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"Cities occupy approximately 3% of the Earth's habitable land area and are home to roughly half of all humans worldwide, with both estimates predicted to grow. Urban space is thus becoming an important, novel ecological niche for humans and wildlife alike. Building on knowledge gathered by urban ecologists during the last half century, evidence of evolutionary responses to urbanisation has rapidly emerged. Urban evolutionary biology is a nascent yet fast-growing field of research - and a fascinating testing ground for evolutionary biologists worldwide. Urbanisation offers a great range of opportunities to examine evolutionary processes because of the radically altered and easily quantifiable urban habitat, and the large number of cities worldwide enabling rigorous, replicated tests of evolutionary hypotheses. Urban populations are increasingly exhibiting both neutral and adaptive evolutionary changes at levels ranging from genotypes to phenotypes. The novelty of urban evolutionary biology is that these changes are driven by the cities we have built, including effects of infrastructure, pollution, and the social characteristics of our urban neighbourhoods. It will thereby enrich the field of evolutionary biology with emergent yet incredibly potent new research themes where the urban habitat is key. With contributions written by leading evolutionary biologists working on urban drivers of evolution, Urban Evolutionary Biology (title in italics) is the first academic book in the field. It synthesises current knowledge on evolutionary processes occurring literally on our doorstep, across the globe and in each city independently. This advanced textbook is suitable for graduate level students as well as professional researchers studying the evolutionary biology and genetics of urban environments. It is also highly relevant to urban ecologists and urban wildlife practitioners"--

Reber's axiom: "Any organism with flexible cell walls, a sensitivity to its surrounds and the capacity for locomotion will possess the biological foundations of mind and consciousness" does not seem to be supported by things we know and the logic of evolutionary biology. The latter leads to the conclusion that conscious species are flexible in their behavior (rather than in their cell walls), as argued in Ng (1995, 2016). Locomotion may be completely hard-wired and need not involve consciousness. It is hard enough to explain how consciousness could emerge in a sophisticated brain: Isn't it a harder problem to show or see how consciousness could emerge in a much more primitive organism, as Reber suggests? As we are unlikely to solve the hard problem of consciousness any time soon, surely a more immediate problem is to ascertain with high probability which species are capable of welfare (enjoyment and suffering).

The traditional emphasis on human nature as the foundation of politics needs to be reexamined from the perspective of contemporary biology. Because biological processes operate independently on the individual, the social group, and the species, an evolutionary approach to both observational research and cost-benefit analysis does not entail reductionism. Selfishness and altruism, participation in social groups, languages and cultures, and the rise and fall of centralized states can all be illuminated by empirical evidence and theories in the life sciences. For political philosophy, a new "naturalism" points to a return to the Aristotelian view that values or standards of judgment have rationally intelligible foundations, thereby challenging the relativist or nihilistic orientation that has characterized most contemporary thought.

The biology of transient, unstable populations form the evolutionary stage used to describe events leading to the origin of new species, which is the theme of the present analysis. This problem is approached from different perspectives, ranging from population genetics, population ecology and developmental biology to the molecular level of evolution. Covering these main disciplines involved in the elucidation of evolutionary mechanisms, the present volume bridges the gap between molecularly orientated evolutionists and population biologists. Readers will find a high quality, well balanced set of theoretical and experimental articles authored by leading researchers in the field of evolutionary biology

AbstractEvolutionary biology is striking for its ability to explain a large and diverse range of empirical phenomena on the basis of a few general theoretical principles. This article offers a philosophical perspective on the way that evolutionary biology has come to achieve such impressive generality, by focusing on "the strategy of endogenization". This strategy involves devising evolutionary explanations for biological features that were originally part of the background conditions, or scaffolding, against which such explanations take place. Where successful, the strategy moves biology a step closer to the ideal of explaining as much as possible from evolutionary first principles. The strategy of endogenization is illustrated through a series of biological examples, historical and recent, and its philosophical implications are explored.

1. Defining traditional ecological knowledge -- 2. All things are connected : communities as both ecological and social entities in indigenous American thought -- 3. Predators not prey : "wolves of creation" rather than "lambs of God" -- 4. Metaphors and models : indigenous knowledge and evolutionary ecology -- 5. Cultural and biological creation and the concept of relatedness -- 6. Applying principles of TEK within the Western scientific tradition -- 7. Connected to the land : nature and spirit in Native American novels -- 8. Ecological indians : European imaginations and indigenous reality -- 9. A critical comment on both Western science and indigenous responses to the Western scientific tradition -- 10. Who speaks for the buffalo? : finding the indigenous in academia -- 11. Traditional ecological knowledge : the third alternative.