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Summary
Summary
A broad overview of the science of evolution, and why understanding it matters in our everyday lives.
Explaining Life through Evolution tells the origin story of life on this planet and how we arrived at the tremendous diversity among organisms that we see around us today.
Prosanta Chakrabarty explains evolution in a concise, accessible, and engaging way, emphasizing the importance of understanding evolution in everyday contemporary life. Weaving his own lived experience among discussions of Darwin and the origins of evolutionary thought, Chakrabarty also covers key concepts to our understanding of our current condition, including mutation; the spectrum of race, sex, gender, and sexuality; the limitations of ancestry tests; and the evolution of viruses like SARS-CoV-2, the virus at the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Offering a contemporary update to classic popular evolution books by Stephen Jay Gould, Jerry Coyne, and others, Explaining Life through Evolution is not only an illuminating read, but also an essential guide to the kind of scientific literacy that we need in order to face the challenges of our collective future.
Author Notes
Prosanta Chakrabarty is Professor of Evolutionary Biology and Curator of Fishes at Louisiana State University. He is a TED Senior Fellow, an Elected Fellow of AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), a Fulbright Distinguished Chair, and a National Geographic Certified Educator.
Reviews (1)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This eclectic primer by Chakrabarty (A Guide to Academia), a biology professor at Louisiana State University, explores the science of evolution. The author expounds on three proposed explanations for genetic variation: natural selection (survival of the fittest), sexual selection (survival of the most attractive), and Japanese biologist Motoo Kimura's "neutral theory of molecular evolution," which posits that much genetic difference between species is effectively random and has little bearing on individuals' ability to survive and reproduce. However, the presentation of the science is somewhat scattered, with tidbits about Aristotle's hierarchy of living creatures, the nature of truth, and what humans share with their distant marine ancestors (the larynx evolved from gills) jumbled together. Nonetheless, the freewheeling spirit sometimes works to the book's benefit (one amusing chapter offers a comic of Charles Darwin's life) and the author's humorous tone keeps the proceedings light ("Nipples on males--what's up with that?"). The strongest sections propose how science can inform political debates, as when Chakrabarty notes that the existence of same-sex mating across the animal kingdom casts doubt on the assumptions of those who consider homosexuality "unnatural." Pop science fans willing to look past some disorganization will be rewarded. (Aug.)
Excerpts
Excerpts
Our Genealogy and Ancestry Why should you care about where you belong on the Tree of Life? Because not only does it tell you where you came from, but also who you are. As humans, we tend to focus on the differences between us, no matter how small those differences might be, but we are all more similar to one another than many of us are willing to believe. As more and more people take ancestry tests, sending their money and saliva to 23andMe and other genealogy testing centers, we need to be educated on what the results of those tests actually mean scientifically, and we all have to decide, together, what they mean socially. Many of us are coming to learn that science describes gender, race, sex, and sexuality as attributes on a spectrum, but for much of our modern lives we've forced these attributes into a few arbitrary, usually binary, categories--and nature loathes a binary. Why look at the rainbow that is humanity in just black and white? If instead you look at that rainbow carefully you would celebrate the fact that all of that colorful diversity comes from the same little drops of water, each with just a little different shine. We humans focus on our differences because we share so many similarities. To the cosmos, we are all still just "star stuff," to quote Carl Sagan; all of us life forms are made up of the same chemical elements--hydrogen formed during the Big Bang and elements like oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen forged in the hearts of stars.[i] It's what we do with our star stuff that makes us special. The more you learn about evolution and about "where you are from," the more you can see our similarities. An alien might be surprised how we focus on the small stuff instead of the star stuff. Twins can check off different boxes for race based on how they look and perhaps based on how other people see them. There are just a few genes that determine eye color and skin pigment--is that what determines your "race'? What does it mean when one sibling has dark skin and is treated as "Black" and the other fair skin and is treated as "white," as sometimes happens with mixed-race children?[ii] I love the poem "Genetics" in Jacqueline Woodson's book Brown Girl Dreaming ,[iii] which talks about how strangers didn't believe her "pale as dust" brother was actually related to her darker-skinned family until they all smiled, revealing the same gap between their two front teeth. Do DNA test results show your "race" or family history as easily as those shared gap-tooth smiles? Not always. You can have a Native American ancestor who doesn't show up at all in your DNA test results but does in your sister's results. You might be African American but have some significant proportion of Neanderthal DNA that is usually seen at that level only in people of European descent. There are hard truths in your DNA, but there are also mysteries--and even miracles. Your genome is Pandora's Box, Aladdin's Lamp, and Alice's Looking Glass; understanding what your genome, can and can't tell you is part of understanding your origins. Our Genealogy and Ancestry [i] K. Mack, The End of Everything: Astrophysics and the Ultimate Fate of the Cosmos (New York: Scribner, 2020); C. Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred (London: Hachette UK, 2021). [ii] P. Edmonds, "These Twins Will Make You Rethink Race," National Geographic, April 2018 https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-twins-black-white-biggs/. [iii] J. Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming (New York: Penguin Random House, 2016). Excerpted from Explaining Life Through Evolution by Prosanta Chakrabarty All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Part I A Personal Prologue | |
Called to Action | 3 |
Pulled into the Fight | 11 |
On Trust | 17 |
Facts and Truth | 21 |
Part II The Evolution Revolution | |
Introduction to Evolution | 27 |
The Great Chain of Being or Ladder of Life | 37 |
Theories of Evolution | 47 |
From so Simple a Beginning | 53 |
The Selection of Natural Selection | 67 |
Mendel and the Maintenance of Variation | 73 |
Mutants and Mutations | 79 |
Speciation: The Formation of New Species | 89 |
On Fossils and the Book of Life | 97 |
Part III Questions and Misconceptions | |
Who You Calling "Primitive"? | 109 |
Our Crappy-Crappie Bodies | 117 |
The Tree of Life | 123 |
The Origin of Life | 129 |
The History of Life | 137 |
Part IV Why Understanding Evolution Matters | |
Evolution in the Anthropocene | 145 |
Natural History | 155 |
Our Genealogy and Ancestry | 163 |
Sex/Gender/Sexuality | 175 |
Combatting Post-Truth with Trust | 189 |
Conversation with a Creationist | 195 |
Epilogue | 201 |
Acknowledgments | 207 |
Glossary | 209 |
Notes | 219 |
Further Reading | 257 |
Figure Credits | 259 |
Index | 263 |