The Influence of Plants on the Evolution of Terrestrial Communities
A three part take home message...
If there is a take home message that I wish to leave you with, it is threefold. First, change: that the history of the Earth and the organisms on it is dominated by change. Change is something that we as human beings often find difficult and, thereby, we come to the second take home point, the concept of extinction. Extinction is something we look at and we think of as equivalent to death, and as human beings, our basic philosophies and all of our religions are focused on dealing on death, which is something that is hard for us to accept. Extinction is death at a much greater level. Extinction is the disappearance and death of a species and a unique genetic solution. Almost everything that has ever lived on the Earth is extinct. There are very few things alive today, compared to the total diversity of creatures that have existed throughout time. We tend to look at extinction and we think it is bad. We try to stop it. We try to stabilize the present day as what we, in our corporate human memory, think of the world as it ought to be. We want to keep it there. We don't want it to change. We are here now, selfish bunch of little hairless apes that we are.
This raises the third point that we are the first organisms (that we are aware of) who have the mental ability to comprehend the diversity of life, and to come up with a hypothesis for its evolution through time. We are the first group of organisms who can comprehend the total history that has brought us here. For that reason, we should take great pleasure in the knowledge that we can derive, and that you can convey to your students, in being able to comprehend what the world is, and how it works, and how we got here. This knowledge carries responsibility - our knowledge provides us with the responsibility of stewardship: we are the first organisms that have an ability to comprehend the total history of life. Therefore we also have a responsibility to treasure it, to take care of it.
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