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Between 1969 and 1980, Soviet archaeologists conducted excavations of Mesopotamian villages occupied from pre-agricultural times through the beginnings of early civilization. This volume brings together translations of Russian articles along with new work.

Acclaimed and coveted by both naturalists and lovers of wildlife illustration, Jonathan Kingdon's seven-volume East African Mammals has become a classic of modern natural history. This paperback edition makes Kingdon's remarkable artistic and scientific achievement—his hundreds of drawings and perceptive study of all the mammals in East Africa's species-rich fauna—available to the wide audience it deserves. 

Volume IIA of East African Mammals begins a two-part study of East Africa's smallest and least conspicuous mammals. It deals with bats and insectivores, including tenrecs, moles, hedgehogs, and shrews.

In each volume Kingdon combines his text with hundreds of finished drawings and quick sketches, the latter a form of field note that provides an incomparable description of the animal's movements and personality. Kingdom explains his drawings "as a wordless questioning of form. . . . The probing pencil is like the dissecting scalpel, seeking to expose relevant structures that may not be immediately obvious and are certainly hidden from the shadowy world of the camera lens." As an artist, Kingdon's achievement has been compared with Audubon's; as a scientist, his work has made these volumes indispensable to any serious student of East African mammals.

Acclaimed and coveted by both naturalists and lovers of wildlife illustration, Jonathan Kingdon's seven-volume East African Mammals has become a classic of modern natural history. This paperback edition makes Kingdon's remarkable artistic and scientific achievement—his hundreds of drawings and perceptive study of all the mammals in East Africa's species-rich fauna—available to the wide audience it deserves. 

Volume IIB of East African Mammals is a study of some of  East Africa's smallest and least conspicuous mammals, hares and rodents.

In each volume Kingdon combines his text with hundreds of finished drawings and quick sketches, the latter a form of field note that provides an incomparable description of the animal's movements and personality. Kingdom explains his drawings "as a wordless questioning of form. . . . The probing pencil is like the dissecting scalpel, seeking to expose relevant structures that may not be immediately obvious and are certainly hidden from the shadowy world of the camera lens." As an artist, Kingdon's achievement has been compared with Audubon's; as a scientist, his work has made these volumes indispensable to any serious student of East African mammals.

Acclaimed and coveted by both naturalists and lovers of wildlife illustration, Jonathan Kingdon's seven-volume East African Mammals has become a classic of modern natural history. This paperback edition makes Kingdon's remarkable artistic and scientific achievement—his hundreds of drawings and perceptive study of all the mammals in East Africa's species-rich fauna—available to the wide audience it deserves.

Volume IIIA documents the carnivores of East Africa—lions, cheetahs, jackals, otters, civets, genets, mongooses, hyenas, and such lesser-known species as the zorilla and the aardwolf.

The beauty of the animals, so vivid in these incomparable drawings, is made more poignant by the acknowledgment of their increasingly endangered status. Kingdon discusses the inevitable problems posed by large mammal communities in a developing continent and includes numerous maps indicating their declining ranges and populations.

Acclaimed and coveted by both naturalists and lovers of wildlife illustration, Jonathan Kingdon's seven-volume East African Mammals has become a classic of modern natural history. This paperback edition makes Kingdon's remarkable artistic and scientific achievement—his hundreds of drawings and perceptive study of all the mammals in East Africa's species-rich fauna—available to the wide audience it deserves.

Volume IIIB celebrates the large mammals for which the African plains are so famous—elephants, rhinos, zebras, bushpigs, and warthogs, hippopotamuses, camels, chevrotains, giraffes. Kingdon brings his artist's eye to such puzzles as the zebra's stripes and the giraffe's spots, making original observations throughout the seven volumes about the evolutionary and functional significance of coat color, facial expressions, and curious forms and markings.

The beauty of the animals, so vivid in these incomparable drawings, is made more poignant by the acknowledgment of their increasingly endangered status. Kingdon discusses the inevitable problems posed by large mammal communities in a developing continent and includes numerous maps indicating their declining ranges and populations.

Kingdon's remarkable seven-volume masterwork on East African mammals concludes with two volumes on the bovids, placing them in a broad comparative, ecological, and evolutionary context. Volume IIIC covers cattle, water buffalo, kudus, elands, dwarf antelopes, duikers, reedbucks, and waterbucks; IIID covers gazelles, impalas, wildebeests, oryxes, sheep, and goats. In addition to the stunning, lifelike drawings that are an integral part of the text, the volumes include a reappraisal of bovid taxonomy and original analyses of the form and function of body shape and size, horn shape, coat pattern, and tooth structure.

Kingdon's remarkable seven-volume masterwork on East African mammals concludes with two volumes on the bovids, placing them in a broad comparative, ecological, and evolutionary context. Volume IIIC covers cattle, water buffalo, kudus, elands, dwarf antelopes, duikers, reedbucks, and waterbucks; IIID covers gazelles, impalas, wildebeests, oryxes, sheep, and goats. In addition to the stunning, lifelike drawings that are an integral part of the text, the volumes include a reappraisal of bovid taxonomy and original analyses of the form and function of body shape and size, horn shape, coat pattern, and tooth structure.

In these essays that survey the burgeoning field of tropical herpetology, former students and associates pay tribute to Jay Savage's four decades of mentoring. The result is a book unlike any other available in tropical herpetology. Covering a wide array of subjects, Ecology and Evolution in the Tropics is the first book in more than two decades to broadly review research on tropical amphibians and reptiles. A tribute to Savage and an invaluable addition to the herpetological literature, this work will be cited for years to come.

How did life emerge on Earth? Is there life on other worlds? These questions, until recently confined to the pages of speculative essays and tabloid headlines, are now the subject of legitimate scientific research. This book presents a unique perspective--a combined historical, scientific, and philosophical analysis, which does justice to the complex nature of the subject. The book's first part offers an overview of the main ideas on the origin of life as they developed from antiquity until the twentieth century. The second, more detailed part of the book examines contemporary theories and major debates within the origin-of-life scientific community.
Topics include:

"By combining recent advances in the physical sciences with some of the novel ideas, techniques, and data of modern biology, this book attempts to achieve a new and different kind of evolutionary synthesis. I found it to be challenging, fascinating, infuriating, and provocative, but certainly not dull."—James H, Brown, University of New Mexico

"This book is unquestionably mandatory reading not only for every living biologist but for generations of biologists to come."—Jack P. Hailman, Animal Behaviour, review of the first edition

"An important contribution to modern evolutionary thinking. It fortifies the place of Evolutionary Theory among the other well-established natural laws."—R.Gessink,TAXON

Plant breeders have long sought technologies to extend human control over nature. Early in the twentieth century, this led some to experiment with startlingly strange tools like x-ray machines, chromosome-altering chemicals, and radioactive elements. Contemporary reports celebrated these mutation-inducing methods as ways of generating variation in plants on demand. Speeding up evolution, they imagined, would allow breeders to genetically engineer crops and flowers to order. Creating a new food crop or garden flower would soon be as straightforward as innovating any other modern industrial product. 

In Evolution Made to Order, Helen Anne Curry traces the history of America’s pursuit of tools that could intervene in evolution. An immersive journey through the scientific and social worlds of midcentury genetics and plant breeding and a compelling exploration of American cultures of innovation, Evolution Made to Order provides vital historical context for current worldwide ethical and policy debates over genetic engineering.

A unified interpretation of the evolution of species, humanity, and society

How were the tropical Americas formed? This ambitious volume draws on extensive, multidisciplinary research to develop new views of the geological formation of the isthmus linking North and South America and of the major environmental changes that reshaped the Neotropics to create its present-day marine and terrestrial ecosystems.

Recent discoveries show that dramatic changes in climate and ocean circulation can occur very quickly, and that ecological communities respond just as rapidly. Abrupt changes in the composition of fossil assemblages, formerly dismissed as artifacts of a poor fossil record, now are seen as accurate records of swift changes in the composition of ocean communities.

The twenty-four contributors use current work in paleontology, geology, oceanography, anthropology, ecology, and evolution to paint this challenging portrait of rapid environmental and evolutionary change. Their conclusions argue for a revision of existing interpretations of the fossil record and the processes—including invading Eurasian peoples—that have produced it.

Evolution and Geological Significance of Larger Benthic Foraminifera is a comprehensive reference work on the larger benthic foraminifera. This second edition is substantially revised, including extensive reanalysis of  the most recent work on Cenozoic forms. It provides documentation of the biostratigraphic ranges and palaeoecological significance of the larger foraminifera, which is essential for understanding many major oil-bearing sedimentary basins. In addition, it offers a palaeogeographic interpretation of the shallow marine late Palaeozoic to Cenozoic world.

Marcelle K. BouDagher-Fadel collects and significantly adds to the information already published on the larger benthic foraminifera. New research in the Far East, the Middle East, South Africa, Tibet, and the Americas has provided fresh insights into the evolution and palaeographic significance of these vital reef-forming forms. With the aid of new and precise biostratigraphic dating, she presents revised phylogenies and ranges of the larger foraminifera. The book is illustrated throughout, with examples of different families and groups at the generic levels. Key species are discussed and their biostratigraphic ranges are depicted in comparative charts.

Commitment is at the core of social life. The social fabric is woven from promises and threats that are not always immediately advantageous to the parties involved. Many commitments, such as signing a contract, are fairly straightforward deals, in which both parties agree to give up certain options. Other commitments, such as the promise of life-long love or a threat of murder, are based on more intangible factors such as human emotions. In Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment, distinguished researchers from the fields of economics, psychology, ethology, anthropology, philosophy, medicine, and law offer a rich variety of perspectives on the nature of commitment and question whether the capacity for making, assessing, and keeping commitments has been shaped by natural selection. Game theorists have shown that players who use commitment strategies—by learning to convey subjective offers and to gauge commitments others are willing to make—achieve greater success than those who rationally calculate every move for immediate reward. Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment includes contributions from some of the pioneering students of commitment. Their elegant analyses highlight the critical role of reputation-building, and show the importance of investigating how people can believe that others would carry out promises or threats that go against their own self-interest. Other contributors provide real-world examples of commitment across cultures and suggest the evolutionary origins of the capacity for commitment. Perhaps nowhere is the importance of commitment and reputation more evident than in the institutions of law, medicine, and religion. Essays by professionals in each field explore why many practitioners remain largely ethical in spite of manifest opportunities for client exploitation. Finally, Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment turns to leading animal behavior experts to explore whether non-humans also use commitment strategies, most notably through the transmission of threats or signs of non-aggression. Such examples illustrate how such tendencies in humans may have evolved. Viewed as an adaptive evolutionary strategy, commitment offers enormous potential for explaining complex and irrational emotional behaviors within a biological framework. Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment presents compelling evidence for this view, and offers a potential bridge across the current rift between biology and the social sciences. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust

"Wright's views about population genetics and evolution are so fundamental and so comprehensive that every serious student must examine these books firsthand. . . . Publication of this treatise is a major event in evolutionary biology."-Daniel L. Hartl, BioScience

"Wright's views about population genetics and evolution are so fundamental and so comprehensive that every serious student must examine these books firsthand. . . . Publication of this treatise is a major event in evolutionary biology."-Daniel L. Hartl, BioScience

"Wright's views about population genetics and evolution are so fundamental and so comprehensive that every serious student must examine these books firsthand. . . . Publication of this treatise is a major event in evolutionary biology."-Daniel L. Hartl, BioScience

"Wright's views about population genetics and evolution are so fundamental and so comprehensive that every serious student must examine these books firsthand. . . . Publication of this treatise is a major event in evolutionary biology."-Daniel L. Hartl, BioScience

In The Evolution of Ceramic Production Organization in a Maya Community, Dean E. Arnold continues his unique approach to ceramic ethnoarchaeology, tracing the history of potters in Ticul, Yucatán, and their production space over a period of more than four decades. This follow-up to his 2008 work Social Change and the Evolution of Ceramic Production and Distribution uses narrative to trace the changes in production personnel and their spatial organization through the changes in production organization in Ticul.

Although several kinds of production units developed, households were the most persistent units of production in spite of massive social change and the reorientation of pottery production to the tourist market. Entrepreneurial workshops, government-sponsored workshops, and workshops attached to tourist hotels developed more recently but were short-lived, whereas pottery-making households extended deep into the nineteenth century. Through this continuity and change, intermittent crafting, multi-crafting, and potters' increased management of economic risk also factored into the development of the production organization in Ticul.

Illustrated with more than 100 images of production units, The Evolution of Ceramic Production Organization in a Maya Community is an important contribution to the understanding of ceramic production. Scholars with interests in craft specialization, craft production, and demography, as well as specialists in Mesoamerican archaeology, anthropology, history, and economy, will find this volume especially useful.

René Girard (1923–2015) was one of the leading thinkers of our era—a provocative sage who bypassed prevailing orthodoxies to offer a bold, sweeping vision of human nature, human history, and human destiny. His oeuvre, offering a “mimetic theory” of cultural origins and human behavior, inspired such writers as Milan Kundera and J. M. Coetzee, and earned him a place among the forty “immortals” of the Académie Française. Too often, however, his work is considered only within various academic specializations. This first-ever biographical study takes a wider view. Cynthia L. Haven traces the evolution of Girard’s thought in parallel with his life and times. She recounts his formative years in France and his arrival in a country torn by racial division, and reveals his insights into the collective delusions of our technological world and the changing nature of warfare. Drawing on interviews with Girard and his colleagues, Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard provides an essential introduction to one of the twentieth century’s most controversial and original minds.

Major advances in our understanding of the history of life on Earth have been achieved through the study of exceptionally well-preserved fossil sites, known scientifically as fossil Lagerstätten. The examination of such sites provides a surprisingly complete picture of the evolution of ecosystems throughout the ages. In Evolution of Fossil Ecosystems, Paul A. Selden and John R. Nudds celebrate these unique and rare preserves of ancient ecosystems with succinct summaries of fourteen of the better-known fossil Lagerstätten—including the Ediacara in South Australia, the Hunsrück Slate in Germany, the Santana and Crato Formations in Brazil, and the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.

Beginning with a general introduction to fossil Lagerstätten, Evolution of Fossil Ecosystems goes on, chapter by chapter, to consider each fossil site, detailing its evolutionary position and significance; a brief history of the locality; its background sedimentology, stratigraphy, and paleoenvironment; its biota and paleoecology; and its commonalities with similar Lagerstätten. Considering deposits both marine and terrestrial, the book covers one fossil site from the Precambrian era, five sites from the Paleozoic era, five sites from the Mesozoic era, and three sites from the Cenozoic era.

Illustrated with hundreds of color photographs and drawings, Evolution of Fossil Ecosystems is a sophisticated yet accessible guide to these critical sites. Containing useful appendixes listing important museums, instructions on how to visit the fossil sites, and additional suggested reading, this book will attract students, academics, and professionals in paleontology, evolution, and the earth and life sciences, as well as dedicated amateurs interested in fossils and geology.

The Evolution of Vertebrate Design is a solid introduction to vertebrate evolution, paleontology, vertebrate biology, and functional, comparative anatomy. Its lucid style also makes it ideal for general readers intrigued by fossil history. Clearly drawn diagrams illustrate biomechanical explanations of the evolution of fins, jaws, joints, and body shapes among vertebrates. A glossary of terms is included.

"A luminous text is matched by lucid drawings rationally placed. . . . A great teaching monograph, the book will charm lay readers of fossil history. For virtually every college & public collection."—Scitech Book News

Water quality concerns are not new to the Great Lakes. They emerged early in the 20th century, in 1909, and matured in 1972 and 1978. They remain a prominent part of today’s conflicted politics and advancing industrial growth. The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, under the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909, became a model to the world for environmental management across an international boundary. Evolution of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement recounts this historic binational relationship, an agreement intended to protect the fragile Great Lakes.
     One strength of the agreement is its flexibility, which includes a requirement for periodic review that allows modification as problems are solved, conditions change, or scientific research reveals new problems. The first progress was made in the 1970s in the area of eutrophication, the process by which lakes gradually age, which normally takes thousands of years to progress, but is accelerated by modern water pollution. The binational agreement led to the successful lowering of phosphorus levels that saved Lake Erie and prevented accelerated eutrophication in the rest of the Great Lakes ecosystem. Another major success at the time was the identification and lowering of the levels of toxic contaminants that cause major threats to human and wildlife health, from accumulating PCBs and other persistent organic pollutants

From the Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925 to the court ruling against the Dover Area School Board’s proposed intelligent design curriculum in 2005, few scientific topics have engendered as much controversy—or grabbed as many headlines—as evolution. And since the debate shows no signs of abating, there is perhaps no better time to step back and ask: What is evolution? Defined as the gradual process by which something changes into a different and usually more complex and efficient form, evolution explains the formation of the universe, the nature of viruses, and the emergence of humans. A first-rate summary of the actual science of evolution, this Scientific American reader is a timely collection that gives readers an opportunity to consider evolution’s impact in various settings.

Divided into four sections that consider the evolution of the universe, cells, dinosaurs, and humans, Evolution brings together more than thirty articles written by some of the world’s most respected evolutionary scientists. As tour guides through the genesis of the universe and complex cells, P. James E. Peebles examines the evidence in support of an expanding cosmos, while Christian de Duve discusses the birth of eukaryotes. In an article that anticipated his book Full House, Stephen Jay Gould argues that chance and contingency are as important as natural selection for evolutionary change. And Ian Tatersall makes two fascinating contributions, submitting his view that the schematic of human evolution looks less like a ladder and more like a bush.

With the latest on what’s being researched at every level of evolutionary studies, from prospects of life on other planets to the inner working of cells, Evolution offers general readers an opportunity to update their knowledge on this hot topic while giving students an introduction to the problems and methodologies of an entire field of inquiry. 

All of Sewall Wright's published papers on evolution up to 1950, and a few published later, are gathered in this volume. William Provine's introductions to each paper include pertinent references to related portions of Provine's Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology and Wright's four-volume masterwork, Evolution and the Genetics of Populations. By comparing the papers in this volume with the corresponding topics in the larger work, it is possible to determine the respects in which Wright extended, changed, or remained constant in his ideas over a period of sixty years.

Wright's shifting-balance theory of evolution, first conceived in 1925, has proved enormously useful in modern evolutionary biology. Wright's international prestige has never been higher than it is currently, and the time is ripe for a rereading of his seminal papers. These papers are not only historically important for understanding the period of the "evolutionary synthesis" of the 1930s and 1940s, but continue to be stimulating and useful to working evolutionary biologists today.

What is the role of neo-Darwinian evolution in explaining variation in prehistoric behavior? Evolutionary Archaeology, a collection of nine papers from a variety of contributors, is the first book-length treatment of the evolutionists' position. All archaeologists, and especially those with a specific interest in method and theory, will find much here to challenge traditional theory, solidify the evolutionists' position, and stir further debate.

Evolutionary archaeologists argue that Darwinian natural selection acts on human behavior, resulting in the persistence of alternative human behaviors and the material products of those behaviors. The contributors address the methodological requirements of evolutionary theory as it may apply to the nature of archaeological data. Several contributors evaluate the methodological implications of basic evolutionary principles, including the structure of explanations, the units of evolution and analysis, and the measurement of information transmission. Others explore the role of specific analytic approaches such as seriation, raw material sourcing, and comparative and engineering analyses. Still others confront the issue of reformulating archaeological problems from the point of view of evolutionary theory.

By focusing on the methodological requirements of evolutionary theory, these essays go far in meeting the challenge of building new archaeological method. The work contributes to a better understanding of cultural evolution and builds toward a new, logical framework to explain variation in the archaeological record.

Evolutionary innovations—the bony skeleton of vertebrates, avian flight, or the insect pollination system of angiosperms, for example—have in recent years become the focus of much fertile new research in evolutionary biology. Innovations may hold the keys to understanding why whole new groups of organisms evolve or, conversely, why groups of organisms become extinct. This volume brings together contributors from the fields of morphology, genetics, embryology, physiology, and paleontology to present research on evolutionary innovations and to suggest directions for further work.

The topics covered include the plurality of evolutionary innovations, patterns and processes at different hierarchical levels, evolutionary genetics of adaptations, heterochrony and other mechanisms of radical evolutionary change in early development, developmental mechanisms at the origin of morphological novelty, the evolution of morphological variation patterns, functional design and its punctuated products, plausibility and testability in assessing the consequences of evolutionary innovations, paradigms and pitfalls of studying physiological evolution, polyphyletic constructional breakthroughs in fossil and extant species, ecology of evolutionary innovations in the fossil record.

Representing the state of the art in evolutionary paleobiology, this book provides a much-needed overview of this rapidly changing field. An influx of ideas and techniques both from other areas of biology and from within paleobiology itself have resulted in numerous recent advances, including increased recognition of the relationships between ecological and evolutionary theory, renewed vigor in the study of ecological communities over geologic timescales, increased understanding of biogeographical patterns, and new mathematical approaches to studying the form and structure of plants and animals.

Contributors to this volume—a veritable who's who of eminent researchers—present the results of original research and new theoretical developments, and provide directions for future studies. Individually wide ranging, these papers all share a debt to the work of James W. Valentine, one of the founders of modern evolutionary paleobiology. This volume's unified approach to the study of life on earth will be a major contribution to paleobiology, evolution, and ecology.

With all the recent advances in molecular and evolutionary biology, one could almost wonder why we need the fossil record. Molecular sequence data can resolve taxonomic relationships, experiments with fruit flies demonstrate evolution and development in real time, and field studies of Galapagos finches have provided the strongest evidence for natural selection ever measured in the wild. What, then, can fossils teach us that living organisms cannot?

Evolutionary Patterns demonstrates the rich variety of clues to evolution that can be gleaned from the fossil record. Chief among these are the major trends and anomalies in species development revealed only by "deep time," such as periodic mass extinctions and species that remain unchanged in form for millions of years. Contributors explore modes of development, the tempo of speciation and extinction, and macroevolutionary patterns and trends. The result is an important contribution to paleobiology and evolutionary biology, and a spirited defense of the fossil record as a crucial tool for understanding evolution and development.

The contributors are Ann F. Budd, Efstathia Bura, Leo W. Buss, Mike Foote, Jörn Geister, Stephen Jay Gould, Eckart Hâkansson, Jean-Georges Harmelin, Lee-Ann C. Hayek, Jeremy B. C. Jackson, Kenneth G. Johnson, Nancy Knowlton, Scott Lidgard, Frank K. McKinney, Daniel W. McShea, Ross H. Nehm, Beth Okamura, John M. Pandolfi, Paul D. Taylor, and Erik Thomsen.

 

Much of the evolutionary debate since Darwin has focused on the level at which natural selection occurs. Most biologists acknowledge multiple levels of selection—from the gene to the species. The debate about group selection, however, is the focus of Mark E. Borrello’s Evolutionary Restraints.

            Tracing the history of biological attempts to determine whether selection leads to the evolution of fitter groups, Borrello takes as his focus the British naturalist V. C. Wynne-Edwards, who proposed that animals could regulate their own populations and thus avoid overexploitation of their resources. By the mid-twentieth century, Wynne-Edwards became an advocate for group selection theory and led a debate that engaged the most significant evolutionary biologists of his time, including Ernst Mayr, G. C. Williams, and Richard Dawkins. This important dialogue bled out into broader conversations about population regulation, environmental crises, and the evolution of human social behavior. By examining a single facet in the long debate about evolution, Borrello provides powerful insight into an intellectual quandary that remains relevant and alive to this day.

This work is a bold new effort to embrace all aspects of life—molecular, cellular, behavioral, and cultural—within the formulation of a general theory of evolution that extends classical Darwinian theory to include human society.

The natural world is infinitely complex and hierarchically structured, with smaller units forming the components of progressively larger systems: molecules make up cells, cells comprise tissues and organs that are, in turn, parts of individual organisms, which are united into populations and integrated into yet more encompassing ecosystems. In the face of such awe-inspiring complexity, there is a need for a comprehensive, non-reductionist evolutionary theory. Having emerged at the crossroads of paleobiology, genetics, and developmental biology, the hierarchical approach to evolution provides a unifying perspective on the natural world and offers an operational framework for scientists seeking to understand the way complex biological systems work and evolve.

Coedited by one of the founders of hierarchy theory and featuring a diverse and renowned group of contributors, this volume provides an integrated, comprehensive, cutting-edge introduction to the hierarchy theory of evolution. From sweeping historical reviews to philosophical pieces, theoretical essays, and strictly empirical chapters, it reveals hierarchy theory as a vibrant field of scientific enterprise that holds promise for unification across the life sciences and offers new venues of empirical and theoretical research. Stretching from molecules to the biosphere, hierarchy theory aims to provide an all-encompassing understanding of evolution and—with this first collection devoted entirely to the concept—will help make transparent the fundamental patterns that propel living systems.

Along with reproduction, balancing energy expenditure with the limits of resource acquisition is essential for both a species and a population to survive. But energy is a limited resource, as we know well, so birds and mammals—the most energy-intensive fauna on the planet—must reduce energy expenditures to maintain this balance, some taking small steps, and others extreme measures.

Here Brian K. McNab draws on his over sixty years in the field to provide a comprehensive account of the energetics of birds and mammals, one fully integrated with their natural history. McNab begins with an overview of thermal rates—much of our own energy is spent maintaining our 98.6?F temperature—and explains how the basal rate of metabolism drives energy use, especially in extreme environments. He then explores those variables that interact with the basal rate of metabolism, like body size and scale and environments, highlighting their influence on behavior, distribution, and even reproductive output. Successive chapters take up energy and population dynamics and evolution. A critical central theme that runs through the book is how the energetic needs of birds and mammals come up against rapid environmental change and how this is hastening the pace of extinction.