The Evolution of Flight in Insects

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Flight only evolved once in the insect kingdom? I can't be sure of that. Some insects have this oscillator muscle, oscillating muscle. That might suggest two different independent evolutions of flight. And i suppose i should give you an opportunity to talk about some of the quirkier ways that animals have developed flight. There are things that just float, right? And certainly there are things that glide that you 've already mentioned, yes. E, the book, of course, is also about a human flight. e, humans also use balloons, ad use lighter than air principle, balloons and airships, dirigibles.

Evolution has equipped species with a variety of ways to travel through the air — flapping, gliding, floating, not to mention jumping really high. But it hasn’t invented jet engines. What are the different ways that heavier-than-air objects might be made to fly, and why does natural selection produce some of them but not others? Richard Dawkins has a new book on the subject, Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution. We take the opportunity to talk about other central issues in evolution: levels of selection, the extended phenotype, the role of adaptation, and how genes relate to organisms.

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Richard Dawkins received his Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Oxford. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, where he was previously the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. He is an internationally best-selling author, whose books include The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and The God Delusion. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature.

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