A Japanese View of Nature

by Pamela J. Asquith (Editor), Joy Hendry (Foreword), Pamela J. Asquith (Editor)

Although Seibutsu no Sekai (The World of Living Things) , the seminal 1941 work of Kinji Imanishi, had an enormous impact in Japan, both on scholars and on the general public, very little is known about it in the English-speaking world. This book makes the complete text available in English for the first time and provides an extensive introduction and notes to set the work in context. Imanishi's work, based on a very wide knowledge of science and the natural world, puts forward a distinctive view of nature and how it should be studied. Imanishi's work is particularly important as a background to ecology, primatology and human social evolution theory in Japan. Imanishi's views on these subjects are extremely interesting because he formulated an approach to viewing nature which challenged the usual international ideas of the time, and which foreshadow approaches that have currency today.

Genres: Philosophy, Japan, Environment

160 pages, Paperback

First published November 8, 2002

Reviews

[João · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found this amazing translated edition at an auction and got it for 2 eur! The book reads today less as an eccentric counter-Darwinian tract than as a visionary anticipation of several currents in modern biology. Specially where biology’s frontier is “collective and relational”: group selection, species societies, niche construction, gene-culture co-evolution, even systemic echoes of evo-devo. So rather than being “anti-Darwin”, he looks like a bridge figure: extending Darwinism into ecology, behavior, and culture well before the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis gave those ideas formal grounding.

[Kitty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truly no idea why I read this I don't understand biology.

[Michael Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most expensive paperback you are ever likely to buy, but worth every penny. Imanishi challenged Darwin's view of evolution - looking at evolution from a collectivist perspective in which he asserts that evolution works at the level of a society as opposed to an individual organism. It's an important and profound book.