Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution, Hardcover

Descriere

FROM EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGIST MENNO SCHILTHUIZEN, A BOOK THAT WILL MAKE YOU SEE YOURSELF AND THE WORLD AROUND YOU IN AN ENTIRELY NEW WAYFor a long time, biologists thought evolution was a necessarily slow process, too incremental to be observed in a lifetime. In Darwin Comes to Town, evolutionary biologist Menno Schilthuizen shows that evolution can in fact happen extremely quickly, and in the strangest of places: the heart of the city. Menno Schilthuizen is one of a growing number of ``urban ecologists`` studying how our manmade environments are accelerating the evolution of the animals and plants around us. Cities are extreme environments and, in a world of adapt or die, the wildlife sharing these spaces with us is being forced to adopt fascinating new ways of surviving, and often thriving: carrion crows in the Japanese city of Sendai have learned to use passing traffic to crack nutsspiders in Vienna are adapting to build their webs near moth-attracting streetlights, while moths in some cities are developing a resistance to the lure of light bulbscertain Puerto Rican city lizards are evolving feet that better grip surfaces like concrete Europe's urban blackbirds sing at a higher pitch than their rural cousins, to be heard over the din of traffic, while many pigeons have eschewed traveling ``as the crow flies`` in favor of following manmade roads. DARWIN COMES TO TOWN draws on these and other eye-popping examples to share a stunning vision of urban evolution in which humans and wildlife co-exist in a unique harmony. It reveals that evolution can happen far more rapidly than Darwin dreamed, while providing a glimmer of hope that our race toward overpopulation might not take the rest of nature down with us.