The rapidly increasing human pressure on the biosphere is pushing biodiversity into the sixth mass extinction event in the history of life on Earth. The organisms being exterminated are integral working parts of our planet's life support system, and their loss is permanent. Like climate change, this irreversible loss has potentially devastating consequences for humanity. As we come to recognise the many ways in which we depend on nature, this can pave the way for a new ethic that acknowledges the importance of co-existence between humans and other species. Biological Extinction features chapters contributed by leading thinkers in diverse fields of knowledge and practice, including biology, economics, geology, archaeology, demography, architecture and intermediate technology. Drawing on examples from various socio-ecological systems, the book offers new perspectives on the urgent issue of biological extinction, proposing novel solutions to the problems that we face.

The principles of game theory apply to a wide range of topics in biology. This book presents the central concepts in evolutionary game theory and provides an authoritative and up-to-date account. The focus is on concepts that are important for biologists in their attempts to explain observations. This strong connection between concepts and applications is a recurrent theme throughout the book which incorporates recent and traditional ideas from animal psychology, neuroscience, and machine learning that provide a mechanistic basis for behaviours shown by players of a game. The approaches taken to modelling games often rest on idealized and unrealistic assumptions whose limitations and consequences are not always appreciated. The authors provide a novel reassessment of the field, highlighting how to overcome limitations and identifying future directions. Game Theory in Biology is an advanced textbook suitable for graduate level students as well as professional researchers (both empiricists and theoreticians) in the fields of behavioural ecology and evolutionary biology. It will also be of relevance to a broader interdisciplinary audience including psychologists and neuroscientists.

Goodenough couples lucid and concise descriptions of the workings of nature with spiritual reflections that are non-denominational and non-theistic but deeply respectful of traditional religions and written in their idiom. She unites timeless spiritual sensibilities with our present-day understanding of genes, cells, brains, sex, and biological evolution.

Oceanic islands are storehouses for unique creatures. Zoologists have long been fascinated by island animals because they break all the rules. Speedy, nervous, little birds repeatedly evolve to become plump, tame and flightless on islands. Equally strange and wonderful plants have evolved on islands. However, plants are very poorly understood relative to animals. Do plants repeatedly evolve similar patterns in dispersal ability, size and defence on islands? This volume answers this question for the first time using a modern quantitative approach. It not only reviews the literature on differences in defence, loss of dispersal, changes in size, alterations to breeding systems and the loss of fire adaptations, but also brings new data into focus to fill gaps in current understanding. By firmly establishing what is currently known about repeated patterns in the evolution of island plants, this book provides a roadmap for future research.

Chronic diseases have rapidly become the leading global cause of morbidity and mortality, yet there is poor understanding of this transition, or why particular social and ethnic groups are especially susceptible. In this book, Wells adopts a multidisciplinary approach to human nutrition, emphasising how power relations shape the physiological pathways to obesity, diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease. Part I reviews the physiological basis of chronic diseases, presenting a 'capacity-load' model that integrates the nutritional contributions of developmental experience and adult lifestyle. Part II presents an evolutionary perspective on the sensitivity of human metabolism to ecological stresses, highlighting how social hierarchy impacts metabolism on an intergenerational timescale. Part III reviews how nutrition has changed over time, as societies evolved and coalesced towards a single global economic system. Part IV integrates these physiological, evolutionary and politico-economic perspectives in a unifying framework, to deepen our understanding of the societal basis of metabolic ill-health.

This book considers evolution at different scales: sequences, genes, gene families, organelles, genomes and species. The focus is on the mathematical and computational tools and concepts, which form an essential basis of evolutionary studies, indicate their limitations, and give them orientation. Recent years have witnessed rapid progress in the mathematics of evolution and phylogeny, with models and methods becoming more realistic, powerful, and complex. Aimed at graduates and researchers in phylogenetics, mathematicians, computer scientists and biologists, and including chapters by leading scientists: A. Bergeron, D. Bertrand, D. Bryant, R. Desper, O. Elemento, N. El-Mabrouk, N. Galtier, O. Gascuel, M. Hendy, S. Holmes, K. Huber, A. Meade, J. Mixtacki, B. Moret, E. Mossel, V. Moulton, M. Pagel, M.-A. Poursat, D. Sankoff, M. Steel, J. Stoye, J. Tang, L.-S. Wang, T. Warnow, Z. Yang, this book of contributed chapters explains the basis and covers the recent results in this highly topical area.

Evolution: The Whole Story contains everything you need to know about the development and survival of life on Earth. Each chapter of this accessible and lavishly illustrated book takes a major living group and presents thematic essays discussing the evolution of particular subgroups as they appeared on Earth with reference to detailed comparative anatomy, evolutionary legacies, and the breakthrough theories of eminent scientists. Accompanying the essays are amazing photographic features that investigate the characteristics of individual organisms in detail: in some, remarkable fossils, assembled skeletons, and lifelike reconstructions are presented and analyzed; while in others, living species are depicted and compared in detail to their direct ancestors, creatures that may have lived millions of years ago.

When Charles Darwin finished The Origin of Species, he thought that he had explained every clue, but one. Though his theory could explain many facts, Darwin knew that there was a significant event in the history of life that his theory did not explain. During this event, the -Cambrian explosion, - many animals suddenly appeared in the fossil record without apparent ancestors in earlier layers of rock. In Darwin's Doubt, Stephen C. Meyer tells the story of the mystery surrounding this explosion of animal life--a mystery that has intensified, not only because the expected ancestors of these animals have not been found, but because scientists have learned more about what it takes to construct an animal. During the last half century, biologists have come to appreciate the central importance of biological information--stored in DNA and elsewhere in cells--to building animal forms.Expanding on the compelling case he presented in his last book, Signature in the Cell, Meyer argues that the origin of this information, as well as other mysterious features of the Cambrian event, are best explained by intelligent design, rather than purely undirected evolutionary processes.

'An insightful book with sparkling wit and humour that will appeal to new and seasoned readers of palaeontology.' Dr Anjana Khatwa, TV presenter and Earth Scientist It is difficult to conceive of the vast scale of the history of life on Earth, from the very first living organisms sparking into life in hydrothermal deep-sea vents to the dizzying diversity of life today. The evolution of life is a sweeping epic of a tale, with twists and turns, surprising heroes and unlikely survivors. The Earth beautifully distils this complex story into a meaningful scale. In taking a closer look at 47 carefully selected organisms over fifteen periods in our planetary history, this book tells the whole story of life on Earth, and the interconnectedness that unites us through our ecosystems and planetary history. Prepare to be confounded by the ingenuity of evolutionary biologies, humbled by our own brief part in this epic history, and disquieted by our disproportionate impact on the world we call home. 'An extraordinarily accessible and informative biography of life seen through the many forms it has generated and preserved in stone, beautifully presented. From tales of the well-known stars of palaeontology like Archaeopteryx to the many-sided cultural stories of the earliest bee fossil, everyone will learn something new.' Thomas Halliday, bestselling author of Otherlands: A World in the Making

The Indispensable Excess of the Aesthetic: Evolution of Sensibility in Nature traces the evolution of sensibility from the most primal indications detectable at the level of cellular receptors and plant tendril sensitivity, animal creativity and play to cultural ramifications. Taking on Darwin's insistence against Wallace that animals do have a sense of beauty, and on recent evolutionary observations, this book compellingly argues that sensibility is a biological faculty that emerges together with life. It argues that there is appreciation and discernment of quality, order, and meaning by organisms in various species determined by their morphological adaptations and environmental conditions. Drawing upon Baumgarten's foundational definition of aesthetics as scientia cognitionis sensitivae, this book proposes a non-anthropocentric approach to aesthetics as well as the use of empirical evidence to sustain its claims updating aesthetic understanding with contemporary biosemiotic and evolutionary theory. The text leads us along three distinct but entwined areas: from the world of matter to that of living matter to the realm of cultivated living matter for exploring how and why sensibility could have evolved. It points out that aspects traditionally used to demarcate and characterize human aesthetics-such as appreciation of symmetry, proportion and color, as well as pleasure, valuation and empathy, sensory seduction, creativity, and skills for representation, even fiction-are present not only in humans but among a variety of plant and animal species.

Darwin’s theory of evolution was a monumental achievement, but there was much he did not know. In his ‘survival of the fittest’ model each step must go forward, life always progressing up the slope towards an evolutionary peak. There is no turning back. So what happens when there is more than one slope, and life finds itself on the wrong one? World-leading biologist Andreas Wagner reveals that life does not, as Darwin believed, only walk – it also leaps.

Drawing on pioneering research, Wagner explores life’s creative process and how, with all the stops and starts, and knowing that sometimes things have to get worse before they get better, it bears a striking resemblance to how we humans work. A beguiling symmetry links Picasso struggling through forty versions of Guernica and the way evolution transformed a dinosaur’s claw into a condor’s wing. This new understanding is already revolutionising our approach to problem-solving across the sciences. In the near future, applied in spheres as diverse as the economy and education, it will enable us to do so much more. Thought-provoking and deeply hopeful, Life Finds a Way reminds us that no matter how many times we have to turn back, we can still reach the highest peaks.

The central insight of Darwin's Origin of Species is that evolution is an ecological phenomenon, arising from the activities of organisms in the 'struggle for life'. By contrast, the Modern Synthesis theory of evolution, which rose to prominence in the twentieth century, presents evolution as a fundamentally molecular phenomenon, occurring in populations of sub-organismal entities - genes. After nearly a century of success, the Modern Synthesis theory is now being challenged by empirical advances in the study of organismal development and inheritance. In this important study, D. M. Walsh shows that the principal defect of the Modern Synthesis resides in its rejection of Darwin's organismal perspective, and argues for 'situated Darwinism': an alternative, organism-centred conception of evolution that prioritises organisms as adaptive agents. His book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of evolutionary biology and the philosophy of biology.

When a predator attacks, prey are faced with a series of 'if', 'when' and 'how' escape decisions - these critical questions are the foci of this book. Cooper and Blumstein bring together a balance of theory and empirical research to summarise over fifty years of scattered research and benchmark current thinking in the rapidly expanding literature on the behavioural ecology of escaping. The book consolidates current and new behaviour models with taxonomically divided empirical chapters that demonstrate the application of escape theory to different groups. The chapters integrate behaviour with physiology, genetics and evolution to lead the reader through the complex decisions faced by prey during a predator attack, examining how these decisions interact with life history and individual variation. The chapter on best practice field methodology and the ideas for future research presented throughout, ensure this volume is practical as well as informative.

Praise for Howard Bloom and GLOBAL BRAIN

"With this bold vision of evolution and human behavior, Bloom has raced ahead to explore possibilities that the timid scientific herd may well be forced to follow."––David Sloan Wilson, Coauthor of Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior

"Filled with scientific firsts."––Elizabeth Loftus, past president, American Psychological Society

"I doubt there is any stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet."––Joseph Chilton Pierce

"A soaring song of songs about the amorous origins of the world and its almost medieval urge to copulate."––Kevin Kelly, Editor-at-Large, Wired

"A superbly written and totally original argument. . . . A must-read."––Robin Fox, coauthor of The Imperial Animal

"As someone who has spent forty years in psychology with a long-standing interest in evolution, I’ll just assimilate Howard Bloom’s accomplishment and my amazement."––David Smillie, Duke University

"Howard Bloom is next on a very short list that includes Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Buckminster Fuller."––Richard Metzger

"Howard Bloom may be the new Stephen Hawking."––Aaron Hicklin, Gear

"You have not lived until you have interacted with Howard Bloom."––James Brody, organizer of the "Healing the Moral Animal" seminars

"Bloom’s concept of collective information processing may startle skeptical readers with its explanatory power."––Publishers Weekly

"I am awestruck."––Douglas Rushkoff, author of Media Virus, Coercion, and Ecstasy Club.

The family Rhinocerotidae has a long and amazing history in North America. From their first appearance about forty million years ago, they diversified into an incredible array of taxa, with a variety of ecologies that do not resemble any of the five living species. They ranged from delicate long-legged dog-sized forms, to huge hippo-like forms that apparently lived in rivers and lakes. This book includes a systematic review of the entire North American Rhinocerotidae, with complete descriptions, measurements, and figures of every bone in every species - the first such review in over a century. More importantly, it discusses the biogeographic patterns of rhinos, their evolutionary patterns and paleoecology, and what rhinos tell us about the evolution of North American landscapes and faunas over 35 million years. It is a complete and authoritative volume that will be a reference of interest to a variety of scientists for years to come.

Why are humans so fond of water? Why is our skin colour so variable? Why aren't we hairy like our close ape relatives? A savannah scenario of human evolution has been widely accepted primarily due to fossil evidence; and fossils do not offer insight into these questions. Other alternative evolutionary scenarios might, but these models have been rejected. This book explores a controversial idea - that human evolution was intimately associated with watery habitats as much or more than typical savannahs. Written from a medical point of view, the author presents evidence supporting a credible alternative explanation for how humans diverged from our primate ancestors. Anatomical and physiological evidence offer insight into hairlessness, different coloured skin, subcutaneous fat, large brains, a marine-type kidney, a unique heat regulation system and speech. This evidence suggests that humans may well have evolved, not just as savannah mammals, as is generally believed, but with more affinity for aquatic habitats - rivers, streams, lakes and coasts. Key Features: Presents the evidence for a close association between riparian habitats and the origin of humans Reviews the "savannah ape" hypothesis for human origins Describes various anatomical adaptations that are associated with hypotheses of human evolution Explores characteristics from the head and neck such as skull and sinus structures, the larynx and ear structures and functions

Humans are complex social beings. To understand human behaviour, an integrated perspective is required - one which considers both what we regularly do (our personality traits) and what motivates us (our values). Personality, Values, Culture uses an evolutionary perspective to look at the similarities and differences in personality and values across modern societies. Integrating research on personality and human values into a functional framework that highlights their underlying compatibilities (driven by shared genetic and brain mechanisms), Fischer describes how personality is shaped by the complex interplay between genes and the environment, both over the course of human evolution and within the lifespan of individuals. He proposes a gene-culture coevolution model of personality and values to explain how and why people differ around the world and how genes, economics, social conditions, and climate jointly shape personality.

Our brains evolved to solve the survival problems of our Stone Age ancestors, so when faced with modern day situations that are less extreme, they often encounter a mismatch. Our primitive brains put us on the wrong foot by responding to stimuli that - in prehistoric times - would have prompted behaviour that was beneficial. If you've ever felt an anxious fight or flight response to a presenting at a board meeting, equivalent to facing imminent death by sabre-toothed tiger, then you have experienced a mismatch. Mismatch is about the clash between our biology and our culture. It is about the dramatic contrast between the first few million years of human history - when humans lived as hunters and gatherers in small-scale societies - and the past twelve thousand years following the agricultural revolution which have led us to comfortable lives in a very different social structure. Has this rapid transition been good for us? How do we, using our primitive minds, try to survive in a modern information society that radically changes every ten years or so? Ronald Giphart and Mark van Vugt show that humans have changed their environment so drastically that the chances for mismatch have significantly increased, and these conflicts can have profound consequences. Reviewed through mismatch glasses, social, societal, and technological trends can be better understood, ranging from the popularity of Facebook and internet porn, to the desire for cosmetic surgery, to our attitudes towards refugees. Mismatches can also affect our physical and psychological well-being, in terms of our attitudes to happiness, physical exercise, choosing good leaders, or finding ways to feel better at home or work. Finally, Mismatch gives us an insight into politics and policy which could enable governments, institutions and businesses to create an environment better suited to human nature, its potential and its constraints. This book is about converting mismatches into matches. The better your life is matched to how your mind operates, the greater your chances of leading a happy, healthy and productive life.

See your city through fresh eyes We are marching towards a future in which three-quarters of humans live in cities, and a large portion of the planet's landmass is urbanized. With much of the rest covered by human-shaped farms, pasture, and plantations, where can nature still go? To the cities -- is Menno Schilthuizen's answer in this remarkable book. And with more and more wildlife carving out new niches among humans, evolution takes a surprising turn. Urban animals evolve to become more cheeky and resourceful, city pigeons develop detox-plumage, and weeds growing from cracks in the pavement get a new type of seeds. City blackbirds are even on their way of becoming an entirely new species, which we could name Turdus urbanicus. Thanks to evolutionary adaptation taking place at unprecedented speeds, plants and animals are coming up with new ways of living in the seemingly hostile environments of asphalt and steel that we humans have created. We are on the verge of a new chapter in the history of life, Schilthuizen says -- a chapter in which much old biodiversity is, sadly, disappearing, but also one in which a new and exciting set of life forms is being born. Menno Schilthuizen shows us that evolution in cities can happen far more rapidly, and strangely, than Darwin had dared dream.

Darwin famously proposed that sexual competition and courtship is (or at least was) the driving force of "art" production not only in animals, but also in humans. The present book is the first to reveal that Darwin's hypothesis, rather than amounting to a full-blown antidote to the humanist tradition, is actually strongly informed both by classical rhetoric and by English and German philosophical aesthetics, thereby Darwin's theory far richer and more interesting for the understanding of poetry and song. The book also discusses how the three most discussed hypothetical functions of the human arts--competition for attention and (loving) acceptance, social cooperation, and self-enhancement--are not mutually exclusive, but can well be conceived of as different aspects of the same processes of producing and responding to the arts. Finally, reviewing the current state of archeological findings, the book advocates a new hypothesis on the multiple origins of the human arts, posing that they arose as new variants of human behavior, when three ancient and largely independent adaptions--sensory and sexual selection-driven biases regarding visual and auditory beauty, play behavior, and technology--joined forces with, and were transformed by, the human capacities for symbolic cognition and language.

A new theory of the evolution of human cognition and human social life that emphasizes the role of information sharing across generations. Over the last three million years or so, our lineage has diverged sharply from those of our great ape relatives. Change has been rapid (in evolutionary terms) and pervasive. Morphology, life history, social life, sexual behavior, and foraging patterns have all shifted sharply away from those of the other great apes. In The Evolved Apprentice, Kim Sterelny argues that the divergence stems from the fact that humans gradually came to enrich the learning environment of the next generation. Humans came to cooperate in sharing information, and to cooperate ecologically and reproductively as well, and these changes initiated positive feedback loops that drove us further from other great apes. Sterelny develops a new theory of the evolution of human cognition and human social life that emphasizes the gradual evolution of information-sharing practices across generations and how these practices transformed human minds and social lives. Sterelny proposes that humans developed a new form of ecological interaction with their environment, cooperative foraging. The ability to cope with the immense variety of human ancestral environments and social forms, he argues, depended not just on adapted minds but also on adapted developmental environments.

Over the past decade, a group of prolific and innovative evolutionary biologists has sought to reinvent historical linguistics through the use of phylogenetic and phylogeographical analysis, treating cognates like genes and conceptualizing the spread of languages in terms of the diffusion of viruses. Using these techniques, researchers claim to have located the origin of the Indo-European language family in Neolithic Anatolia, challenging the near-consensus view that it emerged in the grasslands north of the Black Sea thousands of years later. But despite its widespread celebration in the global media, this new approach fails to withstand scrutiny. As languages do not evolve like biological species and do not spread like viruses, the model produces incoherent results, contradicted by the empirical record at every turn. This book asserts that the origin and spread of languages must be examined primarily through the time-tested techniques of linguistic analysis, rather than those of evolutionary biology.

This engaging book explores the dynamic relationship between evolutionary science and musical culture in Victorian Britain, drawing upon a wealth of popular scientific and musical literature to contextualize evolutionary theories of the Darwinian and non-Darwinian revolutions. Bennett Zon uses musical culture to question the hegemonic role ascribed to Darwin by later thinkers, and interrogates the conceptual premise of modern debates in evolutionary musicology. Structured around the Great Chain of Being, chapters are organized by discipline in successively ascending order according to their object of study, from zoology and the study of animal music to theology and the music of God. Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture takes a non-Darwinian approach to the interpretation of Victorian scientific and musical interrelationships, debunking the idea that the arts had little influence on contemporary scientific ideas and, by probing the origins of musical interdisciplinarity, the volume shows how music helped ideas about evolution to evolve.

Michael Ruse, a leading expert on Charles Darwin, presents a fictional dialogue among characters with sharply contrasting positions regarding the tensions between science and religious belief. Ruse's main characters-an atheist scientist, a skeptical historian and philosopher of science, a relatively liberal female Episcopalian priest, and a Southern Baptist pastor who denies evolution-passionately argue about pressing issues, in a context framed within a television show: "Science versus God- Who is Winning?" These characters represent the different positions concerning science and religion often held today: evolution versus creation, the implications of Christian beliefs upon technological advances in medicine, and the everlasting debate over free will. The second edition of this innovative text incorporates the influence of Eastern religions and philosophies on the debate on human origins, broadening the contextual reach of the dialogue into comparative philosophy and religious studies.

Recent developments in behavioural neuroscience and genomics are providing exciting new tools for understanding mammalian evolution. Drawing on a range of disciplines including genomic reprogramming, immunology, genomic imprinting, placentation and brain development, this book examines the leading role played by the mother's genome and epigenome in the successful evolutionary progression of humans from ancestral mammals. Keverne begins by discussing the historic context of the perceived dominance of males and the patriline, before arguing that it is instead the matriline that exerts the dominant influence in shaping the evolution of our brain development and behaviour, especially the co-adaptive development of brain and placenta. Presenting a balanced outlook on the development of sex differences and an alternative to traditional views, Beyond Sex Differences will be of interest to anyone studying and researching mother and infant development.