The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man (reviewed)

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ichael Tennesen’s 2015 publication, The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man, examines what evolution may have in store for mankind and the earth in the near and distant future. This considerable topic generates numerous questions. What will the future be like for Earth’s plants and animals? How has mankind’s inexorable population growth affected the biomass? Are we truly in the age of the Anthropocene?[1] What is the future of Homo sapiens? Will the next great planetary extinction event also be the end of man? Might another species evolve to compete with or even replace us? Is Earth the only option for the future of man? 

Tennesen’s book explores these questions (and many more) by interviewing scientific experts around the world and weaving those voices into a thoughtful and accessible (if alarming) narrative about extinction and evolution. What is the current state of research suggesting? What might the “aftermath” of man be like? Moreover, are the activities of humans accelerating extinction processes, and if so, is there any way to manage our net impact on the biomass? What final options may be left to the survival of our progeny? Just as the force of extinction events have worked to eradicate whole swathes of species over deep geologic time, so has evolution worked to develop and encourage new species to thrive. Tennesen advances the following questions: “Will nature provide the necessary niches and maneuvers to meet the future? Will the tropics be part of the rescue, if there is one? And will modern man be along for the ride?”[2] 

Humanity’s progress has come as a double-edged sword delivering extraordinary population growth and technological progress, but also irreparable environmental destruction. “Some scientists believe,” Tennesen writes, “that our current situation started at the outset of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain during the 1700s. This is when CO₂ in the atmosphere began its upward climb…[but] others date the commencement of our dilemma to 1800, when the human population reached one billion.”[3] Typically, the population growth of an organism would be an obvious metric in evaluating its health, success, and sustainability. However, as mankind’s impact of the environment is unprecedented, this meteoric population success may paradoxically be contributing to our own demise, in addition to untold species around the Earth. 

What are some of the immediate challenges to mankind’s recent population growth? If it continues at the current rate from the last fifty years, Tennesen argues, it could reach 27 billion by the end of the century, an unsustainable figure for a host of reasons, foremost of which is that there would not be enough food to feed everyone. This has important implications for growing middle-class consumer societies around that world like China, India, and Brazil. Pointedly, the world’s resources could only support a maximum population of 2 billion if all of those people consumed like present-day middle-class Americans.

Population pressures can also impact the spreading of disease. Hunter-gatherer societies often did not develop immune responses to many communicable diseases because they were typically living in low-density population centers. “It is widely understood,” notes Tennesen, “that you need a certain number of people in close proximity for disease to spread. The critical mass—the point at which the disease achieves optimal virulence and transmissibility—[of measles, for example] is a half million.”[4] As Tennesen's book further explores, the implications for humanity’s growing population—and its attendant consumption of natural resources—has already had a lethal impact of the environment. 

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/42236000/gif/_42236868_eco_debt_cred_416416.gif

Many species on Earth do not have to wait for humanity’s population and consumption rates to grow any larger to already be in danger. Twenty thousand species of flora and fauna (that we know of) are at a high risk of extinction. Tennesen cites a study in Nature that concluded that if current rates of extinction continue, “…we would be on track to lose three-quarters or more of all species within the next century.”[5]

Of course, 99.9% of all organisms that have ever existed are extinct.[6] Species have evolved only to later become extinct through the passage of time. As the late comedian George Carlin wryly noted, "we didn't kill them all." There in fact have been five major extinctions over the last 450 million years: Ordovician-Silurian, Late Devonian, Permian-Triassic, Triassic-Jurassic, and Cretaceous-Paleogene. Arguably, we are currently in the sixth, the Holocene Extinction Event. 

http://madan.org.il/up/images/orig/madan/190/2935449estinzione_massa_eng.jpg

Tennesen lastly explores what other options humanity might have if the earth is no longer habitable. Could our consciousnesses be uploaded to a server and saved for eternity? Could we terraform Mars or Europa, one of Jupiter’s largest moons? If we did colonize another planet or distant moon, after successive generations, would those born there be the same as Homo-sapiens, or a new species having adapted to a new environment? Nature on Earth will survive, adapt, and restore the biomass just as it has done for 450 million years, whether humanity is here to witness it or not. The push of extinction and the pull of evolution have long been the forces shaping life of Earth and will continue on in yet more iterations of extinction events and evolutionary expansions. One must wonder: Is man’s fate to end in extinction, to leave our carbon-based bodies behind and exist digitally in a future-earth, or perhaps even colonize new worlds beyond the solar system?

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[1] The Anthropocene is a term widely [but not universally] used since its coining by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000 to denote the present time interval, in which many geologically significant conditions and processes are profoundly altered by human activities (brackets mine, definition from: http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/workinggroups/anthropocene/).
[2] Tennesen, Michael (2015). The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, (5).
[3] Ibid., 22.
[4] Ibid., 94.
[5] Ibid., 133.
[6] Tennesen writes: “Extinction in reality is a simple process. It happens when the death rate of a species exceeds the replacement by newborns. This will come for man in five hundred, five thousand, or fifty thousand years as current rates of overpopulation, disease, or other possibilities [nuclear war, asteroid impact, super-volcano].” Ibid., 151.  

Mt. Everest: Lord of the Seven Summits

source: http://hdwallpaperia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Mount-Everest-Wallpaper-640x480.jpg

To its closest neighbors, the Nepalese, it is Chomolungma, goddess and mother of the earth. In the West it is known as Mt. Everest, after a 19^th century Welsh surveyor, George Everest. Whichever appellation you designate, Mt. Everest is the literal roof of the earth. With a summit reaching a (quite literally) breath-taking 8,848 meters (29,029 feet), Everest sustains a fascinating, perplexing, humbling, inspiring, lethal, and continuously intriguing history. It may be the only mountain on Earth that people the world over can actually name. Bordering Nepal on one side and Tibet on the other, Everest’s geological, historical, and cultural significance casts a wide (if not pun-filled) shadow over time and space. Mt. Everest can also claim lordship over the so-called Seven Summits, the highest peaks of each continent. This sky-scraping mountain, simultaneously the highest vista, graveyard, and trash-dump in the world, continues to capture the world’s imagination. 

source http://3.bp.blogspot.com

Nearly fifty million years ago, via plate tectonics, the Indian-Australian plate subducted the Eurasian Plate. The result was the earliest formation of the Himalayan Mountain Range. The first organized and recorded attempt at the range's highest peak, Everest, occurred during the 1920s by three successive, and ultimately ill-fated, British expeditions. Today, Nepal is the favored course for climbing Mount Everest since it is the easier of the available summit routes and is currently the best charted path. During the 1920s, however, Nepal was “closed” to foreigners, so the expeditions had to traverse the far more difficult path from the Tibetan side of the mountain. 

George Mallory source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/George_Mellori_1915.jpg/220px-George_Mellori_1915.jpg

George Mallory, pictured above, was the only British climber involved in all three of the first official attempts to summit Everest in the 1920s. After several initially unsuccessful attempts, Mallory set out  in June of 1924 for what proved to be his final climb. All expeditions were made during the summertime due to the extremely dangerous nature of winter ascents. During their final climb, Mallory and his climbing partner Andrew Irvine were last spotted by a fellow climber Noel Odell only a few hundred meters from the summit. This would prove to the last time they were seen alive.

Mallory and Irvine, source: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/03/13/article-0-003D605900000258-1000_468x286.jpg

Soon after Odell’s sighting, Mallory and Irvine disappeared and were not seen again until over seventy-five years later. In June 1999, an international team went looking for Mallory and Irvine’s remains and potential proof they had reached the summit before they disappeared. Irvine’s body remains missing to this day, but the team found Mallory’s uncannily preserved corpse at nearly 8,500 meters (27,887 feet) up the mountain. Although there were many artifacts found on Mallory’s person, there was no camera, and therefore no definitive proof that Mallory and Irvine had been the first to summit. Picture below is Mallory found in situ, 1999. The team interred Mallory where they found him.

George Mallory's body, 1999 source: http://static-mb.minutebuzz.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/dead-body8.jpg

In 1953, another British Expedition to summit Everest was launched by Sir Edmund Hillary and his climbing partner Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. They successfully reached the peak on May 29, 1953.

Hillary and Norgay, 1953 source http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Hillary_and_tenzing.jpg

Hillary and Norgay were fêted by their respective governments of Nepal and Britain, although the contemporary bigotry of the West typically acknowledged Hillary as the “leader” and Norgay as the “assistant,” when the truth was that both men were experienced climbers and worked as a team. Hillary, later spent much of the rest of his life campaigning to improve the welfare of the Nepalese people, particularly around the Himalayas.

Hillary in Nepal source: http://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2008/01/11/seha2003_gallery__600x378.jpg

Mt. Everest, whose health-risk perspicuity bears repeating, is hazardous to human health in a myriad of ways. Everest is one of the famed “8000ers,” or mountains whose summits lie above the 8,000 meter mark. This height is significant because the thinness of oxygen above 8,000 meters cannot sustain human life due to the multitudinous dangers of altitude sickness. The Swiss doctor Edouard Wyss-Dunant coined this elevation, fittingly, as the “death zone.” Loss of coordination, fatigue, brain swelling, thinness of the blood, increased risk of frostbite, and disorientation are but a few of its symptoms. Essentially, once you reach the 8,000 meter mark of a mountain, the race is on to make the summit and head back below 8,000 meters to the nearest base camp before you die.
Everest’s death zone has claimed the lives of many of even the most experienced climbers. Perhaps the best known story of Everest’s lethality is related by author and mountaineer Jon Krakauer’s 1997 personal account, Into Thin Air.

source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/46/Into_Thin_Air.jpg

Krakauer’s book, a must read for any Everest or mountaineering enthusiast, tells the story of the ill-fated 1996 expedition where eight climbers died while getting caught in a blizzard on the summit attempt. In all, fifteen climbers died in that climbing year, making 1996 the deadliest on record. 

The vast majority of the bodies, especially near the summit, have never been recovered. This has to do with the simple fact that carrying down frozen bodies, especially those above the 8,000 meter mark, is nearly suicidal. Helicopter rescues are extraordinarily dangerous, exorbitantly expensive, and virtually impossible to secure at this elevation. These unpleasant facts mean that Mt. Everest, among its many titles, is also the highest graveyard in the world, with potentially more than 200 corpses strewn about the mountain. One infamous example is that of “Green Boots,” below.

"Green Boots" source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_606w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2012/05/21/Foreign/Images/AP060707038596.jpg

This unfortunate climber was later identified as Tsewang Paljor, an Indian climber who was caught in the same blizzard as Krakauer’s 1996  expedition, but on a different face of the mountain. Paljor had gone under a cave outcropping to try to shield himself from the storm, but ended up dying from exposure. His body, now forever frozen in situ, is now a grim marker to climbers making their way through the Death Zone, a literal graveyard in the sky. 

So with the enormous financial, emotional, and physical costs associated with climbing Everest, what compels people up the mountain? That intrepid Englishman George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest, famously replied, “because it’s there.” There has always been the cavalier notion of climber as conqueror. Nature provides challenges for the stout of heart, so say these folk. Sir Edmund Hillary, upon returning from the summit of Everest, told climbers at base camp that, “[w]ell, we knocked the bastard off.” 

Hillary/Norgay Summit 1953 source http://www.mountainsoftravelphotos.com/

Climbers site a host of reasons for wanting to ascend Mt. Everest. Personal glory and bragging rights, a love of the outdoors, the physical challenge of the death zone, a chance to work with a climbing team, and a "once in a lifetime" opportunity, among others. Anatoli Bourkreev, one of the greatest climbers of the 20^th century (who himself died climbing Annapurna) once opined thus on the overriding compulsion of mountaineering, a speculation as lofty as the peaks he encountered:

Mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion...I go to them as humans go to worship. From their lofty summits I view my past, dream of the future and, with an unusual acuity, am allowed to experience the present moment...my vision cleared, my strength renewed. In the mountains I celebrate creation. On each journey I am reborn.

Why Evolution Is True: A Review

Jerry Coyne is currently a professor of biology at the University of Chicago in the Department of Ecology and Evolution. Already the author of a standard biology text Speciation (2004), Coyne set out in 2009 to publish Why Evolution Is True, a non-technical summary of the evidence supporting the theory of evolution. Coyne became interested in writing such a text while following a 2005 case, Kitzmiller et al. vs. Dover Area School District et al. Certain religiously motivated members of the Dover School Board insisted that Intelligent Design (a form of biblical creationism) be offered as an alternative to students in biology classrooms. In the ensuing controversy, two board members resigned and biology instructors in the district refused to read to students the board's resolution concerning Intelligent Design as a scientifically viable alternative to biology. Eleven parents of Dover students took the district to court based on what they saw as religious instruction in public schools and therefore a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Dr. Jerry A. Coyne. Source: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/05/the-whys-of-religion-vs-evolution/)

In his ruling in the Kitzmiller case, Judge John Jones III stated that while "Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect...the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis ground in religion into the science classroom (Coyne, xiii). " 

Although Coyne and other biologists celebrated the ruling, they understood the fight between evolutionary biology and Intelligent Design was hardly settled. Creationists are indefatigably opposed to Darwinian evolution in biology texts and classrooms without the creationist alternative pedagogy made similarly available. It was in this context that Coyne prepared his 2009 bestseller, Why Evolution Is True. 

Source: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/04/15/why-evolution-is-true/

Coyne first objective in this book is to explore what precisely the term "evolution" represents. Since so many aspects of evolution have become misstated and conflated (in the media especially, no doubt some of which through sophistry), Why Evolution Is True begins with a definition of what evolution purports. "Life on earth," Coyne argues, "evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species—perhaps a self-replicating molecule—that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection (Coyne, 3)." The formal study of evolution can be traced back to Charles Darwin's world-altering On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859). Today, Darwin’s magnum opus is known more colloquially as On the Origin of Species.

19th century printing of The Origin of Species. Source: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/resources-rx/images/1015/origin-of-species-book_114888_1.jpg

Through the majority of the nineteenth century, most scientists were also creationists. At the time, being a creationist and being a life scientist (natural philosopher) was not a contrary position to hold. Enlightenment thinking had it that while God very much existed (for most thinkers), He was seen more as a Divine Clock-maker, setting the mechanisms of life in motion according to regular laws that could be understood by mankind through the faculties of reason. The beauty and regularity of the laws of natural world, according to this paradigm, gave credence to an Intelligent Designer. However, Darwin's work cleaved a divide between creationism and evolutionary science that continues today. Obviously, omnipotence cannot allow for design failure or even the gradual change of species, which would admit flaws that had to be corrected over time, or in some cases, "dead ends." Fossil finds like that of the feathered dinosaur Archaeopteryx in 1861 were were keystone findings that increased support of the Darwinist model to explain the changes in species over time. This is not the kind of evidence one expects to find in a instantly complete and "celestially" imparted creation.

Fossil of Archaeopteryx. Source: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2009/2/5/1233857620698/Archaeopteryx-fossil-001.jpg

Artist rendering of Archaeopteryx. Source: http://www.search4dinosaurs.com/jm_large_archeopteryx.jpg

Darwin's On the Origins of Species is significant, Coyne continues, because it "provided an alternative hypothesis for the development, diversification, and design of life (Coyne, 17)." However, Coyne concedes, the actual evidence for Darwin's theories at the time was compelling but not "completely decisive." Since Darwin’s time, the evidence for evolution has become so staggering (and tested repeatedly, in accordance with the scientific method) that it is not a matter among biologists of whether evolution is a fact or not (evolution is like gravity in this sense), but rather in how the details of evolution transpire. 

Skeletal comparison of Compsognathus, Archaeopteryx, and Gallus. From: https://pterosaurheresies.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/the-origin-of-archaeopteryx-illustrated/

So how exactly do we use Darwinian Evolution as process to describe the diversification and development of life? We do so through the process of testable predictions.  Coyne lists the six fundamental tenets of Darwinism in which the evidence of evolution can be tested:

1) Since there are fossil remains of ancient life, we should be able to find some evidence for evolutionary change in the fossil record. 

2) We should be able to find some cases of speciation in the fossil record, with one line of descent dividing into two or more.

3) We should be able to find examples of species that link together major groups suspected to have common ancestry, like birds with reptiles, and fish with amphibians.

4) We should expect that species show genetic variation for many traits (otherwise there would be no possibility of evolution happening). 

5) Imperfection is the mark of evolution, not of conscious design. We should then be able to find cases of imperfect adaptation, in which evolution has not been able to achieve the same degree of optimality as would a creator [italics mine]. 

6) We should be able to see natural selection acting in the wild (Coyne, 18). 

Coyne spends the next two chapters, "Remnants: Vestiges, Embryos and Bad Design," and "The Geography of Life," to show that in fact, all six of these testable predictions have been found both in the fossil record as well as in extant animals and plant systems. Of particular significance to understanding how evolution works is to grasp the notion of what Coyne calls "chance and lawlessness," which can also be seen as the "imperfection" of the fifth tenet of testable predictions mentioned earlier. "One cannot understand evolution," Coyne writes, "without grasping its unique interaction between chance and lawlessness...an interaction that...is critically important to understanding the idea of natural selection (Coyne, 110)." Not to mention understanding evolution's confrontational juxtaposition to Intelligent Design.

And why has Intelligent Design held such inexorable sway, despite the voluminous and repeatedly tested evidence in support of evolution? The answer may be more subversive than it initially appears. “Everywhere we look in nature,” Coyne writes, “we see animals that seem beautifully designed to fit into their environment, whether that environment be the physical circumstances of life…or other organisms that every species must deal with (Coyne, 116) [italics in original].” This line of logic, however, is what was so flatly refuted, and in fact given secular explanation, by Darwin’s On the Origins of Species. The ways in which organisms seem so "intelligently” designed for the environment can be explained by the concept of natural selection.

Assorted adaptation of Galapagos Island finches collected by Charles Darwin. Source: 

http://www.biology-online.org/images/darwin_finches.jpg

“Evolution by [natural] selection,” Coyne states, “…is a combination of randomness and lawfulness. There is first a ‘random’ (or “indifferent”) process—the concurrence of mutations that generate an array of genetic variants, both good and bad; and then a ‘lawful’ process—natural selection—that orders this variation, keeping the good and winnowing the bad (Coyne, 118). So while there is “indifference” in the randomness of potential mutations, evolution is certainly not based on “chance,” a charge frequently leveled at it by creationists. A lawful filtering of the fitness of those mutations governs the success or failure of an organism in its environment. Coyne cites another famous biologist, Richard Dawkins, who defined the process of natural selection as “the non-random survival of random events (Coyne, 119).”

The process of mutation, "natural selection" and reproduction. Source: http://freethinkerperspective.blogspot.com/2012/07/how-natural-selection-selects.html

Coyne's book also examines the role of common ancestry as well as homo-sapiens position within the grander scheme of evolution. If you, Constant Reader, are truly interested in learning more about the macro processes of evolution and natural selection, you would be well served to read Why Evolution Is True, an easily accessible text intended for the general reading public. 

Source: Coyne, Jerry A. Why Evolution is True. New York: Penguin Group, 2009.

So You Think You Can Run? Try the Death Valley Badwater Ultramarathon

Referencing the geographic coordinate system, Death Valley National Park is located at 36.2419° N, 116.8258 W. Interfacing the Great Basin to the Mojave Desert, Death Valley National Park is the largest national park in the lower 48 states. Comprising over 3,000,000 acres, of which 95% is designated wilderness, Death Valley National Park contains some of the hottest, driest, and most extreme geography in the world. Temperatures in the summer time regularly top 120° F. The highest recorded temperature on earth, 134° F, was observed at the aptly named Furnace Creek section of Death Valley, in 1913.

Death Valley, CA 

From http://foundtheworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Death-Valley-2.jpg

The Badwater Basin is the lowest point in North American at 282 feet below sea level. A mere 82 miles away sits highest summit in the contiguous United States, Mount Whitney, at 14,505 feet. Given all these remote and extreme features, it may be surprising to most that an actual marathon race is held in Death Valley every year, from Badwater to Mount Whitney. In mid-July. With no prize for first place.

Some of the world's greatest endurance runners prepare for the Badwater Ultramarathon 

Inexplicably ambulating through Death Valley

Most traditional marathons today are 26 mile (and 385 yard) races through large urban centers like London, Los Angeles, and New York. The New York City Marathon, one of the world’s largest, regularly features over 45,000 participants. The Badwater-Death Valley Marathon is a far cry from the traditional marathon. The Badwater race, heralded as the “toughest footrace in the world,” is more accurately categorized as an ultramarathon, or any marathon race beyond the traditional 26 mile limit. In the case of the Badwater Race, it is a held in the infernal desert heat of July, and features a grueling 135 mile slog from the Badwater Basin (-282 feet below sea level) to the Mount Whitney Portal (8,360 feet above sea level). In 2012, a grand total of 96 intrepid souls set out to Death Valley for a chance to win a medal (for those capable of finishing in less than 60 hours) or more brazenly, a belt buckle (for those who finish in under 48 hours). There is no award, other than notoriety, for those who finish first.

A coveted Badwater Ultramarathon belt buckle from the 2009 race

So if you are a runner who would like a real challenge, maybe you can start training for the 2014 race. After all, if you can run 135 miles through the most forbidding desert in the world for a belt-buckle, you can probably do anything. Happy trails!

Running In Death Valley

From: http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/150826114949-dean-karnazes-badwater-marathon-exlarge-169.jpg