Future Evolution

Rating:
Summary: dull & unimaginative
Review:

Ward makes a common freshman mistake of forecasting the future as if it will occur linearly. Which, as anyone who is moderately observant (or reads Jay Gould)knows is not the way the universe works. For example, he postulates humanity "500 and 1,000 million years from now . . .the birds are gone. So too are the
amphibians. . . .There are still lizards, and snakes, and scorpions and cockroaches. And humans. All of humanity, or what is left of it, now lives underground in the cooler recesses of the Earth."

Good grief . . . humanity can manage to survive 500 million years and the best they can do is huddle underground with cockroaches and snakes? We're probably within 50 years or so of being
able to re-create extinct species, almost certainly no more than a century and possibly much less. But 500 million years from now, the best humans can manage are scorpions?

And the idea that humanity is somehow extinction proof flies in the face of reality. If the Yellowstone caldera should decide to erupt North America would be destroyed and much of the rest of the world would be severely if not fatally damaged. Solar flares, very large rocks falling on the earth, pandemics, etc. etc. These are just a few things that could destroy the human race. Saying humanity is extinction proof is as silly as saying a ship is "unsinkable" because it has few water tight bulkheads. That simply makes you harder to sink, not impossible.

On top of errors such as this, the writing is simply bad. It's turgid and unimaginative, not much above a sophomore college level. Ward is supposedly a geologist. He should stick to talking about rocks. It's possible he may know something about them.

IMO, this book speaks more about Wards psychology than it does about possible future evolution.

Buy this book used or in the $1.00 bargain bin.

Rating:
Summary: Put Away Your Shades, The Future May Not Be That Bright
Review: Danger awaits those who declare the existence of patterns based on paltry data, but I feel like living dangerously. I think I have discovered a relationship between the study of mollusks and the writing of great nonfiction on evolution. Exhibit A: Stephen J. Gould studies gastropods [snails for the layperson, or, as we called them in college, ghastly-pods] and writes books on evolution from the highest peak of the adaptive landscape of evolution writers. Exhibit B: Peter Ward studies living and fossil shelled cephalopods [relatives of squids and octopi] and writes books on evolution that have a mother-of-pearl beauty and a filling of tasty meat. Future Evolution is not the book that I'd recommend to first time Ward readers; in my opinion, first timers should start with Time Machines [1998] or Rivers in Time [2000, an updated version of The End Of Evolution (1994)]. But readers of books on evolution should make it a point to put Future Evolution [and Rare Earth (2000, co-written with D. Brownlee)] on their reading list.

Future Evolution is a beautiful book visually, making the hardback a must and worth the price. Paintings by Alexis Rockman compliment and illuminate the text by Ward. Future Evolution is a thought provoking book. Even though the book is grounded in our extensive knowledge of evolution and mass extinctions, any book about the future must extrapolate from the data of the past and this is dangerous in the historical sciences. Future Evolution is not a cheery book. Folks who want to hear that humans will save the Earth from themselves [or that humans will go extinct and leave the Earth to continue happily without us] wiil probably not be supportive of many of Ward's conclusions. For readers who want to THINK about evolution, Future Evolution is a must.

I highly recommend Future Evolution to any reader of good books on science and especially to people interested in evolution, mass extinctions, conservation, and the future of life on the Earth.

Rating:
Summary: Good, also read SB 1 or God by Maddox
Review: From an evolutionary history Mr Ward imagines, with scientific support, our future. The Imagination is good, keeping this review simple, the book has about one in a billion chance at being prophetic. Too much can change and adapt in ways we havnt even begun to understand to predict future evolution, but Mr Ward is surprisingly good and we need such persons to keep on advancing us all. A Book that states our descendants will have to force evolution in their favor(to be able to survive and adapt to self inflicted environmental change) by existing technology actually intriged me much more is SB 1 or God by Karl Mark Maddox.

Rating:
Summary: I feel cheated, but educated......
Review: Hard to review this book, since I have a love hate relationship with it. Since most reviews are all flowers, I'll give you the bad points first. About 5/8 of this book is about PAST evolution. More then the entire first half of this book is an anoying review of the history of evolution. It is not untill waaayyyyyy into the book that you get actually to the future. And even then it's nothing new. Just synopsis of other peoples work and anecdotes from the authors life. And to top it all off this book it supposed to be illustrated, but the illustrations are few and far between and, lets face it, ....
But this book isn't all bad. When it finally does get around to talking about the future of evolution it's pretty fun stuff. Also the book is presented in an unemotional manner that I found refreshing. No "boo hoo we're destroying the earth how sad!" Just "we're wiping out the animals and that's the way it is so stop crying about it and enjoy the pure science." Also the writing style is lite and never bogs you down.

Rating:
Summary: Blah....
Review: I give this book two stars, because the premiss is interesting. Unfortuantly, I did not feel that this was a good book. It gave me the same feeling that Carl Sagan's books did of a man with a certain nihilistic view of life. He seems utterly convinced that humanity is going to wander down the path of what basically amounts to biological damnation. He does not take into acount that there are people all over tbe world that are struggling to save the natural world, though they are sometimes few in number. I was throughly disapointed by this book. I am a realist at the core of my being, but this book seems to have a rather cynical bent to it, though I agree with the author that we as a species will most likely not go the way of the do do and the passanger pigieon. Anyway, there are my two cents.

Rating:
Summary: The best book of its kind
Review: In this very readable and very enlightening book, paleontologist Peter Ward explores the possibilities of evolution in the near and far future. At the start, Ward first takes us into the past to see how mass extinctions have affected species diversity and the processes of evolution. He then brings us into the present and argues that the human-caused mass extinction may now be in its final phases, rather than just beginning.

Taking a cue from H.G. Wells's _The Time Machine_, the best parts of this book concern the future. Will there evolve a new species diversity with more big mammals, for example? Highly unlikely, says Dr. Ward, because there will simply not be the room for them to develop. More likely, the "pests" and "weeds" of our modern world--rodents, dandelions, cockroaches, crows, etc.--will form the leading front in the next wave of evolution.

And what of humanity? Will we stay as we are, or will we develop into new species as a result of genetic engineering or space colonization? Or will we merge with (or be replaced by) intelligent machines? Or might we simply just go extinct ourselves? Dr. Ward provides an excellent examination of these questions, and comes to some rather surprising conclusions.

I was expecting a good book, because I thoroughly enjoyed _Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe_, co-authored by Dr. Ward (along with Dr. Donald Brownlee). I am pleased to report that my expectations were surpassed. If you want to read one outstanding book on where we may be going as a species and as a major force in the biosphere, you can do no better than taking in _Future Evolution_.

Rating:
Summary: Imaginative.
Review: There seems to be four main topics on which professional scientists write for the general reading public: the origin of the universe category, the origin of life category, the origin of consciousness category, and the future of the planet category. Peter Ward's book Future of Evolution falls into the latter. While his book Rare Earth is much more specific and thorough with respect to origins and fates, this book is probably a little more approachable for the reader who has yet to delve into the subject. Like others of its kind, it is a cautionary tale.

The author is a colorful writer who is able to capture the concepts of scientific data in brilliant word-pictures for the non-scientist. He also brings his work and that of others into focus by reflecting on his own experiences in the field, which for those who enjoy adventure stories might well capture the imagination. One of the most poignant stories is that of the death of a close friend during a diving accident (p. 171).

Like many in the scientific community Ward is inclined to see the impacts of human activity on the planet as posing a major and irreversible threat to the continued existence of much of the biota with which we share the planet. Unlike others, however, he believes that much of the worst damage has already been done, namely the demise of the mega fauna of the glacial and post-glacial world and the introduction of domestic cultivars into the floral domain. As a paleontologist he is aware that after each major extinction event in the past, whether a broad spectrum or a narrower one, it takes almost 10 million years for the world's living community to recover. Even if our species lives the usual two million years, it will not live to see that recovery, which is a sobering fact.

While he, like one of my former professors, believes that the human species is almost extinction resistant--barring another asteroid impact like that which put "paid" to the dinosaur--he does believe that the world that our descendants inherit will be vastly different from the one bequeathed to us by our ancestors. He would look to the "weeds" of the living world for the future radiation into vacated niches, animals like rats, insects, and snakes, and plants like the dandelion. He also believes that domesticated animals may give rise to new species.

In the last chapters Ward also gives some thought to the fate of our own species, examining what he calls "unnatural selection." He discusses the apparent increase in behavior disorders in modern society, the possibility of artificial genetic modification of the species, the possibility of merging with machines, the possibility that machines will actually be our only "descendants," the possibility that we will be reduced by an asteroid impact, by nuclear war, or by catastrophic climate change.

A very imaginative book.

Rating:
Summary: Not what I expected
Review: This book has good parts and parts I find unfavorable. This book displays rats that hop like kangaroos and have huge teeth, flying snakes, and long necked pigs. As I am not a supporter of evolutionary theory, I did not get what I expected. Many people have the tendancy to be dogmatic, and often believe things such as this when they fail to understand the masses of evidence lacking for evolution. For instance, by the time the most birdlike dinosaurs (e.g. Microraptor, Shenzhouraptor etc.) existed, modern looking birds (Confuciusornis) existed. Recent unpublished fossil evidence show the earliest birds (Protocyanocitta aegernotus) existed at the beginning of the Jurassic period.

Rating:
Summary: A bright future or a dim one?
Review: This book is a fantastic book on the future evolution of mankind using our knowledge of the past, dealing with causes of extinction and evolution, to build scenarios to come. With the extinction of mega-animals and others, what will replace them? Animals from the farms? Creatures from the sewers under our cities? The book asks what our near future and our future over the next ten MILLION years will be like. Will we be killed off by an asteroid? How about World War Three and the decaying Ozone? Will mankind become stupid thru unnatural selection or will the robots take over? Will climate changes be so slow that we can change with it or happen so fast we'll never be able to adjust in time and die out?

All these questiions and more. In fact, being just about 190 pages, I wanted an even bigger book, with MORE details!

Great pictures!!!

Rating:
Summary: Striking images and a sprightly text
Review: This is almost as much of an art book as it is a book on evolution. The images, photos of about 30 paintings by Alexis Rockman, mostly oil and acrylic on wood or watercolor and ink on paper, are stunning depictions of creatures, past, present and to come: an arsinotherium (a rhino-like animal), a thylacine (a doglike marsupial, extinct in 1936), huge dandelions with thick roots several feet long, rabbits and rats on hind legs like kangaroo, crows like vultures, snakes with wings, etc. The text by geologist Peter Ward is sprightly, informed, very readable, and at times even moving, as when Ward recalls his return to New Caledonia after twenty-five years.

Ward's vision, however, is not pretty. He is not looking at planet earth after humans have gone extinct as some other books on future evolution have done. He sees us as surviving for another 500 million years so that the fauna and flora that do evolve will do so with humans as probably the most significant part of their environment. Consequently there will not be any large mammals, and the most numerous creatures will be small and "weedy." They will be mostly nocturnal animals that have learned to tolerate humans, rats and insects and "escapes" from our farms and genetic engineering labs.

Ward is very good at producing striking word portraits. One is the "brown mountain" he observed flying into Mexico City (the polluted air rising above the city), and another is his fanciful creatures of the future, the "Zeppeliniods," who have learned how to create hydrogen-filled air sacks so they can float in the air. In a particularly dystopian vision on pages 135-137, Ward's time traveler visits a garbage dump 10-million years in the future crawling with "cockroach-sized insects...[and] mammals, a few as large as cats but most rat-, mouse-, or even shrew-sized." These creatures have evolved adaptations for exploiting the garbage dump: "some with long tapered heads, others with thin ribbonlike tongues, others with blunt heads and large knoblike teeth, still other with huge batlike eyes." A pig-like creature with rats "like hairy lampreys with greedy sucking mouths" hanging from its sides appears. Overhead large crows "with brilliant plumage" dive bomb the traveler with knifelike barbs on their feet, driving him bleeding toward a tree where a hungry flock of these clever and hungry crows await. Ward also sees a great increase in the number of snakes, some with unusual adaptations to feed on the garbage eaters.

This "dyspeptic" vision, like some of the other visions in the book, is calculated to shock and revolt the reader, but just how likely is it to come to pass? On the one hand it would seem, not very, since we are already recycling away from garbage dumps in many places in the world. On the other hand, if we consider that we, as domesticated creatures ourselves, may be getting dumber, this scenario might seem more likely. (See page 105 where Ward references neurologist Terry Deacon as noting that "all domesticated animals appear to have undergone a loss of intelligence compared with their wild ancestors.") My feeling, however is, that should we by some wild happenstance still be around ten million years from now (average life span of a mammalian species is about two million years) I would expect us to have used our technology to better effect. More likely of course (and Ward addresses this possibility, but dismisses it) is that we will be replaced by the products of our technology long before then. Whether "they" will think it worthwhile to continue "living" is a very interesting question.

Clearly this is a popular book, almost a "coffee table" book, aimed at a popular readership, but that doesn't mean it's simplistic or dumbed down. True, Ward is biased toward a long-lived humanity which he thinks is likely the only intelligent creature in the cosmos (see Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe (2000), which he wrote with Donald Brownlee), but Rockman's paintings really are first rate, and although the speculations are no more than that, they are interesting in themselves. Additionally there is a wealth of information in the text about evolution. Ward points out for example that it is not likely that we are going to undergo much Darwinian-type evolution in the future unless some humans become isolated. This can happen, he speculates, if an elite population isolates itself reproductively from the masses, or if we establish far-flung colonies in space. Another nice tidbit is Ward's observation that the average human I.Q. is not going to change much because whatever is measured on I.Q. tests is subject to the actions of numerous genes and any short term anomalies will be flooded by the mass of genetic humanity.

This book is a bit pricey because it is printed on expensive, glossy paper for the reproduction of the paintings. It's an attractive and entertaining book.