Evolutionary emergence has (in Girardian understanding) programmed into its late-arriving human agents and actors a capacity to generate types and levels of violence that risk bringing Homo sapiens, together with their environing cosmic habitat, to self-destruction. How so? With what perils, what defenses? What are the chances of avoiding some looming and terminal apocalypse? Can we, in short, "survive" our origins?

Pierpaolo Antonello is Reader in modern Italian literature and culture at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of St John's College. With René Girard and João Cezar de Castro Rocha he coauthored Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture, and he is a member of the Research and Publications committees of Imitatio.
Paul Gifford is Buchanan Professor of French emeritus at the University of St Andrews, where he also was Departmental Chair for seven years and directed the Institute of European Cultural Identity Studies for ten years. He is a member of the French National Center for Scientific Research and former Visiting Scholar at Stanford University.