BookMichael Charles Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison.
Summary: This book is a provocative and invigorating real-time exploration of the future of human evolution by two of the world's leading interdisciplinary ecologists - Michael Charles Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison. Steeped in a rich multitude of the sciences and humanities, the book enshrines an elegant narrative that is highly empathetic, personal, scientifically wide-ranging and original. It focuses on the geo-positioning of the human Self and its corresponding species. The book's overarching viewpoints and poignant through-story examine and powerfully challenge concepts associated historically with assertions of human superiority over all other life forms. Ultimately, The Hypothetical Species: Variables of Human Evolution is a deeply considered treatise on the ecological and psychological state of humanity and her options - both within, and outside the rubrics of evolutionary research - for survival. This important work is beautifully presented with nearly 200 diverse illustrations, and is introduced with a foreword by famed paleobiologist, Dr. Melanie DeVore.
Contents:
Intro; Foreword; Contents;
1: Introduction; When Philosophy Confronts Trillions of Particulars; And There Is Linnaeus; Evolutionary Hybridism; Different Measures of the World; The Problem with Proofs; Something Else; Differentiating Meaning Within the Anthropocene;
2: Between the Theoretical and the Hypothetical; Anthropic Individuals and Multiplicities; Pre-Socratic Fragments; The Paradox and Complexity of Species Definitions; Biosemiotic Variables; Life and Death; Contemporary Hieroglyphics; Biological Differentiations; Libraries of Life; Cultural Transitions; All the Rage
8: Biological Consensus Mechanisms: The Future of CoexistenceThe Legacy of Bambi; At Home in the Wild; A Human Ethical Commons; The Future of Protection; A New Social Contract; Safeguarding the Biosphere; Emblematic Windows on Future Evolution; Vicissitudes and Pathways of Biological Security; Biological Complexities of the Truth; "Some Third Species"; Collective Consensus: The Future of Coexistence; Adaptation Versus Compensation: The Anthropocenic Double Bind; Future Species; Index Biological Fellowships and Falling-OutsFor the Love of Birds; Activist Exploration; Enduring Contradictions Within Natural History; Epiphanies and Radical Shifts in the Human Organism; Hypothetical Biologies; Formulating the History of an Idea; Compassion Probabilities; The Third Act; Ethical Suasion: The Tipping Point for Compassion Drift from the Individual to the Species;
7: The Varieties of Social Contracts; The Embrace of Individual and Collective Non-violence in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries; Exile from the Garden of Eden; The Valuation of Human Nature What Can We Glean of the Other?Altruism in the Biosphere; The Jain Orientation to Ecology; Human Rights; Realms of the Ideal;
3: Taxonomic Uncertainties; A Ghost in the Himalayas; Legacies of Aristotle, Linnaeus, and Darwin; Zoological Multitudes; A United Natures;
4: A Biosphere in Flux; Hybrid Conceptualization; What's in a Name?; Re-evolution; Future Ancestors;
5: " ... As Far as the Microscope Reveals ... "; Darwinian Convolutions; Ecological Ideation; A Proliferation of Syntheses; Existential Import; The Yasuni Effect; Ecological Benchmarks; It's Still All About People;
6: Human Contradictions