Darwin Comes to Town
Menno Schilthuizen is a professor of evolutionary biology at Leiden University and a senior research scientist at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands. He earned two postdoctoral scholarships at Wageningen University after receiving his PhD from Leiden University in 1994. He then spent seven years in Malaysian Borneo as an associate professor at the Institute for Tropical Biology and Conservation. He has authored more than 100 high-impact papers in the scientific literature on these and other topics, and his research focuses on the development of biodiversity in land snails and insects.
Menno Schilthuizen is one of many "urban ecologists" who are examining how the settings we have created for ourselves are hastening and altering the evolution of the creatures and plants around us. In Darwin Comes to Town, he takes us on a journey throughout the globe to show us firsthand how amazingly adaptable and quick natural selection can be.
Global ecosystems are being impacted more and more as human populations rise, and no place does this affect overlap as much as cities. The urban environment is as extreme as it gets, and the wild animals and plants that coexist with us must adapt to a variety of difficult circumstances: they must survive in the city's hotter climate (the "urban heat island"); they must be able to live either in the semidesert of the tall, rocky, and cavernous structures we call buildings or in the pocket-like oases of city parks (which pose their own risks, including smog and free-ranging dogs a). However, as Schilthuizen demonstrates, the wildlife that coexists with us in these areas is not just surviving but also finding new ways to thrive.
In order to provide a breathtaking vision of urban evolution in which people and nature coexist in a special harmony, Darwin Comes to Town draws on startling examples of adaptation. It provides a ray of hope that our race toward overpopulation might not bring the rest of nature down with us by showing that evolution can occur far more quickly than Darwin imagined.
Author: Menno Schilthuizen
Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Darwin-Comes-Town-Jungle-Evolution/dp/1250127823/
Ratings: 4.5 out of 5 stars (from 199 reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #847,614 in Books (
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