From my unpublished book

This is the abstract

Due to an unforeseen exposure to toxins. a group of sexually reproducing organisms in a Petri dish suffered a population collapse down to five or six thousand individuals. These survivors formed a few hundred separate clumps. This population grew and slowly recovered over roughly the next twenty-three hundred (plus) generations. At that point this population had already increased to about four million individuals. Then, despite an occasional cooling trend, an upward trend in ambient temperature coincided with an increase in rates of reproduction. Over roughly the next four hundred generations reproduction accelerated and the population rose from four million to approximately a two hundred fifty million. After that marked increase, in a mere twenty generations, this explosively thriving population increased thirty-two fold to eight billion, covering the entire Petri dish. The Petri dish is the Carl Sagan’s small blue marble, the organism is homo sapiens. In the last twenty generations we have adapted to every environmental niche on earth, taken over the planet and made our first tentative steps toward getting off this rock and making the universe our petri dish.