About this item
In this spirited and irreverent critique of Darwin's long hold over our imagination, a distinguished philosopher of science makes the case that, in culture as well as nature, not only the fittest survive: the world is full of the "good enough" that persist too.Why is the genome of a salamander forty times larger than that of a human? Why does the avocado tree produce a million flowers and only a hundred fruits? Why, in short, is there so much waste in nature? In this lively and wide-ranging meditation on the curious accidents and unexpected detours on the path of life, Daniel Milo argues that we ask these questions because we've embraced a faulty conception of how evolution -- and human society -- really works.Good Enough offers a vigorous critique of the quasi-monopoly that Darwin's concept of natural selection has on our idea of the natural world.
About the Author
I am a natural philosopher at the School for the Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris. I published seven non-fiction books, one novel, and one play, as well as thirty-five papers. I wrote and directed three plays and created three video-arts. All my works turn around one theme: Excess. What is excess? When you can do with less. We could do with so much less! There is too much of everything, from surgical specialties and breeds of dog to varieties of breakfast cereal and synonyms for "wonderful. " During the first phase of my work I studied excess in Man. The culprit is the future: the faculty to imagine alternative scenarios to the here & now and the means to realize some and to regret others. Then I focused on excess in Nature, a phenomena that natural selection is supposed to eliminate but doesn't. Nonhuman life if full of nonsense, inefficiency, uselessness, noise, redundancy. My last book, Good Enough: The Tolerance for Mediocrity in Nature and Society, proposes a synthesis of these two phases and a new theory of the sustainability of excess--and its beauty too.
