Humans Have Caused 10 Times More Extinctions Than Previously Thought, New Study Claims
The great, late comedian George Carlin had a line in his act where he would rail against “save the whales” environmentalists by pointing out that 90 percent of species that ever lived are extinct. “We didn’t kill them all,” he would say in a mocking voice, and it’d get a big laugh. I dunno, though, George. This new study seems to show that even if we didn’t kill them all, we were no slouches either. It shows that humans have increased the natural rate of extinction 1,000 times, even worse than the 100 times previously thought. “This reinforces the urgency to conserve what is left and to try to reduce our impacts,” said lead author Jurriaan de Vos, a Brown University postdoctoral researcher. “It was very, very different before humans entered the scene.” The research compares the rate of extinction to 60 million years before the arrival of humans on the scene, to after the arrival of humans to come to its troubling conclusion. The team used evidence from the phylogenies,