The Fourth Revolt

The Fourth Revolt

Author	Dennis J McCarthy
Language	English
Subject	Biogeography, Earth expansion
Published	1999

The Fourth Revolt is a 1999 book by Dennis J McCarthy.

Overview

The book argues that biogeography — the study of the distribution of living things across the Earth and through time — is more than the meeting-point of evolution, plate tectonics, oceanography, and climatology, and should be recognized as a unifying principle of biology in its own right. In roughly two hundred pages of accessible prose, McCarthy surveys the patterns of species distribution and their causes, and (in keeping with his other work) connects them to questions about the changing size and configuration of the Earth. The title casts this reframing of biogeography as a "fourth revolt" in the history of ideas about life and the planet.

About the author

Dennis J. McCarthy is an American independent scholar and author who writes on biogeography and Earth history; he later published the trade book Here Be Dragons: How the Study of Animal and Plant Distribution Revolutionized Our Views of Life and Earth (Oxford, 2009).

Publication details

• Author: Dennis J McCarthy
• Published: 1999

Links to Purchase Book

• The Fourth Revolt