Humans Are Doomed to Go Extinct
Habitat degradation, low genetic variation, and declining fertility are setting Homo sapiens up for collapse.
Cast your mind back, if you will, to 1965, when Tom Lehrer recorded his live album That Was the Year That Was. Lehrer prefaced a song called “So Long Mom (A Song for World War III)” by saying that “if there’s going to be any songs coming out of World War III, we’d better start writing them now.” Another preoccupation of the 1960s, apart from nuclear annihilation, was overpopulation. Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb was published in 1968, a year when the rate of world population growth was more than 2 percent—the highest in recorded history.
Henry Gee is a paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and editor at Nature. His latest book is A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth (St. Martin’s Press, 2021).
This is a great song worth 3 minutes of your time.
Link to | Tom Lehrer performing So Long Mom.
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