Extinction

"The story of life is not just that of new things appearing but it’s also a story of things dying out at certain periods. Most people have heard about the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago – but the biggest dying of them was at the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago. This was when life really did nearly die out. More than 90 per cent of species became extinct, seas became poisoned, and life was put through a kind of squeezer from which it only just emerged, and everything that appeared afterwards had to have passed through that squeezer. It was the most important extinction event in the history of the planet, no question. It’s worth thinking about what we’re doing to the planet now. You will know about continental drift, and at that time all the continents came together in one great massive supercontinent called Pangaea, which eventually had a terrible effect on climate. Deserts grew and there were very few places where rich, diverse life could carry on. Vertebrates were reduced to very few species which could walk from one end of the earth to the other. Yes. Trilobites were one of the victims, but some things survived, of course, and those things gave rise to all subsequent life. It reset the whole calendar. That’s obviously something people ought to know about. I’m agnostic. I’m not an evangelical atheist, but I don’t see any evidence for God."