It reminds me of one of the most important papers I have ever found.

MASS EXTINCTIONS AS SHADOWS OF ANTI-ENTROPIC GROWTH

Macro-Ecological Revolutions
Benjamin Deniston (Benjamin.Deniston@gmail.com)

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http://archive.larouchepac.com/node/21941
"Early Paleozoic radiations established stable ecosystem relationships, and thereafter only the great era-bounding mass extinctions were able to break patterns of incumbency, permitting the emergence of new community structures with distinct proportional diversity relationships."
http://archive.larouchepac.com/node/21941
"these studies indicate very specific conditions required for the survival of any species, including our own."

The Principle of Survival

"Despite the general fluctuations in the total biodiversity over time, the relative changes in dominance of three physiological characteristics each independently demonstrate our three successive macro-ecological systems. Taking the process in its entirety, life has successfully transitioned from one system to the next, even though any given species may or may not have been able to continue to exist, given its particular fixed mode of existence.

Thus, the irony of the mass extinction.

These great kills can never be understood outside of the larger context of the principle of the anti-entropic progress of life. The largest mass extinctions on record over the past half billion years demarcate the largest system up-shifts, and the largest increases in biospheric energy flux density.

That is, until the emergence of mankind. Never before, in the entire history of billions of years of life, have we seen a species that can willfully subsume and act upon this entire process. With mankind that power exists. The qualities of system up-shifts that took life millions of years, and necessarily required the elimination of countless species (purely as a consequence of life's own inherent ecological/biological characteristics), mankind has the potential to generate, even within a single human lifetime. We do not do this by changing our biological structure, but through the action of the uniquely willful creative powers of the human mind.

Through the willful action of the human mind, man wields the force of billions of years, the force of shaping entire worlds – and we are even now only beginning to get a glimpse of what a thermonuclear, or even matter-anti matter mankind can be, as a true creator in the universe.

If we wish to keep with rigorous technical terminology, we can not justifiably use the term “species” to encapsulate these qualities of mankind. Given the potential for what can only be defined as fixed-species-transcending actions, perhaps the term “metaspecies” would be more satisfying to the subject at hand? To be the most precise, we have Lyndon LaRouche's scientific determination of mankind as the potentially immortal species.

But this only comes with the willful choice to act. We have hundreds of millions of years of warning, as the inherent directionality of life in this universe guarantees an inescapable fate to any fixed (i.e. “sustainable”) mode of life – whether fixed purely for unchangeable biological reasons, or fixed by the immoral choices of action, or inaction.

Thus, the lesson of the mass extinction – one to be taken with the utmost seriousness and urgency at the immediate time."