In an essay for the Princeton University Press Ideas Blog, Janina Wellmann discusses themes from her recent book Biological Motion: A History of Life. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full essay. An excerpt appears below:

“It has taken a long time for humans to recognize that they are animals. Contemporary scientific advances in the life sciences have added to that promising insight by painting a picture of humans, not as autonomous subjects, but rather, inextricably entwined with their environments, starting, for instance, with huge numbers of bacteria, microbes or viruses populating their guts and skins.”