King rat and the brilliant squibbon

Do we really need a cat-dog?
Ward agrees with Palumbi's concerns, saying it's one thing to mix dog genes to come up with a new breed, but another to mix genes from different animals.

"If you really want to see how fast evolution can be," he says, "just focus on dogs." In just the last 200 years of human domestication, dogs "are now the most widely genetic type of creature on the planet."

But, he asks, "What happens if the same ease in producing things gets caught up in creatures we don't like?"

"We're attacking things with an ax and we don't yet have the sophistication" to know the impacts, Ward says. "There will be an escape of genomes from good stuff to bad stuff ... (and) it's going to effect evolution."

Earth without humans
In "The Future is Wild," Dixon, the British geologist, and co-author John Adams create an animal kingdom in which humans no longer reign.

Dixon and Adams give whimsical names to the creatures they dream up, aiming not so much to predict the future but to show some possibilities.

In their vision, humans become extinct in an Ice Age 5 million years from now. "Shagrats," or giant rodents, and "gannet whales," large aquatic birds, have evolved during this stretch of time.

The Ice Age melts away 100 million years later, marking the beginning of the end of large mammals and giving rise to creatures like the "ocean phantom," a jellyfish the size of a truck;  the "swampus," a relative of the octopus that emerges from swamps to feed; and the "toraton," a reptile bigger than dinosaurs.

In 200 million years, evolution brings bizarre animals like "flish," birds that evolved from fish; "bumblebeetles," beetles that fly; and "megasquid," multi-ton, land-based squid creatures.

"Squibbons," a hybrid squid-gibbon ape, live in trees, eat plants as well as flish and "represent the pinnacle of intelligent life on Earth," according to Dixon and Adams' vision.

But it won't be the last species on top. "Undoubtedly," the authors conclude, "the far future will be even wilder."

Rival worlds
Dixon says speculating about such a future helps educate people. "The public appetite for monsters and aliens and strange things of that sort can be a valuable tool and can deliver an audience that would be willing to be informed and educated," he says.

Ward isn't convinced and says his interest in the field of future evolution is driven by presenting scenarios that contrast with visions such as Dixon's.

'"I get tired of futurists so missing the mark, or so it seems to me," he says. "First, there is the sense that humans will soon be gone, or second, that we will produce some 'Blade Runner' world that is all pollution and Michael Jackson mouth masks."  

Palumbi, the Stanford biologist, says that as long as humans do inhabit the planet it will pay to listen to Mother Nature. "Changes to the environment are irreversible," he said, "and thinking them through is important."

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