Perhaps Our Greatest Distinction As A Species

What Did The Last Easter Islander Say As He Chopped Down The Last Tree? The Easter Islanders Didnt Have Anthropologists.

To Science We Owe Dramatic Changes In Our Smug Self-image. Astronomy Taught Us That Our Earth Is Not The Center Of The Universe, But Merely One Of Nine Planets Circling One Of Billions Of Stars. From Biology We Learned That Humans Were Not Specially Created By God But Evolved Along With Tens Of Millions Of Other Species.

Thousands Of Years Ago, Humans Domesticated Every Possible Large Wild Mammal Species Fulfilling All Those Criteria And Worth Domesticating, With The Result That There Have Been No Valuable Additions Of Domestic Animals In Recent Times, Despite The Efforts Of Modern Science.

The History Of Interactions Among Disparate Peoples Is What Shaped The Modern World Through Conquest, Epidemics And Genocide. Those Collisions Created Reverberations That Have Still Not Died Down After Many Centuries, And That Are Actively Continuing In Some Of The World's Most Troubled Areas.

Bird Taxonomy Is A Difficult Field Because Of The Severe Anatomical Constraints Imposed By Flight. There Are Only So Many Ways To Design A Bird Capable, Say, Of Catching Insects In Mid-air, With The Result That Birds Of Similar Habitats Tend To Have Very Similar Anatomies, Whatever Their Ancestry. For Example, American Vultures Look And Behave Much Like Old World Vultures, But Biologists Have Come To Realize That The Former Are Related To Storks, The Latter To Hawks, And That Their Resemblances Result From Their Common Lifestyle.