Pick up a book titled “The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire — Why Our Species is on the Edge of Extinction” (St. Martin’s Press), and it’s safe to assume its pages won’t be full of sunshine, lollipops and rainbows.
But while the author, British paleontologist Henry Gee, delivers an occasionally apocalyptic vision of the future, he also offers some hope for just how humanity can get itself out of a pickle of its own making. “The fact remains that as a species, humans are remarkably pox-ridden, worm-eaten and lousy,” says Gee. “But it is reasonable to ask if humans might evade extinction’s great scythe, and persist indefinitely.”
In “The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire,” Gee examines the many reasons why the human race finds itself in multiple instances of peril.
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