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[Utako]

I heard this read by Ricky Gervais on his Guide to Natural History podcast. It was the first time I heard any writing by Dawkins. I'm so used to hearing him only debate and I had no clue he could weave such vivid prose.



Richard Dawins - The Ancestor's Tale

“A world without rodents would be a very different world. It is less likely to come to pass than a world dominated by rodents and free of people. If nuclear war destroys humanity and most of the rest of life, a good bet for survival in the short term, and for evolutionary ancestry in the long term, is rats.

I have a post-Armageddon vision. We and all other large animals are gone. Rodents emerge as the ultimate post-human scavengers. They gnaw their way through New York, London and Tokyo, digesting spilled larders, ghost supermarkets and human corpses and turning them into new generations of rats and mice, whose racing populations explode out of the cities and into the countryside.

When all the relics of human profligacy are eaten, populations crash again, and the rodents turn on each other, and on the cockroaches scavenging with them. In a period of intense competition, short generations perhaps with radioactivity enhanced mutation-rates boost rapid evolution. With human ships and planes gone, islands become islands again, with local populations isolated save for occasional lucky raftings: ideal conditions for evolutionary divergence. Within 5 million years, a whole range of new species replace the ones we know. Herds of giant grazing rats are stalked by sabre-toothed predatory rats. Given enough time, will a species of intelligent, cultivated rats emerge? Will rodent historians and scientists eventually organise careful archaeological digs (gnaws?) through the strata of our long-compacted cities, and reconstruct the peculiar and temporarily tragic circumstances that gave ratkind its big break?”

Very similar events are covered in amazing detail in the latter third of this novel:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0345457838/?tag=neogaf0e-20

Love, love, love this book.

 

[FairyD]

Elephants.

Why? Because they're pissed and as soon as we are gone, they are taking over. You got this fucking giant, beautiful, majestic, dangerous mammal walking around. Then we, humans, come along and basically fucking massacre the entire fucking species. We beat them, shoot them, turn their tusks into useless crap, use them as weapons, force them to work in a zoo, etc.

But these elephants are smart, they know they can't really do shit because we human got guns and technology. Yeah, sometimes some punk elephant comes along and goes on a rampage and sometimes he'll kill a dude or two. But these elephants, they're just biding their time. They want to survive the game. As soon as we are gone, those elephants are going to squash other animals left and fucking right for no god damn reason. They know what it's like to be a bitch and they aren't playing that shit again. They're pissed and they can't do shit. It's going to be a god damn orgy with the elephants, they'll try to breed as many as possible.

 

[littleworm]

Nothing, we might evolve either through natural selection or science or a combination of both, but humanity will continue to survive in one way or another.

 

[The Lamonster]

The machines will take our place.

 

[speculawyer]

We will go extinct. The only question is whether the Sun does it to us or ourselves.

If we do it to ourselves, well . . . bacteria and insects already dominate us, so they win. But they already won.

 

[Myansie]

Wookies will evolve from the dog.