Mysterious Ways: Contingency, Emergence, and Selection in Nature

General scientific laws guide and constrain how landscapes evolve, but because local geographical and historical contingencies are so important, there are infinite possible evolutionary pathways and outcomes. Nevertheless, certain patterns, structures, and relationships recur repeatedly that tend to maximize efficiency. But no laws determine that this should happen, and landscapes have no goals or intentionality. How does nature keep producing relationships, structures, and patterns that maximize efficiency? Those are the "mysterious ways " this book explains.

Drawing from a broad range of geoscience, bioscience, and other sciences, Mysterious Ways speaks to the stories we tell about how our world came to be, how it changes, and our place in it. The book makes a case for evolution and selection as general phenomena in nature. It shows how evolution and selection operate at the level of landscapes, and how landforms, soils, hydrology, and biota coevolve as they mutually adapt to climate and other environmental changes. It looks at phenomena like the transformation of tropical forests to savannas, karsts to deserts, and riverbed formation as outcomes of tendencies for more efficient, stable, and durable patterns, structures, and relationships to form, grow, replicate, and persist.

Jonathan D. Phillips, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Earth Surface Systems at the University of Kentucky. He taught there for 20 years and previously held faculty positions at Texas A&M, East Carolina, and Arizona State Universities. He has published more than 250 journal articles, books, and book chapters in several areas of the earth, environmental, and ecological sciences, and is the recipient of distinguished career awards from the British Society for Geomorphology and the Geomorphology Specialty Group of the American Association Geographers.