When we look at the animals in the world around us, it’s hard see that the ways animals use to survive has any bearing on humans.

We think of how we adapt to a changing world as an intellectual process. If something changes we reason out a method of dealing with it — if it gets cold we find a way to generate heat, if there is a hurricane or drought we move somewhere else.

Other animal species don’t have the ability to adapt by reasoning their way through a problem. They survive because they’re born that way. They’re born with traits that allow the species to adapt as conditions changed.

Within a species individuals are born with different traits such as more hair, taller, shorter, more muscle, faster, better vision or bear their young earlier or later than the norm to name a few. These varied traits all give a species the ability to adapt to changing conditions. This means those with the right adaptive trait live to reproduce, all the others die.

Looking at the Amazon rain forest with its four stories of plant growth, there are millions of ways a species can evolve and some in ways so specialized that even the smallest of changes in their environment can be cause for extinction. With a planet-altering event, such as a meteor the size of Rhode Island hitting the earth, most existing species lack the traits needed to adapt to the centuries of low light, year round cold and the sparse plant life that this event would bring on. Dinosaurs couldn’t adapt and the only “punishment” that nature has for failure of any type, in this case failure to adapt, is extinction — extinction for the individual or the species.

Humans at the beginning of civilization were the very adaptable generalists. We ate every plant that didn’t poison us, killed and ate any other species we ran across. As we became more technologically advanced we became more specialized, we became metal smiths, farmers, traders, sailors and politicians.

By doing so we lost, however unintentionally, some of our individual ability to adapt while gaining at the species level. As our abilities have diversified so to our focus on specialization has increased with its concomitant individual loss of adaptability. As an example, which of us can fix their own car or start a fire without matches, feed the family without a grocery store or live without AC?

Like the dinosaurs specialization had its price — by making the individual more vulnerable to the effects of change. Human beings by their action or inaction are currently causing the greatest mass extinction of species on earth since the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. If present trends continue one half of all species on earth will be extinct in 100 years. By their extinction they will have proven their inability to adapt to actions of humans.

Think Global – Act Local!

Dr. “Skip” Lazauski’s television show “Eco-Bites,” can now be seen on youtube.com. To reach Dr. Lazauski for questions and comments, send e-mails to IchiOrca@yahoo.com. For more information, see his Web site, www.drskiponline.com.