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How Will Animals Look 250 Million Years From Now?
angkor writes "'How will Earth look 5 million, 100 million, even 200 million years from now?' Fantasic and fun speculation from Animal Planet. It's the work of Dougal Adams, who started this idea years ago in the out-of-print After Man: A Zoology of the Future."
Apparently in 5 million years the earth will be people-less and in an ice-age covering most of Europe.
;)
I am still a staunch believer in the fact that "global warming" is something that the Earth will fix on it's own.
Whether or not we are part of that process is of no concesquence.
Animal Planet agrees!
I was watching animal planet's show about this tonight, and was not all that impressed. They seemed to have a lot of information that they could not back up with respect to how evolution would take place, and why for certain species and not others. I found many holes in their "plots", including the fact that they did not account for any technology that humans would leave behind when they left the planet. It was as if they (we)had left and taken all traces of their (our) existence with them...
The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution was another book by Dougal Adams which provided a zoology of an alternate Earth where mammals never evolved past rodents. He painted a picture of Earth's ecology with all the modern niches filled by the decendants of dinosaurs. It even included a chapter which discusses the evolution of a sentient reptilian species.
Unfortunately, it is also out of print. I have a copy sitting on my shelf next to "After Man". I haven't dusted either off in years, but perhaps it's time.
I whole heartidly agree. Their explanation for why the "smaller" of the two squids was so lame; "naturally squids will move to land to fill the void of humanity". I mean come on, that's the fuzziest logic since producers signed on to film Kangaroo Jack..
a much more relevant question:
will humanity survive another 10,000 years?
i think not.
However, it was fairly well-grounded speculation, for the most part. One of the author's main recurring themes was that given the extinction of many larger ungulate herbivores, rodents and rabbits would evolve to fill the niche. He cited that since mankind had a pretty hard time getting rid of rabbits, they should be able to survive and thrive in the future world. So he listed quite a number of rabbit-descended grazers called "rabbucks", who had evolved hooves for running instead of feet for jumping. Much cooler than llamas, I'd say.
However, some of the animals were pretty ridiculous. One such example was a sloth-descended creature called a "Slobber", which had evolved to feed solely by dripping its long, stringy slobber in front of the mouths of nearby flowers, and waiting for dumb insects to fly into the drool, so it could slurp them up for a snack. The clincher was that its eyes had evolved away, so it was completely blind, crawling through the trees and vines of a jungle with absolutely no vision whatsoever. Sorry, but any smart predator would have made quick and easy meals of these things.
So, yeah, creative and interesting, but not necessarily realistic. The large, predatory weasels were also really fun to see.
Super ninja monkeys will one day rule the world!
I don't ever recall them speaking about dolphins in any respect. Dolphins are believed to be very intelligent (perhaps as intelligent as us). Their intelligence seems to make them a likely candidate for the next civilization, yet there is no mention of them.
Only 200 years it takes for death to die.
mahlen
I think the real question is what will we look like in 100 years? Assuming we are able to ride the accelerating technological curve into utopia instead of oblivion, in less than 100 years we are likely going to gain the ability to morph into almost any imaginable shape and/or becoming uploads traversing the universe.
Planet P Blog - Liberty with Technology.
www.enthea.org
If we look at history, we can clearly observe a pattern of increasing empathy in human behavior. Granted the biggest changes have probably only happened in a few recent centuries, but they have regardless.
My point being, of course, things like slavery and other sort of inequality between people. These are things that were considered perfectly normal -- surely a slave owner in their time would've answered almost exactly like you did now to a question about what the slaves would be like in millions of year, substituting eating with working, of course.
These were values of the time only perhaps questioned by a niche group at the time which the majority only ignored or laughed at. Slowly, however, the niche gained momentum, and suddenly you have a vastly different worldview like what we have today, where slavery is a purely negative thing. The Romans used to say that you can't have freedom without slavery; a vastly different interpretation to today's, don't you think?
My hypothesis would thus be that the niche of animal rights activism today will grow to be a phenomenon supported by the majority. You can already clearly see the change by looking at statistics that show younger generations are adopting vegetarianism, veganism, or any of the many forms of conscious choice to abstain from supporting killing of animals. There's of course no guarantee the change will continue in that direction, but history, I think, shows it will.
One thing also speaking in favor of this is the fact that just like for inequality of people, there is really no factual explanation for why a human life would be so much more important than the life of an individual of another species, and these tend to lose importance over time, when we move onto a (hopefully) more and more logical and scientific society. The value of human life consideration doesn't follow any logical pattern, i.e. a baby for all practices and purposes is perhaps even less sophisticated than many animals, but it's the potential people see in them that makes them important. On the other hand, a person with serious brain damage can also be on a much lower level than many animals, yet it is only the stamp of "being human" that is enough.
This logical inconsistency is based on mostly on emotions and beliefs, partly on Biblical tradition, which is not nearly as important in defining society's values anymore as it was before, but also partly just for evolutionary instict to preserve one's own species, and since today the human race is hardly anymore in the danger of extinction, it has begun to fade in importance.
I'm certainly unable to point a clear timeframe in which a change in these values will occur on a large scale, but the thing I think can be almost said for certain is that it will.
I see sharks becoming land creatures before squid do. And just on a personal level, I can respect a shark taking my place before I can a squid.
~S
That Darwin's theory explains why things are the way they are, with regards to survival, it doesn't explain the HOW, which is mutation. Mutations occur and natural selection drives the duplication of the mutated genes 'til a new species is differentiated from the old.
However, the nature of how mutations really happen, and how "good" ones that are "prefered" arrive (as we're very keyed in to hating anything "different" ourselves and often shun it in humans or kill it in animals) is what we as humans have not been able to truly see or test. Its hard to test, as mammals have too long a breeding period, and colonial insects (ants and bees) are usually dominated by the queen's genes. Most genes that change behaviours tended to have already been on the planet somewhere, and are only spreading now because we're accidentally spreading them (e.g., "africanized/killer" bees).
The show did a good job of suggesting what natural selection might do, given a set of mutations over X million years to produce said animals, but the fact is that the mutations themselves are what's utterly unpredictable...and truth be told, rather boring by comparison to the end-results we saw.
I consider evolution a fact, but not a law in the Newton/Einstein sense, because evolution can't be used to predict the future with any accuracy since evolution doesn't explain mutations; it only relies on them. It would be like trying to use Einstein to predict something in electrons without the use of calculus.
--
There's more of my commentary on the show in my journal @ slashdot, most of it influenced by talk from the same boards.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
I taped it. I'm watching it in segments because I get too angry at the junk science it's based on.
My problems:
Every single animal they had was just a slight modifcation of current specimens. Ok, so maybe things wouldn't change that much for the first part (5 million years), but in 100 million years, the best they could come up with is babookari? (The baboon is allegdly extinct, and that bald, redfaced monkey is all that's left of the primates.)
Disregarding Cope's rule: The idea is that as things evolve, they get bigger. Bigger animals tend to win fights over mates, get more food, have fewer predators. It just makes sense. The last of the mammals being herded by spiders bigger than it? Nope.
Disregarding Dollo's law: Evolution is a one-way path. Dinosaurs evolve into birds which evolve into dinosaurs?
Stupid-ass names: snowstalker. deathgleaner. buttpicker. assgoblin.
The awful subplot: Humans are gone and are sending probes back to check out the earth (but clearly not recolonizing it, even if it has gotten past any environmental damage and is just chock full of raw natural resources) Don't forget the bad tech.: 95 million years of technological progress, and the new space probe not only is just slightly larger and silver, it also can't operate without first attaching to the ancient probe.
Just generally weird ideas:
The spiders are silver to avoid UV radiation.
The birds are blue to avoid UV radiation.
The birds sleep in midair.
One gopher-sized spink is enough to feed an entire flock of deathgleaners.
Bad writing:
The deathgleaners (highly evolved bats) exit their cave "like bats out of hell"
I especially like the egotism that intelligence never really returns to the earth (I've only made it 2/3rds through, so it might).
-transiit