Maggie Ryan Sandford - Consider the Platypus: Evolution through Biology’s Most Baffling Beasts

W hen your passion is communicating with the public about science, youll talk about your work to anyone who will listen, and listen to anyone who will talk. You start to notice patterns in peoples reactions to certain topics. 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 monkeys uncle, to starting debate about theology.

Evolution is a weighty topic, with as many data points as the number of cells that are alive on Earth. 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.

Take, for instance, this anecdote by the evolutionary biologist Jonathan B. Losos, from his book Improbable Destinies. 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. When the gentleman in the seat next to him asked about his work, he happily described the experiment. His fellow traveler had grown up on a farm, so he was familiar with animal proliferationthats what breeding livestock is all about, after all. But as soon as Losos let the name Darwin fall from his lips, the mood of the conversation nosedived. When they were talking mice and mating and coat color and fencing, the two men were speaking the same language. But when animal husbandry became evolution, it became a loaded word.

Sometimes the best way to make a concept less weighty is through a story, such as Red Riding Hoods cute cautionary tale as a stand-in for the harsh risks of talking to strangers. The stories here belong to the animals. Or rather, they belong to entire families of animals, lineages, their arcs told in geological time.

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. Animals that have been scantly researched appear alongside heavily researched animalsthose greatest hits animals that show up in every evolution textbook.

I grilled evolutionary biologists for their favorite critters and plowed through texts for standouts. I stood on the shoulders of those who went before to see what theyd seen and hadnt seen, then went to Google Scholar to see if anyone had seen anything lately and how many people had cited them for it. I thought Id settled on about 140 animals at one point, then painstakingly whittled the list down to the menagerie you see here.

Together, I hope they help illuminate some of the vast, deep, weighty, loaded story of evolution. 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. It was worth it though to meet the creatures that teemed in the branches and streams and under the dirt.

Beagle Laid Ashore, River Santa Cruz, 1839. By Conrad Martens, a landscape artist who traveled alongside Charles Darwin on the HMS Beagles fateful second worldwide voyage.

T his is a book about animals, by animals, for animals. Im an animal. And so are you.

If you have an adverse reaction to being called an animal, remember this: its just a word, a word made up by animals to describe other animals, only to later realize that were among them.

For the purpose of this book, though, I use the definition of animal that is currently universally accepted by the scientific community: an organism (living thing) that:

is made up of more than one cell (multicellular)

feeds on organic matter

rapidly responds to stimuli

reproduces

In short: something that is alive but is not a plant, fungus, virus, bacteria, or other single-celled thing. If youre disappointed to find your favorite animal missing from this book, let me tell you: me too. (The scarcity of birds profiled is downright criminal.)

Overall, though, the choice of featured animals herein represents a microcosm of the study of animal evolution.

WHAT IS THE STUDY OF EVOLUTION CALLED?

Not even that has a single name. Evolutionary biology is the most common, but the researchers can be paleontologists, ecologists, zoologists, taxonomists, physiologists, behavioral neuroscientists, embryologists, oncologists, and now geneticists. Researchers can even be laypeople committed to counting the ticks on their dogs or crows in their yards each season.

Like the process of evolution itself, the process of understanding it is messy. It started blind, crawled along from one fossilized tooth to another, one dissection, one fuzzy DNA gel, one scattershot genome to the next, until slowly those patterns started to emerge.