Welcome to stuff you should know from house stuff works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast You've got Josh, You've got Chuck Here, we're a couple of writers from how stuff works dot com. Right, Chuck, that's right, so Chuck, Yes, are you familiar with any Turkish authors? I've heard this one. Um, what's the punchline? There's no punch line. Oh, that's a real question. Now. I don't know if the Turkish authors.
I didn't either until I was reading an article to Day about a Turkish author who writes in the name Haroon Yahiah. Yeah, I believe that's how it's pronounced, and maybe butchering. Yet my Turkish is a little rusty. Um, but Mr Yahia recently offered ten trillion Turkish lira, which is about eight trillion dollars. It's not one of those upside down things. It's about point eight um point eight Turkish lyric to the dollars last time I checked. Um
to anyone who can provide definitive fossil evidence of evolution. Wow, yes, that's a lot of money. What's his motive? His motive? He's an outspoken creationism creationist crea. He's an outspoken creationism misted. That's in the word now um and uh he he is so vehemently opposed to Have you heard of Richard Dawkins. Okay, Dawkins has a website and uh, you know he's a zoologist who's a huge evolutionary theorist. He actually believes that
we're nothing more than a vehicle for our genes. That's all. We are, just big bags of flesh and our genes are really in control. Um So he's a huge, huge evolutionist. Um and uh mr Yahiah got the um got Dawkins website band in Turkey, So really if you go to Turkey, you can't get unto Richard Dawkins dot com or what dot ceo dot uk or whatever. Um So, he's he's really kind of he thinks evolutionary theory is false and
it's not correct. So he's sort of ingested throwing out this huge sum of money because he claimed he doesn't think anyone can actually prove this right. Yeah. I I didn't get the impression that he is a trillionaire. I don't know how many trillionaires there are. And it sounds like a smart alec to me, kind of a smart Alec sure, but he was pretty specific. He said that
he wanted an intermediate form fossil. And this is like an animal that is clearly um a species that is the the connecting species between one and another, like UM, some fossil that that links us humans to frogs. Because on the tree of life, we all, if you go back far enough, are related. Everything. Every species on Earth came from some little strand of RNA in the primordial soup here on Earth billions of years ago. Right, That's what I believe. That's that's what a lot of people.
But the fossil record, which is this UM, this this record of all the fossils, all the um sedimentary layers, all this stuff over the last five and fifty million years UM is admittedly spotty. The history of our planet. It is. It is. It's a it's a it is. So you go and take an nice sample, you know, when you go down far enough and you reach a point where no one is sampled yet that gets added to the fossil record. It paints this whole picture of
the evolution of life on Earth. Depending on what you believe, everything may have been placed there. That's another theory. Okay, So UM we're still trying to figure out if evolution occurs like consistently over a long period of time, which is called phyletic gradualism, or it could be in short. First is the competing theory, which is punctuated equilibrium. So it's still like I said, it's spotty, but it does have its uses. What uses, I'll give you a use
to a chuck uh. Last year, October of two thousand seven, uh, some British researchers came up or where they published a study that where they used the fossil record and compared it to global climates over a five twenty million year period, because we have what climate information in the fossil record as well, And what they found was that in times of warm global temperatures like we have now, I think the mean global temperature, which is land and ocean average
temperatures put together, it's about fifty four degrees fifty six degrees ferret height, which is about which historically we're in. It's a greenhouse period, which is what we're in now. Traditionally, when the Earth has seen greenhouse periods, mass extinction has taken place. So the question we're forced to explore is will we soon be extinct, right, which if you look at the history of our planet, there's you know, there's
a case for that. And if we're not extinct, certain uh organisms on our planet might become extinct, which could lead to the domino effect and eventually we might be extinct after all. It is very true. Um, there's one case in point a mass extinction, the worst one, apparently on the fossil record, happened at the end of the Permian period. I believe two fifty one million years ago of all the species on Earth died out like all at once. I read. When I read that, I was
just blown away. I mean, can you imagine if all of a sudden it was like, you know, humans, dogs, cats, and yeah, mosquitoes and maybe a cockroach something like that, with all the rest just gone. You know, you didn't see anything when you went outside, right with, humans wouldn't last long if that were the case. No, because we require biodiversity exactly you want to tell them about biodiversity. Yeah,
I can speak a little bit about that. You know, the Earth basically, Josh is like just a big machine and if you were compared to like a car engine, each each little part has its own function. And if one you know, nut on the car engine goes off, that leads to something else to break and something else to break in. And the earth is kind of like that as well. Um, there are no unnecessary parts. Everything
is important. Even even if looking at a car engine you don't really understand, you know, what this does or what that does, It's still essential. It was put there for a reason. If you'll, you know, excuse the comparison, excuse thanks. Uh so, I know when one example you use was a nitrogen in your article if you wanted to enlighten some folks, what I love enlightening folks. You're ready, folks, let's do this. So Um, nitrogen basically is present in
the soil. It's it's an essential food for crops or crops, right. Um. We we've learned to harness wild crops to to be produced under conditions we like corn um and you know, we can control how many grow and how well it grows in that kind of thing. But really, ultimately, none of this would work if it wasn't for the nitrogen present in the soil. And we can add nitrogen, but it occurs naturally in the soil through like worms digesting
you know, all sorts of different microbs that kind of thing. Um, and the microbs themselves are involved in digesting things, and they what they put out is a waste product in many cases is nitrogen which feeds the crops which feed us. Yeah, so I mean the lowly worm or the even lowlier microbe, bacteria, things that just seems so unimportant or even threatening to us.
We are essential life on Earth. That's that. It kind of goes with that machine you were talking about, the interrelated parts that each one's very important, even if it doesn't seem like it. So it with a loss of biodiversity. So we lose the worms, we lose a lot of the nitrogen in the soil. All of a sudden, our crops fail. So we will be effective when we're one way or another despite our technology. It's pretty amazing when
you think about that. The smallest thing can have the the trickle effect and we may actually be able to survive some sort of mass extinction. I mean, we're we're pretty smart species. Like technically we're subtropical, you know what, right, And we've mastered the colder climbs by a technology like clothes or you know, um, tankless hot water heaters that kind of thing. UM. So we're supposed to be living kind of near the equator, UM, so we could conceivably
survive a mass extinction we have before. Actually, supposedly about seventy thousand years ago, human humanity faced a an evolutionary bottleneck, which is where there's some a species is brought to the brink of extinction. So imagine it like a bottle, and then the bottleneck comes and you lose all that
all that life and all those genes and UM. Basically the population squeezed down and they estimate that there is about fifteen thousand people worldwide on planet on planet Earth at that time because of that bottle from what number you know, I don't know the number, but I think a lot more than UM. So on the other end you come out. So really the evolutionary bottleneck, if the species survives, goes from a bottleneck to an evolutionary hourglass
where it becomes robust again and populated. But at that if you go back to that bottleneck, it took a lot of inbreeding to get past that point. Or which under a theory that I have, UM explains why a lot of people today mouth breathe Wow, yeah, let's hear it. That was it. I think I think there's mouth breathers on planet Earth today because seventy thousand years ago it took a lot of inbreeding to get past our evolutionary bottleneck, and previously we breathe. I'd probably throw a nose guilt.
There's no no, no, no no. I mean you know, you know, like you ever watched twenty four Uh I watched the first day? Okay, Well keep for Sutherland. He's a good example of a mouth breather. He breathes through his mouth, breathe with his mouth open. It's still a little slack jaw. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, Okay, Mr Sutherland, no offense, he doesn't listen, so um chuck. That's pretty much the long and short of whether or not we will face a mass extinction. I think it's
entirely possible. Um. I know I've been storing water ever since I wrote this. Really, in your basement, do you have a bomb shelter? Um? I don't know if I call it a bomb shelter. It's more like an emergency bachelor pad. So you've got your Nintendo and your liquor and yeah, exactly, and the water well. I got plenty of that sleeping bags over. You can learn whether or not you're going to die in the next couple of
years by reading will We Soon Be Extinct? On how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because at how stuff works dot com, let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com.