Mammals cannot evolve fast enough to escape current extinction crisis
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Humans are exterminating animal and plant species so quickly that nature's built-in defence mechanism, evolution, cannot keep up. An Aarhus-led research team calculated that if current conservation efforts are not improved, so many mammal species will become extinct during the next five decades that nature will need 3 to 5 million years to recover.
There have been five upheavals over the past 450 million years when the environment has changed so dramatically that the majority of Earth's plant and animal species became extinct. After each mass extinction, evolution has slowly filled in the gaps with new species.
The sixth mass extinction is happening now, but this time, the extinctions are not being caused by natural disasters; they are the work of humans. A team of researchers from Aarhus University and the University of Gothenburg has calculated that the extinctions are moving too rapidly for evolution to keep up.
If mammals diversify at their normal rates, it will still take them 5 to 7 million years to restore biodiversity to its level before modern humans evolved, and 3-5 million years just to reach current biodiversity levels, according to the analysis, which was published recently in PNAS.
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Politicians, profiteers and willing/dupe citizens who are pandered to via religiosity, bigotry and other biases, will continue to vote against their own economic, health and environmental interests.
I keep saying overpopulation is our biggest problem
Exponential growth is going to kick us in the ass before we know it.
Well, the world is decidedly closer to it's next ELE, than it is closer to it's prior one.....
Sad really. I can see just around my town where wooded areas once stood. Replaced by more subdivisions and roads.
Developers and profiteers pave paradise and build communities with names like Willowwood or Whispering Pines ... right over the razed forests they destroy to build them.
What s disgusting hypocritical irony that a self-ascribed “creationist” is likely to support anti-environmentalist, climate denier, energy-company beholden politicians!
In wildness is the preservation of the world...Henry David Thoreau.