Jonathan Weiner

All times seem special to those who live in them.

“Our only real competition for domination of the planet remains the viruses,” the microbiologist Joshua Lederberg once said. “The survival of humanity,” he added, “is not preordained.”

Whether or not we choose to watch, evolution is shaping us all.

We are doing what the dinosaurs did before us, only faster. We bring strangers together to make strange bedfellows, and we remake the beds they lie in, all at once.

The rapid accumulation of change is not always progress, and forward motion is not always an advance.

What we don’t understand on either front is that the more pressure we put on our pests, the more we cause them to evolve around the pressure. The pressure is evolutionary pressure; what we fail to understand is evolution itself.

Some people seem to think that behavior is behavior only when it is a mystery, Hall continued. But once any piece of behavior is understood at the molecular level, it all comes down to metabolism, whether we are talking about the way a weaver ant folds a leaf, a weaverbird weaves a hanging nest, a human being learns and speaks Swahili, or a fly rises with the dawn and settles down at dusk. “Benzer was once subjected, in my earshot,” Hall said, “to some dumb question like ‘Is that the mind or the brain?’ But every aspect of mind and brain is ultimately metabolism! What do we think? Some kind of electric aura hovers around our heads?” We still seem to want something outside the mechanism, Hall said, some deus ex machina to save us from the clockwork that we have been exploring above and inside our heads for the last several centuries. It is now time for us to accept that behavior is as much a part of the material world as the stars above us and the atoms inside us. All behavior turns on molecular clockwork, Hall said, yet all behavior is fascinating.

Taken together, these new studies suggest that Darwin did not know the strength of his own theory. He vastly underestimated the power of natural selection. Its action is neither rare nor slow. It leads to evolution daily and hourly, all around us, and we can watch.

The pamphlet teaches the skills that skills that Benzer’s former labmates would now need to learn, including propaganda, “that branch of lying which consists in very nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies.”

Why are there so many kinds of animals? Adaptive radiations like Darwin’s finches are the essence of the answer.