Writer: Michael P. Cohen, author of The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (1984), The History of the Sierra Club 1892-1970 (1988), A Garden of Bristlecones: Tales of Change in the Great Basin (1998), and Granite and Grace: Seeking the Heart of Yosemite (University of Nevada Press, 2019).
Book: George C. Williams and Evolutionary Literacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
In this book, a case study of a humanistic reading of an essential evolutionary theorist, George C. Williams (May 12, 1926–September 8, 2010), the author contends that certain classic works of evolutionary theory and history are the most important nature writing of recent times. What it means to be scientifically literate is essential for humanistic scholars, who must ground themselves with literary reading of scientific texts. As the most influential American evolutionary theorist of the second half of the twentieth century, Williams masters critique, frames questions about adaptation and natural selection, and answers them in a plain, aphoristic writing style. Williams aims for parsimony—to “recognize adaptation at the level necessitated by the facts and no higher.” His minimalist voice articulates a powerful process that operates at very low levels by blind and selfish chance at the expense of its designed products, using purely trial and error. Michael P. Cohen’s book shows how Williams’s writings offer a model for any practice of evolutionary literacy, provides an intellectual history of the highly influential twentieth-century American evolutionary theorist, and explores cultural understandings of nature and environmental issues.