A headline in Science, a premier journal, shrieks “An end to human exceptionalism.”

Strictly speaking, the book reviewed, The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire: Why Our Species Is on the Edge of Extinction (St. Martin’s 2025), prophesies human extinction, pure and simple.

Its author, zoologist and science editor Henry Gee, sees human dominance of the planet as coming to an end in the way that empires do:

In his bold and insightful The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire, paleontologist Henry Gee presents a sobering vision of humankind’s future, as intriguing as it is unsettling. Despite our technological prowess and capacity for imagination, he argues, Homo sapiens is “marked for extinction.”

“An end to human exceptionalism,” March 27, 2025

As the author of the review, Adrian Woolfson, goes on to say, the coming human eclipse originated in a sin against Darwinism:

The rot, he suggests, set in when we hunted down and extinguished Neanderthals, Denisovans, and the diminutive “hobbit men” Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis. Suddenly, we had no competition, something as necessary for success as the “irritating grit in an oyster” that creates a pearl. “Human exceptionalism”

That sin was compounded by the success of agriculture in feeding, thus enabling, billions of humans.

One might add: feeding billions of animals that are friends to humans, useful to humans, or are guarded by humans for conservation reasons.

But, Gee argues, progress cannot be indefinitely sustained. While postponing disaster, the Green Revolution and other efforts, such as using genetic engineering to rewrite crop genomes, are unlikely to avert it. We face an impending food security crisis.

At the risk of sounding flip, I can’t help noting that the “impending food security crisis” that Wolfson and Gee worry about will need to stake its claim over against the global obesity epidemic. What’s really going on?

The astonishing creativity of humans relies on their vast populations. As Gee notes, “it takes a civilization of billions to create an Einstein.” Yet, following an uninterrupted period of expansion, humankind now faces the prospect of transitioning to a phase of population decline. A significant milestone occurred in 2022, when, for the first time, more people died in China than were born. A similar trend is occurring in countries such as Japan, Thailand, Italy, and Spain. “Human exceptionalism”

Well, there is an easy remedy: Join and contribute to your local prolife group! Make children popular again!

But in Woolfson’s telling, Gee’s remedy takes us into orbit instead:

The solution to this impending population calamity, Gee argues, is for humankind to expand its domain through the colonization of, and evolutionary diversification on, the Moon, Mars, and other planetary bodies. In so doing, Gee believes humans can rekindle the migratory wanderlust of their ancestors, using their intellectual agility to devise solutions for survival in hostile environments.

That seems like way more trouble, with much less certain outcomes than just making children popular again.

Woolfson recognizes that. But his solution differs from Gee’s (and mine). In his Science article, he proposes artificial general intelligence (computers that think like humans) as part of a response:

The eventual attainment of AGI, for example, would likely reduce the need for flesh-and-blood Einsteins, allowing innovation in more-modest human populations.

In Wooflson’s vision, the smart computers will stand in for our occasional geniuses. His proposed alternative shouldn’t be a surprise. Adrian Woolfson is a commercial genomics expert and himself the author of Life Without Genes (2000). The publisher tells us,

Bringing together the latest insights from genetics and cyberculture, this book contends that all life can be conceived of as information. It explores future developments in genetics, both as a consequence of Darwinian natural selection and under the influence of genetic engineering. The ideas are illustrated by writing that draws on a range of surreal examples including hypermarkets containing every toy in the universe, pufferfish that think like flies, Peter Pan-like trips through human genes and creatures that evolve in months and not millennia. It argues that the future will be dominated by biological machines evolved artificially by a process of accelerated evolution which is called “evolution compression”.

It’s never been established that artificial intelligences can think creatively. It’s curious that people are prepared to rely so much on an outcome that has never been demonstrated.

Woolfson hopes that Gee’s forecast population reduction will enable “rewilding” of the planet. That would, of course, mean no human-led conservation efforts over large areas. If the planet must be wild, we must not interfere, right? Otherwise, it is just another human vision of the way things should be.

Woolfson ends with a flourish:

Edward Gibbon believed that the principal cause of the Roman Empire’s fall was the cultural shift invoked by Christianity. Perhaps an ideological shift will precipitate humanity’s decline. Whatever the cause of our eventual demise, Gee’s pessimistic predictions about our fate offer much to consider.

The view advanced by Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) that Christianity brought about the fall of Rome has been both advanced and critiqued. But at Foundation for Economic Education, Lawrence W. Reed notes,

… by the late imperial period, is it reasonable to blame anybody for abandoning the Roman State? It was so corrupt and tyrannical that I, a fan of the old Republic, wouldn’t have fought for it either.

With a handful of notable exceptions, most Roman emperors were murderers, tyrants, thieves, and lunatics. They crushed the Roman people with confiscatory taxation and monetary debasement to pay for their adventures abroad and their debilitating welfare state at home.

“What Gibbon Got Wrong in ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” November 20, 2021

Actually, the Christians were the people left to pick up the pieces. They had children; the others had largely stopped. Maybe that’s the real future. But it’s so much harder to intellectualize.