10
THE TRIPLE HELIX
Extinction-Level Events
Creative Destruction
We started as a single-cell bacterium almost four billion years ago. Of an estimated 4 billion species since then, 99 percent no longer exist. We humans are the 1 percent.
In the last 500 million years, there have been five mass extinctions, each destroying at least 75 percent of life on earth.1 The one we all know happened 65 million years ago—the Cretaceous event caused by a space rock hitting the Gulf of Mexico, signaling “game over” for 75 percent of species and sending dinosaurs the way of the dinosaurs.
An ominous lesson for us today, climate change played a role in every mass extinction, wiping the slate clean and allowing nature to downsize and evolve. Mass extinction essentially ...
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