Frederick Crews puts much of the blame for our present woes on religion:
Think of the shadows now falling across our planet: overpopulation, pollution, dwindling and maldistributed resources, climatic disruptions, new and resurgent plagues, ethnic and religious hatred, the ravaging of forests and jungles, and the consequent loss of thousands of species per year . . . the greatest mass extinction, it has been said, since the age of the dinosaurs. So long as we regard ourselves as creatures apart who need only repent of our personal sins to retain heaven’s blessing, we won’t take the full measure of our species-wide responsibility for these calamities.
An evolutionary perspective, by contrast, can trace our present woes to the dawn of agriculture ten thousand years ago, when, as Niles Eldredge observes, we became “the first species in the entire 3.8 billion-year history of life to stop living inside local ecosystems. (Quoted from Follies of the Wise, Frederick Crews, page 280.)
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For a recorded interview with Frederick Crews, click here.
For a brief biography of Niles Eldredge, click here. The above quotation is from Eldredge’s book, The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism.
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