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Last broadcast on Thu, 21 May 2009, 21:30 on BBC Radio 4 (see all broadcasts).
Synopsis
Melvyn Bragg and guests Steve Jones, Bill Amos and Eleanor Weston discuss the evolutionary history of the whale.
The ancestor of all whales alive today was a small, land-based mammal with cloven hoofs, perhaps like a pig or a big mole. How this creature developed into the celebrated leviathan of the deep is one of the more extraordinary stories in the canon of evolution. The whale has undergone vast changes in size, has moved from land to water, lost its legs and developed specialised features such as filter feeding and echo location. How it achieved this is an exemplar of how evolution works and how natural selection can impose extreme changes on the body shape and abilities of living things. How the story of the whales was pieced together also reveals the various forms of evidence - from fossils to molecules - that we now use to understand the ancestry of life on Earth.
Steve Jones is Professor of Genetics at University College London; Eleanor Weston is a mammalian palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum, London; Bill Amos is Professor of Evolutionary Genetics at Cambridge University.
Further Reading
Jones, Steve, Almost Like a Whale: The Origin of Species Updated (Doubleday, 1999)
Darwin, Charles, On the Origin of Species (OUP Oxford; New edition, 2008)
Futuyma, Douglas, Evolutionary Biology (Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, Mass., 3rd edition, 1998)
Fortey, Richard, Life: An Unauthorized Biography (HarperCollins, 1997)
Gatesy, J., 'More DNA support for a Cetacea/Hippopotamidae clade: the blood-clotting protein gene gamma-fibrinogen', Molecular Biology and Evolution 14: 537-43, (1997)
Hoezel, R., 'Genetics and ecology of whales and dolphins', Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 25: 377-99, (1994)
Montgelard, C., Catzeflis, F. M., and Douzery, E., 'Phylogenetic relationship of artiodactyls and cetaceans as deduced from the comparison of cytochrome B and 12S rRNA mitochondrial sequence', Molecular Biology and Evolution 14: 550-59, (1997)
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Nikaido, M., Rooney, A. P., and Okada N., 'Phylogenetic relationships among certartiodactyls based on insertions of short and long interspersed elements: Hippopotamuses are the closest extant relatives of whales', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 96: 10261-66, (1999)
Thewissen, J. G. M., and Fish, F. E., 'Locomotor evolution in the earliest cetaceans: Functional model, modern analogues, and paleontological evidence', Paleobiology 23: 482-90 (1997)
Gingerich, Philip D.,ul Haq, Munir, Zalmout, Iyad S., Khan, Intizar Hussain, Malkani, M. Sadiq, 'Origin of Whales from Early Artiodactyls: Hands and Feet of Eocene Protocetidae from Pakistan' Science, Vol 293, (21 September 2001)
Muizon, Christian de, 'L'origine et l'histoire évolutive des Cétacés' (translated into English), published online, ScienceDirect
Roman, Joe and Palumbi, Stephen R. 'Whales Before Whaling in the North Atlantic', Science, Vol 301, (25 July 2003)
Broadcasts
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Thu 21 May 200909:00
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Thu 21 May 200921:30
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