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Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future

Dougal Dixon

Hardcover | Pages: 128 pages

Rating: 3.89 | 372 Users | 55 Reviews

Identify Containing Books Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future

Title	:	Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future
Author	:	Dougal Dixon
Book Format	:	Hardcover
Book Edition	:	Special Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 128 pages
Published	:	September 1990 by St. Martin's Press (first published 1990)
Categories	:	Science Fiction. Fiction. Anthropology. Art

Relation Concering Books Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future

This is the least scientifically plausible Dougal Dixon book I've read, but I still enjoyed its wonderful weirdness. It gets more implausible as it goes on, but then again the plausibility of various forms of future "homo" evolution is pretty much an epistemic black hole.

The book tells very pessimistic story of the future in which earth falls apart due to environmental destruction. Mankind engineers some basic freakish variations of itself to help build spaceships, and before leaving they seed the planet with a bunch of varieties of "homo", (including the poor people who couldn't buy tickets to Alpha Centauri). Seriously advanced intelligence doesn't really make a comeback, except in the aquatics who end up collapsing on themselves anyway.

Some animals like the seekers and socials, eventually develop warlike tenancies and develop basic tribal statism, but refuse to progress any further.

From the perspective of a history and economics fan, I find this fairly implausible. Even if intelligence is ultimately self defeating in the long run of a species, the incentives facing an individual organism within one lifespan would force it to make use of intelligence, not eschew it like the travelers/memory people do. These species basically decide to become primitivist terrorists who destroy and pillage any traces of technology or civilization when they find it.

He underestimates the value of individual minds which can specialize in certain labor tasks, and then cooperate and/or trade with one another. See the following quote: "It is not in the interest of the hive as a whole for anyone to show an individuality, and so it was lost generations upon generations ago. Now and again, however, it surfaces once more, and under the influence of these throwbacks hives begin to experiment with new and different ways of living, which nearly always end in failure. The progressive hive dies, turns to dust, and the neighbouring hives absorb its territory." This seems super unbelievable to me. I'd expect the first species to discover the division of labor, and to make use of technology to very quickly dominate all the rest. This is exactly what humans did.

However, eschewing technological societies does allow for him to focus more on the biological angle rather than the anthropological angle. This is probably good as it allows the book to stay mainly a speculative zoology one, rather than an anthropology one as the title deceptively suggests.

The book itself is much more text heavy than previous Dixon books, but given the different format of this book that is useful. By that I mean: previous Dixon books examined a cross section of various species at one point in time. In this one he examines the evolutionary lineage of a single over a long period of time. So having a lot of text allows you to trace multiple evolutionary lineages without having a wholly unreasonable amount of illustrations.

Anyway, I didn't think it was as good as The New Dinosaurs, or After Man, but it was highly enjoyable nonetheless.

Details Books During Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future

Original Title:	Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future
ISBN:	0312035608 (ISBN13: 9780312035600)
Edition Language:	English

Rating Containing Books Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future

Ratings: 3.89 From 372 Users | 55 Reviews

Comment On Containing Books Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future

Although Dixon himself said he didn't want to write this book, it is actually a pretty cool (and in some places, pretty scary) idea. The book is a short narrative done in different view points of various evolved forms of humans several thousands of years from now. The prose is okay, but the illustrations and ideas behind them are what you really come to the book for. Of course, everything in here is fiction based on science, so there is no guarantee of anything that it portrays happenining...

More of a 3.5 but interesting illustrations and science in the book.

This is the least scientifically plausible Dougal Dixon book I've read, but I still enjoyed its wonderful weirdness. It gets more implausible as it goes on, but then again the plausibility of various forms of future "homo" evolution is pretty much an epistemic black hole.The book tells very pessimistic story of the future in which earth falls apart due to environmental destruction. Mankind engineers some basic freakish variations of itself to help build spaceships, and before leaving they seed

Dougal Dixon's books on speculative biology are among my favorite reading material. Illustrated lavishly in color with pictures of possible future species or species that might have existed today if not for this or that cosmic catastrophe are worth collecting as much for their beauty and humor as for the scientific information and science-fiction texts they contain. This book, however, also had one extra, added attraction: it culminates in an event which, set a couple of million years in our

It's good, but 'After Man' is far better.



Although the art can be a bit strange and awkward at times, it's still fascinating to consider how our species might evolve given different challenges and the passage of time. If you come away with nothing other than the thought of how we might change, this book has done its job.