Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer

Author:Carl Zimmer [Zimmer, Carl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2000-09-21T05:00:00+00:00

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As tapeworms moved into new hosts they had to evolve new ways to live inside them. They had to adapt to new geographies of intestines; the tapeworms that began living inside rats stumbled across new ways to get flour beetles into their final host’s jaws. Reconstructing the rise of these adaptations is treacherous work because sensible-sounding stories about evolution are easy to make up. You see long tails on a swallow and decree that they must have evolved to let the bird maneuver more precisely, but someone else looks at them and decrees that they have evolved that way because female swallows find them attractive on male ones. Or maybe no adapation is involved at all—maybe most of the swallows that happened to establish this species just happened to have long tails, and it’s been that way ever since.

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