predicting the future

Evolution of future organisms is hard to predict, but it's still fun to try.

I like the idea behind the show occasionally aired on Animal Planet and Discovery, The Future Is Wild. Since the process of evolution never stops, what might be living on Earth over the millions of years it will exist? The full version of The Future Is Wild is about three hours long, filled with a lot of intriguing renderings of potential future organisms.

But one has to wonder, how likely are those guesses about what evolution might bring to the planet in over 200 million years? In the last 200 million years, we went from a tiny reptile with an odd hip joint to the biggest animals to ever walk the Earth and intelligent life. Are turtles bigger than even the largest known dinosaur and flying fish really out of the question when we think about it?

Maybe not, but its very likely to be all wrong as the evolutionary adaptations we imagine are all things were designing. Actual evolution will come up with very weird things and will be messy and unpredictable because its not designing adaptations, but animals who happen to be able to survive in a given environment at a given time.

These programs are interesting, fun but very doubtfully will be able to give us an accurate idea of the future, even with a large panel of highly distinguished scientists on board. The way evolution is shown in popular science now, makes it seem guided and purposeful as we try to cover every possible stage of development. However, what were doing is missing the sheer messiness of it all and sudden changes that catch on and eventually make new species.