Discussion Literature / TheFutureIsWild

Moved all this over here...

• You Fail Biology Forever: To be honest, although Dougal Dixon was involved in the creation of the original book, the work was co-produced, so most of the fail comes from other people. The australian mammologist Stephen Harris is one particularly bad case of idiocy, since he, being a person that studies mammals, should recognise its virtually impossible for mammals to be outcompeted by insects and reptiles. I suppose australians hate their mammalian pests so much that such stopped Stephen's brain from working rationally.
  • Actually there are Real Life examples of mammals being outcompeted by reptiles and insects (and birds), mostly in deserts and oceanic islands where resources are too rare to feed the high energy demanding mammals. The extinctions of primates, mammals, terrestrial vertebrates and even fish (save a few examples) as the series goes is a deliberate attempt of the series creators to show that there is no such thing as Evolutionary Levels and any animal group, no matter how "advanced" it is, can go extinct if it doesn't meet the environment requeriments. Volkov's own attempt isn't free of errors by the way (not counting the fact that animal groups can emigrate, especially given the long span of time involved, is probably the most glaring one).
    • True, but it's a tropical, "greenhouse" world we're talking about, which mammals could perfectly adapt to judging from their success in the Eocene. Besides, as the Permian extinction showed us, tetrapods and fish are capable of surviving large scale extinctions, so it's hard to believe that not even a little lizard or bird passed through a mass extinction caused by volcanism of all things.
      • Missed the part of Pangaea II when the world is a massive desert, huh?
    • Still, plenty of mammals and birds are able to survive in the desert.
  • It's mostly Rule of Cool. Dropping the bus on all the dominant modern groups (mammals, birds, even the bony fish in the oceans!) opens the room for the wilder speculations like the squibbons, flish, and the other invertebrates, none of which would have any reasonable chance of appearing if there were still mammals on land, birds in the air, or fish in the sea. The only scientific justification you need is that mass extinctions are arbitrary and random. When you get to time spans of hundreds of millions of years, no lineage, except maybe bacteria, is safe. Lineages that were/are adaptable and diverse at one point in time can easily lose that adaptability, become over-specialized, less diverse, and vulnerable tens of millions of years later. Real-life examples abound. This happened to the trilobytes (the real-life fate of the trilobytes in the end-Permian is almost exactly parallel to what happens to the mammals in this series), ammonites, pterosaurs, even the dinosaurs. At the same time, on these time scales, and again completely arbitrarily and randomly, other lineages, like the insects and reptiles, can stumble upon new adaptations that make them rather suddenly much more competitive or able to apply pressure on previously dominant groups in new niches. This is what the archosaurs did to the synapsids in the Triassic. The series heavily implies that this is exactly what the falconfly and related lineages of insects did to the birds.
  • Also, the animated series has much more egregious examples.

As the You Fail X Forever headers note, they shouldn't be on a main page, and all this natter helps demonstrate why. There's no subpage that it'd make sense to squeeze this into, but it's at least saved here for posterity.

Edited by BritBllt "And for the first time in weeks, I felt the boredom go away!" Hide / Show Replies

Why literature is the default redirect for this? The book was meant to be a companion to the miniseries, so the miniseries came first.

"Detecting trace amounts of mental activity. Possibly a dead weasel or a cartoon viewer"