Professor David Farrier

And in the case of the cliff swallows, that's a selection pressure that is just a pressure on that kind of natural plasticity.

And a particular body plan finds it's better adapted to that environment.

So these shorter wings make them more aerodynamic.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, there's so, I'd love to come on to a lot of these particular animal stories because they've mentioned some of my favorites.

Yes.

Pick some.

Um, well the, the industrial melanism, the, the, the, the, the peppered moth that, that, that, um, you know, that, that turned dark because of the pollution of, you know, that the soup covered woods, uh, in industrial Manchester, that was a mutation, a genetic mutation that, that,

took place maybe 50 years earlier there was a study in nature in 2016 that actually went you know into the genome of these these animals and found it was actually but they thought in 1819 this single mutation took place and there it was ready um

That also is what was behind the ability of the Atlantic tonkots that lives in one of the most polluted environments on the planet, the Hudson River, into which 600,000, I'm terrible, which figures kilograms of an appalling amount of polychlorinated biphenyls were dumped in there in the post-war period.

And yet it has evolved this immunity to this extraordinarily toxic carcinogenic substance, this so-called forever chemical.

It's made itself untouchable in a sense.

That was also a single mutation that's thought was there, you know, in the, you know, just as happens, mutations happen all the time.

It was there in the population and it found its moment.

These mutations are there.

We're creating all these kind of new selection pressures that might, to which they might be a kind of viable response.

In terms of the anti-nest spikes and the bird nest, this is probably one of my favorite examples in the book.

It's a kind of punk architecture because you're right.

These anti-nest spikes, they're a kind of hostile architecture for wildlife.