The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man (42 page)

14
 IS HUMAN EVOLUTION DEAD?

kill large animals without having to have large muscles
: Cochran and Harpending,
The 10,000 Year Explosion
, 3–5.

one hundred times faster than the long-term average
: Ibid., back cover.

Neither of them looks like a wolf
: Ibid., 6.

differences between the Viking invaders and their peaceful Swedish descendants
: John Hawks, Eric T. Wang, Gregory M. Cochran, Henry C. Harpending, and Robert K. Moyzis, “Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
104, no. 52 (December 26, 2007), 20753–58.

Homo sapiens
migrated into Eurasia
: Guy Gugliotta, “The Great Human Migration: Why humans left their homeland 80,000 years ago to colonize the world,”
Smithsonian Magazine
, July 2008,
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-human-migration-13561/
.

They’re different. But you can’t see it
: Weiner,
The Beak of the Finch
, 126.

game-changing mutations to the human genome was lactose tolerance
: Cochran and Harpending,
The 10,000 Year Explosion
, 173–86.

I got to witness this up close
: Michael Benanav, “Through the Eyes of the Maasai,”
New York Times
, August 9, 2013.

Homo sapiens
were once pushed to the edge of extinction
: Robert Krulwich, “How Human Beings Almost Vanished from Earth in 70,000
BC
,”
Robert Krulwich on Science
, NPR, October 22, 2012,
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c
.

large-bodied herbivorous dinosaurs were declining
: Stephen L. Brusatte, Richard J. Butler, Albert Prieto-Marquez, Mark A. Norell, et al., “Dinosaur Morphological Diversity and the End-Cretaceous Extinction,”
Nature Communications
3, no. 804 (May 1, 2012).

a series of glacial cycles that have warmed and cooled the earth
: Pardi and Smith, “Paleoecology in an Era of Climate Change.”

Highly resolved ice cores from Greenland
: European Geoscience Union, “The Oldest Ice Core—Finding a 1.5 Million-year Record of Earth’s Climate,” November 5, 2013,
http://www.egu.eu/news/77/the-oldest-ice-core-finding-a-15-million-year-record-of-earths-climate/
.

The end of the Younger Dryas
: NOAA Paleoclimatology Program, “A Paleo Perspective on Abrupt Climate Change,” August 20, 2008,
www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/data4.html
.

Rhinos ran through the British brush
: Stager,
Deep Future
, 62.

The Arctic will be one of the first areas to go
: National Snow and Ice Data Center, “Quick Facts on Arctic Sea Ice,” 2013,
http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/quickfacts/seaice.html
.

An Arctic passage from Rotterdam to Seattle
: Stager,
Deep Future
, 158.

Summer Arctic sea ice
: Brad Plumer, “Arctic sea ice just hit a record low,”
Washington Post
, August 28, 2012.

global warming may actually put off the next ice age by thousands of years
: Christine Dell’Amore, “Next Ice Age Delayed by Global Warming, Study Says,”
National Geographic News
, September 3, 2009.

15
 BEYOND
HOMO SAPIENS

something like twenty-five human species; why couldn’t there be another
: Juan Enriquez, “Will our kids be a different species?” TED Talk, April 2012,
https://www.ted.com/talks/juan_enriquez_will_our_kids_be_a_different_species
.

there may have been four different species on the planet
: Nicholas Wade, “Genetic Data and Fossil Evidence Tell Differing Tales of Human Origins,”
New York Times
, July 26, 2012.

Americans in general have been growing taller, living longer, and getting thicker
: Patricia Cohen, “Technology Advances; Humans Supersize,”
New York Times
, April 26, 2011.

Allopatric speciation
: Author interview with Scott Carroll, July 1, 2011.

studied populations of a small salamander,
Ensatina
, in the 1950s
: R. C. Stebbins, “Speciation in salamanders of the plethodontid genus
Ensatina
,”
University of California Publications in Zoology
, 1949,
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/devitt_02
.

intermarriage with non-Jews, as well as conversions to Judaism, were quite rare
: Cochran and Harpending,
The 10,000 Year Explosion
, 220.

Googleplex buildings have high ceilings
: Julie Bort, “Tour Google’s Luxurious ‘Googleplex’ Campus in California,”
Business Insider
, October 6, 2013,
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-hq-office-tour-2013-10?op=1
.

drawn to others of their kind, which could lead to speciation
: Peter Ward, “What will become of
Homo sapiens
?”
Scientific American
, January 2009.

born from one of its mother’s skin cells
: “Xiao Xiao Receives Torch Lit by Dolly,”
China Daily
, August 8, 2009,
www.chinadaily.com.cn
.

attempting to map the human brain
: Anne Trafton, “Illuminating neuron activity in 3-D,”
MIT News
, May 18, 2014.

the possibilities involved in uploading one’s mind
: Nick Bostrom, “The Future of Human Evolution,” in
Death and Anti-Death: Two Hundred Years After Kant, Fifty Years After Turing
, edited by Charles Tandy (Palo Alto, CA: Ria University Press, 2004), 339–71,
http://www.nickbostrom.com/fut/evolution.html
.

Second Life is a 3-D online community
: Michael Tennesen, “Avatar Acts: When the Matrix has you, what laws apply to settle conflicts?”
Scientific American
301 (July 2009), 27–28.

national defense institutions are among the most active investors in AI
: James Barrat,
Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era
(New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2013), 25, 171–72.

Georgii Gause pondered the options
: Charles C. Mann, “State of the Species: Does success spell doom for
Homo sapiens
?”
Orion Magazine
, November/December 2012,
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7146
.

gave a name to our time: the “Anthropocene”
: Andrew Revkin, “Confronting the ‘Anthropocene,’ ”
New York Times
, May 11, 2011.

“Then all bets are off”
: Author interview with Ian Tattersall, April 18, 2012.

take a Neanderthal, clean him up, give him a haircut
: Palmer,
Origins
, 138.

if our planet’s beginning is the end of your nose
: Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee,
The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World
(New York: Times Books, 2003), 14.

4.5-billion-year history of our planet in terms of a twenty-four-hour day
: Northern Arizona University, “The History of Life on Earth: The 24-Hour Clock Analogy,”
http://www2.nau.edu/~lrm22/lessons/timeline/24_hours.html
.

The more specimens, the more chance for fossils
: Zalasiewicz,
The Earth After Us
, 120–21, 198.

moved its Doomsday Clock forward to five minutes to midnight
: “Doomsday Clock Moves One Minute Closer to Midnight,”
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
, January 10, 2012,
http://thebulletin.org/timeline
.

all continue to try to overrun their environments
: Mann, “State of the Species.”

But in a few decades in the nineteenth century, slavery almost vanished
: Ibid.

Life may exist on earth, but it will be microscopic
: Ward,
Future Evolution
, 175.

large reptile herbivores mired in a long-term decline
: “Were Dinosaurs Undergoing Long-Term Decline Before Mass Extinction?” American Museum of Natural History, October 26, 2012,
http://www.amnh.org/our-research/science-news2/2012/were-dinosaurs-undergoing-long-term-decline-before-mass-extinction
.

BOOKS

Alley, Richard B.
The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future
. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Alling, Abigail, and Mark Nelson.
Life Under Glass: The Inside Story of Biosphere 2.
Oracle, AZ: Biosphere Press, 1993.

Alonso, L. E., A. Alonso, T. S. Schulenberg, and F. Dallmeier, eds.
Biological and Social Assessments of the Cordillera de Vilcabamba, Peru
(Washington, DC: Conservation International, Center for Applied Biodiversity Sciences, 2001).

Barnosky, Anthony D.
Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming.
Washington, DC: Island Press, Shearwater Books, 2009.

Barrat, James.
Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era
. New York: Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Press, 2013.

Behrensmeyer, Anna K., John D. Damuth, William A. DiMichele, Richard Potts, Hans-Dieter Sues, and Scott L. Wing.
Terrestrial Ecosystems Through Time: Evolutionary Paleoecology of Terrestrial Plants and Animals
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Cochran, Gregory, and Henry Harpending.
The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution
. New York: Basic Books, 2009.

Conniff, Richard.
The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth
. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.

Daily, Gretchen C.
Nature’s Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems
. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1997.

Daily, Gretchen C., and Katherine Ellison.
The New Economy of Nature: The Quest to Make Conservation Profitable
. Washington, DC: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2002.

Darwin, Charles.
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
. New York: Bantam Books, 1999. First published 1859; still the premier text of evolutionary biology.

———.
The Voyage of the Beagle.
Ware, Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1997. First published in 1839.

Dawkins, Richard.
The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

———.
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
. New York: Free Press, 2009.

Despommier, Dickson.
The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century
. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2010. Turning abandoned skyscrapers into future farms.

Diamond, Jared.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.

———.
The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal
. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

Erwin, Douglas.
Extinction: How Life on Earth Nearly Ended 250 Million Years Ago
. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. The classic book on the Permian extinction.

Ferrari, Michele, and Steven Ives.
Las Vegas: An Unconventional History.
New York: Bulfinch Press, 2005.

Finlayson, Clive.
The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived
. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Gould, Stephen Jay.
Ever Since Darwin: Reflections on Natural History
. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.

———.
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory
. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. Gould’s 1,343-page opus on punctuated equilibrium and his other thoughts on Darwinian evolution.

———.
Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989.

Guterl, Fred.
The Fate of the Species: Why the Human Race May Cause Its Own Extinction and How We Can Stop It
. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012.

Jackson, Rob.
The Earth Remains Forever: Generations at a Crossroads
. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002.

Jones, Steve.
The Darwin Archipelago: The Naturalist’s Career Beyond “Origin of Species.”
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.

Kolbert, Elizabeth.
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
. New York: Henry Holt, 2014.

Lane, Nick.
Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution
. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009.

Leakey, Richard, and Roger Lewin.
The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind.
New York: Doubleday, 1995.

Mann, Charles C.
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.

Martin, Paul S.
Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America
. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

National Research Council, Committee on Twenty-first Century Systems Agriculture.
Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems in the 21st Century
. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2010.