On his book Feats of Strength: How Evolution Shapes Animal Athletic Abilities
Cover Interview of March 05, 2019
The wide angle
Even more than it is about performance, this book is about
evolution. What really draws me to performance is how central it is to a
variety of areas in evolutionary biology, from sexual selection to life-history
and sexual conflict. It relates directly to several big questions that
evolutionary biologists are keenly interested in: for example, what makes males
attractive to females? How do traits respond to selection when they are linked
to several others in complex ways?
One can study performance from so many different angles and
perspectives that it allows the creative researcher to explore and make
connections among areas of ecology and evolution that on the face of it might
appear to have little to do with each other. This is the approach that I take
with my research, and it is the same approach that I’ve applied to writing this
book. So, in many ways, this book is really a crash course in evolutionary
ecology – at least, those parts of it that most interest me and to which
performance is most relevant. It may seem to some that my research program resembles
the work of a conspiracy theorist who sees connections everywhere, but that’s
just because they’re all out to get me.
I’ve written several academic reviews in the past on various
performance related topics, and I’ve always enjoyed that process. Good reviews
are tough to write, but very rewarding when you’re able to point to some new
way forward. I wanted to write something more substantial that would reflect my
personal perspective on the interconnectedness of all performance things, but
that makes those links clear and explicit. I also wanted to have something that
I can point to the next time someone asks me how making lizards run on
racetracks could possibly be a real job…
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
The wide angle
Even more than it is about performance, this book is about evolution. What really draws me to performance is how central it is to a variety of areas in evolutionary biology, from sexual selection to life-history and sexual conflict. It relates directly to several big questions that evolutionary biologists are keenly interested in: for example, what makes males attractive to females? How do traits respond to selection when they are linked to several others in complex ways?
One can study performance from so many different angles and perspectives that it allows the creative researcher to explore and make connections among areas of ecology and evolution that on the face of it might appear to have little to do with each other. This is the approach that I take with my research, and it is the same approach that I’ve applied to writing this book. So, in many ways, this book is really a crash course in evolutionary ecology – at least, those parts of it that most interest me and to which performance is most relevant. It may seem to some that my research program resembles the work of a conspiracy theorist who sees connections everywhere, but that’s just because they’re all out to get me.
I’ve written several academic reviews in the past on various performance related topics, and I’ve always enjoyed that process. Good reviews are tough to write, but very rewarding when you’re able to point to some new way forward. I wanted to write something more substantial that would reflect my personal perspective on the interconnectedness of all performance things, but that makes those links clear and explicit. I also wanted to have something that I can point to the next time someone asks me how making lizards run on racetracks could possibly be a real job…