Future Evolution

Future Evolution is a book written by paleontologist Peter Ward and illustrated by Alexis Rockman. He addresses his own opinion of future evolution and compares it with Dougal Dixon's After Man: A Zoology of the Future and H. G. Wells's The Time Machine.

According to Ward, humanity may exist for a long time. Nevertheless we are impacting our world. He splits his book in different chronologies, starting with the near future (the next 1,000 years). Humanity would be struggling to support a massive population of 11 billion. Global warming raises sea levels. The ozone layer weakens. Most of the available land is devoted to agriculture due to the demand for food. Despite all this, the oceanic wildlife remains untethered by most of these impacts, specifically the commercial farmed fish. This is, according to Ward, an era of extinction that would last about 10 million years (note that many human-caused extinctions have already occurred). After that, the world gets stranger.

Ward labels the species that have the potential to survive in a human-infested world. These include dandelions, raccoons, owls, pigs, cattle, rats, snakes, and crows to name but a few. In the human-infested ecosystem, those preadapted to live amongst man survived and prospered. Ward describes garbage dumps in the future infested with multiple species of rats, a snake with a sticky frog-like tongue to snap up rodents, and pigs with snouts specialized for rooting through garbage. The story's time traveller who views this new refuse-covered habitat is gruesomely attacked by ravenous flesh-eating crows.

Ward then questions the potential for humanity to evolve into a new species. According to him, this is incredibly unlikely. For this to happen a human population must isolate itself and interbreed until it becomes a new species. Then he questions if humanity would survive or extinguish itself by climate change, nuclear war, disease, or the posing threat of nanotechnology as terrorist weapons.