Restless Creatures

January 25, 2016
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.

December 15, 2015
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 evolution--less dramatic than enthusiasts claimed; it developed while our ancestors still lived in trees--but 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(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

February 15, 2016

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 Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2016
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)