Books

Nominated for the Zoological Society of London’s Clarivate Award for Science Communication, 2024

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Species evolve over time to become meticulously adapted to their environments, right? 

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Well, sometimes. 

 

Consider that an elephant will not grow a seventh set of teeth, even though the wearing down of the sixth will condemn it to starvation, that hosts of the European cuckoo seem unable to tell that the overgrown monster in their nests is an interloper, and that whales are fully aquatic mammals who, millions of years after first abandoning the land, still cannot breathe underwater.

 

This is a book about evolution, but not its Greatest Hits. Instead it’s an account of everything in the animal kingdom that is self-defeating, ill-made, uneconomical, and downright weird – and how natural selection has favoured it. In the grand struggle for survival, some surprising patterns emerge: animals are always slightly out-of-date; inefficiency tends to increase over time; predators usually lose, and parasites usually win. Flaws of Nature is here to explain how and why.

 

Drawing on scientific research in topics from ecology and palaeontology to sexual selection and genetics, this book takes the reader on the little-travelled journey of evolutionary eccentricities. A wealth of colourful case-studies show how natural selection involves trade-offs, compromises, and botch-jobs, sacrificing individuals in favour of their genes, pitting male against female and parent against offspring, and all the while humming with boundless, beautiful, extravagant waste.