THE MUSEUM OF ODD BODY LEFTOVERS

What remnants of our human evolution do we still carry around?

Wisdom Tooth, the bespectacled guide to this entertaining tour of a fictional museum devoted to vestigial phenomena, provides breezy and accessible explanations of natural selection, adaptation, and evolution. The text is amusingly “edited” as if in red pencil, offering lighthearted editorial commentary and occasional expansion of information at key points. Hanmer’s lively cartoon art includes labeled exhibits, diagrams, and round-eyed caricatures of creatures (microscopic animals, fish, early mammals, hominids, etc.) along the evolutionary path that produced humans and that left the usefulness of some traits behind: wisdom teeth, goosebumps, the palmar reflex, the coccyx, the little bump in the corner of the eye that was once a nictitating membrane, and even hiccups. Poliquin also speculates on possible reasons for humans’ relative hairlessness. A few experiments (picking up a pencil with toes and writing one’s name, timing how long it takes for wet fingers to become wrinkly) encourage self-observation. Though the discussion of evolution and its related processes and the overall attention to detail are precise and sophisticated, Poliquin refers to embryos and fetuses only as “babies” in discussing even the earliest weeks of human ontogeny. A glossary revisits and defines some of the museum exhibits and concepts from the tour.

An appealingly distinctive approach to understanding evolution.