Daniel C. Dennett puts it in this perspective:
The visionary engineer Paul MacCready has made an arresting calculation: ten thousand years ago, human beings (plus their domestic animals) accounted for less than a tenth of 1 percent (by weight) of all vertebrate life on earth and in the air. Back then we were just another mammalian species and not a particularly populous one (he estimates eighty million people worldwide). Today, that percentage, including livestock and pets, is in the neighborhood of 98! (Quoted from page 370 of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel Clement Dennett. Viking, 2006.)
For a brief biography of Daniel C. Dennett, click here. For his home page, click here.
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