“It is not only the species that change evolutionarily through interactions . . . the interactions themselves also change.” Thus states John N. Thompson in the foreword to Interaction and Coevolution, the first title in his series of books exploring the relentless nature of evolution and the processes that shape the web of life. Originally published in 1982 more as an idea piece—an early attempt to synthesize then academically distinct but logically linked strands of ecological thought and to suggest avenues for further research—than as a data-driven monograph, Interaction and Coevolution would go on to be considered a landmark study that pointed to the beginning of a new discipline. Through chapters on antagonism, mutualism, and the effects of these interactions on populations, speciation, and community structure, Thompson seeks to explain not only how interactions differ in the selection pressures they exert on species, but also when interactions are most likely to lead to coevolution. In this era of climate change and swiftly transforming environments, the ideas Thompson puts forward in Interaction and Coevolution are more relevant than ever before.

Coevolution—reciprocal evolutionary change in interacting species driven by natural selection—is one of the most important ecological and genetic processes organizing the earth's biodiversity: most plants and animals require coevolved interactions with other species to survive and reproduce. The Geographic Mosaic of Coevolution analyzes how the biology of species provides the raw material for long-term coevolution, evaluates how local coadaptation forms the basic module of coevolutionary change, and explores how the coevolutionary process reshapes locally coevolving interactions across the earth's constantly changing landscapes. Picking up where his influential The Coevolutionary Process left off, John N. Thompsonsynthesizes the state of a rapidly developing science that integrates approaches from evolutionary ecology, population genetics, phylogeography, systematics, evolutionary biochemistry and physiology, and molecular biology. Using models, data, and hypotheses to develop a complete conceptual framework, Thompson also draws on examples from a wide range of taxa and environments, illustrating the expanding breadth and depth of research in coevolutionary biology.

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Should digital technology be viewed as a new life form, sharing our ecosystem and coevolving with us? Are humans defining technology, or is technology defining humans? In this book, Edward Ashford Lee considers the case that we are less in control of the trajectory of technology than we think. It shapes us as much as we shape it, and it may be more defensible to think of technology as the result of a Darwinian coevolution than the result of top-down intelligent design. Richard Dawkins famously said that a chicken is an egg's way of making another egg. Is a human a computer's way of making another computer? To understand this question requires a deep dive into how evolution works, how humans are different from computers, and how the way technology develops resembles the emergence of a new life form on our planet. Lee presents the case for considering digital beings to be living, then offers counterarguments. What we humans do with our minds is more than computation, and what digital systems do—be teleported at the speed of light, backed up, and restored—may never be possible for humans. To believe that we are simply computations, he argues, is a “dataist” faith and scientifically indefensible. Digital beings depend on humans—and humans depend on digital beings. More likely than a planetary wipe-out of humanity is an ongoing, symbiotic coevolution of culture and technology.

Traditional ecological approaches to species evolution have frequently studied too few species, relatively small areas, and relatively short time spans. In The Coevolutionary Process, John N. Thompson advances a new conceptual approach to the evolution of species interactions—the geographic mosaic theory of coevolution. Thompson demonstrates how an integrated study of life histories, genetics, and the geographic structure of populations yields a broader understanding of coevolution, or the development of reciprocal adaptations and specializations in interdependent species. Using examples of species interactions from an enormous range of taxa, Thompson examines how and when extreme specialization evolves in interdependent species and how geographic differences in specialization, adaptation, and the outcomes of interactions shape coevolution. Through the geographic mosaic theory, Thompson bridges the gap between the study of specialization and coevolution in local communities and the study of broader patterns seen in comparisons of the phylogenies of interacting species.

The average kilometer of tropical rainforest is teeming with life; it contains thousands of species of plants and animals. As The Ornaments of Life reveals, many of the most colorful and eye-catching rainforest inhabitants—toucans, monkeys, leaf-nosed bats, and hummingbirds to name a few—are an important component of the infrastructure that supports life in the forest. These fruit-and-nectar eating birds and mammals pollinate the flowers and disperse the seeds of hundreds of tropical plants, and unlike temperate communities, much of this greenery relies exclusively on animals for reproduction. Synthesizing recent research by ecologists and evolutionary biologists, Theodore H. Fleming and W. John Kress demonstrate the tremendous functional and evolutionary importance of these tropical pollinators and frugivores. They shed light on how these mutually symbiotic relationships evolved and lay out the current conservation status of these essential species. In order to illustrate the striking beauty of these “ornaments” of the rainforest, the authors have included a series of breathtaking color plates and full-color graphs and diagrams.

It has long been recognized that plants and animals profoundly affect one another’s characteristics during the course of evolution. However, the importance of coevolution as a dynamic process involving such diverse factors as chemical communication, population structure and dynamics, energetics, and the evolution, structure, and functioning of ecosystems has been widely recognized for a comparatively short time. Coevolution represents a point of view about the structure of nature that only began to be fully explored in the late twentieth century. The papers presented here herald its emergence as an important and promising field of biological research. Coevolution of Animals and Plants is the first book to focus on the dynamic aspects of animal-plant coevolution. It covers, as broadly as possible, all the ways in which plants interact with animals. Thus, it includes discussions of leaf-feeding animals and their impact on plant evolution as well as of predator-prey relationships involving the seeds of angiosperms. Several papers deal with the most familiar aspect of mutualistic plant-animal interactions—pollination relationships. The interactions of orchids and bees, ants and plants, and butterflies and plants are discussed. One article provides a fascinating example of more indirect relationships centered around the role of carotenoids, which are produced by plants but play a fundamental part in the visual systems of both plants and animals. Coevolution of Animals and Plants provides a general conceptual framework for studies on animal-plant interaction. The papers are written from a theoretical, rather than a speculative, standpoint, stressing patterns that can be applied in a broader sense to relationships within ecosystems. Contributors to the volume include Paul Feeny, Miriam Rothschild, Christopher Smith, Brian Hocking, Lawrence Gilbert, Calaway Dodson, Herbert Baker, Bernd Heinrich, Doyle McKey, and Gordon Frankie.