Unnatural Selection is a stunningly illustrated book about selective breeding鈥攖he ongoing transformation of animals at the hand of man. More important, it’s a book about selective breeding on a far, far grander scale鈥攁 scale that encompasses all life on Earth. We’d call it evolution.
A unique fusion of art, science, and history, this book is intended as a tribute to what Charles Darwin might have achieved had he possessed that elusive missing piece to the evolutionary puzzle鈥攖he knowledge of how individual traits are passed from one generation to the next. With the benefit of a century and a half of hindsight, Katrina van Grouw explains evolution by building on the analogy that Darwin himself used鈥攃omparing the selective breeding process with natural selection in the wild, and, like Darwin, featuring a multitude of fascinating examples.
This is more than just a book about pets and livestock, however. The revelation of Unnatural Selection is that identical traits can occur in all animals, wild and domesticated, and both are governed by the same evolutionary principles. As van Grouw shows, animals are plastic things, constantly changing. In wild animals, the changes are usually too slow to see鈥攕pecies appear to stay the same. When it comes to domesticated animals, however, change happens fast, making them the perfect model of evolution in action.
Featuring more than four hundred breathtaking illustrations of living animals, skeletons, and historical specimens, Unnatural Selection will be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in natural history and the history of evolutionary thinking.
Katrina van Grouw, author of The Unfeathered Bird (Princeton), inhabits that no man's land midway between art and science. She holds degrees in fine art and natural history illustration and is a former curator of ornithological collections at a major national museum. She's a self-taught scientist with a passion for evolutionary biology and its history.
鈥淭his massive and breathtakingly beautiful book uses artificial selection鈥攖he means by which breeders promote desired traits, turning 鈥榯ame populations into more beautiful, more useful, more productive, more efficient, or simply different versions鈥欌�攖o elucidate the processes of evolution itself.鈥濃�擩ulie Zickefoose, Wall Street Journal
鈥淸A] witty, exquisitely illustrated book.鈥濃�擜lison Abbott, Nature
鈥�Unnatural Selection feels like an homage to the standards of a bygone publishing age, through its large-format pages and its use of heavy sepia-coloured paper, but especially in van Grouw鈥檚 lovingly detailed monochrome drawings.鈥濃�擬ark Cocker, The Spectator
鈥淰an Grouw鈥檚 beautiful anatomical illustrations are as informative and scientifically rigorous as a statistical plot but also as aesthetically pleasing as the pieces hanging in an art gallery. . . . Van Grouw is perfectly placed to communicate in a way that is conversational but also precise, confidently knowledgeable, and often poetic. It seems too easy to make a comparison with Darwin, yet it would be remiss not to.鈥濃�擟aitlin R. Kight, Trends in Ecology & Evolution
鈥淎 hefty, gorgeous, yet serious, book . . . stuffed with Katrina鈥檚 exquisitely observed pencil drawings. . . . A remarkable portrayal of the wonder of artificial selection鈥攁n ancient process that鈥檚 still going on today.鈥濃�擝en Hoare, BBC Wildlife
鈥淲hether you are an artist, illustrator, zoologist, pet-enthusiast or simply curious, you will be intrigued, educated and inspired by this extraordinary book.鈥濃�擳im Birkhead, Archives of Natural History
鈥淵ou don鈥檛 need to be a scientist, veterinarian, scientific illustrator or artist to fall deeply, madly in love with this painstakingly accurate, stunning book.鈥濃�擥rrl Scientist, Forbes
