At first thumb-through, the heft and gravitas of The Darwinian Tourist: Viewing the World Through Evolutionary Eyes may lend it an academic air. And while it’s certainly scholarly, a few mid-flip cease and desists may allow the notice of some novelties and riches that are not quite textbook examples of a quintessential biology book.
Perhaps an endeavor-in-print with the mantis shrimp will jump out at you, a creature with claws so strong they can crack a diver’s face mask or break through a glass aquarium. Marvel some pages later at the pre-evolved existence of a “stupidworld” that harbored forgetful predators with poor vision, the Mr. Magoos of the ocean blue, if you will. Take actions and traits to a human scale with Australian divers who are given to “muck diving” into the muddy and shallow but creature-rich Dinah’s Beach in eastern Papua New Guinea. Or read about the cross-dressing festivals of the Kuruba aboriginal tribal group in southern India.
Whether it seems you missed some days in school or not, Christopher Wills, Professor of Biological Sciences and member of the Center for Molecular Genetics at the University of California San Diego, leaves his lab coat behind to take the reader on an armchair venture in biodiversity to demonstrate — in an accessible and sumptuous personal narrative illustrated with over 100 original photographs — how ecology and evolution have interrelated to create the world we live in.
Wills first sets the itinerary by encouraging us to view the world through an evolutionary outlook that will imbue “a renewed sense of wonder about life’s astounding present-day diversity, along with a new appreciation of that diversity’s fourth dimension – its long evolutionary history.”
That sense of wonder, by the way, can be a tough nut to crack, especially when Wills has to convince us that humans are related to the water-breathing cuttlefish – or rather, that we had a common ancestor.
In any case, to provide a little framework, within the context of the flora and fauna in Part I: The Living World, and Part II: The Human Story, The Darwinian Tourist starts by exploring the evolutionary processes which account for why individual species are the way they are, and delves into how new species come into being. Wills subsequently explains how collaboration and symbioses between living organisms come about as a result of evolution. Later, we see how evolutionary processes have led to the huge diversity of life we find on earth, and how patterns of human migration have been shaped by, and have influenced, evolution.
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