Beginning in the North American Boreal Forest that stretches through Canada, and roving across the continent from the Northern Sierra to Alabama's Paint Rock Forest to a ranch in Mexico, Hiss sets out on a journey to take stock of the "superorganism" that is the earth: its land, its elements, its occupants, its greatest threats, and what we can do to keep it, and ourselves, alive. He invites us to understand not only the scope and gravity of the problems...

"Around the turn of the nineteenth century, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck first established epigenetics to explain the inheritance of acquired characteristics; however, his theory was supplanted decades later by Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection through heritable genetic mutations. But natural selection could not adequately explain how rapidly species re-diversified and repopulated after mass extinctions. Now advances in the study of DNA and...