The Ghosts of Evolution
Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms
by Connie Barlow · first published 2000
33% recommend67% neutral
"In October 1977, Dan Janzen, an ecologist then in his late thirties, wrote to the famous paleontologist Paul Martin, saying "I've got a screwy idea." What had led to Janzen's "screwy idea" was a mundane observation about the Costa Rican forest that, as he thought about it more and more, made less and less sense: There was a lot of uneaten fruit lying around on the forest floor. Fruit evolved to be eaten - it's a strategy plants employ to get animals to scatter their seeds - so such massive piles of rotting fruit made no evolutionary sense. Janzen wanted Martin to tell him what animals migh
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…this is biased towards older books, because simply books that have been around for a long time can be mentioned. Let me get across a book with unusual conclusions that deserves to be known more. "The Ghosts Of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms" https://www.amazon.com/Ghosts-Evolution-Nonsensical-Ecologic... "A new vision is sweeping through ecological science: The dense…
on “Top Books on Amazon Based on Number of HN Users Linking Them in Comments” ↗There is a book on my reading list about this, "The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronsims", by Connie Barlow. I saw a review of it somewhere, and given the timing, it may be an expansion of the article. Glad to see them…
on “The trees that miss the mammoths (2011)” ↗…thing that came to my mind. Nearly every time I'm at the grocery I think about the giant ground sloth theory of avocado evolution: A number of authors, including Connie Barlow in her 2001 book The Ghosts of Evolution, have speculated that the avocado is an "evolutionary anachronism" with megafaunal dispersal syndrome (a concept originally proposed in the 1980s by Paul S. Martin and Daniel H. Janzen), arguing…
on “Who carved South America's mysterious ancient tunnels? [pdf]” ↗