Synergistic Selection: How Cooperation Has Shaped Evolution And The Rise Of Humankind (Paperback)

"Nothing about the evolution of biological complexity makes sense except in the light of synergy." Peter Corning's new book is being hailed as a major contribution to what is perhaps the greatest shift in our understanding of evolution since The Origin of Species. It's a tour de force that takes us on a synergy-guided tour of the history of life. As Corning puts it, "life on Earth has been a synergistic phenomenon from the get go." Corning also shows how synergy has been a key to human evolution, including the rise of complex modern societies. "Cooperation may have been the vehicle, but synergy was the driver." As we now face a tipping point and another major transition in evolution, Corning offers us a synergy-based road-map to the future. "One of the great take-home lessons from the epic of evolution is that cooperation produces synergy, and synergy is the way forward. The arc of evolution bends toward synergy."

Readership: Undergraduate, graduate students and the general public interested in general science, general life sciences, evolutionary biology, human biology/anthropology/primatology, and public policy.

Peter A Corning is the Director of the Institute for the Study of Complex Systems (ISCS) in Seattle, Washington. He graduated from Brown University and served as a naval aviator and a science reporter for Newsweek magazine before completing a combined social science-life science doctorate at New York University, as well as post-doctoral training in genetics under an NIMH fellowship in the Institute for Behavioral Genetics at the University of Colorado. Following this, he taught for a decade in Stanford University's Human Biology Program, along with holding research appointments in the Behavior Genetics Laboratory and the Engineering Economic Systems Department. Dr Corning was subsequently a senior fellow at the Collegium Budapest (Institute for Advanced Study) in Hungary before becoming the director of the ISCS. His professional affiliations include the Evolution Institute, where he is a member of the scientific advisory board, the International Society for the Systems Sciences, where he is a past-president, and the International Society for Bioeconomics, where he has served as treasurer. In addition, he has been an active member of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, the American Society for Cybernetics, the International Society for Endocytobiology, and the International Society for Human Ethology. He is also the author of five books and more than 150 scientific papers and book chapters.