E-Books →The Convergent Evolution of Agriculture in Humans and Insects (The MIT Press)

English | 2022 | ISBN: 0262543206 | 339 pages | True PDF EPUB | 78.09 MB
Contributors explore common elements in the evolutionary histories of both human and insect agriculture resulting from convergent evolution.
During the past 12,000 years, agriculture originated in humans as many as twenty-three times, and during the past 65 million years, agriculture also originated in nonhuman animals at least twenty times and in insects at least fifteen times. It is much more likely that these independent origins represent similar solutions to the challenge of growing food than that they are due purely to chance. This volume seeks to identify common elements in the evolutionary histories of both human and insect agriculture that are the results of convergent evolution. The goal is to create a new, synthetic field that characterizes, quantifies, and empirically documents the evolutionary and ecological mechanisms that drive both human and nonhuman agriculture.