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Article: Extinction
- Article from:
- Macmillan Encyclopedia of Death and Dying
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CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 The Gale Group Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Extinction
Humans are the only species aware of not only of their own eventual personal deaths but of their collective demise as well. This latter insight came late in human history
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a product of evolutionary theory and of paleontological and archaeological research.
The West still deals with the twin "cognitive shocks" from the mid-nineteenth-century discoveries that extinction was the fate both of creatures very much like human beings and of cultures as articulate as those in the West, whose people can still speak directly to Western civilization because of their writing systems. On top of these are the twentieth century's scientific end-of-world scenarios, predicting the ...