Robert G. B. Reid – författare

Highlights the influence of saltatory evolution and rapid climate change on human evolution, migration and behavioural change. Growing concern over the potential impacts of climate change on our future is clearly evident. In order to better understand our present circumstances and deal effectively with future climate change, society needs to become more informed about the historical connection between climate and humans. The authors' combined research in the fields of climate change, evolutionary biology, Earth sciences and human migration and behaviour complement each other, and have facilitated an innovative and integrated approach to the human evolution-climate connection. The Climate Connection provides an in-depth text linking 135,000 years of climate change with human evolution and implications for our future, for those working and interested in the field and those embarking on upper-level courses on this topic.

My favourite literary critique comes from the little girl in James Thurber's The Darlings at the Top oj the Stairs: 'This book tells me more about penguins than I wanted to know'. My daughter Clio, who learned the alphabet by typing words for the first draft of this book, has similar sentiments about the present work, and she suggests that my next effort 'should be quite short, maybe four pages'. However, this is an epistemological work, in a very general sense. It deals not only with the 'facts' of evolutionary biology and its interpretive logic, but also considers intellectual progress and prejudice, soul-searching and gullibility, and heuristic induction and wishful thinking; which may be more about penguins than students accustomed to cut-and-dried assertions, and teachers who cut and dry, might want to know. Some of my penguins, progenitors of significant epistemological lines, have been detailed down to the last feather, including a number of birds that by conventional wisdom, 'nobody takes seriously'. Some are sketches copied from other naturalists; others are phantoms that cry out for an incarnation denieci by a combination of accident and time constraints. Students in my courses in comparative physiology and the history and philosophy of biology have been the main sounding boards for my ideas. Richard Ring has always listened with polite interest when I have expatiated.