Russell, Edmund (Author)
American Historical Review
Volume: 119, no. 5
Issue: 5
Pages: 1514-1528
Edition Details: Part of a series: History Meets Biology
Language: English
COEVOLUTION HAS BEEN ONE OF THE most important processes in history. Yet despite its ability to lead to new interpretations of well-studied events, it has also been one of the least appreciated. Its low profile is due partly to the disciplinary divide between human history and natural science, partly to historians' reliance on sources that did not recognize it, and partly to the ease with which one can take its products for granted.1 But look at some of its effects. By ushering in the Agricultural Revolution, it was responsible for the transition from prehistory to history (traditionally defined). It was the primary means of increasing physical power for almost all of history. It helped spark, and sustained, the Industrial Revolution. It helped human numbers to soar from 954 million to 7.1 billion in the past two hundred years. It was responsible for the food people ate, the way they made their living, the diseases they suffered, and the technology they developed. Not a trivial list of accomplishments.2 Coevolution is the process in which populations of different species evolve repeatedly in response to each other. The key ideas are reciprocity and continual change. Population A leads population B to evolve, the new version of population B leads population A to evolve, the new version of population A leads population B to evolve again, and so on through time. The idea of coevolution was first developed to explain why flowers seemed perfectly designed for the specific species of insects that pollinated them. Most likely, the traits of populations of plants and the traits of populations of their insect pollinators changed repeatedly in response to each other. Other examples of coevolution include fleet predators and prey (when one became faster, the other had to become faster, too, to survive) and the development of leguminous plants with nitrogen-fixing bacteria that inhabit their roots.3 Historians would have nothing to study without coevolution, because human beings probably would not exist. We might think of our bodies as entirely human, but it would be more accurate to think of them as porous ecosystems swarming with bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and viruses. Symbionts in our guts, hair, skin, and mouths help us survive by digesting food and protecting us from disease. They make up 90 percent of the cells in our bodies. Human cells are larger than bacterial and fungal cells, so our bodies are more human than not when it comes to volume, but our bodies are more bacterial than human when it comes to numbers. We have a lot to learn about human microbiota, the extent of which has only recently been documented, but evidence suggests that coevolution has adapted us to our microbiota and vice versa.4 (For more on this topic, see Julia Adeney Thomas's essay in this roundtable.)
...MoreArticle Roundtable, American Historical Review (2014) Introduction: History Meets Biology. American Historical Review (pp. 1492-1499).
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