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After World War II, the question of how to define a universal human nature took on new urgency. This book charts the rise and precipitous fall in Cold War America of a theory that attributed man's evolutionary success to his unique capacity for murder. The book reveals how the scientists who advanced this “killer ape” theory capitalized on an expanding postwar market in intellectual paperbacks and widespread faith in the power of science to solve humanity's problems, even to answer the most fundamental questions of human identity. The killer ape theory spread quickly from colloquial science publications to late-night television, classrooms, political debates, and Hollywood films. Behind the scenes, however, scientists were sharply divided, their disagreements centering squarely on questions of race and gender. Then, in the 1970s, the theory unraveled altogether when primatologists discovered that chimpanzees also kill members of their own species. While the discovery brought an end to definitions of human exceptionalism delineated by violence, the book shows how some evolutionists began to argue for a shared chimpanzee–human history of aggression even as other scientists discredited such theories as sloppy popularizations. A wide-ranging account of a compelling episode in American science, the book argues that the legacy of the killer ape persists today in the conviction that science can resolve the essential dilemmas of human nature.

Humans possess an extraordinary capacity for cultural production, from the arts and language to science and technology. How did the human mind—and the uniquely human ability to devise and transmit culture—evolve from its roots in animal behavior? This book presents a new theory of human cognitive evolution. It reveals how culture is not just the magnificent end product of an evolutionary process that produced a species unlike all others—it is also the key driving force behind that process. The book shows how the learned and socially transmitted activities of our ancestors shaped our intellects through accelerating cycles of evolutionary feedback. The truly unique characteristics of our species—such as our intelligence, language, teaching, and cooperation—are not adaptive responses to predators, disease, or other external conditions. Rather, humans are creatures of their own making. The book explains how animals imitate, innovate, and have remarkable traditions of their own. It traces our rise from scavenger apes in prehistory to modern humans able to design iPhones, dance the tango, and send astronauts into space. This book tells the story of the painstaking fieldwork, the key experiments, the false leads, and the stunning scientific breakthroughs that led to this new understanding of how culture transformed human evolution. It is the story of how Darwin's intellectual descendants picked up where he left off and took up the challenge of providing a scientific account of the evolution of the human mind.

As human populations grow and resources are depleted, agriculture will need to use land, water, and other resources more efficiently and without sacrificing long-term sustainability. This book presents an entirely new approach to these challenges, one that draws on the principles of evolution and natural selection. It shows how both biotechnology and traditional plant breeding can use Darwinian insights to identify promising routes for crop genetic improvement and avoid costly dead ends. It explains why plant traits that have been genetically optimized by individual selection—such as photosynthesis and drought tolerance—are bad candidates for genetic improvement. Traits like plant height and leaf angle, which determine the collective performance of plant communities, offer more room for improvement. Agriculturalists can also benefit from more sophisticated comparisons among natural communities and from the study of wild species in the landscapes where they evolved. The book reveals why it is sometimes better to slow or even reverse evolutionary trends when they are inconsistent with our present goals, and how we can glean new ideas from natural selection's marvelous innovations in wild species.

Human beings have evolved to become the most dominant species on Earth. This astonishing transformation is usually explained in terms of cognitive ability—people are just smarter than all the rest. But this book argues that culture—our ability to learn from each other—has been the essential ingredient of our remarkable success. The book shows how a unique combination of cultural adaptation and large-scale cooperation has transformed our species and assured our survival—making us the different kind of animal we are today. The book is based on the Tanner Lectures delivered at Princeton University, featuring challenging responses across the chapters.

This book develops a unified framework for understanding the structure of ecological community and the dynamics of natural selection that shape the evolution of the species inhabiting them. All species engage in interactions with many other species, and these interactions regulate their abundance, define their trajectories of natural selection, and shape their movement decisions. This book synthesizes the ecological and evolutionary dynamics generated by species interactions that structure local biological communities and regional metacommunities. The book explores the ecological performance characteristics needed for invasibility and coexistence of species in complex networks of species interactions. This species interaction framework is then extended to examine the ecological dynamics of natural selection that drive coevolution of interacting species in these complex interaction networks. The models of natural selection resulting from species interactions are used to evaluate the ecological conditions that foster diversification at multiple trophic levels. Analyses show that diversification depends on the ecological context in which species interactions occur and the types of traits that define the mechanisms of those species interactions. Lastly, looking at the mechanisms of speciation that affect species richness and diversity at various spatial scales and the consequences of past climate change over the Quaternary period, the book considers how metacommunity structure is shaped at regional and biogeographic scales. Integrating evolutionary theory into the study of community ecology, the book provides a new framework for predicting how communities are organized and how they may change over time.

Homology—a similar trait shared by different species and derived from common ancestry, such as a seal's fin and a bird's wing—is one of the most fundamental yet challenging concepts in evolutionary biology. This book provides the first mechanistically based theory of what homology is and how it arises in evolution. The book argues that homology, or character identity, can be explained through the historical continuity of character identity networks—that is, the gene regulatory networks that enable differential gene expression. It shows how character identity is independent of the form and function of the character itself because the same network can activate different effector genes and thus control the development of different shapes, sizes, and qualities of the character. Demonstrating how this theoretical model can provide a foundation for understanding the evolutionary origin of novel characters, the book applies it to the origin and evolution of specific systems, such as cell types; skin, hair, and feathers; limbs and digits; and flowers. The first major synthesis of homology to be published in decades, this book reveals how a mechanistically based theory can serve as a unifying concept for any branch of science concerned with the structure and development of organisms, and how it can help explain major transitions in evolution and broad patterns of biological diversity.

Mutualistic interactions among plants and animals have played a paramount role in shaping biodiversity. Yet the majority of studies on mutualistic interactions have involved only a few species, as opposed to broader mutual connections between communities of organisms. This is the first book to comprehensively explore this burgeoning field. Integrating different approaches, from the statistical description of network structures to the development of new analytical frameworks, the book describes the architecture of these mutualistic networks and shows their importance for the robustness of biodiversity and the coevolutionary process. Making a case for why we should care about mutualisms and their complex networks, this book offers a new perspective on the study and synthesis of this growing area for ecologists and evolutionary biologists. It will serve as the standard reference for all future work on mutualistic interactions in biological communities.

Optics—a field of physics focusing on the study of light—is also central to many areas of biology, including vision, ecology, botany, animal behavior, neurobiology, and molecular biology. This book introduces the fundamentals of optics to biologists and nonphysicists, giving them the tools they need to successfully incorporate optical measurements and principles into their research. The book starts with the basics, describing the properties of light and the units and geometry of measurement. It then explores how light is created and propagates and how it interacts with matter, covering topics such as absorption, scattering, fluorescence, and polarization. The book also provides a tutorial on how to measure light as well as an informative discussion of quantum mechanics. The book features a host of examples drawn from nature and everyday life, and several appendixes that offer further practical guidance for researchers. This concise book uses a minimum of equations and jargon, explaining the basic physics of light in a succinct and lively manner. It is the essential primer for working biologists and for anyone seeking an accessible introduction to optics.

This book challenges a central tenet of evolutionary biology. The book makes the bold and provocative claim that some biological diversity may be explained by something other than natural selection. The book makes an argument for the underappreciated role that randomness—or chance—plays in evolution. Due to the tremendous and enduring influence of Darwin's natural selection, the importance of randomness has been to some extent overshadowed. The book shows how the effects of randomness differ for organisms of different sizes, and how the smaller an organism is, the more likely it is that morphological differences will be random and selection may not be involved to any degree. The book then traces the increase in size and complexity of organisms over geological time, and looks at the varying significance of randomness at different size levels, from microorganisms to large mammals. The book also discusses how sexual cycles vary depending on size and complexity, and how the trend away from randomness in higher forms has even been reversed in some social organisms.

Social behavior has long puzzled evolutionary biologists, since the classical theory of natural selection maintains that individuals should not sacrifice their own fitness to affect that of others. This book argues that a theory first presented in 1963 by William D. Hamilton—inclusive fitness theory—provides the most fundamental and general explanation for the evolution and maintenance of social behaviors in the natural world. The book guides readers through the vast and confusing literature on the evolution of social behavior, introducing and explaining the competing theories that claim to provide answers to questions such as why animals evolve to behave altruistically. Using simple statistical language and techniques that practicing biologists will be familiar with, the book provides a comprehensive yet easily understandable treatment of key concepts and their repeated misinterpretations. Particular attention is paid to how more realistic features of behavior, such as nonadditivity and conditionality, can complicate analysis. The book highlights the general problem of identifying the underlying causes of evolutionary change, and proposes fruitful approaches to doing so in the study of social evolution. It describes how inclusive fitness theory addresses both simple and complex social scenarios, the controversies surrounding the theory, and how experimental work supports the theory as the most powerful explanation for social behavior and its evolution.

The number of species found at a given point on the planet varies by orders of magnitude, yet large-scale gradients in biodiversity appear to follow some very general patterns. Little mechanistic theory has been formulated to explain the emergence of observed gradients of biodiversity both on land and in the oceans. Based on a comprehensive empirical synthesis of global patterns of species diversity and their drivers, this book develops and applies a new theory that can predict such patterns from few underlying processes. The book shows that global patterns of biodiversity fall into four consistent categories, according to where species live: on land or in coastal, pelagic, and deep ocean habitats. The fact that most species groups, from bacteria to whales, appear to follow similar biogeographic patterns of richness within these habitats points toward some underlying structuring principles. Based on empirical analyses of environmental correlates across these habitats, the book combines aspects of neutral, metabolic, and niche theory into one unifying framework. Applying it to model terrestrial and marine realms, the book demonstrates that a relatively simple theory that incorporates temperature and community size as driving variables is able to explain divergent patterns of species richness at a global scale. Integrating ecological and evolutionary perspectives, the book yields surprising insights into the fundamental mechanisms that shape the distribution of life on our planet.

Viruses are everywhere, infecting all sorts of living organisms, from the tiniest bacteria to the largest mammals. Many are harmful parasites, but viruses also play a major role as drivers of our evolution as a species and are essential regulators of the composition and complexity of ecosystems on a global scale. This book draws on complex systems theory to provide a fresh look at viral origins, populations, and evolution, and the coevolutionary dynamics of viruses and their hosts. New viruses continue to emerge that threaten people, crops, and farm animals. Viruses constantly evade our immune systems, and antiviral therapies and vaccination campaigns can be powerless against them. These unique characteristics of virus biology are a consequence of their tremendous evolutionary potential, which enables viruses to quickly adapt to any environmental challenge. This book presents a unified framework for understanding viruses as complex adaptive systems. It shows how the application of complex systems theory to viral dynamics has provided new insights into the development of AIDS in patients infected with HIV-1, the emergence of new antigenic variants of the influenza A virus, and other cutting-edge advances. The book also extends the analogy of viruses to the evolution of other replicators such as computer viruses, cancer, and languages.

Visual ecology is the study of how animals use visual systems to meet their ecological needs, how these systems have evolved, and how they are specialized for particular visual tasks. This book provides the first up-to-date synthesis of the field to appear in more than three decades. Featuring some 225 illustrations, including more than 140 in color, spread throughout the text, the book begins by discussing the basic properties of light and the optical environment. It then looks at how photoreceptors intercept light and convert it to usable biological signals, how the pigments and cells of vision vary among animals, and how the properties of these components affect a given receptor's sensitivity to light. The book goes on to examine how eyes and photoreceptors become specialized for an array of visual tasks, such as navigation, evading prey, mate choice, and communication. A timely and much-needed resource for students and researchers alike, the book also includes a glossary and a wealth of examples drawn from the full diversity of visual systems.