The Darwinian Tourist
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ALmost all naturalists and birders, professional and amateur, love to travel, and there is an endless marvel of animals and plants to be seen the further one explores. Those with private incomes aside, few get to spread their wings further than the research biologist.
Christopher Wills is one such lucky scientist. For decades he has studied human genomics, complex ecosystems and disease evolution from Borneo to Madagascar and Ecuador to New South Wales. His day job means that he is enraptured and sharp eyed enough for few invertebrates, birds and plants to escape his notice, and long and macro lenses have accompanied him almost everywhere, meaning his travels have been captured in minute and colourful detail.
Wills has travelled enough to adapt this already engrossing travelogue to key topics in evolutionary theory, and fill them with personal examples. The book is divided into two main sections centred on wildlife and human evolution, and examples of evolutionary subjects from his travels copiously illustrate each.
He waxes on the diverse forms of animals, the extremes of natural selection, tectonic changes and human co-evolution with domestic animals, without ever browbeating you with science, or letting the fascination of the creatures themselves become mundane. Human expansion is described with intriguing anthropological pit-stops in Arnhem Land, Australia, for Aborigines, Botswana for Bushmen and Flores, Indonesia, for our most recently extinct dwarf relative, Homo floresiensis.
The book covers so much ground in its pages that one almost gets a feeling of intellectual whiplash, but it is well written and well researched enough to turn this into a pleasure. A few clichés are dropped in (Hoatzins as ‘punk rockers’ again?), and there is a bit of Time-Life post-colonialism in the pages – a New Zealand sheep farming family are captioned by name, but all the photos of ethnic families and tribes people are left unnamed or labelled only as a group.
It is, of course, possible for all of us to enjoy wildlife fully by casual observation, but Wills shows how much richer and complete our travelling and nature-watching can be when we put our sightings in their ancient and myriad greater contexts.
David Callahan
Click here to buy in our bookshop.
Christopher Wills is one such lucky scientist. For decades he has studied human genomics, complex ecosystems and disease evolution from Borneo to Madagascar and Ecuador to New South Wales. His day job means that he is enraptured and sharp eyed enough for few invertebrates, birds and plants to escape his notice, and long and macro lenses have accompanied him almost everywhere, meaning his travels have been captured in minute and colourful detail.
Wills has travelled enough to adapt this already engrossing travelogue to key topics in evolutionary theory, and fill them with personal examples. The book is divided into two main sections centred on wildlife and human evolution, and examples of evolutionary subjects from his travels copiously illustrate each.
He waxes on the diverse forms of animals, the extremes of natural selection, tectonic changes and human co-evolution with domestic animals, without ever browbeating you with science, or letting the fascination of the creatures themselves become mundane. Human expansion is described with intriguing anthropological pit-stops in Arnhem Land, Australia, for Aborigines, Botswana for Bushmen and Flores, Indonesia, for our most recently extinct dwarf relative, Homo floresiensis.
The book covers so much ground in its pages that one almost gets a feeling of intellectual whiplash, but it is well written and well researched enough to turn this into a pleasure. A few clichés are dropped in (Hoatzins as ‘punk rockers’ again?), and there is a bit of Time-Life post-colonialism in the pages – a New Zealand sheep farming family are captioned by name, but all the photos of ethnic families and tribes people are left unnamed or labelled only as a group.
It is, of course, possible for all of us to enjoy wildlife fully by casual observation, but Wills shows how much richer and complete our travelling and nature-watching can be when we put our sightings in their ancient and myriad greater contexts.
David Callahan
Click here to buy in our bookshop.
First published in Birdwatch 230:78 (August 2011)
