Are our scientific institutions being colonised by activists less interested in pursing objective truth than in spinning a political narrative? It is worth asking given an extraordinary spat which is developing among evolutionary biologists as to whether life on Earth is experiencing a ‘sixth mass extinction’.

The trouble with all these extrapolations is that they are being made from a tiny number of extinctions which have occurred so far

In April a paper by John Wiens of the University of Arizona and published in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution argued that while the Earth is ‘on the brink of a major diversity loss’ which would be ‘catastrophic’, there was little evidence to suggest that it will be on the scale of the five mass extinctions which fossil records indicate have o

See Full Page