How The Zebra Got Its Stripes: Darwinian Stories Told Through Evolutionary Biology, by Leo Grasset

I have to admit that I found this book to be entertaining, but not perhaps in the way that the author would have enjoyed. This book follows in the tradition of Rudyard Kipling’s entertaining Just-So Tales, but told without an awareness of what Kipling was trying to accomplish. If Kipling was viewing the overly tidy and self-assured explanations he was passing along with a high degree of gentle skepticism, this book takes the fictional nature of evolutionary biology as truth, and thus is not aware of the fictional nature of the explanations provided within the book. It is as if the author wants the edgy coolness of someone who writes with humor and irony but does not subject the foundation of his misguided worldview to the irony and skepticism that would be necessary to read this book with enjoyment. When taken as a witty and generally good-natured discussion of Darwinian orthodoxy when it comes to various stories, the book reminds one of the slippery and protean nature of Evolution in that it views itself as the sole arbiter of biological truth but always leaves itself with an out in case specific predictions are found to be false, thus preventing itself from suffering falsifiability in its essentials.

This book is a short book of a bit less than 150 pages of core reading material divided into four parts and fifteen short chapters. The book begins with the author’s view of different supposed aspects of evolution (I), with chapters on the pseudopenis of the female hyena (1), which is an apparent aid to obtaining consent for mating, the giraffe’s long neck (2), the random flight of the gazelle (3), as well as how the zebra got its stripes (4). The next part of the book looks at odd animal behaviors (II), such as the air conditioning of the termite mound (5), the impala’s simple code to mimic its neighbors for safety (6), the political philosophy of animals (7) like buffalos and elephants, and how antelopes engage in sexual manipulation (8). The next part of the book looks at extraordinary creatures (III), like the Milky Way-navigating dung beetle (9), elephant ground communication (10), honey badgers (11), and lions (12). The last part of the book looks at the human factor (IV), including how mankind has messed with lions (13), catastrophic change (14), and the impact of human change on animal life (15), after which the book ends with a discussion of the author and zebras, suggestions for further reading, acknowledgements, and an index.

One of the notable aspect of this book that is betrayed in the first chapter is that evolution is a fertile way to express imagination with often few ways of entirely falsifying man’s tendency for speculation and fictional narratives. There are a lot of reasons why zebras could have stripes and it is by far not a simple thing to discuss why zebras have stripes while other similar species, like horses, don’t happen to have them. There are other signs of confusion here, in that the author makes the same mistake concerning “self-organization” that the computer programmers of models of life did in the dawn of computer population modeling, in that having a simple code of copying what one’s neighbor does, as is done by the impala in the savannah, is still a code and not something that can develop in the absence of programming and design altogether. It is a shame that there is such creativity when it comes to the micro levels of evolution and so little when it comes to viewing it in the macro sense, weighing it in the balance, and finding it wanting. Perhaps, though, such a job is better left to readers who are not part of the Darwinian priesthood and who have nothing to lose by subjecting it to criticism.