herewith a short article previously only seen by handful of social media contacts on the topic of diversity…
“DIVERSITY: If you’ve ever pondered: “What is the purpose of Life?”… then my personal opinion would be that it’s all about creating ‘diversity’.
‘Life’ (as we know it here on Earth) — which it seems may well be a rarity across the Universe, given the particular ingredients, circumstances and requirements necessary for it even to occur — has apparently spent some 3.7 billion of the past 4.5 billion years trying-out various permutations of the basic building blocks of life… At least 5 times, so far, Life has built an edifice of diversity before having the ‘castle of blocks’ knocked down by one force or another… Even then, when mass-extinctions have occurred there have been enough residual life-forms/potential for the process to continue, new forms of life to thrive and for the planet to become the home to whole new ranges of plants, bugs, creatures…etc. Until ‘the next time’.
Typically mass-extinctions have tended to occur at around about either more-or-less 65 million or (weirdly enough, twice that) 130 million year intervals (at least since the Late Ordovician period almost half-a-billion years ago).
Life’s potential to overcome the setbacks of mass-extinction events has been predicated on the one major driving-impetus that belies Life itself — the tendency to create ‘diversity’… The more diverse the range of species and life-forms the more likely there will be some that manage to survive when ‘times is bad’. No matter how ‘hot’ it gets, how ‘cold’ it gets, how ‘dark’ or ‘toxic’ it gets — there have always been some species that have been able not only just to survive but actually thrive and lay the ground for a new raft of species to emerge and become dominant in the ‘new world’ that evolves after a major period of global catastrophe.
In the past ‘climate change’ has been involved in these events, whether fostered by some cataclysmic natural occurrences, especially volcanic activity it seems… Or something extra-terrestrially-extra-ordinary (but always possible to happen again, at any time, as the planet plows on through uncharted space in the way that it does every day…and night!): i.e. a massive asteroid impact.
As we seem to be, just now, on the cusp of the timing that has marked some previous ‘mass extinction’ timeframes (it has been 66 million years since the 93-mile wide Chicxulub impactor hit what is now Mexico and is thought to have brought the Cretaceous period to an end) it cannot be far from many minds that H. sapiens themselves might become the first species to cause the next ‘Mass extinction’ event — making it a literally ‘man-made’ one.
Human beings have, in recent times. proven themselves to have a tendency to work in ways that are antithetical to Nature and ‘Life’ itself. For whereas Life can be seen to have prioritized ‘diversity’, mankind might ‘celebrate diversity’ in terms of its various societies and cultures BUT actually acts in so many ways that have effectively reduced diversity.
In the past century many species have become extinct, through the impact of the actions of human beings. Modern agricultural practices, too, have increasingly tended to work against Nature — focusing on a very limited range of particular crops, often by way of covering huge tracts of lands with ‘unnatural’ mono-cultures. Human farmers have also focused on breeding a very limited range of food animals.
In this era when it takes 20 calories of energy to produce every 1 calorie of food it doesn’t take a mathematical genius to recognize that this kind of ‘transaction’ cannot continue to occur as the human population rises inexorably!
Should things tend towards the worst outcome, and our species become a particular instigator of the next mass-extinction, (an occurrence, man-made or otherwise, which inevitably will happen, and may most likely include the demise of our own species) the ‘good news’ is that ‘Life’ on Earth will no doubt collect the blocks and begin building ‘diversity’ anew… And perhaps at some time in the next 60-odd million years there may be another self-proclaimed-most intelligent species that will ‘dominate’ the planet and among their number there may be ‘historians’ who will have to conclude that the 6th great mass-extinction event was apparently largely triggered by the actions of a certain species that ‘defied diversity’ and just perhaps, they might learn something about what not to do?”
