Sunday, Oct. 26, 2003

oblivion

i keep vacillating between hating and liking my evolution class, but i think i finally decided i like it. in all honesty i've never taken a class which has forced me to think as much as this one has. I would reccomend taking a class on evolution to anyone, because regardless of your beliefs, it will force you to confront them more than you ever had before. reading this chapter on extinction, its just simply mind-blowing. everything in this world could vanish in an instant. and i don't know if it would be more ironic for our destruction to result from our own creation, or from the very forces that created us. maybe tomorrow a volcano could erupt, or an asteroid could hit, and everything would be changed. everything would disapear and then have to be reborn. what would the world look like after another mass extinction? before the permian-triassic extinction, there were no flowers. or birds. i wonder what it looked like then.

creation and destruction are natural processes that happen all the time and throughout history, on a macro and micro level. why then should i be so avid an environmentalist? the extinction of species is completely natural. even 90% of the world's species at one time. it has happened before. global warming is nothing new -- just because human intervention hastens these processes, does that mean we should be trying to escape the inevitable? does that make me a selfish self-preservationist? if that's true than why aren't conservatives also conservationists? so many questions.

there have been so many planes flying overhead tonight. freaks me out completely.