“Everybody got to move somewhere,” sings Bob Dylan in "Mississippi." But why? Are we constantly in motion due to some fatal flaw in our make-up? A neurotic aversion to standing still? No, says Matt Wilkinson, author of Restless Creatures: The Story of Life in Ten Movements, the reason is bigger than that: Movement is what makes us human and has been the driving force of life on Earth. 

Talking from his home in England, the Cambridge evolutionary biologist recalls what pterodactyls taught him about movement, how getting lost is important, and why our feet are, in his words, squidgy.  

From the very beginning, right back to the very origin of life, those organisms with the ability to explore their environment had access to resources that others didn’t. Not only that, they were also able to move from place to place. Should any mishap befall them, they were more likely to survive. Locomotion has dominated the evolution of life and continues to do