Menno Schilthuizen

Biography

Menno Schilthuizen is Associate Professor at the Institute for Tropical Biology and Conservation at the Malaysia Sabah University on Borneo. His research focuses on taxonomy and evolutionary biology, particularly land snails, dung and carrion beetles and parasitic wasps. He is also a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. He writes regularly for Science, the New Scientist, De Volkskrant and De Morgen.

Titles

Frogs, Flies and Dandelions

(Het mysterie der mysteriën, 2002)

What are biological species? Why are there tens of millions of species on earth and not one million or a couple of thousand? Was Darwin right that adaptations come about through the effect of natural selection? How does a species split into two new ones? Is this phenomenon, the central theme in the theory of evolution, one which Darwin referred to as the mystery of mysteries, still unsolved? Is there one single origin of species or are they created in various ways? How different is different? Continued...