roots (!) and berries. I don’t believe in 
the “strigers”— brachiating cats with 
opposable thumbs — that prey on the 
khiffahs. I can’t believe for an instant 
that all the dogs, cats, foxes, goats, rab- 
bits, and other Eurasian mammals that 
have been introduced to Australia over 
the last two centuries are going to step 
politely aside and allow the native mar- 
supials to have a big evolutionary radi- 
ation (especially one featuring pouched 
monkeys and blind, slobbering sloths) in 
the next fifty million years, even if 
Homo sapiens is out of the picture. I’m 
not only sure that these products of 
Dixon’s imagination won't happen (after 
all, the odds are a zillion to one against 
any detailed prediction about the distant 
future); I have some empirical and theo- 
retical reasons for being fairly confident 
that they can’t happen. And having such 
reasons is heartening because (unless I 
am just deluded) it means that evolu- 
tionary biology has enough predictive 
power to rule out a vast number of 
seemingly possible futures and that we 
probably understand evolution a good 
deal better than some of us are willing to 
admit. 
Does this make evolutionary biology a 
real hard-core predictive science? Yes 
and no, but mostly no. For example, I’m 
willing to predict that if people become 
extinct and Australian marsupials don’t, 
there will be animals in Australia ten 
million years later descended from do- 
mestic cats. Testing this prediction, 
however, is a bit sticky; the conditions of 
the experiment presuppose that no one 
is left to note the results. And this dis- 
mal presupposition is crucial to any sort 
of long-term evolutionary prediction. As 
long as Homo sapiens is running around 
disseminating diseases and poisons and 
edible garbage and foreign animals in 
all directions, turning forests into 
deserts and deserts into suburbs, and 
generally altering the environment in 
massive and unpredictable ways too fast 
for the process of adaptation to catch 
up, all bets are off about the future of 
terrestrial life in the long run. This is 
why Dixon’s book has to begin by killing 
off its author and his audience. Begin- 
ning with that premise, you might con- 
coct a more inventive or more plausible 
fantasy than After Man , but you can’t 
develop a science that presupposes the 
absence of scientists. A predictive sci- 
ence of macroevolution is a contradic- 
tion in terms. 
Matt Cartmill is professor of anatomy 
and associate professor of anthropol- 
ogy at Duke University. 
St. Martin’s Press 
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