For me, it was a rather "nose to the grindstone" winter - no snow-shoeing, no weekend escapes to the coast, and very little discretionary reading. As a result, my pile of unread magazines had become a precarious tower. During a short-lived lull, I began chipping away at last year's pile. I recently read an interesting two-part New Yorker magazine series on "The Annals of Extinction" by one of my favorite science writers, Elizabeth Kolbert. Part One mostly covered the work of Georges Cuvier, whose theory was that mass extinctions provided a major force for determining the species now existing on earth. His theory lost out to Lyell's view of orderly progression and Darwin's theory of evolution and survival of the fittest. Part Two of the series discussed graphtolites and other fossil records that seem to provide strong evidence that long-ago mass extinctions greatly influenced the species that inhabit the planet today. Despite the long-ago Cuvier versus Darwin controversy, current thought is more the combined theory of Cuviwin or Darvier - that population changes are driven by infrequent mass extinctions interspersed with slower evolutionary change.
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