Future Evolution

Resumen

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. 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. 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.