Status Updates From Evolution: The Triumph of a...

Instead of eradicating diseases,[biologist Paul]Ewald argues,we may have more luck trying to domesticate them.It wouldn't be the 1st time we've domesticated natural enemies."Wolves have been harmful to us throughout our evolutionary history,"says Ewald,"but we've been living with some wolves which have evolved into dogs.Instead of harming us, they now..help us.I think we can do the same thing with..disease organisms.

The biologist J. S. B. Haldane liked to say that if biology had taught him anything about the nature of the Creator, it was that he had "an inordinate fondness for beetles."

The diversity of life is like a field full of fireflies, each flash representing a species....Extinction is the dark counterpart to evolution's creativity.

But Victorian biologists knew that if there was [an] imperative for progress many animals were ignoring it. Barnacles, for example, descended from free-swimming crustaceans, but they had given up that independent life for a lazy existence clamped to..a ship hull...Ray Lankester...worried that degeneration could strike human society. "Perhaps we are all drifting towards the condition of intellectual barnacles."

In fact, legs and toes evolved on fish millions of years before they left the water.