"In the future, the biggest land animals will be smaller than they are now"

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

23 points·cwan··8 comments

Writing in the Times of London in 1894, one writer estimated that in 50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure.

Human civilization evolution is faster, then natural evolution.

In the future, metaphors will be even thinner because bloggers keep stretching them...

I'm not sure if it's a metaphor. Normally, predators will eat the smaller, younger and sicker animals, leaving the larger and stronger ones to survive. So there is pressure for prey animals to get larger to escape predators and pressure for predators to get larger in response. (Of course there is also pressure to remain small to reduce metabolic needs, and the size of the organism is as such dictated by the balance of these and other forces.)

However, hunting inverts this pyramid, culling the largest and most attractive individuals and leading to the survival of the smallest and least showy. And lo and behold it seems to be happening: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE50B73320090113

I wonder how I can short animal sizes.

I'm guessing the dominant animal (man) in prosperous places would get larger and stronger.

Maybe. Humans are getting larger from one generation to the next, but we're still not as tall as our agricultural ancestors.

Can you give a reference for that?

... because the world is going to become a bunch of islands. And it'll be lame because it'll be boring, because each island won't have much diversity.

And then something from another island will notice we're tasty. Then we're totally boned.

In summary: stop building crap! Especially those damned islands!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com