Restless Creatures
The Story of Life in Ten Movements
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
From flying pterodactyls to walking primates, the story of life as told through the evolution of locomotion.
Most of us never think about how we get from one place to another. For most people, putting one foot in front of the other requires no thought at all. Yet the fact that we and other species are able to do so is one of the great triumphs of evolution. To truly understand how life evolved on Earth, it is crucial to understand movement. Restless Creatures makes the bold new argument that the true story of evolution is the story of locomotion, from the first stirrings of bacteria to the amazing feats of Olympic athletes.
By retracing the four-billion-year history of locomotion, evolutionary biologist Matt Wilkinson shows how the physical challenges of moving from place to place-when coupled with the implacable logic of natural selection-offer a uniquely powerful means of illuminating the living world. Whales and dolphins look like fish because they have been molded by the constraints of underwater locomotion. The unbending physical needs of flight have brought bats, birds, and pterodactyls to strikingly similar anatomies. Movement explains why we have opposable thumbs, why moving can make us feel good, how fish fins became limbs, and even why-classic fiction notwithstanding-there are no flying monkeys nor animals with wheels. Even plants aren't immune from locomotion's long reach: their seeds, pollen, and very form are all determined by their aptitude to disperse.
From sprinting cheetah to spinning maple fruit, soaring albatross to burrowing worm, crawling amoeba to running human-all are the way they are because of how they move. There is a famous saying: "nothing in biology makes sense unless in the light of evolution." As Wilkinson makes clear: little makes sense unless in the light of locomotion. A powerful yet accessible work of evolutionary biology, Restless Creatures is the essential guide for understanding how life on Earth was shaped by the simple need to move from point A to point B.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With a view toward locomotion as "a 4-billion-year dance between the physical rules of propulsion and the logic of natural selection," Wilkinson, a zoologist and science writer at the University of Cambridge, walks (and swings, and crawls, and swims) through the history of directed movement. He covers a range of creatures, from upright humanoids to Urbi, the common ancestor of all bilaterally symmetrical, repetitively structured creatures such as vertebrates and arthropods. Wilkinson gathers his evidence from both ergonomic studies of living creatures and fossil records; basic embryology; the physics of lift, drag, and momentum; and the physiology of the development of such features as the stable backbone and land-worthy limbs. He addresses the creationist argument what good is half a wing? by showing clear paths along which features could develop pre-adaptively. Side jaunts into the anatomy of flyers and motile plants complete the picture, though weaken the feeling of the book as an "evolutionary narrative of the human lineage." Still, Wilkinson builds a coherent historical narrative while touching on a wide variety of biological topics. Lay readers with some general biology background will find that he's managed to connect the dots in a way that makes sense. Illus.
