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This article examines the presentation of humans as a subject of ecological and behavioral study in academic biology textbooks and essay collections. It aims to expand a channel of inquiry into the ways in which human relationships with other species are articulated in scientific discourse during an era of anthropogenic climate change (the Anthropocene). Both humans and nonhumans are subjects of behavioral ecology because they undergo evolutionary adaptation. However, the notion that biologists can use evolutionary adaptation to explain human behavior has been much disputed. The article uses literary analysis to argue that a range of behavioral ecology publications, which all use evolutionary adaptation to explain biological processes, employ a variety of textual strategies to situate the human in relation to other species. Rather than arguing that any single approach is particularly appropriate, the focus is on variety as a sign of the complexity of contemporary human and nonhuman identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1678 a committee of Fellows of the Royal Society was appointed to oversee the production of an ‘English Atlas’ in co-operation with the printer Moses Pitt. The new atlas was to be large and grand, published in eleven volumes with hundreds of maps. It was, as the official proposal put it, no less than ‘a new and Accurat description of the World’. However, it was never brought to completion. This article examines unpublished mathematical papers which document John Pell’s attempts to devise a projectional model in accordance with the published proposals for the atlas. Proposals and advertisements for potential collaborators, composed and circulated by the committee, put forward a representation of idealised cartographic practice. However, when it came to calculating the projection, Pell struggled to accommodate these idealised practices. Pell’s mathematical papers, previously unexamined, afford an unusual perspective on the Royal Society’s methods, and suggest that failures, as well as successes, influenced the developing identity of the scientific community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]