The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment (Shearwater) - Softcover

Ehrlich, Paul R.; Ehrlich, Anne H.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1597260975 ISBN 13: 9781597260978

Verlag: Island Press, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

In humanity’s more than 100,000 year history, we have evolved from vulnerable creatures clawing sustenance from Earth to a sophisticated global society manipulating every inch of it. In short, we have become the dominant animal. Why, then, are we creating a world that threatens our own species? What can we do to change the current trajectory toward more climate change, increased famine, and epidemic disease?
 
Renowned Stanford scientists Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich believe that intelligently addressing those questions depends on a clear understanding of how we evolved and how and why we’re changing the planet in ways that darken our descendants’ future. The Dominant Animal arms readers with that knowledge, tracing the interplay between environmental change and genetic and cultural evolution since the dawn of humanity. In lucid and engaging prose, they describe how Homo sapiens adapted to their surroundings, eventually developing the vibrant cultures, vast scientific knowledge, and technological wizardry we know today.
 
But the Ehrlichs also explore the flip side of this triumphant story of innovation and conquest. As we clear forests to raise crops and build cities, lace the continents with highways, and create chemicals never before seen in nature, we may be undermining our own supremacy. The threats of environmental damage are clear from the daily headlines, but the outcome is far from destined. Humanity can again adapt—if we learn from our evolutionary past.
 
Those lessons are crystallized in The Dominant Animal. Tackling the fundamental challenge of the human predicament, Paul and Anne Ehrlich offer a vivid and unique exploration of our origins, our evolution, and our future.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Paul R. Ehrlich is Bing Professor of Population Studies and professor of biology at Stanford University and a fellow of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics. The author of Human Natures, The Population Bomb, and many other books, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a recipient of numerous international honors, including the Crafoord Prize and the MacArthur “genius award.”

Anne H. Ehrlich is affiliated with Stanford's Biology Department and Center for Conservation Biology, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has served on the board of the Sierra Club and other conservation organizations, has coauthored more than ten books with her husband, and is a recipient of the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement and the United Nations Environment Programme/Sasakawa Environment Prize.

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The Dominant Animal

Human Evolution and The Environment

By Paul R. Ehrlich, Anne H. Ehrlich

ISLAND PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-59726-097-8

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Page, 
Dedication, 
Note on the Paperback Edition, 
Prologue, 
CHAPTER 1 - Darwin's Legacy and Mendel's Mechanism, 
CHAPTER 2 - The Entangled Bank, 
CHAPTER 3 - Our Distant Past, 
CHAPTER 4 - Of Genes and Culture, 
CHAPTER 5 - Cultural Evolution: How We Relate to One Another, 
CHAPTER 6 - Perception, Evolution, and Beliefs, 
CHAPTER 7 - The Ups and Downs of Populations, 
CHAPTER 8 - History as Cultural Evolution, 
CHAPTER 9 - Cycles of Life (and Death), 
CHAPTER 10 - Ecosystems and Human Domination of Earth, 
CHAPTER 11 - Consumption and Its Costs, 
CHAPTER 12 - A New Imperative, 
CHAPTER 13 - Altering the Global Atmosphere, 
CHAPTER 14 - Energy: Are We Running Out of It?, 
CHAPTER 15 - Saving Our Natural Capital, 
CHAPTER 16 - Governance: Tackling Unanticipated Consequences, 
Epilogue, 
Postscript, 
Glossary, 
Notes, 
Selected Bibliography, 
Acknowledgments, 
Index, 
About the Authors, 

CHAPTER 1

Darwin's Legacy and Mendel's Mechanism

"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

THEODOSIUS DOBZHANSKY, 1973

HURRICANE KATRINA was a new kind of experience for most Americans—a huge natural disaster that demonstrated how poorly prepared the United States was, in 2005, for natural disasters. It also underlined that something strange is going on with the weather, even if Katrina's destructiveness itself might just have been a rare event in normal variability in the size and paths of hurricanes. If you regularly watch TV, read newspapers, or go to the movies, you can hardly have missed news about unusual weather. Global temperatures are going up, glaciers are melting, storms seem more frequently intense and so do droughts, and sea level is gradually rising.

Other animals are noticing too, at some level. Polar bears are finding it more difficult to make a living as the sea ice from which they hunt seals disappears. Coral animals in some places are dying as seawater warms, threatening the existence of coral reefs. If you are a bird-watcher, you might have noticed that some migratory birds from Latin America are arriving earlier each spring on their North American breeding grounds. In the Yukon of Canada, red squirrels are having their young earlier because of the great quantities of spruce seeds made available by a warming climate. In Europe, flowers are blooming about a week earlier in spring than they did in 1975—and in 2006 they were still blooming in Moscow in November.

POPULATIONS EVOLVING

That populations of organisms do not remain static in the face of environmental change is a recurring theme in the study of the natural world. Today, numerous animals and plants are changing their lives in response to the human-caused alteration of climatic regimes—the annual sequence of changes in temperature and rainfall—in their environments. While the average temperature increase of Earth has been less than a degree Celsius (?°C is 1.8°F) over the past fifty years, in the same period at the high-altitude laboratory in Colorado where we've worked since 1960, magpies have arrived from the lowlands for the first time and many flowers are blooming earlier, all apparently in response to earlier spring melting of the alpine snow.

Pitcher-plant mosquitoes (Wyeomyia smithii) are a good example of such climate-related changes. They inhabit eastern North America, and their early stages (eggs, larvae, and pupae) all live in water trapped in the "pitchers" of a carnivorous plant, Sarracenia purpurea. The plants grow primarily in nitrogen-poor soil and supplement their "diet" by digesting insects, mostly ants and flies, that die when trapped by downward-pointing hairs in their tubular leaf, which the small, hovering mosquitoes easily avoid. Southern populations of the mosquitoes produce five or more generations per year; northern populations, just one.

The larvae (wigglers), which hibernate in the leaves of the host plant, use the length of the day to determine when to enter that dormant state and when to resume activity. The critical day lengths at which the mosquitoes carry out these functions are quite rigidly controlled by their genes. But over the past thirty years, the genetically controlled clocks of more northerly populations have shifted their response so that hibernation does not begin until the day length becomes even shorter. As a result, the northern populations now behave much as the southern populations do, waiting until later in the fall before hibernating. Without that shift, as a warming climate in North America lengthens the growing season, the larvae would hibernate too soon. They would need to survive on the fat they had stored—not just survive through the winter as previously, but also without feeding through a warm period at the end of summer. This would lessen their chances of being alive when warm weather returned in the spring. With the shift, their necessary hibernation is shorter, helping them to survive without eating.

Other animals have not been able to change their behavior in response to a warming climate. Some populations of pied flycatchers (Ficedula hypoleuca), an attractive brown, black, and white insect-eating bird in Europe, have declined in size by 90 percent. The reason? The peak of insect abundance is occurring ever earlier as the environment warms, and the birds' customary breeding time is now too late for their offspring to have an optimal food supply. They have not successfully adjusted to the challenge of climate change, but neither have their populations remained static; they, along with other slow adjusters, are blinking out.

DARWIN AND WALLACE'S GREAT IDEA

Why do some organisms adjust successfully to environmental change while others do not? For a biologist, there is no more basic or fascinating question, and it now has a pretty good answer—thanks in large part to scientific foundations laid by two Victorian Englishmen. In 1859, Charles Darwin (1809–82) and the brilliant polymath Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) simultaneously proposed the first basically correct model for the mechanism that causes shifts such as that in mosquito hibernation. Historically, Darwin has received most of the credit for this world-changing idea—justifiably, since he supported his conjecture with an abundantly documented book, On the Origin of Species. He had formed many of his ideas on the basis of a five-year trip around the world as a naturalist on the British naval survey ship HMS Beagle (1831–36) and had subsequently corresponded about them with numerous colleagues.

It came as a shock to him when, in 1858, Wallace sent him a paper outlining Darwin's basic idea. Darwin, at the urging of friends, had his and Wallace's idea presented jointly at a meeting of a scientific society. But he followed this in 1859 with Origin, which sold out in a day and cemented his reputation as the greatest of all biologists. Like many great ideas, the Darwin-Wallace theory, which has come down to us identified by the term "natural selection," was disarmingly simple. Basically, it recognized that variation ordinarily exists among individuals within a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Island Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1597260975
• ISBN 13: 9781597260978
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 2
• Anzahl der Seiten: 464
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland