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Summary
Summary
From flying pterodactyls to walking primates, the story of life as told through the evolution of locomotion.
Most of us never think about how we get from one place to another. For most people, putting one foot in front of the other requires no thought at all. Yet the fact that we and other species are able to do so is one of the great triumphs of evolution. To truly understand how life evolved on Earth, it is crucial to understand movement. Restless Creatures makes the bold new argument that the true story of evolution is the story of locomotion, from the first stirrings of bacteria to the amazing feats of Olympic athletes.
By retracing the four-billion-year history of locomotion, evolutionary biologist Matt Wilkinson shows how the physical challenges of moving from place to place-when coupled with the implacable logic of natural selection-offer a uniquely powerful means of illuminating the living world. Whales and dolphins look like fish because they have been molded by the constraints of underwater locomotion. The unbending physical needs of flight have brought bats, birds, and pterodactyls to strikingly similar anatomies. Movement explains why we have opposable thumbs, why moving can make us feel good, how fish fins became limbs, and even why-classic fiction notwithstanding-there are no flying monkeys nor animals with wheels. Even plants aren't immune from locomotion's long reach: their seeds, pollen, and very form are all determined by their aptitude to disperse.
From sprinting cheetah to spinning maple fruit, soaring albatross to burrowing worm, crawling amoeba to running human-all are the way they are because of how they move. There is a famous saying: "nothing in biology makes sense unless in the light of evolution." As Wilkinson makes clear: little makes sense unless in the light of locomotion. A powerful yet accessible work of evolutionary biology, Restless Creatures is the essential guide for understanding how life on Earth was shaped by the simple need to move from point A to point B.
Author Notes
Matt Wilkinson is a science writer and biologist in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge. He lives in Cambridge, UK.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With a view toward locomotion as "a 4-billion-year dance between the physical rules of propulsion and the logic of natural selection," Wilkinson, a zoologist and science writer at the University of Cambridge, walks (and swings, and crawls, and swims) through the history of directed movement. He covers a range of creatures, from upright humanoids to Urbi, the common ancestor of all bilaterally symmetrical, repetitively structured creatures such as vertebrates and arthropods. Wilkinson gathers his evidence from both ergonomic studies of living creatures and fossil records; basic embryology; the physics of lift, drag, and momentum; and the physiology of the development of such features as the stable backbone and land-worthy limbs. He addresses the creationist argument-what good is half a wing?-by showing clear paths along which features could develop pre-adaptively. Side jaunts into the anatomy of flyers and motile plants complete the picture, though weaken the feeling of the book as an "evolutionary narrative of the human lineage." Still, Wilkinson builds a coherent historical narrative while touching on a wide variety of biological topics. Lay readers with some general biology background will find that he's managed to connect the dots in a way that makes sense. Illus. Agent: Peter Tallack, Science Factory. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Robots read, talk, and beat grandmasters at chess, but, given legs, they can barely walk. How living creatures move turns out to be complicated but not dull, writes British biologist and science writer Wilkinson in this ingenious but not-dumbed-down history of life's 4-billion-year progress in getting from one place to another. Human walking, a dazzlingly efficient process, takes up the first two of the author's 10 chapters. Readers not only learn the role of bipedalism in our evolutionless dramatic than enthusiasts claimed; it developed while our ancestors still lived in treesbut more about musculoskeletal kinetics and lateral versus dynamic sequence gaits. Birds, bats, and insects fly, but in a denser medium, so do fish. Wilkinson, a zoologist and science writer at the University of Cambridge, delivers a precisely detailed account of how they manage without ignoring the aero- and hydrodynamic principles that make it possible. Plants, bacteria, and protozoa have their own surprisingly sophisticated ways of getting around. Although these three do fine without one, the brain itself evolved as a locomotor organ. The study of DNA gets the headlines, but Wilkinson makes a good case that simple movement deserves equal billing. "It wasn't until locomotion came on the scene that the living world came of age and became more than biochemistry alone," writes the author. "If self-propulsion had never evolved, life would be nothing more than a few scattered and short-lived patches of unusually complex chemistry, running inconsequently on the ocean floor of an otherwise dead planet." Wilkinson delves into physics, anatomy, and physiology as well as biology, and he doesn't hesitate to throw in the occasional equation. This is not light reading, but readers willing to pay close attention will come away with a deep understanding of an essential basis of life. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Who besides Wilkinson looks at a NASCAR rally and sees a malign disruption of Darwinian evolution? Before he laments humankind's modern dependence on motor vehicles, however, Wilkinson sketches the very long history of natural locomotion, beginning with the primitive self-propulsion that carried prokaryotes from dark, deep-sea hydrothermal vents (where many scientists believe life originated) into sunlit regions where photosynthesis evolved. Further unraveling of the biological history of locomotion reveals how the vertebrate backbone emerged out of the natural selection favoring creatures that could swim in primal oceans, how a locomotion-guiding nervous system appeared in jellyfish and other cnidarians, how fish fins transformed into limbs among the tetrapods venturing onto land, and how protohuman primates developed an upright and bipedal gait as they left arboreal life behind, so determining the distinctively human posture. Through all of this lucidly detailed narrative, readers see how evolution endowed life with powers of movement, and how those powers opened dramatic new possibilities for evolutionary metamorphoses. An illuminating survey of the evolutionary dynamics of locomotion.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2016 Booklist
Choice Review
How organisms, ranging from bacteria to winged vertebrates, move from one place to another is accomplished by mechanisms that, like all traits, are subject to the forces of natural selection. Undeniably, locomotion has a role in the survival and reproduction of all manners of organisms: even fungi have some type of motility in their life cycles, even if it is windblown spores. But could the role of locomotion in the lives of all manners of species be so significant that its achievement has been the primary driving force of the evolutionary process? This is the thesis of zoologist Wilkinson (Univ. of Cambridge, UK). In Restless Creatures, he asserts there is no aspect of the lives of organisms (food acquisition, predator avoidance, new environment colonization, mate procurement, or even the emergence of consciousness) that cannot be understood in the context of locomotion. Wilkinson writes in an engaging style. He begins with human bipedalism and works backward through time to reveal the evolutionary history of how organisms move and how these mechanisms arose and were favored in circumstances where energy efficiency and the advantages of exploring new places translated to success in an ever competitive world. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through researchers/faculty; general readers. --Zane Brian Johnson, Lake Erie College
Library Journal Review
Tracing the evolutionary history of locomotion from single-celled animals to humans, Wilkinson (zoology, Univ. of Cambridge) demonstrates how the need to move has shaped the living world. His expansive definition of locomotion includes the dispersal of seeds and pollen by plants and closing of Venus flytrap leaves and the use of muscle contractions by sponges and jellyfish to remain active in the marine environment. The survival of any creature depends upon locomotion and the physical laws that govern it. The author describes human gait in comparison to that of chimpanzees, explains why humans can't fly, and discusses the evolution of the backbone, which makes swimming efficient. Wilkinson's PhD research on the subject of pterodactyl flight gives him insight into the evolutionary path from dinosaurs to birds. He concludes with a discussion of the deleterious effects of both cars and mass transit on the human ability to walk. VERDICT -Illustrated with drawings and photographs and including a lengthy bibliography, this book is aimed at undergraduates and general readers with some background in biology. While -Wallace Arthur's -Evolving Animals: The Story of Our Kingdom is wider in scope, this work deeply investigates the importance of locomotion to all life forms.-Judith B. Barnett, Univ. of Rhode Island Lib., Kingston © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| 1 Just Put One Foot in Front of the Other | p. 11 |
| 2 Two Legs Good | p. 37 |
| 3 Leaps of Faith | p. 63 |
| 4 Go-Faster Stripe | p. 89 |
| 5 The Improbable Invasion | p. 113 |
| 6 A Winning Formula | p. 137 |
| 7 Brain and Brawn | p. 167 |
| 8 Give It a Rest | p. 191 |
| 9 Exodus | p. 217 |
| 10 Locomotive Souls | p. 243 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 269 |
| List of Illustrations | p. 271 |
| Bibliography | p. 275 |
| Index | p. 291 |