![]() (The scarcity of birds profiled is downright criminal.) If you’re disappointed to find your favorite animal missing from this book, let me tell you: me too. In short: something that is alive but is not a plant, fungus, virus, bacteria, or other single-celled thing. Is made up of more than one cell (multicellular) It was worth it though to meet the creatures that teemed in the branches and streams and under the dirt. If nothing else, the experts I talked to seemed to be glad I was taking on this effort instead of them, so heyyyy! Happy to help! Even though this project sometimes made me feel like Red Riding Hood herself, venturing one step at a time into a big dark woods with way too many paths and a basket not nearly big enough for everything I needed to carry. Together, I hope they help illuminate some of the vast, deep, weighty, loaded story of evolution. I thought I’d settled on about 140 animals at one point, then painstakingly whittled the list down to the menagerie you see here. I stood on the shoulders of those who went before to see what they’d seen and hadn’t seen, then went to Google Scholar to see if anyone had seen anything lately and how many people had cited them for it. I grilled evolutionary biologists for their favorite critters and plowed through texts for standouts. Animals that have been scantly researched appear alongside heavily researched animals-those “greatest hits” animals that show up in every evolution textbook. ![]() In selecting stories for this book, I attempted to be democratic in my sampling, to include animals from far-flung corners of the animal kingdom, animals beloved and reviled and rarely heard of. Or rather, they belong to entire families of animals, lineages, their arcs told in geological time. ![]() ![]() Sometimes the best way to make a concept less weighty is through a story, such as Red Riding Hood’s cute cautionary tale as a stand-in for the harsh risks of talking to strangers. But when animal husbandry became evolution, it became a loaded word. When they were talking mice and mating and coat color and fencing, the two men were speaking the same language. But as soon as Losos let the name Darwin fall from his lips, the mood of the conversation nosedived. His fellow traveler had grown up on a farm, so he was familiar with animal proliferation-that’s what breeding livestock is all about, after all. When the gentleman in the seat next to him asked about his work, he happily described the experiment. He describes a conversation he had on an airplane, en route to conduct a field study on the evolution of color in desert mice, for which he invented a special fencing technique. Losos, from his book Improbable Destinies. Take, for instance, this anecdote by the evolutionary biologist Jonathan B. Only biologists who really specialize in the subject are willing to lean in to conversation about it, as it is so fraught with core beliefs. Evolution, it turns out, is a word that gets a reaction, which can range from name-checking terms like “survival of the fittest” to jokes about being a monkey’s uncle, to starting debate about theology.Įvolution is a weighty topic, with as many data points as the number of cells that are alive on Earth. You start to notice patterns in people’s reactions to certain topics. When your passion is communicating with the public about science, you’ll talk about your work to anyone who will listen, and listen to anyone who will talk. ![]()
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