This audiobook is about evolution—but not about its greatest achievements. Instead, it looks at all kinds of evolutionary solutions that could be called suicidal, failed, inefficient, or frankly weird—and it explains why natural selection favors all of this. In the grand struggle for survival, some surprising patterns appear: animals always fall a little behind changes in their environment; inefficiency tends to increase over time; predators usually lose, while parasites win. Skillfully blending humor with scientific insight, Andy Dobson discusses the limits of what evolution can do and the price that has to be paid for it.