The Flamingo’s Smile
Reflections in Natural History
Essays from Natural History magazine, arguing repeatedly that not every trait is an adaptation.
The fifth collection of Stephen Jay Gould’s monthly essays for Natural History magazine. Gould moves from the flamingo’s upside-down bill to Mickey Mouse’s changing proportions, the Piltdown forgery, the extinction of the dinosaurs and the misuse of intelligence testing, using each oddity to argue a point about how evolution actually works, that quirk, constraint and history matter as much as adaptation, and that a perfect design would tell us nothing.
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Carl Zimmer
Someone like Richard Dawkins would look at this as potentially being an adaptation, and would ask, ‘How does this behaviour raise the reproductive success of the male, so that natural selection favours that expression and it spreads?’ Gould likes to push people to think about other possibilities. Maybe some things are a fluke of history. Maybe something that looks like an adaptation is nothing of the sort.
Interview · September 2012
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