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A leading biologist offers a comprehensive and accessible history of invasive species science, from its earliest antecedents through its current research foci and controversies.
 
From the arrival of the naval shipworm in the Black Sea in the first millennium BC to the escape of the Burmese python in Florida in 1992, humans have moved species to new locations, deliberately or inadvertently, for thousands of years. Agricultural and environmental impacts of some invasions were evident early, although whether observers recognized that the cause was an introduced species is uncertain. The history of invasion biology truly begins in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, when explorers noticed European species on various distant islands and in North America. In the nineteenth century, biogeographers, studying species distributions across the globe, introduced the first native and non-native species categorizations, and prominent researchers like Charles Darwin began to describe the impacts of introduced species. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as humans moved increasing numbers of species across the globe, the advent of modern ecology deepened our understanding of the scope of the problem.
 
In Ecological Explosions, invasive species expert Daniel Simberloff provides a thorough overview of the development of invasion science, from early research—including from the perspectives of leading scientists like Aldo Leopold—to the field’s future. Simberloff explores the work of pioneering ecologists like Charles Elton, antecedents of what became today’s invasion biology, before discussing the field’s true emergence in the 1980s, its explosive methodological and theoretical expansion, its integration with other disciplines, and its increasing visibility, not only within the biological literature but also in government policies across the world in the 1990s. Finally, he investigates current controversies, such as the debate over whether the entire science is xenophobic, and asks how ecosystems might adapt to a rapidly globalizing world and ever-increasing numbers of introduced species—including the joro spider, lionfish, spotted lanternfly, common reed, and Asian carp.

• Aristotle and the Greek atomists' conceptions of the organism
• Alexander Oparin and J.B.S. Haldane's 1920s breakthrough papers
• Possible life on Mars?

An innovative view of the role of fitness concepts in evolutionary theory.
 
Natural selection is one of the factors responsible for changes in biological populations. Some traits or organisms are fitter than others, and natural selection occurs when there are changes in the distribution of traits in populations because of fitness differences. Many philosophers of biology insist that a trait’s fitness should be defined as an average of the fitnesses of individual members of the population that have the trait.
 
Marshall Abrams argues convincingly against this widespread approach. As he shows, it conflicts with the roles that fitness is supposed to play in evolutionary theory and with the ways that evolutionary biologists use fitness concepts in empirical research. The assumption that a causal kind of fitness is fundamentally a property of actual individuals has resulted in unnecessary philosophical puzzles and years of debate. Abrams came to see that the fitnesses of traits that are the basis of natural selection cannot be defined in terms of the fitnesses of actual members of populations, as philosophers of biology often claim. Rather, it is an overall population-environment system—not actual, particular organisms living in particular environmental conditions—that is the basis of trait fitnesses. Abrams argues that by distinguishing different classes of fitness concepts and the roles they play in the practice of evolutionary biology, we can see that evolutionary biologists’ diverse uses of fitness concepts make sense together and are consistent with the idea that fitness differences cause evolution.
 
Abrams’s insight has broad significance, for it provides a general framework for thinking about the metaphysics of biological evolution and its relations to empirical research. As such, it is a game-changing book for philosophers of biology, biologists who want deeper insight into the nature of evolution, and anyone interested in the applied philosophy of probability.

Written by specialists in the field, the papers in this volume explore evolution of animals and plants on the deserts of North America, South America, and Australia. Together, the articles constitute a complete survey of the geological history of the deserts of three continents, the evolution of the animals and plants of those deserts, and their adaptations to the environments in which they live.

The first paper, by Otto T. Solbrig, discusses the flora of the South American temperate and semidesert regions, citing numerous genera and reasons that they are found in the different areas. John S. Beard uses the same approach in his discussion of the evolution of Australian desert plants and focuses on western Australian areas. Guillermo Sarmiento appraises the evolution of arid vegetation in tropical America, including the Lesser Antilles and the Coast Range of Venezuela and Colombia. A. R. Main surveys the adaptation of Australian vertebrates to desert conditions and gives examples of how various species of birds, reptiles, and amphibians adapt to their environment in order for the greatest number to survive. James A. MacMahon designates specific communities in the Mojave, Sonoran, and Chihuahuan deserts and discusses the similarity of species of the North American desert mammal faunas found there, while Bobbi S. Low focuses on the evolution of amphibian life histories in the desert and compiles a lengthy table of amphibia comparing egg size, habitat, number of eggs per clutch, and so forth. Finally, W. Frank Blair treats adaptation of anurans to equivalent desert scrub of North and South America and cites various species of frogs and toads that are found in similar areas.

The volume also includes an introduction by the editor and an index. Evolution of Desert Biota is the result of a symposium held during the First International Congress of Systematic and Evolutionary Biology in Boulder, Colorado; in August 1973.