Process Metaphysics and Mutative Life: Sketches of Lived Time is the first title in the new series Palgrave Perspectives on Process Thought, which promises publications that take an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to philosophy. Khandker's book proposes new methods for studying complex interactions of living processes by combining process philosophy with concepts from biology and problems in science. Drawing mostly on Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson, but also on other key process thinkers like Charles Hartshorne and William James, she explains issues ranging from formalism, evolution, and symbiogenesis to the theory of special relativity, black holes, and cybernetics. Khandker demonstrates how process metaphysics can be used to resolve issues in a number of case studies by pointing to concepts that have the capacity to explain and resolve theoretical gridlocks. Perhaps most importantly, the book outlines a method that brings the problems of panpsychism and ecology together. Panpsychist elements enrich the philosophy of biology insofar as they provide an outlook on ecology that is not based “on some separate specialism that we term ‘ethics,’” but on the vitalism of life functions (6–7). Khandker argues that rethinking the relations between forms of life is crucial in a time of environmental crisis. The book's focus on ecological interpretations of process metaphysics and “lived times” underpins the chapters where in each we can find its application to a set of specific scientific issues.In “Transmutation,” Khandker argues that Whitehead's method of looking at nature as interlocking processes on multiple scales can help to clarify issues in shifts in species status of fluctuating and mobile populations (28). When can we classify them as “successful,” invasive, or despotic? How can we monitor them? Biology already looks at nature on many scales: the macrolevel, such as geological changes that in turn shape environment, and on the microlevel, such as genetics. In these categories, however, we can see that the scientific distinctions between different factors, like natural and artificial selection, can amount to contingent frames of reference for what can be considered a “successful” species (42). For example, there is a habitual omission of the history of human activity (such as colonialism) that has altered ecosystems, resulting in the classification of species as invasive (49). Moreover, monitoring living populations is difficult due to the complexity of conditions upon which they rely. Khandker proposes that by using the concept of scales, we can draw on the microlevel of quantum physics to explain behaviors of a population on a macrolevel. By moving scales to broader generalizations, we can account for collections of patterns of regular behavior that on the individual level are unpredictable and seem random. We can take the trade-off “in accuracy of measurement when we move from the level of an individual member of a specific population to the broader regularity of the movements of the total population” (47). The ontological emphasis on interrelation between many scales of natural becoming that process thought entails serves as a theoretical link between microlevels and macrolevels that biology could put in use when studying the complexity of conditions that shape the behavior of species. The chapter opens the core argument of the book: ecology can draw on process metaphysics by taking creative activity at the subatomic level as a point of departure to understand broader patterns of lived time. Process provides an ontological foundation for an ecological method of studying biological problems such that the human is simply another species in an ecosystem.This argument is expanded in the chapter “Symbiosis,” in which Khandker continues to provide a broad range of biological facts, this time from studies of the phenomenon of symbiogenesis and of serial endosymbiotic theory (SET), where evolutionary processes not only progress as “the gradual change of genetic mutation” (60) but also as “replication and reproduction involving the incorporation of parts and characteristics of new organic wholes” (60). Such cases show that organic lifeforms experiencing one another can construct a new biological reality. Complex evolutionary transitions, like the ones SET exposes, provide evidence for panexperientialism or, at a minimum, for autopoiesis, where life increases complexity not only gradually, as Darwin said, but also in creative leaps driven by experience. Whitehead's method of looking at natural phenomena with the concept of prehension, where experience partially constructs reality, together with the unorthodoxy of SET, composes a strong argument against the scientific reductionism of taking life-forms as distinct beings. Khandker again argues for the Whiteheadian approach to science in which the biological and the physical are reconciled because reality is constructed of interlocking processes on multiple levels that amount to the organization of life in ecosystems. Ecosystems as organic wholes are composed of geological, atmospheric, and life processes regulating and prehending one another. Process thought as an ecological method can help us rethink the imbalances of nature that we face in times of environmental degradation.The next chapter, “Metamorphosis,” begins an inquiry into how drawing and diagram-making as a method of process studies, and how such pedagogical and representational practice can help us to think of living organisms differently. Khandker starts with a historical investigation into how Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's drawings contributed to biology and a discussion around the claim “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” His documentation of the process of plant development shows different stages of contraction and expansion between stem and flower (90) and can be viewed as a contribution to formalism, but it also reveals a pattern of spiral tendency, which Khandker argues is not reducible to essence or fixed stages. Khandker interprets these drawings in light of Bergson to show the “limitations of the formalist method of thinking” (90). She challenges Goethe by placing the primacy of process above the unity of forms that is often present in German Idealism. Drawing as a form of expression fixes a moment of time. In turn, static images tend to refocus our thought on forms rather than on the “process of development” (96). Instead of taking these forms as a basis for an interpretation of telos or origin, we should treat them as demonstrations of how things escape being static.The chapter “Reminiscence” continues to argue for diagrams as a process method for science, for a study of time, and analogically for the study of the perceiving subject. Bergson's take on diagrams can help to “visualise the structure and behaviour of otherwise ‘imperceptible’ objects such as black holes . . . [and] provides us with a useful perspective on the purpose and limitations of diagrams and drawing as a way of thinking through process-philosophical problems” (112). To take Khandker's analogy, drawing a diagram of how a black hole bends the curvature of space-time, we can also illustrate how a perceiving subject distorts reality while interpretating it. Khandker stretches this analogy to explore limitations of methods in studying time and other processes. She argues for a creative understanding of subjectivity in which the subject creates rather than constitutes (112). Referring to Bergson's response to Einstein, she claims that Bergson's model of consciousness, in which it is formed in a circular process from perception to memory formation, proves that only lived time is real. The relation between “physical, psychological, and metaphysical duration (the third denied by Einstein . . . and the means of measurement . . . becomes indistinguishable from time itself)” (126). Using multidimensional diagrams (similar to Bergson's diagram of perception) as a method for studying black holes can serve as a pedagogical tool for the consideration of the relationship between virtual and actual, which is a reality that is not accessible to ordinary perception (139). However, Khandker warns against the dogmatic overinterpretation of spatial organization of ideas. A perceiving and interpretating subject will always cause a distortion in an image of reality.“Plasticity” encompasses the previously outlined arguments to link them with panpsychist approaches to ecology. Building on Bergson's approach to the relationship between memory and matter, Khandker deals with nonhuman or more-than-human forms of memory to think ecologically about mind. For this investigation, she adds Hartshorne's discussion of panpsychism and Bateson's ideas on cybernetics. First, she explains that there is nothing insane about the idea of panpsychism, that it is not about believing that “the chair is a sentient individual” (148). It is to argue after Hartshorne that the difference between sentient and nonsentient beings concerns complexity and aggregation. The vibration of a chair is on the microlevel. The microconstituents feel one another and feel the environment. Following Bergson, she emphasizes that the deadening of matter is simply a habit of mind. This approach to panpsychism resonates with cybernetic theories insofar as Bateson “reiterates Harsthorne's concerns about the problematic scientific resistance to finding the ‘minimum of mind.’ . . . Mind should be understood as pattern rather than as a thing or substance” (153). Bateson views the patterns in nature as indicative of intuition or direction or mind in nature in which change, e.g., evolution, is about accurate selection of right choices (disregarding the wrong ones). Khandker describes panpsychist ecology as affirmation of creative patterns or patterns of self-regulation such that we can see information flows within the circuits of a cybernetic system or in communities of prehensions that compose an organism on many levels. To quote Khandker, panpsychist ecology is about “acknowledgement of activity across all orders of life and non-living systems” (166).The final chapter, “Extinction,” explains how the nonanthropomorphic forms of mind in nature and the human mind are connected in a nonhierarchical structure. Adding William James and Gustav Fechner to her analysis, she discusses alternative positions to complex interdependencies of ecosystems, such as pluralist panpsychism, world-soul, and monism. The main idea here is that panpsychism helps us to think about relations between matter, species, and organic regulation on a psychological level. Extinction is a trauma to an ecosystem—the dying out of species causes an experience of loss that reverberates on all scales of nature. This approach to ecology is a call to analyze and rethink our relationship to absent lives for how they still impact ecosystems and our actions (177).Process Metaphysics and Mutative Life: Sketches of Lived Time impresses with its application of process thought across disciplines. The book also does a great job in providing a narrative that ties together a complexity of issues and theories. Khandker's focus on scientific research and its metaphysical interpretation builds strong foundations for anyone interested in further exploration of process thought as a method for science and is a must read for ecologists who wish to employ process thought in practice. The book should also appeal to those who are curious about theoretical links among process thinkers, due to comparisons of Goethe with Bergson and a description of Hartshorne's influences on Bateson. Khandker's ecological reading of panpsychism and science does a great job in presenting process metaphysics as a lucid theoretical alternative that deserves to be taken as a serious explanatory framework for the current environmental emergency. The book aims to present ecology in a manner that includes humans in a nonhierarchical way. The inclusion of nonanthropocentric forms of memory, mind, or sentience in the ecological environment should inform ecological action. However, the question that remains is if the recognition of nature as intentional or of our interconnectivity on physical, psychological, and metaphysical levels is enough for ecological action to be taken. In this context, the destruction of nature can be read as suicidal, but we still might need to refer to some form of ethics to be able to say that suicide is wrong. Protection of life in any form is an implicit ethical statement. It is difficult to be concerned with issues like the destruction of ecosystems without some sort of ethics because we need to refer to such destruction as wrong. History and current political events show that people can passively watch entire cultures and populations being slaughtered even if they recognize them as sentient. I agree that process thought is necessarily an ecological thought because ecology by its definition explores the vital interconnections of living beings and their environments. It does have pedagogical capacities to explain how the dissection of ecosystems requires action, but we still might need ethics to determine which action should be taken. Khandker argues for philosophy of biology that is not based on ethics, and it would be interesting to see more discussion of this topic in the book.Another question that the book poses is if organic process theories should be taken as distinct from cybernetics. Khandker argues that Bateson's unwillingness to align himself with Whitehead might have been unjustified (158). However, I believe that, although there are a multitude of similarities in how the philosophy of organism and the cybernetics view consider the functioning of a system of nature as such, there are some core ontological differences that perhaps cannot be conciliated. The cybernetic understandings of nature are mechanistic. Regulation happens through a circular return with difference that corrects the system toward a state of equilibrium. In this approach, nature's regulation is based on a recursive process that leaves no space for creativity understood in any way other than in mechanistic terms. By contrast, Whitehead bases his entire metaphysical system on the creativity we can observe in, for example, SET leaps. For Whitehead, creativity involves more than operative functions. Outbursts of natural creativity would be more difficult to recreate in a cybernetic system where correction according to received information has a predetermined telos of continuous determinism. Khandker refers to stochastic understandings of the processes of becoming that allow for randomness, but in my interpretation, this is still too limited to encompass Whiteheadian creativity. There is an agreement between the two thinkers that mind emerges as an effect of relations; however, Bateson explains creativity in a mechanistic way as “the endless trial and error of mental progress” (quoted by Khandker 160), which in my view cannot be taken as the same as Whitehead's creativity. However, the topic of cybernetics and philosophy of organism could amount to a whole other book (or a series of them). Khandker initiates a discussion that perhaps requires more research and exploration in the field of process thought.