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King rat and the brilliant squibbon
Experts imagine a future with, and without, humans
 Courtesy Of Alexis Rockman Artist Alexis Rockman drew this for the cover of Peter Ward's book "Future Evolution." Titled "Neozoic Era" after the geological time we live in, the piece shows human trash buried by dirt that's become a habitat for super-rabbits that can run great distances, and for dandelions whose spores bombard Earth. Click on the image to hear Rockman describe his process. |
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SEATTLE - It's not that Peter Ward has a special fondness for rats. It's just that he sees them as survivors and, in the future world he posits, they might be the ultimate survivor — and evolver.
Sure, humans will still have their pets, but they probably will not thrive on their own and many will be genetically engineered. As for large mammals such as lions and tigers and bears, in Ward's world they will be driven to extinction by the loss of their habitats and global warming.
No, the real rulers will be rodents — and snakes. "The fossil record shows that they have the genetic capability of whipping out new species," says Ward, a biology professor at the University of Washington.
Oh yeah, cockroaches are also within the category he calls "champion speciators."
Ward is among the academics who focus on the future of evolution. Many agree that animal evolution will be shaped by urbanization, genetic engineering and climate change. But some disagree on whether humans themselves will continue as a species.
British geologist Dougal Dixon, in the book "The Future is Wild," creates a scenario millions of years from now in which humans become extinct and are replaced by an animal kingdom dominated by a giant land-based squid.
Why dabble in what Dixon himself calls "speculative biology?" For Dixon, it's a "novel approach to the instruction of science.
"To give fictitious examples of factual process and situations, especially in evolution, ecology and the other life sciences, gives people another way to look at those subjects — a way that has not been explored before," he says.
The future is now
In Ward's world, described in his book "Future Evolution," humans don't die off, but Earth as we know it sure has changed. "You've got to assume that humans are going to continue and at high population numbers," he tells MSNBC.com.
If that's the case, he says, then animals will have to evolve to thrive in two dominant environments — cities, where the masses live, and tracts of cropland cultivated to feed those masses.
Gone will be the vast grasslands that gave rise to large mammals. "I bet we'll never see a large animal species ever again," Ward says. "Give it a million years," he says, and lions, tigers and bears might all be gone.
Temperature swings over time in this world will favor species that can adapt relatively quickly, and animals will have to be able to survive in polluted air and water. A perfect world for rodents, snakes, cockroaches and foraging birds like crows.
Ward believes rats and snakes belong in the category known as "supertaxa," groups of organisms that create many new species while having a relatively low extinction rate.
Steve Stanley, a geobiologist at Johns Hopkins University who coined the term, agrees. Rats and snakes "are diversifying rapidly today," he says, "and if rodents continue to diversify, they will further stimulate the diversification of snakes, because many snakes eat rodents."
The human touch
A parallel track in this future world involves animals domesticated or engineered by humans.
Stanford biologist Stephen Palumbi, in his book "The Evolution Explosion," argues that humans have accelerated evolution with well-intentioned tinkering — and usually without thinking of the consequences.
He calls this tinkering "brute force evolution," writing that "we humans have a talent for upping the evolutionary ante and accelerating the evolutionary game, especially among the species that live with us most intimately — our diseases, food and pests."
"Anything that works we like to do more and more and more of," he said in an interview, noting that in the case of vaccines, insecticides and herbicides, that means short-term gains against disease and pests only to see them develop a resistance and come back even stronger.
Palumbi does see a "movement towards greater awareness" of such dangers and suggests that society take them into account much as it does significant environmental changes that come with development. "There's no reason we couldn't do an 'evolutionary impact statement,'" he says.
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