Mediancat

Flish is fine by me. Sharkopath, yeah, that one's a bit much, along with "Carakiller," but then again there's a bird these days with the name "Great tit." Most of the names were fine, quite in line with what we call creatures these days.

And I still didn't see any real dogpiling on the mammals; the birds, too, were wiped out.

Rob aka Mediancat

Ab_Normal

Rob: does the book have an explanation for why humanity left Earth? The issue seemed glossed over in the show.

Non-praying Mantis

Actually, it does, but I don't buy it.

Dixon hypothesizes that man, after developing medical technology, stops evolving and eventually becomes extinct by allowing people with potentially disadvantageous genes dominate.

Wakka, wakka, wakka!

NPM

Mediancat

You're referring to After Man, NPM; and what Dixon says there is, yes, man stops evolving by forcing his environment to adapt to him rather than the other way around, but you've got the actual cause of death wrong:

"Ultimately, the earth could no longer supply the raw materials needed for man's agriculture, industry or medicine, and as shortage of supply caused the collapse of one structure after another, his whole complex and interlocking social and technological edifice crumbled. Man, no longer able to adapt, rushed uncontrollably to his inevitable extinction."

Seems plausible enough to me, and in any event that's the conceit to get the book started and isn't really important to an overall understanding and enjoyment of the concepts. The opening pages and the book as a whole provided my first real scientific explanation of evolution, and Dixon did a wonderful job of that. And of course, the "sketchbook" of the future animals is amazing.

I haven't read The Future Is Wild yet, but I know that on the show man left Earth; they didn't die out.

Rob aka Mediancat

A groath industry

pz

Argh. That's awful. It is a standard canard by people who don't understand evolution to claim that man has "stopped evolving" -- it's simply not true. If anything, removing selection pressures by means of technologies that extend life is going to make evolution proceed faster. Genetic diversity in humans is increasing faster now than it ever has before.

I've seen Dixon's books before, and never bothered to do more than glance at them. You've convinced me that I don't even need to do that.

Mediancat

Two things: One, is your opinion absolutely widespread among all or most evolutionary biologists? Or is it one of those things that's simply up in the air? I ask because I don't know. (And if it is, was this known in 1980?)

Two, saying Dixon doesn't understand evolution because of one area of disagreement seems unfair. The beginning of After Man contains several pages on evolution and the history of life. His specialty might not be evolutionary biology -- see Dixon's website for his biography (he in fact has an MS in geology) -- but he seems to have done substantial work with dinosaurs and a lot of popular science writing. He may have missed one area, but again, this is simply a way to move humanity offstage so the real meat of the book can begin. It's not a major point of the book.

Rob aka Mediancat

pz

As far as I know, yes. It should have been known in the 80s, too.
It's a rather substantial error for someone who has written several books that are supposedly relevant to evolutionary biology.

RufusAtticus

Although some selection forces are probably non existant in humans now, more so in developed countries, fertility selection is still going on very strong.

Mediancat

Dixon isn't necessarily referring to events as they are today (precisely, as they were in 1980), but may be referring to a hypothetical future.

I still think this one mistake doesn't disqualify his entire body of work. I'm sure I could come up with a howler or two in the works of most popular scientists. If he blew this one, he blew it; but again, this is simply the excuse for the absence of man from the future and has little relevance to the work as a whole.

I'm not an evolutionary biologist, simply a moderately well-read layman; but there don't seem to be any glaring errors in the rest of the work.

And this book sparked my interest in not only reading about science (I lack the mathematical skills to be a scientist), but in speculative fiction as a whole. It really worked to spark my imagination, and I can't have been the only one.

After all that, one error is not going to trouble me too greatly.

Rob aka Mediancat

Strigers, strigers, jumping flying multiplying

ksagnostic

I wanted to jump in and defend help Rob defend Dixon, but agree with pz about the quality of the program.

Like Rob, I have enjoyed Dixon's books After Man and even more, The New Dinosaurs. He also had a book Man After Man, about adaptive radiation in humans through genetic engineering as well as more natural selective pressures, but I haven't read that one.

I think it is clear from reading the two books that Dixon tried to make his animals odd and visually interesting (he is an artist, after all), but he also tried to make them plausible for the most part. In the books, he described his beasts and their ecosystems in loving detail. Some of his animals do occupy questionable (although creative) niches, and also some of his stuff is dated (for example, The New Dinosaurs was written before the impact crater for the k/t boundry was found...he postulated Iceland), but when it comes down to it, his books are nothing more than speculative fiction. And, so far as I could tell, like other speculative fiction writers he tried to play fair with the scientific themes he used and the mechanisms he invoked. Admittedly I am a layman, but I don't think I am all that ignorant a layman.

That being said, the show on Animal Planet was quite poor. I had the impression that it was rushed, and that mostly they concentrated on the weirdness of the animals (sort of like Adam Sandler's Halloween routine on SNL--"I'm crazy pencil head. Look at this pencil in my head. Isn't that CRAZY? Now give me some candy!"), and created what appeared to be barren, extremely limited ecosystems of two or three animals, like a forest apparently occupied by two terrestrial squids, one of which is a lumbering, ineffective giant predator (on the special, on the website the animal is portrayed as a herbivore). How could an animal that was that big survive on little Squibbons anyway, particularly if they were so hard to catch?) On the other hand, Dixon in his books attempted to present a variety of animals occupying a variety of niches in each environment he portrayed. As a reader, I got the sense of full and vibrant ecosystems, rather than the rather barren, one dimensional environments portrayed on the show.

The narrative was beyond bad. We'd have probes that were supposedly the mechanism for showing us the life forms, but then the narrator would say "scientists predict" or "scientists say" as if modern day scientists are making definitive statements about the future of life on this planet ("Mark my words, this will be the planet of the squids!"). I can hear Kent Hovind now saying, "Those evolutionists say that the planet is going to be overrun by giant squids! Silly evolutionists!" Worse, the paleontology presented was laughable, almost Fred Flintstonian, from the pterosaur portraying the dinosaurian ancestor of birds (and why the hell bring that up anyway, other than to say "Hey, we're like 'Walking with Dinosaurs', aren't we cool?") to the 200 million year old Brachiasaurs-- Jurassic dinosaurs in a Triassic timeframe. Dixon's tendency to have the underdog triumph in the end was clear in the program (and you also see this in Life After Man), but here it seemed to be more for a pathetic little shock value ("Ohhh look, the last primates are eaten up by dino birds! Ohhh look, the last mammals are farm animals for colonial spiders! Isn't that CRAZY?! Now give us some candy!"--I must confess to liking the colonial spiders, however.).

However, I suspect the stupid stuff in this program was not due to Dixon, but to Animal Planet's desire to get this thing out. If Dixon were to write a book on this (I would prefer three books, one for each time period), I would guess he would include substantial detail that the TV special left out.