Charles King, “The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus” (Oxford UP, 2008)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Mar 5, 2010 · 1h 9m

There’s a concept I find myself coming back to again and again–“speciation.” It’s drawn from the vocabulary of evolutionary biology and means, roughly, the process by which new species arise. Speciation occurs when a species must adapt to new circumstances; the more new circumstances, the more new species. Thus one kind of Finch (to take a relevant example) becomes many kinds of Finches when those Finches are compelled to adapt to the circumstances presented by, say, a set of different Islands. To each Island its own Finch. The same process occurs in human history though we don’t really have…