THE END OF EVOLUTION: A Journey in...

THE END OF EVOLUTION: A Journey in Search of Clues to the Third Mass Extinction Facing Planet Earth by Peter Ward (Bantam: $12.95; 301 pp., illustrated). Peter Ward argues that the burgeoning human population and its wasteful habits are destroying species at a rate that may have already eclipsed the extinction of the dinosaurs in scale. He offers an unusually well-balanced account of the events that destroyed most of the animal species on Earth at the end of the Permian and Cretaceous periods. Neither previous extinction occurred overnight, as some extreme adherents of the asteroid-impact theory maintain. But Ward demonstrates that the Earth’s biological and botanical patrimony is being squandered at an unprecedented rate and the ominous implications of that phenomenon.