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This book follows the development of evolutionary science over the past two hundred years. It highlights the fact that life endures even though all organisms and species are transitory or ephemeral. It goes on to explain that the extinction and evolution of species—interconnected in the web of life as “eternal ephemera”—are key concerns of evolutionary biology. The book begins in France with the naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who in 1801 first framed the overarching question about the emergence of new species. It moves on to the Italian geologist Giambattista Brocchi who brought in ideas from geology and paleontology to expand the question. It details how, in 1825, at the University of Edinburgh, Robert Grant and Robert Jameson introduced the astounding ideas formulated by Lamarck and Brocchi to a young medical student named Charles Darwin and follows Darwin as he sets out on his voyage on the Beagle in 1831. The book revisits Darwin's early insights into evolution in South America and his later synthesis of his knowledge into the theory of the origin of species. It then considers the ideas of more recent evolutionary thinkers, such as George Gaylord Simpson, Ernst Mayr and Theodosius Dobzhansky, as well as Niles Eldredge and Steven Jay Gould, who developed the concept of punctuated equilibria. The book provides many insights into evolutionary biology, and celebrates the organic, vital relationship between scientific thinking and its subjects.

This book pursues the investigation Fontenay began in her magnum opus, The Silence of the Beasts: Philosophy Confronts Animality with a series of essays of somewhat more topical reach. Fontenay’s perspective is resolutely informed by Continental Philosophy, which brings her to articulate a very strong critique of the pragmatist frame through which animal rights are often defended. Fontenay seeks to maintain the anthropological difference between man and animal that Singer and Cavalieri openly and brazenly, upon Fontenay’s account, ignore. While seeking to articulate the need for animal rights, Fontenay does not for as much encourage an abandon of what she calls the “human exception,” a defense of which she mounts in her chapter on “The Improper.” If the human exception must be maintained, Fontenay is attentive to the ways in which the account of the fragility common to animals and humans should lead to new ways of thinking about ethics and politics. Singer and Cavalieri are taken to task for ignoring the importance of this human exception (and, as a result, minimizing the crimes against humanity committed during the Shoah) and argues that animal rights should further develop their already extant legal status “between possessions and persons.” For Fontenay, it is not enough simply to investigate how philosophers, politicians or artists consider animals or the question of their rights nor is not enough for these different discourses simply to make mention of the “animal cause” to qualify them as allies in the struggle for animal rights.