Richard Prum: evaluation

Transcript context

…But flying squirrels are not that plentiful, right? They’re not taking over the world. They don’t seem to do that well. Yeah, they sure as hell are taking over Borneo, I can tell you. When you go into Southeast Asia, there are forests where there are incredibly diverse gliding mammals of multiple families. That’s probably because the forest is made mostly of dipterocarps, which look like really, really high broccoli, 30 meters high. There’s a lot of space. Why are they gliding? Well, to get away from predators. Or even, ultimately, they get good enough at it that they can use it to disperse from tree to tree. The idea is that that’s how it started. Of course, maybe one of the reasons why flying squirrels haven’t taken over the world is because they never got to powered flight like birds did, which obviously is going a lot further. Now, according to Jennifer Ackerman, duetting of song occurs in about 16 percent of bird species. How well can we explain the cross-sectional variation there?…

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