The ant/acacia study appeared in Science 319:192–95 (2008). Leon Kass wrote about “the wisdom of repugnance” in an article in the June 1997 (volume 216) issue of The New Republic.
CHAPTER 6: HEATED ARGUMENT
Various global warming scenarios are reviewed in Mark Lynas’s book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (National Geographic, Washington, D.C., 2008). Tuvalu’s threat to bring a lawsuit against the United States and Australia was widely reported in the media, particularly on the BBC News website. The auto sales data presented in Figure 28 was taken from Edmunds Inc., The New York Times, and J. D. Power and Associates.
The report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis (Summary for Policymakers), is available at www.ipcc.ch. The controversy over the hockey stick graph is reviewed on the website http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2005/03/03/hockey-stick-1998-2005-rip/.
The 2008 Audubon Society Christmas bird count summary is available at http://www.audubon.org/bird/bacc/Species.html.
Bernice de Jong Boers’s article on Mount Tambora appeared in the October 1995 issue of the journal Indonesia (volume 60). The Tambora story is told in Volcano Weather: The Story of 1816, the Year Without a Summer, by Henry Stommel and Elizabeth Stommel (Seven Seas Press, Newport, R.I., 1983). The cultural effects of the Tambora eruption were discussed in the January 29, 2005, issue of New Scientist.
The World Disasters Report 2001, published by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, estimated that more people were forced to leave their homes because of environmental disasters than war—around 25 million at that time, and the number has increased since then. Energy usage in America versus India was discussed in Thomas Homer-Dixon’s excellent book on peak oil and the energy crisis, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization (Island Press, Washington, D.C., 2006). There are many good descriptions of the pebble bed reactor available on the Web. A good overview of desalination technologies is available in the September 2007 issue of Scientific American, as well as in an article by Kathryn Kranhold in the January 17, 2008, issue of The Wall Street Journal.
CHAPTER 7: TOWARD A NEW MYTHOS
The prisoner’s dilemma was first described in John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944, republished by Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2007). Lawrence H. Keeley’s study on violence in “primitive” societies is detailed in his book War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996).
The lifetime chance of being murdered in the United States (1 in 100) was estimated in Michael Ghiglieri’s book The Dark Side of Man: Tracing the Origins of Violence (Perseus Books, Reading, Mass., 1999). The Moriori and their extinction are discussed in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Karen Armstrong discusses Sayyid Qutb and the history of fundamentalism in her fascinating book The Battle for God (Ballantine, New York, 2001).
The survey detailing public acceptance of evolution around the world appeared in Science 313:765–66 (2006). The Economist article quoting Stephen Ulph on Internet usage among Islamic fundamentalists is “A World Wide Web of Terror,” in the July 12, 2007, issue. The estimate of the rates of language loss is from Daniel Nettel and Suzanne Romaine’s book Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002). The statistics on Facebook users can be found on Facebook’s website (http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics), and the average number of users was discussed in a February 26, 2009, article in The Economist.
The following books were cited in the final section of this chapter: Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (Times Books, New York, 2003); James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscapes (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1993); and William McDonough, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (North Point Press, New York, 2002). James Howard Kunstler’s Washington Post editorial appeared in the May 25, 2008, issue of the newspaper.
About the Author
SPENCER WELLS is an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society and Frank H. T. Rhodes Class of ’56 Professor at Cornell University. He leads the Genographic Project, which is collecting and analyzing hundreds of thousands of DNA samples from people around the world in order to decipher how our ancestors populated the planet. Wells received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and conducted postdoctoral work at Stanford and Oxford. He has written two other books, The Journey of Man and Deep Ancestry. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, a documentary filmmaker.
Copyright © 2010 by Spencer Wells
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Wells, Spencer.
Pandora’s seed : the unforeseen cost of civilization / by Spencer Wells.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60374-0
1. Nature—Effect of human beings on. 2. Agriculture—Environmental aspects.
3. Civilization—History. I. Title.
GF75.W46 2010
304.2—dc22 2009040010
www.atrandom.com
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