Restless Creatures
by Matt Wilkinson
Matt Wilkinson proposes that locomotion – getting from place to place – is the primary driver of evolution in all living things including, perhaps surprisingly, plants. It makes sense if you think about it. Getting from one place to another isn’t absolutely essential for survival or reproduction, but it does offer compelling selective advantages.
The book is divided into ten chapters. Nine of them trace the evolution of movement backward through time, beginning with human locomotion (walking and running) and ending with the transport mechanisms of prokaryotes – the famous bacterial flagella and the more primitive method of mucus excretion, or pooping yourself along. The final chapter deals with the impact of locomotion on cognition, and why humans need to return to a more legwork-powered lifestyle.
All this is enormously interesting but I am not sure that Wilkinson explains it as effectively as he might. It’s a difficult task he’s taken on and he discharges it quite well, but I often found myself having to re-read passages with close attention and trace obsessively the accompanying diagrams before I understood what was going on. I have an education in the (physical) sciences; I’m not sure how readers without that advantage will fare.
In Wilkinson’s defence, some of the phenomena he describes are very complex and still quite poorly understood. It is only this century, for example, that we have really come to understand how the movements fish make with their tails and bodies propel them through the water. The construction, operation and evolution of bacterial cilia is also, he makes us understand, an ongoing field of biological research.
I enjoyed reading the book and found it very instructive, but I could not avoid the feeling that Richard Dawkins or Matt Ridley would have made a better fist of the subject.
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