Future Evolution - An Illuminated History of Life to Come - Peter Ward 2001

"Be fertile and multiply, fill the Earth and instill fear and terror into all the animals of the Earth and birds of the sky."
- God, in a conversation with Noah

"The presence of humanity began a radical revision of the diversity of life on Earth - both in the number of species present and in their abundance relative to one another."

"It is an unambiguous fact that very early on, our species learned to manipulate the forces of evolution to suit its own purposes, creating varieties of animals and plants that would never have appeared on Earth in the absence of our will. Large-scale bioengineering was underway well before the invention of written language. We call this process domestication, but it was nothing less than efficient and ruthless bioengineering of food stocks - and the elimination of species posing a threat to those food stocks." (Man has, since first appearing, purposely manipulated the Earth to its own benefit. This is not a recent problem and the author proposes that current human actions have limited impact compared to the massive change humans created as they developed).

"Mass extinctions are both instigators of and obstacles to evolution and innovation."

"The Ice Age mass extinction resulted in a major reorganization of terrestrial ecosystems on every continent save Africa. But today Africa is making up for lost time, losing its megamammals as the large herds of game become restricted to game parks and reserves, where they easily become prey to poaching within their newly restricted habitats." (Example of conservationists acting without thinking of the consequences of the consequences.)

"In reality, we have only the haziest idea of how many species currently exist on Earth." (Therefor making it impossible to determine extinction rates and evolution rates). But "The Earth currently has more species than at any time during previous geologic epochs."

"Global diversification remains a simple equation:

origination minus extinction = diversification

The highest net rates of diversification seem to occur in animals with small body sizes, short generation times, wide distributions, and high abundances. Although two of these traits - wide distribution and high abundance - seem to negate new speciation, they retard extinction even more. The net result is higher diversification than extinction."

"In the present-day Age of Humanity, it appears that the large-scale environmental changes causing the observed rise in extinction are abiotic - climate change and changes in landscape and vegetation - yet their ultimate cause is biotic - the actions of humans. These circumstances have no precedent on Earth."

- k 1/2010 (bold and initialized segments were added by me to highlight the author's words)