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Future Evolution-- an Illuminated History of Life to Come

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Future Evolution-- an Illuminated History of Life to Come Images by ALEXIS ROCKMAN Foreword by NILES ELDREDGE A W. H. Freeman Book TIMES BOOKS Henry Holt and Company New York To H. G. Wells and his descendants TIMES BOOKS Henry Holt and Company, LLC Publishers since 1866 115 West 18th Street New York, New York 10011 I would like to thank the following people for various reasons: Sam Fleischman Diana Blume Rob DeSalle Jill Rowe Kirk Johnson Daniel Heiminder John Michel Kurt Keifer Carl Zimmer Niles Eldredge Andrew Vallely Alisa Tager Jean-Jacques Annaud Tom Sanford Anne Pasternak And I would like to thank my gallerists Jay Gorney, Karin Bravin, and John Lee, and especially Rodney Hill.—A.R. Henry Holt® is a registered trademark of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright © 2001 by Peter Ward (text) and Alexis Rockman (images). All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ward, Peter Future evolution / Peter Ward; images by Alexis Rockman; foreword by Niles Eldredge. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN 0-7167-3496-6 (cloth) 1. Evolution (Biology) I. Title. QH366.2 .W37 2001 576.8—dc21 2001003607 Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and premiums. For details contact: Director, Special Markets First Edition 2001 Designed by Diana Blume Printed in Hong Kong 10 987654321 IMAGES Facing page The Farm, 2000 36 The Rise of Mammals, 1; page 102 Oil and acrylic on wood, 1998 96 X 120 inches Oil and acrylic on wood, Page 12 Lystrosaurus and the 32 X 40 inches Permian, 1998 ze 40 North America, 1998 Oil and acrylic on wood, Oil and acrylic on wood, 48 X 40 inches 40 X 60 inches Page 16 Four Interpretations of Page 42 La Brea Tar Pit Drawings Gorgon Heads, Genus (clockwise from upper Rubidgea (clockwise from left): Saber tooth cat; upper left): reptilian; two American mastodon; after the fashion on a camel; La Brea condor. mammal-like reptile; La Brea tar and lacquer amphibian. on gessoed paper, 11 X Permian sediment and 8.5 inches* polymer on paper, Page 46 First Encounter 8.5 X 11 inches* Watercolor and ink on Page 19 Early Therapods Mating, paper, 26.25 X 38.25 1998 inches Oil and acrylic on wood, Page 49 Fragments, 1998 40 X 48 inches Oil and acrylic on wood, Page 25 Chicxulub, 1998 64 X 96 inches Oil and acrylic on wood, Page 62 The Beach: Demerara 56 X 44 inches River Delta, 1994-96 Page 27 Triceratops and the K-T Oil, sand, polymer, Extinction, 1998 lacquer, mixed media on Oil and acrylic on wood, wood, 96 X 64 inches 24 X 18 inches Page 69 Pasture, Scrub, Cecropia, Page 31 Velociraptor Pursues Primary and Secondary Cretaceous Mammal, 1998 Forest, 1998 Oil and acrylic on wood, Watercolor and ink on 40 X 32 inches paper, 30.50 X 41 inches IMAGES Pages 74-75 A Recent History of the Page 116 Snake Evolution, 2000 World, 1997-98 Watercolor and ink on Oil and acrylic on wood, paper, (graphic overlay), 58 X 255.75 inches 24 X 18 inches Page 78 Central Park, 1997-98 Page 127 Crow Evolution, 2000 Acrylic and oil on two Watercolor and ink on paper wood panels, (graphic overlay), 8 X 80 inches (overall) 24 X 18 inches Page 84 Concrete Jungle III, Page 129 Pig Evolution, 2000 1992 Watercolor and ink on paper Oil on wood, 56 X 44 (graphic overlay), inches 24 X 18 inches Page 94 Concrete Jungle II, Page 131 Burgess Shale Drawings 1991 (clockwise from upper left): Oil on wood, 96 X 64 Opabinia, Anomalocaris, inches Hallucigenia, Wiwaxia. Page 106 Drainage Ditch: Pulverized shale and polymer Georgetown, Guyana, on paper, 11 X 8.5 inches 1995 (one vertical drawing), Oil on two wood panels, 8.5 X 11 inches (three 60 X 100 inches horizontal drawings)* Page 118 Thylacine, 1997 Page 138 The Hammock, 2000 Watercolor and ink on Oil on wood, 60 X 72 paper, 26.25 X 38.25 inches inches Page 154 The Triumph of Humans, Page 122-123 Rat Evolution, 1999 2001 Oil and acrylic on wood, Watercolor and ink on paper, 15 X 50 inches 17 X 14 inches Page 115 Dandelion Evolution, Page 168 The Evaporated World, 2000 2000 Watercolor and ink on paper, Watercolor and ink on 24 X 18 inches paper (graphic overlay), 24 X 18 inches *These drawings were created with pigments derived from the medium in which the actual fossils were discovered, provided to the artist by the author. All images courtesy of Gorney Bravin + Lee, New York. All works were photographed by Oren Slor, New York. Vlll FOREWORD BIOLOGICAL FUTURES Niles Eldredge Committee on Evolutionary Processes, and Division of Paleontology, The American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th Street, New York, New York 10024 Predict the future? The future of evolution of life on earth-human life, bird life, fungal life? Most of us New Yorkers would say, "Fageddabout it!" We can't even predict weather with any accuracy more than three days in advance, even with all our global monitoring stations, constant satellite imagery and computer modeling. We go to bed at night, sure that the sun will "rise," but with no way of knowing if the Dow Jones Industrial Average will rise, stay flat, or plummet. Sure, we can explain what happens ex post facto ("the snowstorm didn't materialize because high pressure from Canada deflected the low off the Jersey shore," or "the market fell on disappointing earnings reports in the tech sector"). But predicting such complex systems with any consistency remains an elusive goal, maybe even a fantasy. So how on earth can we expect to do any better with the future of life—with its millions of species, its myriad ecosystems—projecting what's going to happen, not this week or next month, but hundreds, thousands, millions of years down the road? Fageddabout it! But hold on. One of the key ingredients of the scientific endeavor, after all, is predictivity: if an idea is true, we reason, there must be certain observable IX FOREWORD consequences—and if we consistently fail to observe the predicted results, there must be something wrong with the idea itself: we must "reject the hypothesis." Laboratory experiments—though sometimes done blindly ("let's see what hap­ pens if we mix these two chemicals!")—are nonetheless usually performed with some expectation in mind of what the results will be: future outcomes, in other words, are predicted. But even here we encounter difficulties: creationists are fond of pointing out that evolutionary biologists have usually been reluctant to predict what will happen in the evolutionary future, and claim that this failure to render testable predictions of life's future means that evolutionary biology is therefore not true science. In any event, none of us will live long enough to see if our predictions turn out to be correct. Not so, say the philosophers: the future state of a system is not what is neces­ sarily meant by predictivity in science; rather, for an idea to be scientific, we must simply make predictions about what we would expect to observe in the natural world if that idea is true. Thus the grand prediction of evolution would be that, if all life has descended ("with modification," as Darwin himself put it) from a single ancestor, diversifying into separate lineages as the process went along, there should be a single pattern of resemblance linking up all life on earth. More closely related species should look more like each other than more remote kin—but there should be some vestige of common inheritance of features that are found in absolutely all forms of life. That's in fact what we do see: RNA is present in all life forms; all ver­ tebrate animals have backbones (the very meaning of the group's name), all mam­ mals have hair. Then, too, we would predict, were evolution "true," that in the history of life the simplest forms would have appeared first, the more complex later. That, too, we see, haunting our diagrams of the structure of relationships in the living world, but especially in the sequence of life preserved in the fossil record. Life was nothing but bacteria for its first billion or so years, and nothing but single-celled organisms for its first 2 billion years. Simpler forms of animal life preceded the more com­ plex—and reptiles preceded their famous derivatives, birds and mammals. So, not only is evolution a legitimately scientific concept, it is also almost cer­ tainly true—having had its two grand predictions about what life should look like (both now and in the fossil record) "corroborated" so many times over that there is no residual rational doubt that life as we know it is the product of evolution. But if we need not predict the future for us to see the scientific nature of the very idea of evolution, is that all we can do? What about those of us who do not x FOREWORD want to say "fageddabout it!" when we wonder what the future holds—especially for ourselves, the human beings who have so recently, so thoroughly changed the face of our globe? Is there nothing rational we can say, nothing about what we've learned from life's history that can serve as a basis for reading the future—or at least narrowing down the possibilities? The exciting answer is "Yes!"—there's a whole lot we can say, and with confi­ dence. Life's evolution, though usually portrayed as a string of events that saw the eventual emergence of leopards and hippos through a long lineage stretching back to primordial bacteria, can also be read as a series of patterns repeated so often that we can be sure they will happen again.
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