Richard Banfield

What if Martin Luther King had delivered a comprehensive twelve-point plan about achieving civil rights in America, a plan more comprehensive than any other plan for civil rights ever offered? King's message would still have reached thousands of people. But his belief would not have been clear.

When the hard-shelled nautiloids evolved to abandon their shells to avoid biosonar detection, beaked whales refined their biosonar to echolocate the internal structures of the soft-bodied squid--which then developed survival countermeasures including camouflage, shape-shifting, and ink-cloud diversions. Millennium by millennium, the beaked whales improved their sonar to defeat these escape mechanisms and chase the squid deeper into the canyon. This evolutionary pursuit-and-escape minuet between squid and beaked whales continued for thousands of generations, until the whales could hunt squid at depths of a mile or more—deeper than any other predator.