Black hats

ScientificAmerican.com has an interesting esssay by paleontologist Scott Sampson, who points out that we should probably laud the incredible success of dinosaurs rather than dwelling on their ultimate extinction. They represented the dominant form of life on the planet for about 160 million years, a couple of orders of magnitude up on us. And, of course, they didn't really go away. Just look out the window and you'll likely spot a couple of little flying dinos.

Sampson also points out that, while extinction is the inevitable fate for any species, unnecessary and untimely extinctions are probably a bad thing. So, the fact that the the driving force behind the sixth of the great extinctions is not an asteroid or Milankovitch cycles or a virus, but a certian bipedal primate should motivate us to reverse the process. When future historians of another species look back at the history of the planet, do we want to be discussed under the section titled "The Hitler Species?"