# Quote — Stephen Baxter, Evolution

> The fault is all ours. We have become overwhelming. About one in twenty of all the people who have ever existed is alive today, compared to just one in a thousand of other species. As a result we are depleting the earth.
>
> But even now the question is still asked: Does it really matter? So we lose a few cute mammals, and a lot of bugs nobody ever heard of. So what? We’re still here.
>
> Yes, we are. But the ecosystem is like a vast life-support machine. It is built on the interaction of species on all scales of life, from the humblest fungi filaments that sustain the roots of plants to the tremendous global cycles of water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. Darwin’s entangled bank, indeed. How does the machine stay stable? We don’t know. Which are its most important components? We don’t know. How much of it can we take out safely? We don’t know that either. Even if we could identify and save the species that are critical for our survival, we wouldn’t know which species they depend on in turn. But if we keep on our present course, we will soon find out the limits of robustness.
>
> I may be biased, but I believe it will matter a great deal if we were to die by our own foolishness. Because we bring to the world something that no other creature in all its long history has had, and that is conscious purpose. We can think our way out of this.
>
> So my question is—consciously, purposefully, what are we going to do?

- Author: [Stephen Baxter](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-baxter.md)
- Book: [Evolution](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-baxter/evolution.md)
- Page: 509
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stephen_Baxter#Evolution_(2002)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-baxter/evolution/the-fault-is-all

## More from this book

> Relentless Pleistocene selection was shaping everything that would make up humanity. Even love was a by-product of evolution. Love, and the pain of loss.

p. 308 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-baxter/evolution/relentless-pleistocene-selection.md)

> In the last centuries of the empire, educational standards and literacy had fallen. In the dulled heads of the masses, distracted by cheap food and the barbaric spectacles of the coliseums, the values on which Rome had been founded and the ancient rationalism of the Greeks had been replaced by mysticism and superstition. It was—Honorius had explained to his pupil—as if a whole culture was losing its mind. People were forgetting how to think, and soon they would forget they had forgotten. And, to Honorius’s thinking, Christianity only exacerbated that problem.
>
> “You know, Augustine warned us that belief in the old myths was fading—even a century and a half ago, as the dogma of the Christians took root. And with the loss of the myths, so vanishes the learning of a thousand years, which are codified in those myths, and the monolithic dogmas of the Church will snuff out rational inquiry for ten more centuries. The light is fading, Athalric.”

p. 502 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-baxter/evolution/in-the-last.md)

> For the genes it made sense, of course. Otherwise it would not have happened.

p. 597 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-baxter/evolution/for-the-genes.md)