Goodreads asked Douglas J. Emlen:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Douglas J. Emlen I’ve been interested in animals with extreme shapes for as long as I can recall…. and by the time I got to graduate school I’d zeroed in on insects (they were the “uncharted frontier” of the animal world, with so many species unstudied and so much still to learn; they also had an abundance of species with absurd morphologies). From there it was an easy jump to beetles — they’re so cool — and they have ridiculous horns. I’ve been studying beetle horns ever since (twenty five years!)

The book arose as a side project, initially. After two decades studying beetle horns — the function of beetle horns, the sneaky alternative tactics employed by tiny males without horns, the hormonal and developmental genetic mechanisms regulating expression of beetle horns, the phylogenetic relationships among species with beetle horns, well, you get the idea — after years working on one type of animal weapon, I had a chance to step back, and look at all the other crazy weapons that were out there. I knew there were lots, and that there were loads of papers on these other species, but given the crazy pace of academic life I’d never had the time to really read that literature the way that I should have. SO I started pouring through the literature. As part of this I ended up writing an academic review (an article on animal weapons in Annual Review of Ecology, Systematics, and Evolution), but the editor kept making me trim, trim, trim, and all the fun natural history got cut from the final paper. So I decided to write a book spinning the stories together of all these wonderful species with their ridiculous armaments.

But then something really magic happened. As I worked through all my copious notes, with notecards and scribbles and sketches spread all over every table and surface, I began to realize that all of these different stories were really just one story. It didn’t matter if I was talking about a mastodon with 15-foot tusks or a moose fly with 1/2 inch antlers — the essential biology of these extreme weapons was always the same. This meant I had to completely re-organize the book, and the order in which I organized and presented the material; but it also meant I now had something much more important to say — ideas that were likely to be groundbreaking for biologists too, not just interesting natural history for a non-academic audience. These new ideas were exciting and, I felt, likely to shake up my field.

Then the plot thickened. My editors kept asking me to look into human weapons too. We all know that our weapons can get sucked into arms races, so just how similar are these processes? At first I resisted, but then I started digging. And digging, and digging — the deeper I dug the more astonished I became. The story really IS the same, and it applies to our weapons too. I was nervous at first, about talking about military arms races, given my background as a biologist rather than a historian, but I stumbled on work by a true card-carrying (if there is such a thing) military historian (Robert O’Connell), and in his books (Of Arms and Men, in particular), he’d come to almost exactly the same conclusions that I had!! So I, a biologist, was talking about the essential features of animal arms races, dipping into history where and when it felt appropriate, and he was a military historian talking about manufactured weapons and arms races, dipping into biology. We’d converged on much the same lessons. I was blown away (fortunately, he turned out to be super kind and helpful, and he read through my entire manuscript and helped “fact check” a lot of my military history). So now I am much more confident that these parallels are real, and important.

So my book started out as a book on animal weapons, with a chapter or two tacked on at the end comparing human weapons. But my editors wanted a lot more, so it then became a book with animal chapters, and boxes inserted into each chapter with the human parallels; But they wanted more still, so, in the end, it became a book that flowed back and forth between these realms and covers them fairly equally.

Bottom line: it all started with me taking the time to step back and think outside of my box, digging into the literature on lots of diverse weapons that are not beetle horns. But the project pulled me in and became rather all-consuming, and the book evolved a ton as it came together.

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