I hope we might work together in future,,currently I am just a student but soon I will be among greatest scientist that world will ever see
For a second, I thought he was going to say that the wolves living in Chernobyl develop less cancer than their fellow wolves outside Chernobyl. That would be huge!
Humanity has become not only a new factor of extinction, but also a new factor of evolution on the planet; one of the tasks for a new species has been completed. And yes, don’t thank us for the plastic, you’re always welcome, we will produce much more
The non-sequitur reasoning of human egotism: Step 1 - demonstrate how many ways we are a horrible species, the absence of which everything else on this planet would benefit from; Step 2 - use that information to figure out how to further *our* survival? Maybe, if you're a fan of stories, you might want to notice that the story we've always told is a delusion of self-justifications and presumptions that somehow we can just completely change everything millions of years of evolution have programmed us to be. And that story is also a tale of horror for every other living thing in our wake. Probably not a great story to do anything with but end with a fade to black. You talk of cancers, but humanity has been the worst cancer this planet has faced. Any "good" we do for other creatures has always been moderately mitigating harms that wouldn't have existed for them in the first place if it weren't for us. And you're not a hero by "solving" a problem you yourself created. We can't just opt out of our essential, destructive nature with positive spins and TED talks. In philosophy the "trolley problem" demonstrates how we perceive morality essentially as a math problem: whatever ends benefits the highest numbers even if at the expense of the lesser numbers is the most preferable. Given that premise, with the millions of species that have died out as a consequence of the existence of humanity, the math suggests that the most moral thing humanity could do is be the next to go extinct, taking as few other species out with us as possible. Caring about this planet inevitably means rooting for a post-humanist future in which everything else can thrive.
