Word: extinctions
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...Guns, Germs, and Steel, his attempt to understand how Western nations rose to political and technological pre-eminence (the title gives you a pretty good hint). In Collapse, he's a little like the title character in Dr. Seuss's The Lorax: he perches on the smoking ruins of extinct societies and calmly explains how they fell--and why, in almost every case, they never even saw it coming...
Despite all the devastation, there are hopeful messages in Collapse. In most cases, the problems those extinct peoples faced weren't insoluble; they just couldn't spot the difficulties in time, whether because of cultural blind spots, scientific ignorance or sheer pigheadedness. "We don't need new technologies to solve our problems," Diamond writes, "we 'just' need the political will to apply solutions already available. Of course," he adds, "that's a big 'just.'" With Diamond's help, maybe we'll learn to see our own problems a little more clearly--before we chop down that last palm tree...
...Everyday, Jaclyn Smith and Joe Boxer, the sales pitch goes, the two perennial retail losers just might create a winning formula. On the other hand, by combining two badly managed retail dinosaurs into one, wags say, the companies may simply save themselves some bankruptcy fees when they inevitably go extinct...
...Africa but had spread all the way to Southeast Asia by 1.8 million years ago (the celebrated Java Man was the first to be discovered). Previous excavations in central Flores had already uncovered primitive stone tools, dating to about 800,000 years ago, mixed in with fossils of an extinct species of dwarf elephant known as Stegodon...
...direct, unbranching line of descent ... Now all that has changed ... While his Australopithecus cousins foraged or scavenged, Homo habilis began to make tools and to hunt. Both actions accelerated his evolution ... "There have been thousands of living organisms," [Leakey] says, "of which a very high percentage has become extinct. There is nothing, at the moment, to suggest that we are not part of that same pattern...