“[W]hen [agricultural] people beset by climatic vagaries begin to feel at odds with nature, they begin to lose their sense of integration with it. Life becomes a struggle to overcome nature: to modify it and, if at all possible, to dominate it. It is no coincidence that the founding documents of the Judeo-Christian religions, ultimately derived from the early farmers of the Fertile Crescent, contain what Niles Eldredge of the American Museum of Natural History has called ‘the most ringing declaration of independence ever set down.’ This is the passage from the first book of the Bible, Genesis (1: 27), which translates as ‘God said . . . be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion . . . over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’ The independence declared here is independence of our species from nature itself, based on a profound feeling of separateness from the environment on which we depend.”

—Ian Tattersall, The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE, 2008.