The Future Is Wild [UK Import]

First off: This series is based on a great idea that, I think, has waited for a long time to happen.

Extrapolating evolution is something that should have been done long ago. But oddly, there have been few attempts at it. The attempts that have been done are by Science Fiction authors and I am aware of no vision of evolution's future that had any scientific merit at all.

Enter "The Future Is Wild". Biologists have teamed up with the Discovery Channel and a host of other television producers to create and visualize a plausible projection of what wildlife might look like five, a hundred and two hundred years from now, if human interference is taken out of the picture. The result is highly speculative, well produced, thought provoking and fun to watch.

Each episode highlights a few organisms in a selected habitat on an Earth that will look very different from the one we know: an ice age Earth in five million years, a hot and humid Earth in a hundred million years when the greenhouse effect has run amok, and a very hot and dry Earth in two hundred million years time, when cataclysmic volcanic eruptions have altered the face of and life on Earth beyond anything that looks familiar to us.

There is a lot of sound science behind all this speculation, and i wholeheartedly endorse this program. I have one issue with it though. The sound and interesting science is presented in a very sensationalist way - the result of having to sell the content to a TV audience, i assume. The effect of this ranges from the presenter going on my nerves to, more importantly, developing only scenarios that are designed to shock the viewer.

My basical beef with the future scenarios is this (and I have to admit that I am not an expert in the field, so maybe I am mistaken): Evolution on this planet may have hit a lot of road bumps (less euphemistically called "mass extinctions"), but looking at the past three billion years of evolution one trend becomes crystal clear. Life has evolved from simple organisms to ever more complex, better adapted, more survivable forms. The authors of this series reverse this trend and predict that mammals and birds will become extinct and their ecological niches will be taken by fish, insects and cephalopods, organisms which have been overtaken evolutionary by mammals and birds. I see no reason to question that trend. It is far more plausible that if mammals are out-evolved one day (which I expect they will), they will be out-evolved by their descendants and not their ancestors.

All in all, I have to give kudos to the producers though. I deduct a star for annoying sensationalism, but I strongly recommend this series anway.