The Extinction of Dinosaurs

In his essay, Gould proposes three possibilities as to why dinosaurs are extinct; a rise in temperature causing males to become sterile, hallucinogenic plants, and the age-old asteroid-hit-the-earth theory. Almost immediately, he can disprove the first two theories. The first one, though based solidly in the study of modern alligators, cannot be applied to ancient dinosaurs, seeing as fossils do not include genitals. Plus, most dinosaur bones are determined to be male or female either through DNA testing or by the shape of the pelvis (if intact). The second hypothesis he proposes is not based in testable fact and is pure speculation, seeing as flowering plants that included hallucinogens developed a few million years before the dinosaurs went extinct, plus, there is no way to tell if their liver could (or couldn’t) detoxify the plants. It also doesn’t explain why the marine life or the carnivores died out, seeing as the marine life created their own food, and the carnivores didn’t eat the plants.
    Gould also discusses the importance of evidence that supports or disproves a hypothesis. Evidence is important because without it, everything would be useless speculation. Let’s use color as an example. There are the three primary colors that make up all other colors, red, yellow, and blue. You could claim that blue and yellow make purple, but without evidence, no one could say if it was true or not. Of course, if you were to try to prove this hypothesis, you’d mix blue and yellow and get green, not purple.
    The media comes up with many speculations, and though no one is able to prove them, the common populace is inclined to believe them. Why? Because people want to believe that there’s a reason for everything. That’s the same reason that the Greeks created the gods like Zeus, Athena, and Ares, and the Romans after them, simply re-naming the same gods. It’s also the reason we have science today. As humans evolved, some wanted more earthly reasons for why things happen, so they developed tools like the microscope and the telescope to study the world around them. And as we learned how things worked, we put it to different uses, like electricity, computers, etc.
    Dinosaurs never searched for the answers to the world, all they saw was life and death, food and danger. That may be one reason they went extinct. When the asteroid hit, they didn’t know how to adapt. So they all died and we’re left with the remnants of those one great giant lizards. But then again, that’s all just useless speculation, and I was just saying how useless speculation that cannot be either proved or disproved is, well, useless. There’s no point to it.
    Though humans think we’re the strongest intellectually, we don’t know everything, and probably never will, but we as a race will certainly try our best to learn everything before we inevitably go extinct, even if it’s millions of years in the future.
Humans want to believe that we will be around for forever, but if you look at the past, and the five incidents of mass extinction (usually killing off the dominant race and allowing a new race to evolve and take over) that Gould mentions, you realize that there is a very small chance that humans will actually survive that long. We may survive a few more million years, but some day our time on the earth will be up, and a new race will take over. It’s a fascinating realization that someday perhaps a new intelligent race will be studying our fossils and trying to decide how we went extinct.