How Birds Are Evolving: Professor Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology LectureBook review
Authored by Douglas J. Futuyma, translated by Tomoyuki Matoba, Maruzen Publishing, published in November 2025, 336 pages, 8,400 yen (excluding tax).
This book is a Japanese translation of How Birds Evolve: What Science Reveals about Their Origin, Lives, and Diversity by Douglas J. Futuyma, one of the leading figures in evolutionary biology. It covers a wide range of evolutionary topics concerning birds, starting with explanations of fundamental concepts in evolutionary science.
Chapter 1 introduces the overview of evolutionary biology using birds as an example. Chapter 2 explains phylogenetic trees, which are the core of evolutionary biology. It provides an easy-to-understand explanation of what a phylogenetic tree is, incorporating specific examples such as the introduction of molecular phylogenetic trees. Chapter 3 provides a detailed explanation of the evolutionary history of birds from Archaeopteryx onward, based on fossil records, molecular phylogenetic trees, and morphological comparisons. Chapter 4, titled "How Bird Populations Change and Adapt," explains natural selection and adaptation using various evolutionary studies of birds as examples. Chapter 5 focuses on intra-specific diversity, explaining the mechanisms by which it is maintained, citing examples of bird research involving gene flow, negative frequency-dependent selection, and sexually antagonistic selection. Chapter 6, titled "How Adaptation Evolves," explains that biochemical adaptation is important for acquiring specialized diets and surviving in unique environments such as low-oxygen conditions, and discusses how characteristic feathers, feet, and beaks have been acquired in each species. Chapter 7 focuses on life history, offering evolutionary considerations regarding egg-laying and parenting practices. Chapter 8 focuses on sexual selection and discusses the evolution of sexual traits. Chapter 9 covers social behaviors such as flocking and cooperative breeding. Chapter 10 focuses on speciation, explaining what a species is and how speciation occurs. Chapter 11 explains bird evolution from the perspective of phylogeography. Chapter 12 discusses extinction, conservation, and evolutionary potential.
The primary feature of this book is the clarity of its explanations. With a level of biological knowledge taught in undergraduate university courses, readers will be able to fully understand and progress through the text, even without prior knowledge of avian evolutionary insights. Furthermore, various adjacent fields related to evolutionary ecology (such as genome analysis) appear throughout, which likely makes it accessible to researchers from other fields. In addition to the inherent skill of the original author's explanations, the meticulousness of the translation is also evident. The Japanese phrasing is relatively straightforward, with wording that can be fully understood even without a specialization in evolutionary biology. Thus, because the book is written so that a wide range of readers can understand evolutionary biology and its related topics through the example of birds, it can be said to be a highly valuable book as an introduction to evolutionary biology.
Kazuki Sakura (National Institute for Basic Biology, Division of Evolutionary Biology)
How Birds Are Evolving: Professor Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology Lecture - Book Review (PDF file)
