We may receive an affiliate commission from anything you buy from this article.In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell published the first of several bestselling books, “The Tipping Point,” in which he applied the laws of epidemics to promote positive social change. Now, he’s returned to that optimistic book’s lessons in “Revenge of the Tipping Point” (to be published October 1 by Little, Brown & Co.), to examine the flip side of those theories.The new book’s topics range from cheetah reproduction and the Harvard women’s rugby team to the Holocaust.Read the excerpt below, and don’t miss David Pogue’s interview with Malcolm Gladwell on “CBS Sunday Morning” September 29!”Revenge of the Tipping Point” by Malcolm GladwellPrefer to listen? Audible has a 30-day free trial available right now.In the 1970s, zookeepers around the world began to invest more and more resources in breeding their animal populations in captivity. The logic was clear. Why go to all the trouble of capturing animals in the wild? The growing conservation movement also favored breeding programs. The new strategy was a big success — with one big outlier: the cheetah.”They seldom had offspring that survived, and many of them when put together couldn’t breed,” remembers the geneticist Stephen O’Brien, who was then working at the National Cancer Institute.It didn’t make sense. The cheetah seemed a perfect example of evolutionary fitness: a massive nuclear reactor for a heart, the legs of a greyhound, a skull shaped like a professional cyclist’s aerodynamic helmet, and semi-retractable claws that, as O’Brien puts it, “grip the earth like football cleats as they race after their prey at sixty miles per hour.””It’s the fastest animal on earth,” O’Brien said. “The second fastest animal on earth is the American pronghorn. And the reason that it’s the second-fastest is that it was running from the cheetahs.”The zookeepers w …
