Almost Like a Whale. Jones, Steve. Anchor, London. 2000. Pp xxxvii + 499. £8.99 (Pbk).

Steve Jones says he has never met a biology undergraduate who has read Darwin’s The Origin of Species. I confess that although I started to read it as an undergraduate I did not finish it until some years later. Laziness on my part no doubt but also, I think, because it was rather like reading a whodunit knowing the murderer before opening the book. The key question unanswered in Darwin’s book was how were the traits selected for by natural selection passed down the generations? Genetics had already provided the answer. Jones regards The Origin as the book of the millennium, and he may well be right. What other book before or since has had such a revolutionary impact not only on the life sciences but also on almost every other aspect of human thought and life? Everything is now said to evolve – even, it seems, car designs. What was seen as a static, created universe a mere 5863 years old in which mankind (specially created, of course) alone had the ability to change things was, after Darwin, revealed as a constantly changing system, unimaginably old, in which we humans are very closely related to other animals and, like them, the product of random events.

So, if today the worldview has changed and evolution applies to almost everything, are books like this necessary? They are, for several reasons. Firstly there are still a surprising number of people who reject Darwin’s theory of organic evolution. Who deny all the evidence for it although most religions have by now managed to accommodate it in their beliefs. A strong desire to be unique, for humans to be quite distinct from the rest of the living world appears to be the main motivation for such attitudes. Secondly among many of those who accept the idea of evolution there is a widespread ignorance of exactly how it happened. All too often we are told, especially in television programmes, that “X evolved in order to avoid Y or to take advantage of a future change in their environment.” A little thought (something rare to absent among some TV producers, it seems) shows that animals and plants cannot adapt to an environmental change which has not yet happened. Nor do they consciously change to avoid predators. What in fact happens is rather more brutal. When an environment changes significantly only those organisms able to survive in the new conditions are able to reproduce. These will often be small in numbers and genetically different from most of their original population, Natural selection in action, or the survival of the luckiest. Which is why most of the living organisms which have ever existed are now extinct. Evolution and progress (however defined) are not synonyms.

An update of The Origin is, therefore, timely as we enter the new millennium. Jones has included many things of which Darwin knew nothing such as AIDS, genes, DNA, and cladistics, as well as a wealth of ecological data, on ants especially, collected since Darwin’s day. The striking thing is that as our knowledge of the living world increases at all levels from molecular biology to ecosystems, evolution, descent with modification, remains the best, really the only, logical explanation of how it all happened. Given that all organisms evolve, including Homo sapiens, what kind of future lies ahead for our own species? How will natural selection affect us and what, if anything, could we do about it?

We are the only animal able to modify our environment consciously and to a considerable extent. This we have been doing for a long time now and the result is that we have been able to prevent natural selection acting fully on ourselves and on many of our domesticated animals and cultivated plants. So we and our favoured organisms have survived in vastly larger numbers than we would have in the wild. Hence the human population explosion and the accelerated extinction of many wild species. However, as Jones points out, for us natural selection is only suspended. Antibiotics, a major current reason for this suspension, may well not be effective for ever. Already bacteria are becoming more and more resistant to them. Evolution may be on hold for humans but not for our disease organisms and it is almost certainly only a matter of time before our present ability to treat infectious diseases so successfully is a thing of the past. Our crops are also under threat as weeds and plant disease organisms evolve and some become resistant to herbicides and pesticides. Having speeded up the extinction of many wild plants we have drastically reduced the gene pool from which all our cultivated crops are derived. Perhaps our knowledge of genetics and the ability to produce genetically modified organisms will enable us to keep natural selection at bay, at least for a time. Or perhaps not. In the very long run it seems almost inevitable that disease and famine will return worldwide and these potent agents of natural selection will usher in a new dark age when only the fit and the fortunate will survive. The human race will evolve again for better or worse.

Today’s biology students may well find The Origin too long, rather boring, and out-of-date in places. I hope, therefore, that instead they will read this book which, I assure them, they will find up-to-date, far from boring, and, unless they have chosen the wrong subject, certainly not too long. If some of them then at least dip into The Origin they will find that reading Jones will have made understanding Darwin easier. It is also an excellent book for the non-biologist who would like to understand what evolution is, how it happened, and what it portends for our own species’ future. Read, and learn what is almost like a whale.

John Timson