from the editor

EDMUND RUSSELL opens this issue with a powerful challenge—scholars need to pay more attention to evolution as a historical force. His argument is brilliant and wide-ranging. I am particularly impressed by Russell s case for the study of domestication. If we aim as a field to offer insight into the entirety of human interactions with the non-human world, we need more studies of the everyday role of plants and animals in history. Since the domestication of dogs and the beginning of agriculture, humans have shaped the evolution of many forms of life. The deliberate manipulation of plant and animal genetics has accelerated tremendously in the last hundred years, and humanity now depends more than ever on biotechnology, broadly defined. Yet we cannot understand the history of domestication by looking only at political, economic, cultural, and social forces. We also need to understand the complexities of evolutionary change. To underscore the importance of Russell s argument, the cover image in this issue comes from a chapter on domestic pigeons in Charles Darwin's The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, first published in 1868. Darwin bred and studied pigeons. Though all the domestic breeds had descended from one source, he wrote, the amount of variation in pigeons was "extraordinarily great," and the differences among breeds therefore revealed much about "the progress of change in domestic animals." . . .