No, a super-resistant virus that will annihilate us in our millions rather than nuclear weapons or global warming poses the greatest threat to civilisation in the next fifty years. John Jeremiah Sullivan muses on the impending conflict between humans and animals.
From this perspective, we know relatively little about animal history because human history is mostly the history of human conventions. Animals do, however, occasionally alter their habits. —John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, a British geneticist who published What is Life? in 1947
Animals are evolving, but I'm not sure why. Inuit elder Inusiq Nasalik, 88, September 6, 2004
I was requested to write an article about the destiny of the human race for this magazine last year, a subject about which my sporadic descent into the crushing mental.
I spent a few days at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University in England in search of understanding. I dialed the FEMA employee's number who I had been assured was the most visionary. I spoke with any self-identifying futurologist who would respond to a question and who wasn't immediately apparent to be insane; Bill Lilly at the New School for Human Advancement was particularly helpful. I had a conversation with someone in the Vatican. The Vatican employs a future specialist—basically, a house Book of Revelation expert. In brief, I want you to know that I tried and tried, for months, to write about something other than what I've ended up writing about here. A digression that surfaced early in the study immediately screamed career killer and was repeatedly thrown.
The extent to which I'd unconsciously internalized a belief in the existence of some guy, some prematurely middle-aged guy, either Jewish or Asian (or, in the comedy version I occasionally screen internally, Irish), who sits in a room in the basement of some government building and knows what's going to happen in the future, whose mutterings need to be taken seriously, revealed itself to me when I was surprised at this fairly obvious-seeming realization. Is this a final spasm in the gene for religion? Probably. I only know that it arrived as. The extent to which I'd unconsciously internalized a belief in the existence of some guy, some prematurely middle-aged guy, either Jewish or Asian (or, in the comedy version I occasionally screen internally, Irish), who sits in a room in the basement of some government building and knows what's going to happen in the future, whose mutterings need to be taken seriously, revealed itself to me when I was surprised at this fairly obvious-seeming realization. Is this a final spasm in the gene for religion? Probably. I only know that it arrived as.
In the better biology departments, the following query has recently been raised frequently: What will be involved with the inevitable increased human exposure to remaining communities of truly wild species when we invade, clear-cut, burn, pollute, occupy, make too hot or too dry, or otherwise render unsuitable for wildlife a growing portion of the planet? not for us, but rather for them. What kinds of alterations, modifications, and reactions should we be on the lookout for in the animals themselves as the stresses of this global-biological endgame start to manifest themselves at the level of the individual organism? Here, stress-related behaviour modification, or so-called "phenotypic plasticity," rather than microevolutionary alterations to existing species, is what we're talking about.
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