Mysterious Ways - Contingency, Emergence, and Selection in Nature

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. Describing how evolution and selection operate at the level of landscapes, this book also shows how landforms, soils, hydrology, and biota coevolve as they mutually adapt to climate and other environmental changes,

List of contents

• Preface


• Chapter 1: Mysterious Ways


• Chapter 2: Supra-organic Landscapes


• Chapter 3: It Depends on the Scale...


• Chapter 4: Landscape Memory


• Chapter 5: The Goals of Landscape Evolution


• Chapter 6: Selection and Landscape Evolution


• Chapter 7: Store and Pour and Adapt


• Chapter 8: Why Everything is Connected to Everything Else


• Chapter 9: Perfection


• Chapter 10: Climate Change and Mysterious Ways


• Epilogue

About the author

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.

Product details

• Authors: Jonathan Phillips, Jonathan D Phillips, Jonathan D. (Professor Emeritus of Earth Phillips, Phillips Jonathan D.
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 20.05.2025
• EAN: 9780197755099
• ISBN: 978-0-19-775509-9
• No. of pages: 416
• Subjects: Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Geosciences > Geology; SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Ecology, SCIENCE / Earth Sciences / Geology, Applied ecology, Physical geography & topography, Historical Geology, Historical geology and palaeogeology, Physical geography and topography