Human Ecology, Demography - General & Miscellaneous, Physical Anthropology, Evolution
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Overview
In Dominion, Niles Eldredge, the paleontologist whose evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibria (developed with Stephen Jay Gould in the early 1970s) is today's science, reveals that the decoupling of physical and cultural evolution some ten thousand years ago offers the strongest clue to what to expect in the future. As the author makes clear, agriculture relieved us from dependence on the local ecosystem; culture, not biology, allowed us to step outside the natural world, literally to have dominion over "the beasts of the field." We no longer had to depend upon the vastly slower rates of biological evolution to adjust to changing climates or to take advantage of new food resources. We used our wits and actually did do something about the weather. However valid the premise, our escape from nature - our dominion over it - is an illusion. Eldredge explains that though we, unlike all other species, are no longer rooted in local ecosystems, we have not escaped nature - the mega-ecosystem. Instead we have merely redefined our role within it. Our revised status in nature holds the key to understanding our evolutionary future. Being global means that we can no longer look to technological fixes to address the classic question posed by Thomas Malthus in 1799: How will we survive if population grows faster than our capacity to feed ourselves? As Niles Eldredge puts it, "Malthus was not so much wrong as ahead of his time."Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Some 10,000 years ago, declares Eldredge, humans invented agriculture and became the first species to live beyond the confines of a local ecosystem. Ever since, notes the author, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, people have ignored, exploited or trashed their natural surroundings, living as though self-sufficient and detached from nature. Mass extinction of nonhuman species, loss of biodiversity, despoliation of the environment and runaway population growth are among the consequences confronting us, and solving them, Eldredge argues, will require a recognition that we are the first global species: ``The whole earth has become our local ecosystem.'' This refreshingly succinct report charts human interaction with the environment from the first toolmakers of 2.5 million years ago to the three distinct migrations of Homo species out of Africa, which, Eldredge believes, took place within the last million years. He also explains how he and Stephen Jay Gould arrived at the theory of punctuated equilibria, which holds that evolutionary change took place in relatively quick, abrupt spurts. (Oct.)Book Details
Published
December 31, 1995
Publisher
New York : H. Holt, 1995.
Pages
190
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780805029826