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Charles C. Mann Quote

Homo sapiens, she once told me, is an unusually successful species. And it is the fate of every successful species to wipe itself out—that is the way things work in biology. By wipe itself out Margulis didn’t necessarily mean extinction—just that something comprehensively bad would happen, wrecking the human enterprise. Borlaug and Vogt might have wanted to stop us from destroying ourselves, she would have said, but they were kidding themselves. Neither conservation nor technology has anything to do with biological reality.

Charles C. Mann

Homo sapiens, she once told me, is an unusually successful species. And it is the fate of every successful species to wipe itself out—that is the way things work in biology. By wipe itself out Margulis didn’t necessarily mean extinction—just that something comprehensively bad would happen, wrecking the human enterprise. Borlaug and Vogt might have wanted to stop us from destroying ourselves, she would have said, but they were kidding themselves. Neither conservation nor technology has anything to do with biological reality.

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About Charles C. Mann

Charles C. Mann (born 1955) is an American journalist and author, specializing in scientific topics. In 2006 his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus won the National Academies Communication Award for best book of the year. He is the co-author of four books, and contributing editor for Science, The Atlantic Monthly, and Wired.