environmental change

Book review – Imperfection: A Natural History

8-minute read
keywords: evolutionary biology

This is the second of a two-part review where I am revisiting the idea that evolution by natural selection is not a process that will always result in perfect adaptations. I first touched on this back in 2019 when reviewing Daniel S. Milo’s Good Enough which, as per its title, argued that evolution does not care for perfection: good enough to survive will do just nicely. Having previously reviewed Andy Dobson’s witty Flaws of Nature, I am now turning to Telmo Pievani’s Imperfection: A Natural History which offers an altogether more erudite take on the topic.

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Book review – Flaws of Nature: The Limits and Liabilities of Natural Selection

7-minute read
keywords: evolution, popular science

Back in 2019, I reviewed Daniel S. Milo’s book Good Enough which was a critique of adaptationist storytelling. For organisms to survive, evolution by natural selection does not, and need not always result in perfect adaptations. Here, I revisit this topic with a double review of, first, Andy Dobson’s Flaws of Nature and, next, Telmo Pievani’s Imperfection. There is plenty more to this thought-provoking idea and Dobson will reel you right in: “It’s evolution, but not the Greatest Hits” (p. 16).

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Book review – Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene

7-minute read

The idea that extinction is a bad thing and diversity a good thing seems self-evident to us. But, by surveying more than two centuries of scholarship, science historian David Sepkoski shows that this was not always the prevailing belief. Rather than a book discussing mass extinction, Catastrophic Thinking is more meta than that, discussing how we have been discussing mass extinction. So, we have an interesting premise, but also an interesting author because—bonus detail—the work of his father, J. John (Jack) Sepkoski Jr., was instrumental in recognizing the Big Five mass extinctions. I could not wait to get to grips with this book.

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