"Extinction: 'Superpredator' Attack! (In 10 Million Years.)" (2005)

  MSNBC.com

Newsweek

> <p><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">June 20 issue - The laws of nature sound like they were drafted in ivory towers: Boyle's law, Bernoulli's principle, the three laws of thermodynamics. But if Polish physicist Adam Lipowski is right, scientists may soon add a more common-sense axiom: what goes around comes around. Every 26 million years or so, a mass extinction wipes out most of the world's species, and it's usually blamed on a meteorite or an act of God. (The next one's not due for another 10 million years.) But after modeling evolution on a computer, Lipowski noticed that genetic mutations, accumulating over millennia, regularly produce &quot;superpredators&quot;&mdash;killers so powerful that they destroy the entire food chain, including themselves. That means the culprits behind mass extinction may not be meteorites, but meat eaters.<font>

Who were Earth's great superpredators? Scientists aren't sure, and Lipowski says that looks can be deceiving. "For all we know, it could be a bacterium," he says. "It doesn't have to eat all the other species—it just has to change the equilibrium." That sounds familiar to conservationists, many of whom believe that humans are superpredators. Lipowski is cagey ("We can not implement human beings in our model"), but he is willing to say which species might flourish after the next big extinction—and it's not us. "It will be something very different, something currently considered very poorly adapted," he says. So another maxim might become scientific truth: the meek shall inherit the earth.

—Mary Carmichael