Human extinction: Are we already too late?
As I was reading Henry Gee’s “Humans Are Doomed to Go Extinct,” I was reminded of an iconic scene from one of the many “Star Trek” movies. In “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” the ship’s captain, James Kirk, rushes to the engine room to discover that his friend Spock is staggering around in a compartment now filled with lethal radiation. Kirk’s instinct is to rush in and try to save Spock. But, Kirk is held back by his colleagues in order to prevent the deadly radiation from flooding the entire engineering area.
“He’ll die,” Kirk says. “He’s dead already,” one of his colleagues responds, meaning that Spock has already received a fatal dose of radiation. Kirk is too late to save Spock. But it turns out that many fictional characters survive because of Spock’s sacrifice.
It does not seem to Henry Gee, however, that any similar heroic sacrifices by one individual or a few will save humankind. The human race is collectively like Spock; it may be walking around, but it is dead already as a species—and the final demise is coming soon by evolutionary standards.
Gee, a paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and editor at Nature, writes: “There comes a time in the progress of any species, even ones that seem to be thriving, when extinction will be inevitable, no matter what they might do to avert it.”
The reasons humans are in trouble are clear:
-
- Very little genetic variation. Humans are remarkably uniform genetically, a trait which makes any species vulnerable to extinction when circumstances change. Gee remarks: “There is more genetic variation in a few troupes of wild chimpanzees than in the entire human population.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
