Earthworms Rule
Posted by: Rebecca Vnuk
What would you guess is Earth’s most successful species? According to Christopher Lloyd’s What on Earth Evolved?, it’s not humans. Written for a general audience, the book is subtitled 100 Species That Changed the World, and Lloyd starts by profiling species, including influenza, ants, earthworms, rats, and slime mold, that evolved through natural selection. He then goes on to profile species such as wheat, dogs, silkworms, apples, coffee, and herpes, that made their impact with a little help from man. He also includes a chart ranking the 100 top species in terms of overall impact. Earthworms, to which Charles Darwin devoted an entire book, are number one; homo sapiens is number 6, slotted between lactobacillus and stony corals. Lloyd had to make “painful decisions,” he writes, about what to leave off the list of top 100 species, so he provides a list of 30 also-rans, among them spiders, Neanderthals, and rust.
To tie in with the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, there has been a spate of reference books related to Darwin and 
evolution (far fewer books related to Abraham Lincoln, who was also born in 1809, but never mind). Among them are All Things Darwin: An Encyclopedia of Darwin’s World (2007), More than Darwin: An Encyclopedia of the People and Places of the Evolution-Creationism Controversy (2008), and Icons of Evolution: An Encyclopedia of People, Evidence, and Controversies (2008), not to mention Darwin’s Universe: Evolution from A to Z (2009) by Richard Milner, he of the one-man musical, “Charles Darwin: Live & in Concert.” As their titles imply, all of these books focus on Darwin’s life and work, or how the theory of evolution has itself evolved, generating discord along the way. What on Earth Evolved? offers something different. It’s an interesting way to look at natural history as well as evolution, and I’m adding it to my shelf of reference books that are fun.
For more fun, Lloyd has created a What on Earth Evolved? game that’s played online. And here’s a link to an NPR interview about the book.
