Books

‘Evolution’ isn’t just for adults anymore

Reviewing the children’s book ‘Evolution: How We and all Living Things Came to Be.’

February 12, 2024

Evolution is a difficult thing to explain. Even to adults. Now imagine trying to break down all the nuances and dispel the misconceptions for kids.

That’s what writer and illustrator Daniel Loxton attempted to do in his 2010 book Evolution: How We and all Living Things Came to Be. For the most part, the book accomplishes this daunting task.

Evolution begins where it should — at the beginning. Loxton smartly points out that you wouldn’t recognize most of life’s history if you saw it, and that for the first 3 billion years of evolution on Earth, single-celled organisms were all there was.

Loxton rightly calls evolution “the most important idea in all of biology,” reminding us that this is how we get new diseases, and points out that “understanding evolution helps us fight those diseases.” In a world where there are doctors and professional biologists who somehow deny evolution’s reality, these are not the trivial points they may seem like on the surface. Trying to understand anything in medicine, or about life at all, without viewing it in an evolutionary framework, is a little like reading an index but not the actual book.

The first 12 or so pages of the 56-page Evolution could be described as the story of the theory itself, and how it came to be. This might be seen as tangential, but more than probably any other theory in science, it’s instructive to see why it took so long for something that seems pretty clear to us, today, to come together. Coming from a biblical background in which God created everything as is, pre-evolution scholars didn’t even think that species could go (and had gone) extinct. Realizing that the Earth was actually much older than originally thought, and that the further back in time you look, the simpler the fossils we find are, really got some wheels turning.

'Evolution' isn't just for adults anymore

Of course there’s talk of Charles Darwin’s finches, and what a species actually is (as best as we can define it). It’s nice that Evolution includes Darwin’s study of domesticated pigeon traits as an obvious example of heritability, and calls out new fruit fly and mosquito species that have developed within the past couple hundred years. The timing of the book’s publication makes the inclusion of the famous peppered moth example a little dodgy, as at that time, there was heavy criticism of the original study. A couple years later, though, work was published that more or less confirmed what we always thought.

Before going any further, Loxton makes the excellent decision to preface his explanation of evolution’s mechanisms with a warning about the inadequacy of our language when talking about the subject. Evolution is essentially a succession of things that happen, with no will or direction, so it doesn’t actually “do” anything. Then there’s a discussion of mutations and how we’re all mutants in a way, that’s linked back to comics in bid for familiarity that feels a bit out of place.

Loxton does make the brilliant analogy that evolution is kind of like someone modding their car. You can change little things, like the rims or the paint job, but you’re not going to suddenly take a wheel away and expect the thing to still work. It’s why most animal skeletons look staggeringly similar, since it’s hard to change a complex body plan too much once it’s already in place. This leads into the idea of convergent evolution — like with sharks and dolphins — when unrelated animals start to take on similar features, so they all perform as best as possible in a particular environment.

More myths dispelled in Evolution include the idea of “living fossils” (just because something looks the same as it did millions of years, ago, that doesn’t mean it is the same), the idea that evolution has anything to say about how life began on Earth, and that the process always “chooses” the best trait every time. Firstly, “best” is relative, and will be defined differently in different situations. More directly, as Loxton states in a section heading, “Good Enough is Good Enough.” An animal doesn’t have to be the fastest or the strongest thing ever — it just needs to be a little faster or stronger than the animal next to it.

Much like us flawed, cobbled together organisms, as good as it is, Evolution is not perfect. Early on the book claims that Darwin solved “how nature produces new species,” when it’s probably more accurate to say that Darwin established that nature produces new species — the how of it wouldn’t be understood until the discovery of DNA and genes, something like 100 years later. There’s mention of the idea of transitional fossils, even though everything in a sense is a transition to something else, and two pages on faked contemporaneous human and dinosaur footprints (which would have been more at home in Junior Skeptic, which Loxton wrote for almost 20 years).

Human evolution

Overall, Evolution: How We and all Living Things Came to Be does an excellent job of explaining how the process works and where the idea came from. It’s also beautifully illustrated by the author himeslf, with some useful diagrams where appropriate. Loxton utilizes his decades of experience in the organized skepticism movement to cut off evolution myths (like a linear “march of progress”) before they can take root in young minds; and you might just learn something, too!

Every February, to help celebrate Darwin Day, the Science section of AIPT cranks up the critical thinking for SKEPTICISM MONTH! Skepticism is an approach to evaluating claims that emphasizes evidence and applies the tools of science. All month we’ll be highlighting skepticism in pop culture, and skepticism *OF* pop culture.

AIPT Science is co-presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.