A Quote by David M. Raup
There are millions of different species of animals and plants on earth--possibly as many as forty million. But somewhere between five and fifty BILLION species have existed at one time or another. Thus, only about one in a thousand species is still alive--a truly lousy survival record: 99.9 percent failure!
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There are about 250,000 different species of fossil plants and animals known . . In spite of this large quantity of information, it is but a tiny fraction of the diversity that [according to the theory] actually lived in the past. There are well over a million species living today and . . [it is] possible to predict how many species ought to be in our fossil record. That number is at least 100 times the number we have found.
For millions of years, on average, one species became extinct every century.... We are now heaving more than a thousand different species of animals and plants off the planet every year.
It's fair to say when you go out and walk in the woods or on a beach, the most conspicuous forms of life you will see are plants and animals, and certainly there's a huge diversity of those types of organisms, perhaps 10 million animal species and several hundred thousand plant species.
Most people are surprised when they hear my somber figures: we know of 2 million species of plants, animals and microorganisms, and we can give them each a scientific name and a diagnostic description. We know, perhaps generously, more than just a little bit of the anatomy in no more than 10 percent. We have done thorough studies in fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent. And the total number of species on Earth is unknown to the nearest order of magnitude.
When I am at a dinner table, I love to ask everybody, 'How long do you think our species might last?' I've read that the average age of a species, of any species, is about two million years. Is it possible we can have an average life span as a species? And do you picture us two million years more or a million and a half years, or 5,000?
I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of of our fossils, radioactive at that.
Thus, just as animals of many species, including man, are disposed to respond with fear to sudden movement or a marked change in level of sound or light because to do so has a survival value, so are many species, including man, disposed to respond to separation from a potentially caregiving figure and for the same reasons.
The planet earth has a life span of eight billion years, give or take a few million. People have been around for approximately forty thousand years-a virtual blink in the cosmos. It is sad that we as a species are ravaging the natural world so fast that we are jeopardizing our survival. If we wipe ourselves out, it would be the height of folly, but the earth will survive even us. It will eventually restore itself. It might take a few thousand years, and it won't be just as it was before, but its life is stronger than death.
Diversity is a survival factor for the community itself. A community of a hundred million species can survive anything short of total global catastrophe. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature drop of twenty degrees—which would be a lot more devastating than it sounds. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature rise of twenty degrees. But a community of a hundred species or a thousand species has almost no survival value at all.
The only way to save a rhinoceros is to save the environment in which it lives, because there's a mutual dependency between it and millions of other species of both animals and plants.
A species has to become pretty intellectually advanced in order to grasp the concept of death in the abstract, and to dream up the idea of immortality. Long before that (in evolutionary terms) all species with brains have the survival instinct in some form. So, I am just saying that there are many existent proofs of species that have one, but not the other.
It must be stressed that there is nothing insulting about looking at people as animals. We are animals, after all. Homo sapiens is a species of primate, a biological phenomenon dominated by biological rules, like any other species. Human nature is no more than one particular kind of animal nature. Agreed, the human species is an extraordinary animal; but all other species are also extraordinary animals, each in their own way, and the scientific man-watcher can bring many fresh insights to the study of human affairs if he can retain this basic attitude of evolutionary humility.
I'd bet almost anything that life from another planet, if formed independently from life on Earth, would be more different from all species of Earth life than any two species of Earth life are from each other.
Researchers keep identifying new species, but they have no idea about the life cycle of a given species or its other hosts. They cut open an animal and find a new species. Where did it come from? What effect does it have on its host? What is its next host? They don't know and they don't have time to find out, because there are too many other species waiting to be discovered and described.
Of the many species that have existed on earth - estimates run as high as fifty billion - more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error.
There are times when you do have to bring animals into captivity to save a species like California Condors, or Arabian Aurochs. But they have something called species survival plans, and they do it in a very thoughtful way and are careful with the genetics.
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