Evolutionary biology has long sought to explain how new traits and new species arise. Darwin maintained that competition is key to understanding this biodiversity and held that selection acting to minimize competition causes competitors to become increasingly different, thereby promoting new traits and new species. Despite Darwin’s emphasis, competition’s role in diversification remains controversial and largely underappreciated. In their synthetic and provocative book, evolutionary ecologists David and Karin Pfennig explore competition's role in generating and maintaining biodiversity. The authors discuss how selection can lessen resource competition or costly reproductive interactions by promoting trait evolution through a process known as character displacement. They further describe character displacement’s underlying genetic and developmental mechanisms. The authors then consider character displacement’s myriad downstream effects, ranging from shaping ecological communities to promoting new traits and new species and even fueling large-scale evolutionary trends. Drawing on numerous studies from natural populations, and written for a broad audience, Evolution’s Wedge seeks to inspire future research into character displacement’s many implications for ecology and evolution.

Despite Darwin's emphasis, competition's role in diversification remains controversial and largely underappreciated.

In this explosive investigation into the limits of endurance, journalist and New York Times bestselling author Scott Carney discovers how humans can wedge control over automatic physiological responses into the breaking point between stress and biology. We can reclaim our evolutionary destiny.

"First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 2007."

Structural geology has developed at a very rapid pace in recent years. Evolution of Geological Structures in Micro- to Macro-Scales, covering a wide spectrum of current research in structural geology from the grain scale to the scale of orogenic belts and from the brittle to the ductile field, provides an overview of newly emerging concepts in a single volume. The book covers a wide range of advances in such broad fields as hydraulic factures, normal faults, overthrusts, ductile shear zones, rock fabrics, folds, superposed folds and basement structures.

Everything you were taught about evolution is wrong.

The subduction zone volatile cycle is key to understanding the petrogenesis, transport, storage and eruption of arc magmas. Volatiles control the flux of slab components into the mantle wedge, are responsible for melt generation through lowering the solidi of mantle materials and influence the crystallizing phase assemblages in the overriding crust. Further, the rates and extents of degassing during magma storage and decompression affect magma rheology, ultimately control eruption style and have consequences for the environmental impact of explosive arc volcanism. This book highlights recent progress in constraining the role of volatiles in magmatic processes. Individual book sections are devoted to tracing volatiles from the subducting slab to the overriding crust, their role in subvolcanic processes and eruption triggering, as well as magmatic-hydrothermal systems and volcanic degassing. For the first time, all aspects of the overarching theme of volatile cycling are covered in detail within a single volume.