As professor that teaches a small unit on evolution in her sophomore Biology course, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is not your typical science book. The author has constructed and presented the material with the thought of engaging all levels of science expertise which is fantastic. There is humor brought a subject that most would find dry. It is very well documented and relevant collection of research studies that show the reader how evolution is happening all around you and especially within the urban environment. Ther reader is taken on a journye that is described in detail and places you as the oberver doing the research study he is discussing. I am excited to share many examples with my class and will be recommending this book to students who wish to explore this topic. I know of one that already went out and bought it.

<i>Darwin Comes to Town</i> includes some interesting information, though some of it I have read elsewhere. I found that the compelling bits were bogged down with the author's tangents and long-winded writing. I think what ultimately irritated me the most throughout the entire book was the author's clear sentiment that humans are simply changing the environment across the globe just like any other species does in their neck of the woods (he states a few times that he has some concerns but his enthusiasm and statements speak louder and imply that everything is grand). Take this quote, for instance:

<blockquote>"The beavers of Mannahatta are gone, but they have been replaced by what we could call nature's ultimate ecosystem engineer. <i>Homoe sapiens</i>-running around in modern-day Manhattan, the ecosystem it has engineered for itself, like ants in an anthill. And, as with any good ecosystem engineer, in so doing it has created niches for cohabiting animals and plants."</blockquote>

This is the most positive spin on humans removing nature at at every step I have ever read. Other species are not polluting, destroying and radically negatively altering the planet...there is only one doing that. But you wouldn't know that based on the author's words, we're just on par with ants and beavers!

And perhaps I missed a reference, but I found it frustrating that most (all?) of the examples of species adapting in urban environments are species that have very fast reproduction rates which automatically allow them a greater ability to adapt to these environments. It is not terribly shocking that insects can adapt to urban life over decades when that is an untold number of generations (for instance his London underground mosquitoes could very well have at least 4 generations or more a year). He says nothing about other species which have been unable to adapt, largely due to territory loss/eradication/longer reproductive rates.

There was some interesting information but I sadly cannot recommend this book. It is a book that very much feels like it gives glowing praise to humans without any rational balance as to what is occurring across the globe.

At the close of his exploration of the somewhat oxymoronic “urban nature,” Menno Schilthuizen tells us that one of his aims is that “the urban organisms you see on your daily wanderings of the city streets will not become more special, more interesting, worthy of more than a casual glance.” Schilthuizen, I’d say, is more likely to succeed than not in achieving his goal, as Darwin Comes to Town is a delightfully informative whose insights are enthusiastically and clearly conveyed.

Schilthuizen loses no time in introducing us to a different way of viewing our noisome, concrete and metal cityscapes, opening up with a description of how “the inner city, for all its hustle and bustle and thoroughly unnatural appearance, becomes a constellation of miniature ecosystems . . . Here a snapdragon growing in wild profusion from some invisible crack . . . The emerald veins of moss sprouting from slits between cracked reinforced glass . . Feral rock pigeons . . . “ Though we tend to think of cities as barren wastelands, not “of” nature but nature’s antithesis, Schilthuizen does yeoman’s work in opening our eyes to the bounty of life in it, above it, under it: insects, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians.

If that were all, Darwin Comes to Town would be a nice enough catalog of the world at our feet (or above our heads). But the subtitle of the book is How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution. And this is where things get truly fascinating, as Schilthuizen points out that much as we think of evolution as occurring at a glacial pace (literally), “it can actually be observed here and now.” And the book is rife with such examples, beginning with the Culex molestus, the London Underground mosquito, which over the London Tube’s relatively blink-of-an-eye existence, has become genetically diverse across different tube lines, which act as islands would. Mosquitoes in different lines are genetically different from one another and from their brethren above. The underground insects feed on humans not birds, mate in small numbers rather than large swarms, and do not hibernate, since the temperature is always tolerable. They have adapted to their human-created environments—our human presence is now forcing evolution on a grand and shockingly fast scale.

After some background on the massive growth in urbanization and loss of the wild (a sad stat: “each year the average distance between a given point on the map and the nearest forest increases about 1.5%”), we’re treated to a host of other examples of adaptation and possible speciation. We get non-native catfish who have learned to hurl themselves out of shallow water to latch on to non-native pigeons. We learn of the myriad of ways urban birds are different from their relations in the country—raising their birdcalls to a different pitch and calling at different times of the day so as to be better heard against the city soundscape, becoming better problem/puzzle solvers, becoming less risk-averse. We revisit a classic example of the idea of human-forced evolution—the peppered moth—and follow its rollercoaster ride of acceptance—skepticism—acceptance. We learn how pigeons in the city are better able to deal with poisonous metals, similar to a tiny fish, the mummichong, that lives in water that is so polluted it would kill most other marine creatures. In all these cases, Schilthuizen is very careful not to generalize or oversell, precisely characterizing, for example, the difference in the examples between learned/adaptive behavior and true genetic speciation.

Along the way we explore how the modern world is driving everything toward greater homogeneity thanks to the spread of non-natives and increased urbanization. Nearly half of urban life, he tells us, is non-native and much of it is becoming the same kind of life—the same insects, the same birds, the same plants, all “inching toward a single globalized multi-purpose urban biodiversity.”

It’s both wildly fascinating and at times depressing, as it can feel a bit like whistling past the graveyard or finding what comfort one can in what we’re doing to the world. But it’s impossible to resist Schilthuizen’s enthusiasm and sense of wonder. And toward the end he opens both up even more speculatively as we consider ways in which we can do some actual design or engineering into our cities to incorporate some of what we’re learning—building green roofs for instance, or not putting in life-corridors to allow the isolated pockets of creatures to continue to diverge from their common ancestry. It’s a good conclusion to an excellent book, leaving us to think not just of the impact we’ve had but the impact we could have if we were just a bit more thoughtful and purposeful about things. Not a bad thing to ponder as we, thanks to Schilthuizen, look with a bit more wonder at the nature-we-don’t-think-of-as-nature around us.

When I first read the blurb for this book, I knew I wanted to read it. After all, I have wondered, through the years, about the seagulls that hang out in a Midwestern U.S. parking lot, or the seemingly traffic-savvy mother deer making her away across Main Street in a small tourist town. Thanks to Netgalley, I was able to enjoy an advance eBook reading copy. It was fascinating, and did not disappoint!

Menno Schilthuizen, a Dutch scientist, is enthusiastic and presents science in an easily accessible manner to the lay person. The theme of the book posits that animal and plant species are adapting and evolving to urban settings and challenges, sometimes at an accelerated pace (contrary to Darwin's belief that evolution was an incremental, slow, barely perceptible process). He begins by explaining how certain types of beetles have managed to capitalize on ants' "engineered ecosystem," and extrapolates that example to other species that manage to thrive in the urban "ecosystem." Some birds, for example, have adapted the pitch of their call to compensate for competing traffic noise. Other animals and plants have adapted to urban challenges such as light pollution, chemical pollution, traffic hazards, ecological changes.

Schilthuizen's prose is easy and fun to read ("testosteroney" is an adjective!), well organized and well supported with examples and case studies. He is careful to ask questions about changes -- such as which are genetic, and which are behavioral? He ends the book by inviting his readers to participate in online, crowdsourced research. What fun!

In <i>Darwin Comes to Town</i>, Schilthuizen asks us to embrace the uncomfortable, yet inevitable, evidence that human activity has forever changed the trajectory of evolution for the species of plants and animals that survive in urban environments. Urbanization will increase not decrease in the coming years. The pressure to adapt quickly means that speciation can be studied right in our own backyards, parks, and subway tunnels. The point is not that we should stop fighting for pristine, wild places. It's more about learning to do right for the species that we live with side-by-side. Schilthuizen's writing style is enjoyable and often humorous. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in nature and evolution.

Goodreads Rating: 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5.

It was after much debate that I put in a request for this book on NetGalley. The cover art is amazing and anything involving nature and evolution always sound interesting. But I was so convinced that this book would make me mad and try to convince me humans are some sort of savior to nature by building cities or some such radical view. The possibility of it being quite dense in subject matter was another doubt.

But that cover art kept calling me back. I got approved for a copy, and when I started reading it, all my doubts were happily crushed.

Urban evolution is something that has been occurring for centuries, but has recently become even more common thanks to ever expanding cities, increased population density, and the continuing new inventions of humans. Organisms of all walks of life are starting to adapt and evolve to be more comfortable and adept at living in cities. Some species are even starting to evolve so much that there starts to be an easily measurable difference between city and country species. Many city birds, for example, have differing calls and songs, plumage, nesting habits, and times of day when they’re most active. Many times these differences are the complete opposite of what’s needed to survive in the country (e.g. higher pitched songbirds do better in cities as their songs and calls can be heard over the city noise) and these birds have quickly started to evolve into city-adept subspecies. A variety of experiments has shown that some city smart species do not just learn to adapt to the city, but rather these city smarts become encoded in their DNA. As urban areas will only become more and more common, these adaptations help ensure that species will be able to continue to flourish in a new type of forest, this time made up of skyscrapers and traffic noise.

Schilthuizen writes in an extremely approachable manner, never descending into overly jargony descriptions, providing detailed summaries of many important studies and papers, and always providing the common name of a species, with the Latin name handily in parenthesis. Each chapter is well-rounded and the concepts build off of each other without feeling like a textbook. It was enjoyable to sit down and read at any time of day; I didn’t feel like I had to mentally prepare myself for a deep dive into masters level biology terminology.

This book did it’s job convincing me that urban evolution is vital for the continuation of species and nature as a whole. While there are so many species that will not be able to adapt to live in such a new environment, there are still many others that, due to tiny genetic quirks in a few individuals, will flourish in urban and developed settings. It’s a must for them if they want to survive in the ever-developing world. Of course, pristine nature settings must continued to be preserved and used as a basis for species study, but urban evolution and nature is creating an entirely new ballpark that many biologists tend to ignore in their studies, causing our view of many species to be, in a way, outdated.

The first chapter discusses myrmecophiles–animals who have evolved to live in or off of ant nests. They use a variety of tricks, like scent mimicry to rob the ants or playing dead to gain access to the inside. If we think of the ant hill as a city and the ants as humans, all the myrmecophiles are the birds, mice, flowers, and insects that have learned to exploit the cities’ resources and evolve so that they can survive in a more toxic, noisier, brighter, and busier environment than the open spaces they once knew.

It’s an enlightening read, one that makes me both sad, to know that so many species will never be able to evolve into city dwellers and that many species will only survive via their urban-evolved siblings, and a bit hopeful that those siblings will continue to help nature exist even in a continuingly anti-natural world.