Why Rats Laugh and Jellyfish Sleep
And Other Enchanting Stories of Evolution
-
- USD 14.99
-
- USD 14.99
Publisher Description
For fans of accessible and fun popular science comes an exploration of evolution’s quirkiest puzzles and most enduring mysteries.
Why do cats live longer than dogs? Why do bees have yellow stripes? Why can we smell a skunk from a mile away? Such questions can be seen as puzzles about creatures' evolved traits. Besides triggering our curiosity, they focus our attention on beguiling designs that have been millions of years in the making. Indeed, looking at the living world through a Darwinian lens reveals its colossal depth in a way that's all too easy to miss in the age of endless distractions. You need only summon up your inner inquisitive 7-year-old to notice such puzzles, and to find yourself looking deeper while considering possible solutions.
In this lively book, science writer David Stipp ponders Darwinian puzzles about nine familiar creatures and things—bumblebees, dogs, sparrows, caffeine, earthworms, and sleep, among others—to show how rewarding it can be to look at nature in a deeper way. By revealing hidden depths of the ordinary, Why Rats Laugh and Jellyfish Sleep shows not only that fascinating intricacies lie just beneath the natural world's familiar surfaces, but that noticing them lets us make connections we didn't realize existed.
This is backyard biophilia at its most entertaining and enlightening.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biological traits can be viewed as "whydunits," according to this thought-provoking study from journalist Stipp (A Most Elegant Equation). He attempts to answer nine "naive/brilliant" questions about why certain life forms are the way they are, and details the impacts various scientific discoveries have had on human life. In a chapter about why skunks smell so bad, readers learn that the creatures' stinky spray "taps into an ancient, olfactory loathing mechanism that evolved before skunks themselves appeared." That insight leads to an investigation of "stink bombs" as a means of warfare, as in the Office of Strategic Service's WWII-era "Who, Me?" project, which attempted to embarrass and distract Nazi soldiers with an awful smell. Elsewhere, Stipp explains how ducks sleep (often with one eye open), how octopuses dream (they have nightmares, which scientists previously thought only happened in warm-blooded creatures), and what happens when a spider on drugs spins a web (caffeine makes for seriously deformed webs). With wit and flair, Stipp proves that "familiar things we tend to ignore in our daily haste are often more interesting than they seem." This has charm to spare.
