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A review by octavia_cade
Darwin Comes to Town by Menno Schilthuizen
challenging
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
4.0
Very interesting book about evolution taking place in cities. One of the opening examples was particularly effective - mosquitoes in the London Underground, effectively cut off from different populations on different lines, evolving differently from each other.
This could be quite a difficult topic, but the book's very much popular science, directed at a lay audience, which is appealing. I've read a number of popular science books that are far less accessible, so it's a success there. A couple of things help it along, I think. First, the chapters are all relatively short. Almost bite-sized, averaging 10-15 pages each, so it's easy to get through. Secondly, a lot of this is concerned with sharing the details of practical experiments. There's not a lot of theory here. There are a lot of clearly explained examples, such as the above-mentioned mosquitoes, and I've always found practical examples an extremely effective way of getting ideas across. Admittedly, those examples tend towards insects, and to a lesser degree birds - animals with relatively short generations, so that the ability to assess genetic change over time is something that can be demonstrably measured.
I'm not as certain as Schilthuizen as to his conclusions about the value of introduced species, though. I think he's right when he says that urban environments are increasingly sharing organisms across the world, but remembering the Tallamy book I read some time back, Bringing Nature Home, where introduced species are very clearly shown to have a deleterious effect on endemic biodiversity, well. The homogenisation that Schilthuizen describes may have somewhat less value in that context.
This could be quite a difficult topic, but the book's very much popular science, directed at a lay audience, which is appealing. I've read a number of popular science books that are far less accessible, so it's a success there. A couple of things help it along, I think. First, the chapters are all relatively short. Almost bite-sized, averaging 10-15 pages each, so it's easy to get through. Secondly, a lot of this is concerned with sharing the details of practical experiments. There's not a lot of theory here. There are a lot of clearly explained examples, such as the above-mentioned mosquitoes, and I've always found practical examples an extremely effective way of getting ideas across. Admittedly, those examples tend towards insects, and to a lesser degree birds - animals with relatively short generations, so that the ability to assess genetic change over time is something that can be demonstrably measured.
I'm not as certain as Schilthuizen as to his conclusions about the value of introduced species, though. I think he's right when he says that urban environments are increasingly sharing organisms across the world, but remembering the Tallamy book I read some time back, Bringing Nature Home, where introduced species are very clearly shown to have a deleterious effect on endemic biodiversity, well. The homogenisation that Schilthuizen describes may have somewhat less value in that context.