A lavishly illustrated look at how evolution plays out in selective breeding

Unnatural Selectionis a stunningly illustrated book about selective breedingthe ongoing transformation of animals at the hand of man. More important, it’s a book about selective breeding on a far, far grander scalea 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 puzzlethe 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 usedcomparing 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 ofUnnatural Selectionis that identical traits can occur inallanimals, 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 seespecies 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 Selectionwill be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in natural history and the history of evolutionary thinking.