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Ed Russell’s New Book is Released

Carson Fellow Edmund Russell's book on evolutionary history is due out in late January 2011

17.01.2011

Ed Russell's Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth (Cambridge University Press) is due out at the end of January 2011. The book encourages historians to study the impact of human beings on the evolution of populations of non-human species, and the impact of those changes in turn on human history.  Hunting, fishing, medicine, pest control, domestication, and breeding are examples of human activities that have shaped evolution.  To show how an evolutionary approach can revise our understanding of well-studied events, one chapter suggests that anthropogenic evolution by Amerindians in the New World helped spark the industrial revolution in England by developing long fiber suitable for machine spinning.

Russell has been at the RCC since October 2010, where he is working on a new project that examines how neuroscience might help humanists understand the relationship between people and environments.

For more information about Edmund Russell and his current research project, see his profile in our Fellows section.

110117_EdRussel Book