David Steen and co-authors in this journal offer a philosophical argument to support an “Evolutionary Community Concept” to identify what they call “evolutionary communities.” They describe these as “unique collections of species that interact and have co-evolved in a given geographic area” and that include “co-evolved dependencies between different parts of a community.” Steen et al. refer to the coevolution of assemblages, collections, communities, dependencies, interspecific and abiotic interactions, and traits, but they do not define “co-evolution” or provide an example (...) in which co-evolution has been demonstrated. There may be as many ways to explain interactions among species as these interactions themselves; they may result, for example, from ecological fitting and phenotypic plasticity. In this paper, I argue that standard Darwinian Theory explains intraspecific microevolution or descent with modification within an interbreeding and potentially continuous population. The power, mechanism, or force that causes interspecific co-evolution, especially at the community scale, requires further explanation. (shrink)

While nature is often claimed to be a space of harmonized balance or an antidote to the chaos of the modern world, we need a more grounded assessment of nature as endlessly changing and much less predictable than we like to assume. In this essay, I explore Karen Traviss’ provocative exploration of unbalanced nature and unbounded bodies in her wess’har series with the guidance of two ecocritics who reject the concept of balanced nature, Dana Phillips and Ursula Heise. Additionally, I (...) turn to the environmental philosopher Val Plumwood for insights regarding Traviss’ spurious yet rather standard vision of an unlimited technological panacea. Traviss’ series portrays how the boundaries and limits that we perceive as solid are often much less so than we believe, yet she also reveals—inadvertently, it seems—how easily we blindly ignore other, more solid limits. (shrink)