In this scientifically authoritative essay collection, Salzman, a seasoned and provocative environmentalist, demonstrates how evolutionary theory penetrates nearly all aspects of human society. She faults social justice movements for their short-sighted focus on human needs to the exclusion of nonhuman nature and stresses the potential of evolutionary thought for replacing religious and secular ideologies with an ecological paradigm for broad social change.
Salzman's special concern is the resurgence of irrationality, anti-intellectualism and anti-science attitudes.. She explodes the myth of genetic determinism promoted in popular media, discrediting the belief that natural selection involves violence. In place of the arbitrary "economism" of socialists and the free marketeers' faith in untrammeled economic growth, she envisions a human society modeled on interdependent self-regulating natural systems.