Understanding how life evolves has been the topic of extensive research for decades, leading to all kinds of implications and not a little controversy. Australian science writer Zoe Kean provides a fresh, contemporary take across the evolutionary science landscape, ranging from sex and love through to cancer, ageing and alcohol to sleep and consciousness.
She describes, in a highly personable manner, how such research might lead to a better life for humans and non-humans. In so doing, she draws on the academic literature, interviews with leading researchers and personal anecdotes. The book explores current evolutionary paradoxes in partnership with the scientists who seek to understand how humans evolved to be perfect as well as imperfect. As she notes, “We are just one species, and a weird one at that.”
The story is of complex, long-running issues as much social as they are medical and biophysical. For evolutionary science is important not just in the academic domain: for example, Big Pharma has an obvious interest in developing products that respond to cancers.
Each topic is considerable. The chapter on cancer could be extended into a full-length book building on the considerable research since Siddhartha Mukherjee’s 2010 classic, The Emperor of All Maladies. The chapter on alcohol could spin out to all abusive substances and associated practices. The final chapter, on inner lives, might lead to an extensive exploration of philosophical and spiritual developments such as those put forward by Sheila Jasanoff, Donna Haraway, Timothy Morton, and so on.
An excursion into those counter-arguments on the last subject, including anti “woke” sentiment, an apparent aversion to evidence-based public rhetoric and the growth of “alternative” movements (Groundswell, Project 2025, etc) would be fascinating. That the book itself leads to an appetite for such discussion is praise itself.
Eugenics is a topic that appears at the edges of the political spectrum and there are oblique references linking the outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) and evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers to Jeffrey Epstein. The author is delightfully self-aware when she notes that, “Listening to [Robert] Gatenby evangelise about adaptive therapy and his extinction trials, it is hard for me to keep up my journalistic detachment and not get carried away with excitement.” Fortunately, creationism and other such ideas play very minor roles alongside the science heavyweights.
As a science journalist, Kean is well placed to bridge two ecosystems: that of formal research, with its strict form mostly devoid of emotional content, and that of the trade paperback, with its more emotional appeal to a broader audience. To achieve this requires synthesising a large amount of research literature peer-reviewed within the science academy into a form that engages and informs without drowning the reader in the theoretical caveats, field work constraints and methodological restrictions.
Done well and the reader is swept along by provocative questions and stimulating responses. Kean achieves this without patronising the reader with oversimplification or dragging in the attention-seeking, polarising views lurking in the darker corners of social media. Presenting the essence of a large body of research to an audience increasingly bombarded by bombastic counter-claims to inquiry informed by AI content generators or, worse still, unreliable sources, is increasingly difficult.
The book grapples with serious research that underpins serious questions at a time when the role of science and intellectual endeavour are themselves being undermined. Scientific experts with public mana are increasingly rare, and while Kean follows the likes of David Attenborough, Jacob Bronowski, James Lovelock and Jared Diamond, hers is a more accessible, less grandiose and certainly more self-aware approach.
Kean’s voice ranges from palatable, Ted talk-type descriptions extracted from scientific papers to a casual, at times almost flippant, comical style. For example, when following debates about binary views of sex she feels “stuck in the middle of an arguing couple”.
A chapter on the links between environmental deterioration, biodiversity loss and the potential role of tools such as gene editing would have been interesting – at least in the New Zealand context – but it would have taken the book well beyond its current boundaries.
However, the description of the “sensitive plant” (Mimosa pudica), which folds its leaves together when sensing a disturbance, making it harder for predators to eat, was especially delightful. Similarly, there are but a few mentions of world-views from indigenous knowledge in Australia, New Zealand or elsewhere. This is a book embedded solely in the scientific mainstream, though the importance of the human/non-human divide is touched on in the chapter on consciousness.
There is no simple soundbite response to the book’s titular question: Why are we like this? However, it argues clearly and, in the main, engagingly for the ongoing pursuit of answers and to be cautious against loud rhetoric. Reading the book will certainly keep the question alive and well informed.
Why Are We Like This? An evolutionary search for answers to life’s big questions, by Zoe Kean (NewSouth, $30), is out now.
