Mysterious Ways
Contingency, Emergence, and Selection in Nature
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Estimated delivery time: In stock at the publisher, but not at Prospero's office. Delivery time approx. 3-5 weeks.
Not in stock at Prospero.
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 27 May 2025
- ISBN 9780197755099
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages416 pages
- Size 237x165x29 mm
- Weight 717 g
- Language English 607
Categories
Short description:
Drawing from a broad range of geoscience, bioscience, and other sciences, Mysterious Ways speaks to the stories we tell about how our world came to be, how it changes, and our place in it. Describing how evolution and selection operate at the level of landscapes, this book also shows how landforms, soils, hydrology, and biota coevolve as they mutually adapt to climate and other environmental changes,
MoreLong description:
General scientific laws guide and constrain how landscapes evolve, but because local geographical and historical contingencies are so important, there are infinite possible evolutionary pathways and outcomes. Nevertheless, certain patterns, structures, and relationships recur repeatedly that tend to maximize efficiency. But no laws determine that this should happen, and landscapes have no goals or intentionality. How does nature keep producing relationships, structures, and patterns that maximize efficiency? Those are the "mysterious ways " this book explains.
Drawing from a broad range of geoscience, bioscience, and other sciences, Mysterious Ways speaks to the stories we tell about how our world came to be, how it changes, and our place in it. The book makes a case for evolution and selection as general phenomena in nature. It shows how evolution and selection operate at the level of landscapes, and how landforms, soils, hydrology, and biota coevolve as they mutually adapt to climate and other environmental changes. It looks at phenomena like the transformation of tropical forests to savannas, karsts to deserts, and riverbed formation as outcomes of tendencies for more efficient, stable, and durable patterns, structures, and relationships to form, grow, replicate, and persist.
Table of Contents:
Preface
Chapter 1: Mysterious Ways
Chapter 2: Supra-organic Landscapes
Chapter 3: It Depends on the Scale...
Chapter 4: Landscape Memory
Chapter 5: The Goals of Landscape Evolution
Chapter 6: Selection and Landscape Evolution
Chapter 7: Store and Pour and Adapt
Chapter 8: Why Everything is Connected to Everything Else
Chapter 9: Perfection
Chapter 10: Climate Change and Mysterious Ways
Epilogue
