A panoramic view of the evolution of life on our planet, from its origins to humanity's future. In A History of Bodies, Brains, and Minds , Francisco Aboitiz provides a brief history of life, the brain, and cognition, from the earliest living beings to our own species. The author proceeds from the basic premise that, since evolution by natural selection is the process underlying the origin of life and its evolution on earth, the brain—and thus our minds—must also be the result of biological evolution. The aim of this book is to narrate how animal bodies came to be built with their nervous systems and how our species evolved with culture, technology, language, and consciousness. The book is organized in four parts, each delving into a different aspect of evolutionary development: • Definitions lays the groundwork by discussing the principles of biological evolution and explores the definition and mechanisms of life itself. • Beginnings describes the origins of life, starting from the emergence of the first cells to the development of neurons as the building blocks for brain networks. • The Rise of Bodies and Brains examines the evolution of animals with bilateral symmetry, the emergence of chordates and vertebrates, and the expansion and diversification of the vertebrate brain. • A Singular Ape explores Homo sapiens and our species' unique traits, such as bipedality, tool use, culture, language, communication, and consciousness. Comprehensive and deeply insightful, this book helps us understand our place in the natural world and the cosmos—as well as what the future might hold for life on earth.

How niche construction theory extends evolutionary theory beyond natural selection to a more general theory about the coevolution of organisms with their environments. In Niche Construction , John Odling-Smee, the leading authority on niche construction theory, extends evolutionary theory from an explanation of how populations of organisms respond to natural selection pressures in their environments to a more general theory about the coevolution of organisms with their environments. Organisms, he shows, cause changes in their local external environments by interacting with them, thereby contributing in fundamental ways to their own and one another's evolution. This book applies niche construction theory to current problems such as human-induced global warming and suggests how humans might contribute positively to the future evolution of life on Earth. Odling-Smee explains how orthodox evolutionary theory falls short in two ways. First, it does not describe how organisms contribute to their own and one another's evolution through their environment-changing niche constructing activities. Second, it fails to explain how genetic evolution can give rise to supplementary knowledge-gaining processes in many species. These include certain developmental processes in individual organisms and socio-cultural processes in animals, including humans. Neo-Darwinism, the author writes, assesses the fitness of individual organisms in populations in terms of their capacity to survive and reproduce, but without attributing these capacities to the active, purposeful agency of organisms. He argues that the purposeful agency of individual organisms plays a central role in evolution. He also discusses the relationship of an organism's energy-consuming activities and the second law of thermodynamics.

An unsettling exploration of the hidden power dynamics of global health, seen through the lens of childhood diarrhea and its treatment within the Guatemalan context. Deaths from childhood diarrhea seem preposterous in high-income countries. Yet, for children under five years old in the rest of the world, diarrhea is the third highest cause of mortality. Despite a glut of prevention and treatment programming spanning more than forty years, this least glamorous of global health ills remains a critical problem. In Underbelly , Rachel Hall-Clifford takes a hard look at the pathways of global health funding and development policies and the outcomes they deliver for recipient individuals and communities. Drawing on fifteen years of ethnographic research in highland Guatemala, Hall-Clifford focuses on the provision of primary health care services as a critical exemplar of how global health and development programs fall short. Guatemala has a fragmented health system, the author explains, that guarantees health as a human right but also suffers from systemic racism, inadequate health services and access to those services, community distrust from a legacy of harm and violence, and a demeaning paternalism. Bringing together the discourses of global health and medical anthropology, Underbelly explores the ways in which global health—its actors, structures, and systems—perpetuates the challenges it purports to fix: this is the underbelly. Hall-Clifford argues that global health programs, conceived in offices distant from the places in which they are delivered, often have unintended consequences and contribute to pluralistic and exclusionary health systems that mirror neoliberal economies. She argues that if we are to fix this entrenched crisis of health inequity, we must use the immense resources of global health to center local communities as drivers of change. With a foreword written by Waleska López Canu, an Indigenous Maya medical director, and an afterword by Arthur Kleinman, renowned expert in global health, this book underscores the importance of looking deeper into what seems on its surface incontrovertibly “good” to understand the more complex realities on the ground and in people's lives.

Why immunization must be made mandatory in times of vaccine hesitancy, and how we can design and implement immunization policies in a practical, trustworthy, and democratic way. We live in perilous times when a significant number of citizens are either defiantly antivaccination or hesitant to accept vaccinations for themselves or for their children. In Inducing Immunity? , legal philosopher Roland Pierik and bioethicist Marcel Verweij explore ways to regulate collective immunization in as democratic a manner as possible. Approaching the problem as a matter of a conflict between the responsibility of government to protect public health and the basic right to freedom of citizens, Pierik and Verweij argue that John Stuart Mill's harm principle—the idea that individuals should be free to act so long as their actions do not harm others—offers a strong basis for coercive immunization policies. Covering childhood immunization policies, as well as vaccination programs aimed at adult citizens, the authors argue that a coercive immunization policy in any liberal democracy must first satisfy the principle of proportionality. This leads them to an in-depth exploration of the role of exemptions, the nature of coercion, and the contents of vaccination programs. In the final part of the book, the authors also discuss the importance and scope of freedom of speech, given how the current spread of misinformation has undermined confidence in vaccines. Offering an in-depth analysis in bioethics and legal philosophy, Inducing Immunity? is a sensible and applicable guide for health professionals, policymakers, and academics alike on how we can—and must—do better with our immunization policies.

A novel, interdisciplinary exploration of the relative contributions of rigidity and flexibility in the adoption, maintenance, and evolution of technical traditions. Techniques can either be used in rigid, stereotypical ways or in flexibly adaptive ways, or in some combination of the two. The Evolution of Techniques , edited by Mathieu Charbonneau, addresses the impacts of both flexibility and rigidity on how techniques are used, transformed, and reconstructed, at varying social and temporal scales. The multidisciplinary contributors demonstrate the important role of the varied learning contexts and social configurations involved in the transmission, use, and evolution of techniques. They explore the diversity of cognitive, behavioral, sociocultural, and ecological mechanisms that promote and constrain technical flexibility and rigidity, proposing a deeper picture of the enablers of, and obstacles to, technical transmission and change. In line with the extended evolutionary synthesis, the book proposes a more inclusive and materially grounded conception of technical evolution in terms of promiscuous, dynamic, and multidirectional causal processes. Offering new evidence and novel theoretical perspectives, the contributors deploy a diversity of methods, including ethnographies, field and laboratory experiments, cladistics and phylogenetic tree building, historiography, and philosophical analysis. Examples of the wide range of topics covered include field experiments with potters from five cultures, stability and change in Paleolithic toolmaking, why children lack flexibility when making tools, and cultural techniques in nonhuman animals. The volume's three thematic sections are: • Timescales of technical rigidity and flexibility • Rigid copying to flexible reconstruction • Exogenous factors of technical rigidity and flexibility The volume closes with a discussion by philosopher Kim Sterelny. Contributors Rita Astuti, Adam Howell Boyette, Blandine Bril, Josep Call, Mathieu Charbonneau, Arianna Curioni, Nicola Cutting, Bert De Munck, György Gergely, Anne-Lise Goujon, Ildikó Király, Catherine Lara, Sébastien Manem, Luke McEllin, Helena Miton, Giulio Ongaro, Sarah Pope-Caldwell, Valentine Roux, Manon Schweinfurth, Dan Sperber, Kim Sterelny, Dietrich Stout, James W. A. Strachan, Sadie Tenpas

An in-depth look at genetic alteration in the natural world and the oppositions to it, seen through the case study of a gene drive for malaria. May We Make the World? is an engaging reflection on the history, nature, goal, and meaning of using a new technological idea—CRISPR-based genetic engineering—to alter the genome of the mosquito that carries malaria. This technology, called a “gene drive,” can alter the sex ratio in Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes, the key vector for falciparum, the deadliest form of malaria. P. Falciparum kills 400,000 people a year, largely the poorest children in the world among them. In her sobering examination of the issue, Laurie Zoloth considers the leading ethical arguments for and against gene drives, explores the regulatory efforts that have emerged long in advance of the science, and considers the philosophical questions raised by the struggle to eliminate malaria. The development of a gene drive for malaria will have far-reaching implications for it represents the first use of genetic engineering in the natural world and the first creation of a genetic variant intended to spread in the African wild beyond human control. Drawing on two decades of work, Zoloth brilliantly argues that we can understand the complex moral issues at stake only by carefully reflecting on the science, the nature of the local and global discourse about genetic engineering, and the long history of malaria, which—as it transformed from a worldwide disease to a tropical one—reshaped the world as we know it.

The first collection of its kind to explore the diverse and global history of psychedelics as they appealed to several generations of researchers and thinkers. Expanding Mindscapes offers a fascinatingly fluid and diverse history of psychedelics that stretches around the globe. While much of the literature to date has focused on the history of these drugs in the United States and Canada, editors Erika Dyck and Chris Elcock deliberately move away from these places in this collection to reveal a longer and more global history of psychedelics, which chronicles their discovery, use, and cultural impact in the twentieth century. The authors in this collection explore everything from LSD psychotherapy in communist Czechoslovakia to the first applications of LSD-25 in South America to the intersection of modernism and ayahuasca in China. Along the way, they also consider how psychedelic experiments generated their own cultural expressions, where the specter of the United States may have loomed large and where colonial empires exerted influence on the local reception of psychedelics in botanical and pharmaceutical pursuits. Breaking new ground by adopting perspectives that are currently lacking in the historiography of psychedelics, this collection adds to the burgeoning field by offering important discussions on underexplored topics such as gender, agriculture, parapsychology, anarchism, and technological innovations.

How the West African Ebola epidemic was transformed from an urgent and distant tragedy into an existential threat to American lives—establishing the dynamics that would later dominate the US response to epidemics such as COVID-19. In 2014 and 2015, the viral Ebola epidemic in West Africa inspired breathless US media coverage and became the subject of heated public debate over just how to understand the security issue that the outbreak presented. Was it a security concern because of the lives at risk in West Africa? Or because of its threat to regional and global stability? Or was it potentially a threat to the American people? In More Than a Health Crisis , Jessica Kirk reveals how these varied positions spoke to divisions within the American public, concerning how we think about and respond to uncertainty, competing expertise, and securitization. Kirk insightfully examines how experts in different fields offered conflicting assessments of the risks posed by Ebola, and then goes on to analyze how the US press undermined the authority of the public health experts who accurately predicted that the virus posed little danger to Americans. Reading the media coverage of the Ebola epidemic as a case study in the biopolitics of fear, Kirk considers how the US response reflected not only anxieties over globalization but also long-held narratives about the “Dark Continent.” Finally, Kirk shows how the US and global public response to the Ebola outbreak challenged traditional models of securitization and identifies patterns that have tragically recurred with subsequent epidemics such as COVID-19 and monkeypox.

A coherent and comprehensive theory of life that synthesizes the specific properties of living organisms. Despite continued advances, science has until now struggled to describe the specific properties that define a living being. By synthesizing several aspects of organismic biology and contemporary science, Properties of Life by Bernd Rosslenbroich generates a coherent concept of the singular quality of being alive—a concept that provides a crucial foundation for scientists, farmers, and medical practitioners and helps explain how we all interact with the world around us and within ourselves. Is an organism an aggregate of parts or an integrated system with agency? Is it a passive stimulus-response machine or a being equipped with subjectivity and consciousness? Rosslenbroich argues that the way people in different fields understand life determines their assumptions about organic function and behavior. In medicine, this extends to the human organism, which influences prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. Drawing attention to a long-standing but underappreciated line of thought in organismic biology, Rosslenbroich's original idea emphasizes the autonomy of living processes, their network characteristics, and their self-determined organization in time and structure. A timely and revelatory book, Properties of Life formulates an integrated, unified theory that remains flexible enough to accommodate future developments and resilient enough to withstand the challenges of different theoretical and disciplinary backgrounds.

A unique exploration of teleonomy—also known as “evolved purposiveness”—as a major influence in evolution by a broad range of specialists in biology and the philosophy of science. The evolved purposiveness of living systems, termed “teleonomy” by chronobiologist Colin Pittendrigh, has been both a major outcome and causal factor in the history of life on Earth. Many theorists have appreciated this over the years, going back to Lamarck and even Darwin in the nineteenth century. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the complex, dynamic process of evolution was simplified into the one-way, bottom-up, single gene-centered paradigm widely known as the modern synthesis. In Evolution “On Purpose ,” edited by Peter A. Corning, Stuart A. Kauffman, Denis Noble, James A. Shapiro, Richard I. Vane-Wright, and Addy Pross, some twenty theorists attempt to modify this reductive approach by exploring in depth the different ways in which living systems have themselves shaped the course of evolution. Evolution “On Purpose” puts forward a more inclusive theoretical synthesis that goes far beyond the underlying principles and assumptions of the modern synthesis to accommodate work since the 1950s in molecular genetics, developmental biology, epigenetic inheritance, genomics, multilevel selection, niche construction, physiology, behavior, biosemiotics, chemical reaction theory, and other fields. In the view of the authors, active biological processes are responsible for the direction and the rate of evolution. Essays in this collection grapple with topics from the two-way “read-write” genome to cognition and decision-making in plants to the niche-construction activities of many organisms to the self-making evolution of humankind. As this collection compellingly shows, and as bacterial geneticist James Shapiro emphasizes, “The capacity of living organisms to alter their own heredity is undeniable.”

An intimate account of rural New England families living on the edge of homelessness, as well as the practices and policies of care that fail them. Families on the Edge is an ethnographic portrait of families in rural and small-town New England who are often undercut by the very systems that are set up to help them. In this book, author and medical anthropologist Elizabeth Carpenter-Song draws on a decade of ethnographic research to chart the struggles of a cohort of families she met in a Vermont family shelter in 2009, as they contend with housing insecurity, mental illness, and substance use. Few other works have attempted to take such a long-term view of how vulnerability to homelessness unfolds over time or to engage so fully with existing scholarship in the fields of anthropology and health services. Research on homelessness in the United States has been overwhelmingly conducted in urban settings, so much less is known about its trajectory in rural areas and small towns. Carpenter-Song's book identifies how specific aspects of rural New England—including scarce affordable housing stock, extremely limited transportation, and cultural expectations of self-reliance—come together to thwart opportunities for families despite their continual striving to “make it” in this environment. Carpenter-Song shines a light on the many high-stakes consequences that occur when systems of care fail and offers a way forward for clinicians, health researchers, and policymakers seeking practical solutions.

Essays on evolvability from the perspectives of quantitative and population genetics, evolutionary developmental biology, systems biology, macroevolution, and the philosophy of science. Evolvability—the capability of organisms to evolve—wasn't recognized as a fundamental concept in evolutionary theory until 1990. Though there is still some debate as to whether it represents a truly new concept, the essays in this volume emphasize its value in enabling new research programs and facilitating communication among the major disciplines in evolutionary biology. The contributors, many of whom were instrumental in the development of the concept of evolvability, synthesize what we have learned about it over the past thirty years. They focus on the historical and philosophical contexts that influenced the emergence of the concept and suggest ways to develop a common language and theory to drive further evolvability research. The essays, drawn from a workshop on evolvability hosted in 2019–2020 by the Center of Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, in Oslo, provide scientific and historical background on evolvability. The contributors represent different disciplines of evolutionary biology, including quantitative and population genetics, evolutionary developmental biology, systems biology, and macroevolution, as well as the philosophy of science. This plurality of approaches allows researchers in disciplines as diverse as developmental biology, molecular biology, and systems biology to communicate with those working in mainstream evolutionary biology. The contributors also discuss key questions at the forefront of research on evolvability. Contributors: J. David Aponte, W. Scott Armbruster, Geir H. Bolstad, Salomé Bourg, Ingo Brigandt, Anne Calof, James M. Cheverud, Josselin Clo, Frietson Galis, Mark Grabowski, Rebecca Green, Benedikt Hallgrímsson, Thomas F. Hansen, Agnes Holstad, David Houle, David Jablonski, Arthur Lander, Arnaud LeRouzic, Alan C. Love, Ralph Marcucio, Michael B. Morrissey, Laura Nuño de la Rosa, Øystein H. Opedal, Mihaela Pavličev, Christophe Pélabon, Jane M. Reid, Heather Richbourg, Jacqueline L. Sztepanacz, Masahito Tsuboi, Cristina Villegas, Marta Vidal-García, Kjetil L. Voje, Andreas Wagner, Günter P. Wagner, Nathan M. Young

An argument for the centrality of rights in health security, and how to apply ethical principles to protecting those rights during public health crises. In recent years, efforts to respond to infectious diseases have been described in terms of national and global security, leading to the formation of the field of “health security.” In War on All Fronts , Nicholas G. Evans provides a novel theory of just health security and its relation to the practice of conventional public health. Using COVID-19 as a jumping-off point to examine wider issues, including how the US thinks about and prepares for pandemics, Evans shows the flaws in using the “war metaphor" and how any serious understanding of health security must square with human rights—even when a disease poses a threat to national security. Evans asks what ethical principles justify declaring, and taking action during, a public health emergency such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The relevant principles, he argues, parallel those of the ethics of armed conflict. Just war theory, properly understood, begins with pacifism and a commitment to the right not to be killed and then steps back to ask under what limited conditions it is permissible to kill. In a similar way, a just health security must also begin with the idea that public health should hold human rights sacrosanct and then ask under what limited conditions other concerns might prevail. Evans's overall goal is to formulate a guide to action, particularly as the world deals with the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. Turning to the transition from war back to peace in public health, he looks at reparation, rebuilding, and the accountability of actors during the crisis.

A wide-ranging philosophical exploration of what it is to experience grief and what this tells us about human emotional life. Experiences of grief can be bewildering, disorienting, and isolating; everything seems somehow different, in ways that are difficult to comprehend and describe. Why does the world as a whole look distant, strange, and unfamiliar? How can we know that someone is dead, while at the same time find this utterly unfathomable, impossible? Grief Worlds explores a host of philosophical questions raised by grief, showing how philosophical inquiry can enhance our understanding of grief and vice versa. Throughout the book, Matthew Ratcliffe focuses on the phenomenology of grief: what do experiences of grief consist of, how are they structured, and what can they tell us about the nature of human experience more generally? While acknowledging the diversity of grief, Ratcliffe sets out to identify its common features. Drawing extensively on first-person accounts, he proposes that grief is a process that involves experiencing, comprehending, and navigating a pervasive disturbance of one's experiential world. Its course over time depends on ways of experiencing and relating to other people, both the living and the dead. Along with its insights into the workings of grief, the book provides us with a broader philosophical perspective for thinking about human emotional experience.

A philosopher who has experienced psychosis argues that recovery requires regaining agency and autonomy within a therapeutic relationship based on mutual trust. In Mental Patient, philosopher Abigail Gosselin uses her personal experiences with psychosis and the process of recovery to explore often overlooked psychiatric ethics. For many people who struggle with psychosis, she argues, psychosis impairs agency and autonomy. She shows how clinicians can help psychiatric patients regain agency and autonomy through a positive therapeutic relationship characterized by mutual trust. Patients, she says, need to take an active role in regaining their agency and autonomy—specifically, by giving testimony, cons tructing a narrative of their experience to instill meaning, making choices about treatment, and deciding to show up and participate in life activities. Gosselin examines how psychotic experience is medicalized and describes what it is like to be a patient receiving mental health care treatment. In addition to mutual trust, she says, a productive therapeutic relationship requires the clinician's empathetic understanding of the patient's experiences and perspective. She also explains why psychotic patients sometimes feel ambivalent about recovery and struggle to stay committed to it. The psychiatric ethics issues she examines include the development of epistemic agency and credibility, epistemic justice, the use of coercion, therapeutic alliance, the significance of choice, and the taking of responsibility. Mental Patient differs from straightforward memoirs of psychiatric illness in that it analyses philosophic issues related to psychosis and recovery, and it differs from other books on psychiatric ethics in that its analyses are drawn from the author's first-person experiences as a mental patient.

An argument that the development of scientific practice and growth of scientific knowledge are governed by Darwin's evolutionary model of descent with modification. Although scientific investigation is influenced by our cognitive and moral failings as well as all of the factors impinging on human life, the historical development of scientific knowledge has trended toward an increasingly accurate picture of an increasing number of phenomena. Taking a fresh look at Thomas Kuhn's 1962 work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , in How Knowledge Grows Chris Haufe uses evolutionary theory to explain both why scientific practice develops the way it does and how scientific knowledge expands. This evolutionary model, claims Haufe, helps to explain what is epistemically special about scientific knowledge: its tendency to grow in both depth and breadth. Kuhn showed how intellectual communities achieve consensus in part by discriminating against ideas that differ from their own and isolating themselves intellectually from other fields of inquiry and broader social concerns. These same characteristics, says Haufe, determine a biological population's degree of susceptibility to modification by natural selection. He argues that scientific knowledge grows, even across generations of variable groups of scientists, precisely because its development is governed by Darwinian evolution. Indeed, he supports the claim that this susceptibility to modification through natural selection helps to explain the epistemic power of certain branches of modern science. In updating and expanding the evolutionary approach to scientific knowledge, Haufe provides a model for thinking about science that acknowledges the historical contingency of scientific thought while showing why we nevertheless should trust the results of scientific research when it is the product of certain kinds of scientific communities.

How epidemic photography during a global pandemic of bubonic plague contributed to the development of modern epidemiology and our concept of the “pandemic.” In Visual Plague , Christos Lynteris examines the emergence of epidemic photography during the third plague pandemic (1894–1959), a global pandemic of bubonic plague that led to over twelve million deaths. Unlike medical photography, epidemic photography was not exclusively, or even primarily, concerned with exposing the patient's body or medical examinations and operations. Instead, it played a key role in reconceptualizing infectious diseases by visualizing the “pandemic” as a new concept and structure of experience—one that frames and responds to the smallest local outbreak of an infectious disease as an event of global importance and consequence. As the third plague pandemic struck more and more countries, the international circulation of plague photographs in the press generated an unprecedented spectacle of imminent global threat. Nothing contributed to this sense of global interconnectedness, anticipation, and fear more than photography. Exploring the impact of epidemic photography at the time of its emergence, Lynteris highlights its entanglement with colonial politics, epistemologies, and aesthetics, as well as with major shifts in epidemiological thinking and public health practice. He explores the characteristics, uses, and impact of epidemic photography and how it differs from the general corpus of medical photography. The new photography was used not simply to visualize or illustrate a pandemic, but to articulate, respond to, and unsettle key questions of epidemiology and epidemic control, as well as to foster the notion of the “pandemic,” which continues to affect our lives today.

A comprehensive review of the scientific literature on the possible benefits of CBD, describing findings from both preclinical and human clinical studies. CBD (cannabidiol), a nonintoxicating compound derived from the cannabis plant, can be found in products ranging from lotion and smoothies to chewable gummies and pet treats. It's been promoted—but not always scientifically validated—as a treatment for medical conditions including psychosis, anxiety, pain, and even cancer. In this book, three leading cannabis researchers look at the science of CBD, offering a comprehensive review of the scientific literature on the possible benefits of CBD and describing their findings from both preclinical and human clinical studies. As it turns out, the current CBD fad has some basis in preclinical animal research that indicates potential beneficial effects. Clinical studies, hampered by regulations governing research with cannabis, have lagged behind the basic animal research. The authors examine what research shows about chemical and pharmacological aspects of CBD and CBD's interaction with THC, the main psychotropic compound found in cannabis. They go on to review the current state of knowledge about CBD's effectiveness in treating epilepsy, cancer, nausea, pain, anxiety, PTSD, depression, sleep disorders, psychosis, and addiction.

How biomedical research using various animal species and in vitro cellular systems has resulted in both major successes and translational failure. In Model Systems in Biology , comparative neurobiologist Georg Striedter examines how biomedical researchers have used animal species and in vitro cellular systems to understand and develop treatments for human diseases ranging from cancer and polio to Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia. Although there have been some major successes, much of this “translational” research on model systems has failed to generalize to humans. Striedter explores the history of such research, focusing on the models used and considering the question of model selection from a variety of perspectives—the philosophical, the historical, and that of practicing biologists. Striedter reviews some philosophical concepts and ethical issues, including concerns over animal suffering and the compromises that result. He traces the history of the most widely used animal and in vitro models, describing how they compete with one another in a changing ecosystem of models. He examines how therapies for bacterial and viral infections, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and neurological disorders have been developed using animal and cell culture models—and how research into these diseases has both taken advantage of and been hindered by model system differences. Finally, Striedter argues for a “big tent” biology, in which a diverse set of models and research strategies can coexist productively.

The groundbreaking first book by a major evolutionary biologist, published in 1912, that anticipated current thinking about organismal complexity. Julian Huxley's The Individual in the Animal Kingdom , published in 1912, is a concise and groundbreaking work that is almost entirely unknown today. In it, Huxley analyzes the evolutionary advances in life's organizational complexity, anticipating many of today's ideas about changes in individuality. Huxley's overarching system of concepts and his coherent logical principles were so far ahead of their time that they remain valid to this day. In part, this is because his explicitly Darwinian approach carefully distinguished between the integrated form and function of hierarchies within organisms and loosely defined, nonorganismal ecological communities. In The Individual in the Animal Kingdom , we meet a youthful Huxley who uses his commanding knowledge of natural history to develop a nonreductionist account of life's complexity that aligns with seminal early insights by Darwin, Wallace, Weismann, and Wheeler. As volume editors Richard Gawne and Jacobus Boomsma point out, this work disappeared into oblivion despite its relevance for contemporary research on organismal complexity and major evolutionary transitions. This MIT Press edition gives Huxley's book a second hearing, offering readers a unique vantage point on the discoveries of evolutionary biology past and present.