Earth, Life, and System: Evolution and Ecology on a Gaian Planet

· Fordham Univ Press
Ebook
374
Pages
Eligible
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About this ebook

“A strikingly original . . . collection of essays, which places the work and broad intellectual interests of Lynne Margulis in a variety of contexts.” —Stacy Alaimo, author of Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times

Exploring the broad implications of evolutionary theorist Lynn Margulis’s work, this collection brings together specialists across a range of disciplines, from paleontology, molecular biology, evolutionary theory, and geobiology to developmental systems theory, archaeology, history of science, cultural science studies, and literature and science. Addressing the multiple themes that animated Margulis’s science, the essays within take up, variously, astrobiology and the origin of life, ecology and symbiosis from the microbial to the planetary scale, the coupled interactions of earthly environments and evolving life in Gaia theory and earth system science, and the connections of these newer scientific ideas to cultural and creative productions.

“Altogether, Earth, Life, and System offers a series of often fascinating, always stimulating . . . invariably enriching essays in an incisive and unruly science and its existential repercussions. It is a fitting tribute to one of modern science’s most generative and productive independent spirits, a gadfly like Socrates whose ultimate concern was to ensure that enquiry and debate were never stifled by received opinion and ‘normal’ expectations.” —The British Society for Literature and Science

“A vital contribution to interdisciplinary knowledge about life, evolution, and the planetary imaginary.” —Tyler Volk, award-winning author of Quarks to Culture

“Contributors include biologists, philosophers, historians, and even Margulis’s son, a science writer who sets the tone for the rest of the text in an intimate first chapter about his mother. Clarke’s sought-after interdisciplinarity shines in the finished product.” —Isis Review

About the author

Bruce Clarke is Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science and chair of the Department of English at Texas Tech University. His research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and science, with special interests in systems theory, narrative theory, and ecology. In 2010–11 he was senior fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy, Bauhaus-University Weimar. His books are Allegories of Writing (1995), Dora Marsden and Early Modernism (1996), Energy Forms (2001), Posthuman Metamorphosis (2008), and Neocybernetics and Narrative (2014). He has coedited From Energy to Information (2002), Emergence and Embodiment (2009), and the Routledge Companion to Literature and Science (2010). He is now writing a cultural history of the American locations, transnational authors, and key concepts of the systems discourses gathered in the Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly.

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