Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping their outcomes towards success or failure: long-term planning, and willingness to rec… - Jared Diamond

People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental/population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!"

Those numbers may not sound like a big deal until one reflects that average global temperatures were "only" 5 degrees cooler at the height of the last Ice Age.

Just as strawberries are adapted to birds, so acorns are adapted to squirrels, mangos to bats, and some sedges to ants. That fulfills part of our definition of plant domestication, as the genetic modification of an ancestral plant in ways that make it more useful to consumers. But no one would seriously describe this evolutionary process as domestication, because birds and bats and other animal consumers don't fulfill the other part of the definition: they don't consciously grow plants.