| Title | : | A New History of Life: The Radical New Discoveries about the Origins and Evolution of Life on Earth |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 160819907X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781608199075 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 391 |
| Publication | : | First published March 10, 2015 |
Writing with zest, humor, and clarity, Ward and Kirschvink show that many of our long-held beliefs about the history of life are wrong. Three central themes emerge from the narrative. First, the development of life was not a stately, gradual process: Catastrophe, argue Ward and Kirschvink, shaped life's history more than all other forces combined—from notorious events like the sudden extinction of dinosaurs to recently discovered ones like "Snowball Earth" and the "Great Oxygenation Event." One startling possibility: that life arrived on Earth from Mars. Second, life consists of carbon, but three other molecules have determined how it evolved: oxygen, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen sulfide are carbon's silent partners. Third, ever since Darwin we have thought of evolution in terms of species. Yet it is the evolution of ecosystems—from deep-ocean vents to rainforests—that has formed the living world as we know it.
Drawing on their years of experience in paleontology, biology, chemistry, and astrobiology, Ward and Kirschvink tell a story of life on Earth that is at once too fabulous to imagine and too familiar to dismiss. And in a provocative coda, they assemble discoveries from the latest cutting-edge research to imagine how the history of life might unfold deep into the future.
A New History of Life: The Radical New Discoveries about the Origins and Evolution of Life on Earth Reviews
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This is yet another book whose authors have joined the quest to understand our origins and what might happen to our species as green house gases rise. Ward and Kirschvink attempt to include the most up to date information of extinction available. Just as epigenetics is currently challenging our understanding of evolution, so too are relatively recent findings in fields related to extinction patterns. The role of Cuvier's catastrophism has seen a resurgence since the discovery of the meteoroid's impact on Earth's organisms. Further findings on how body morphology and function change in response to co2 and o2 are further supporting catastrophism. These authors challenge the notion that there were five extinctions and posit there were actually ten that deserve much greater attention and study, if we are to fully understand how greenhouse gases will affect our future.
In addition to the rise in mapping when and how extinctions happen (including the newest book by Lisa Randall on Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs) researchers are also increasingly interested in mapping out the networks of ecosystems- how might the extinction of species affect the survival of other species. For example, how does fire affect ecosystems? How do oxygen and carbon gas levels shape the bodies of organisms like clams? How does their shape affect burrowing behavior, and how does that burrowing behavior affect Earth's surface? How does Earth's surface then affect the development of future species? One of the best lecture series that also addresses the network/complexity/emergence of ecosystems is The Modern Scholar: Ecological Planet: An Introduction to Earth's Major Ecosystems by John Kricher.
I am a great lover of detailed books on cell respiration or photosynthesis (ie., Nick Lane's entire collection of books and Paul Falkowski's Life's Engines). This book included quite a bit of the nitty gritty science that I find so exciting and satisfying when trying to really understand what is going on around us, at the tiniest levels that translate to macro organisms and their elaborate ecosystems.
The writing was at times too much like an article. I love authors who hold your hand and assume you have no idea what point they are trying to make. Even when it is very clear to me what their argument is, I really like to be guided along so that I am free to just enjoy what is being discussed instead of trying to understand what point they are making. It's difficult to achieve this type of writing, certainly they do a better job than Nick Lane who seems to alienate much of his potential audience. Yet, they could have done a better job of handholding. On the flip side they painted some wonderful images with their words. I won't soon forget the image that is burned in my mind of the dinosaur who possessed fingers, a working thumb, feathers, and was running fast over the earth. Nor will I soon forget the image of clams burrowing the bottom of the sea floor changing the crusts very structure and function. I loved the imagery evoked when discussing the sea floor, plate tectonics, coccolithophores, and subduction zones (This was a focus in at least 3 separate chapters and was magnificent each time. Even if I was starting to get a bit bored, when they included talk of chalk, my interest was piqued!). I would have liked more of that type of writing.
For further reading:
Lisa Randall's Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs
John Kricher's The Modern Scholar: Ecological Planet: An Introduction to Earth's Major Ecosystems
Nick Lane (all of his books)
Geoffrey West's Scaling in Biology
Sean Carroll's Endless Forms Most beautiful
Paul Falkowski's Life's Engines
Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants -
“New” is a bit of an overstatement. It develops themes already covered in books like Nick Lane’s Oxygen (not exactly recent) and David Beerling’s The Emerald Planet; the main contribution to my understanding is a bit more depth on how oxygen and carbon dioxide have limited and unlimited life over the course of its development. The back emphasises the authors’ belief in panspermia, specifically in the form that states life on Earth was seeded from Mars, but there’s very little space devoted to that — and exactly zero actual evidence.
It’s mostly a reasonable read, if not at all “new”, but they badly needed some more time with an editor. They have odd repetitions, or places where they don’t define a word until long after its first use (not a problem for me, but possibly difficult for other pop science readers), and at times the grammar is just terrible. Sentences don’t have subjects, or the verb doesn’t agree, or… It’s not so bad that I’d call it a mess, but I was very conscious that they needed a proofreader or three to make their book feel more professional.
There were some interesting things in here, though: for example, a discussion of different types of lungs and breathing systems. I hadn’t seen that discussed before, and it was fascinating. And for dinosaur aficionados, yep, they definitely touch on dinosaurs and why they once ruled the Earth (and why, perhaps, that rule ended as it did).
Reviewed for The Bibliophibian. If you like my science reviews, you might also want to check out my science blog,
NEAT science. -
At first, this book didn't catch me. It started with what amount to a rant about current classification systems on, basically, fossils, and I have learnt to be dubious of divulgative books on science who criticize the current orthodoxy, mainly because the audience likely doesn't have the skill to evaluate the claims.
Still, in this particular instance I had to take it back.
The book is a very, very, very good read, showing how life may have evolved in relation both to great extintion events and to the importance of ecosystemic evolution.
All in all a great book, wonderfl both for people who are new to the scientific divulgation genre and for aficionados. -
Excelente atualização sobre a história do planeta. Eu não fazia ideia do quanto a atmosfera da Terra já havia mudado, muitas vezes abruptamente. Os ciclos de oxigênio, gás carbônico e calor, e a influência que eles têm na vida são surpreendentes. Ainda ganhei uma explicação sobre o estado da arte das transições evolutivas. Recomendadíssimo para quem quer saber mais sobre a vida no planeta.
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كتاب ممتاز يعتمد عاى أحدث الدراسات في سرد تاريخ الحياة على كوكب الارض منذ نشأتها حتى الآن
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In the 20th century, it was accepted that dinosaurs were somewhere between crocodiles and birds, but it was always assumed that they were closer to crocodiles. However, everything we have learned in this century has made dinosaurs seem more and more bird-like: they had bird-like bones, were warm-blooded, had feathers and now we are fairly sure that they had bird-like lungs. It is no longer a surprise that dinosaurs ruled before mammals. The real surprise is that we mammals ever ruled at all.
Birds (and dinosaurs) have superior lungs in that they have a three-stroke breathing cycle. Mammals have only two: (1) inhale air from outside the body into the lungs and (2) exhale it out again. An awful lot of air we inhale next is precisely the spent air we exhaled on our previous breath. Birds (1) inhale air from the outside the body into a rear air sac, (2) transhale that air forward through the lungs into a forward air sac and (3) exhale from the forward sac back to the outside. Air crosses the lungs only once, and in only one direction, so the blood can flow in the opposite direction, releasing carbon dioxide into spent air at the front before picking oxygen from fresher air at the back. A good proportion of those air sacs are cleverly concealed inside their hollow bones, so their breathing apparatus takes up not much more abdominal space than our own. (Dinosaurs unquestionably have hollow bones too.) This gives birds a 33% advantage at sea level and a much greater advantage at higher altitudes. Birds migrate across the Himalayas. No bat can go anything like that high.
The only advantages mammals had over dinosaurs were better teeth and marginally better child-bearing and -rearing. And the earliest mammals laid eggs and had pretty poor milk. Even today, many mammals (eg wolves) feed their young by regurgitation, just as birds do and dinosaurs no doubt did.
Dinosaurs came to power in the early Jurassic, when oxygen levels were half what they are now. They could out-breathe any vertebrate on the planet . So there is no mystery at all. -
Спасибо коллеге по аспирантуре за выданную литературу по вопросу, в котором у меня вроде бы и есть какие-то знания, но в голове они почему-то долго не удерживаются. "Не моё, Сань" - как говорил один знакомый попсовый гопник. Вероятно, так оно и есть - не моё.
Книга, однако, достойная - не только мощно развёрнутой теорией, но и ссылочным аппаратом, из которого эта теория произросла. Интересное предположение о всем известных метеоритах-убийцах - вроде бы как, они всего лишь служили, как нокаутирующие удары после того, как вымирание в несколько раундов и так порядком измордовало живой мир планеты. Забавно, что мы, вроде как, тоже живём в эпоху очередного вымирания - то ли шестого, если только крупные считать, то ли уже одиннадцатого. От подсчётов не легче.
В главе 13 поймал два момента. В одном говорится, что одно из самых приятных моментов от общения в научной среде - наслаждение чувством коллегиальной солидарности. Это так. Дальше говорят об оборудовании, которое в старые времена энтузиасты-учёные делали себе сами, будучи кустарями от науки, двигающими науку вперёд. Искусные технари, целая эпоха людей с руками из плечевых, а не тазовых суставов. Эпоха ушла по причине экономии бюджета и появления новых технологий.
Вдруг взгрснлс. -
Interesting book and a good overview of the history of life on Earth - the authors’ perspectives as geologist added a holistic angle that viewed major events in the history of life that I was already familiar with (the Cambrian explosion, etc.) as tangled up with the shifting geology of our world.
My main complaints with the book are that it can get rambly and disjointed at times, with frequent back-and-forth chronological shifts in discussion even between paragraphs, and that out of the many authors of important studies referenced, perhaps three are female and four are not white, and fewer are not from Top 10 institutions such as MIT or Cambridge or Harvard. Whether this is due to the unconscious biases of the elderly white male Top 10 institution authors or more a symptom of the scientific system itself is up for debate, but it was very noticeable. Reading this book one could easily be convinced that women and POC have made literally no contributions to paleontology. -
When politics and the world around you begin crushing your will to live with their petty squabbles, read a book about the last billion years and realize how absurd their problems are in the scale of it all. Reflecting on the tiny creatures of the Cambrian is my meditation, reciting the past ages is my mantra, reading about the death of our sun is my nightcap.
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Great insights on the way in which the environment and life affect each other. This book helped me understand, in a more profound way, the evolution between the different periods in Earth's history.
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I started reading this after having a conversation with my dad about how our moon became our moon, and he told me to read about how life came to our earth. Most of our conversations go off on tangents, this one was unusually reigned in.
I read the first 25 pages and then put it down for two months. Two months spent staring at it out of the corner of my eye. Curious but not curious enough. It took another lockdown and Christmas anxiety for me to want to escape into the safe confines of learning. Specifically about 10 or more periods of creation and extinction. It's easier to cope with doom when it's normalised.
The overarching theme is so so fascinating as was each chapter, but it's a well written 350 page dissertation with a 30 page bibliography. I know I was a little scathing of Sapiens apparent conjecture and lack of citations but this has the opposite problem in that sometimes it tries too hard to be science-y. The language, I felt, hit half of the time, and the other half it edged on awkward and clunky.
Don't get me started on loco-bloody-motion. I nearly threw the book.
Otherwise it really is eye opening, and the writing thing is personal to every person. My dad loved it. So don't not read it because I got mad at worm-y trains. -
Readable overview of last 4.5 billion years of life on Earth. Dry enough to be good bedtime reading, easy to pick up/put down, and often found myself reaching for phone to read more about various new facts I learned. (Lizards can't breathe when they run! The Permian Extinction included poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas killing most organisms on the planet! There are names for the geological time periods on the Moon and Mars!)
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An excellent overview of the prehistory of life, from origins to the beginnings of modern humans. I had been looking for a book that would broadly cover our knowledge of past life from every time period equally, rather than focusing on a particular group or time period. Based on reviews, this seemed the best choice. Each chapter does try to touch on a variety of microbial, plant, and animal life from each geological time period. However, from my layman's knowledge, it did seem to gloss over some major groups, such as pelycosaurs, pterosaurs, and with dinosaurs, you will not get anything like a breakdown of the major groups and their major representative species. So if you're looking for a book that will give you details on popular and well-known fossils, you can find that elsewhere, though likely you will have to look for separate books covering particular eras or groups.
What this tome does accomplish is providing a general overview of the patterns and trends in the evolution of life - as indicated by the title. It's more of an ecological-oriented work, and there seems to be as much discussion of chemistry and geology as biology and paleontology, which was a bit boring for me since I know so little of those fields, and some of the more detailed explanations of chemical processes went over my head.
The authors really love talking about oxygen, and at times, their repeated appeal to oxygen levels (whether increase or decrease) felt a bit redundant, and again, boring to me. However, I am glad to get a different perspective than the familiar stories of super-volcanoes and asteroids causing extinction. The authors also try to convey that extinction and genetic diversity and disparity likely arise from a variety of factors, some of which we likely still barely understand, rather than a single cause.
I appreciated the text's orientation toward the less explored aspects of evolutionary paleontology - they really are trying to provide a "new" history of life. It does not retread the facts likely already familiar to anyone with a casual interest in paleontology, which you tend to see again and again in many books on this subject. Some discussion is a bit dense and technical, but even if you struggle with those parts, I think it's worth it for the breadth it covers. -
This is one of the most important books I've read all year. The authors are archaeologists and research scientists. I've read several of Peter Ward's book and liked them all. But this book does something brand new, it lays out the entire idea of evolution as we know it, expands it back to the beginning of the earth itself, and offers several startling, well documented facts that should both scare us and or exalt us. Ward's previous books offered his Medea theory: i.e. that Gaia (the Earth itself personified) goes out its way to periodically destroy as much life as possible via one global catastrophe after another and then reboots and starts all over again creating new and diversified examples of life. According to the authors this has happened nine times before. We're all aware of the much publicized mass extinction of the reigning dinosaurs 64.5 million years ago, via the Chicxulub Asteroid in Mexico ending what we call the Cretaceous Era. The authors say the extinction was already in the process of happening via plate tectonics which altered the ecology of the planet: the asteroid was just the final blow. And those who follow Geology and Archaeology are well aware of an even greater extinction 247 millions years ago, ending most of the life of the Permian Era. But the authors here lay out seven more mass extinctions including a primal one of nearly a billion years back when oxygen-creating Cyanobacteria in the form of oceanic stromatolites filled the shallow seas and completely altered the earth's atmosphere. And in so doing, wiped out whatever microbial and single celled life that already existed for which O2 was a toxin. The enormous and unchecked expansion of oxygen led to the second mass extinction of whatever had grown in the meanwhile, by causing the first and greatest ice-age on the planet, so extensive that it is known as Snowball Earth. Chemistry, as well as Geology are the main culprits of past worldwide disasters and new beginnings. And it is ongoing. Frightening? Very. Because we are so not in control. More reasons to explore other planets in our own and other solar systems if we wish our species to survive. Useful, yes, because as a species we are really only in the early stages of what could easily be another 2 millions year reign.
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An interesting and somewhat controversial "new" history of life. The authors focus most of their attention on the roles of oxygen and CO2 in the evolution of life, sometimes to the neglect of other potential factors. The origin of life itself is little more than just re-hashed and defunct ideas that have long been shown to not work, but given that origin of life research has seen no useful breakthroughs, this is not surprising. As for the evolution of life once it arose, their is story similar to that of other accounts, with the exception that it was more focused on oxygen and CO2, as already noted. I think some of their unique insights may stand the test of time, while others will pass as better explanations come along.
One other thing that annoyed me somewhat was their attempt to make the topic more accessible to the general reader, which lead to sloppy use of some simpler seeming terminology, while still using a lot of inaccessible terminology in a lot of cases. -
I found this book interesting but frustrating. The exploration of the main themes of the book (that catastrophes and atmospheric composition have been some of the most important factors in the course of evolution) was really well done. Unfortunately, the framing of this discussion is rooted in the simultaneously over-optimistic and over-pessimistic "Medea Hypothesis," as well a simplistic interpretation of natural selection.
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من أجمل الكتب التي قرأت في 2020
كتاب يطرح تصورا جديدا ومثيرا للحياة بالعودة للوراء نحو 4 بليون سنة
وبدون فرض آراء أو وصاية على القارئ يطرح تعريفات عن معنى الحياة
ويعترف بأن الحديث عن نشأة الحياة من اللاحياة ليس أمرا يسيرا
لكنه يحفز ذهن القارئ ليفكر مع المؤلفين
وعلى الرغم من اللغة العلمية والمعلومات المتخصصة إلا أن الكتاب مكتوب بأسلوب رشيق وأدبي وفيه تواصل مع القارئ
وأنصح كل من تشغلهم فكرة الحياة على الأرض وكل من يود مناقشة نظرية التطور أن يطالع هذا الكتاب بعناية قبل التسرع -
Good 2.0 on the development of planetary (and a bit if extra-planetary) life. Desperately needed an editor though-a lot of repetition as if both authors wrote on the same topic and there was a failure to synthesize their individual pieces. Overall readable and enjoyable, full of adventurous ideas (new or unconventional theories are identified as such) and sprinkled with wry humor.
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An extraordinary book, both in the subject matter and the scientific authenticity of the material. An in-depth study of the history of the planet, and the many diverse and varied phases of it's lifespan. I keep referencing the book in conversations - it has had a profound impact on my view of life today and the damage we are currently inflicting on the planet and ourselves.
Thanks Dad! -
This is big history at its finest, one going back 4.5 billion years ago, with each chapter being divided into millions of years. To boot, the final chapter is about the future of humanity, and those things which scientists can predict still. Highly recommended
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The daily routine and obligations of life don’t always allow us to keep our educations up to date. Before you know it you last classroom experience is decades behind you. That when it can be nice for the curious-minded to have an “updated refresher” on a subject. If you’re looking for one that covers the latest info on paleontology and the origins of life, this book’s a pretty good choice.
Published in 2015, the info’s pretty up to date. But these are fields where things are advancing quickly! In just three years a number of the facts presented in this book have been reconsidered and new info thrown into the mix. Still, if your education in this area is a decade or four out of date, you can’t go wrong by diving in, here.
The book advances chronologically. That allows the story of life on Earth to flow in a way that’s both engaging and builds connections between periods that make logical sense. And the story doesn’t end with the Anthropocene. The authors continue the story into the future and follow where current science point to for the end of our planetary home.
I really wish the writing style were a bit better crafted. The text reads like someone constantly (and often unsuccessfully) fighting their “academic” writing style in order to deliver a more “popular” treatment of the subject. And at several points the authors let the profession’s power struggles take up more story space than is warranted.
But even with those caveats, I found the book’s content to be immensely engaging, hitting several instances occurring of “WOW! I didn’t know that? How did I not know that??”. Overall it’s a very good subject refresher/updater and it’d be nice to see them do updates to it in, say, five year intervals. -
This is a very hard book to rate. For the wealth of new information and interesting (albeit controversial) theories, I give it five stars. For the writing, I give it two stars. The writing is bad on every level, including numerous typos, grammatical errors, awkward sentences, sentences that didn't make any sense, poor organization, and unnecessary repetition. This book needed a good editor so badly.
So much for the form. The content is fascinating. Be prepared for quite a bit of chemistry. These authors believe that the story of life on Earth is in many ways the story of chemicals - in the life forms, but especially outside us - in the air and in the water. In some ways, it is carbon and oxygen - not the life forms themselves, that are the center of this narrative.
Other complaints - not nearly enough illustrations, but I made up for that by keeping my smart phone handy so I could Google every interesting plant or animal they mentioned. I think of this book as a good supplement to Richard Fortey's 1990s book, Life, which is much better written and has a more comprehensive scope. -
Excellent overview of how earth changes affected ecosystems
This was an interesting and ambitious book, which was sometimes heavier than many nonfiction that I pick up. The authors try to dance between textbook level and popular science read. Most of the time, they succeed. I read the Amazon excerpt and decided to go with the Audible version, which is always preferable to me when it’s nonfiction. I was very pleased with Tom Parks’ excellent narration, and listened whilst Wiki-ing for charts, graphs and illustrations. Kudos to Tom Parks for his unhurried, steady presentation.
I was most interested in the many mass extinctions, some new to me. At first, the time scales are daunting, but the authors took time to explain the periods. I was especially interested in how O2 and CO2 controlled the environment—not to mention the huge temperature variations. Chemistry and climate changes were as important as were geological changes. I took my time with this book and often repeated the denser chapters after doing some research and ferreting out diagrams and illustrations. I have a biosciences background, but there was much new-to-me information. Excellent book. -
The "new" part is the emphasis on the driving role of the changing level of oxygen in the atmosphere (10-30% in the Phanerozoic, now 21%). There are some redundancies, as if separately written chapters were poorly edited together. There's some wisecracking. The writers are bona fide scholars, but it's hard to tell if their presentation is the scholarly consensus or their own wild idea. Still. an enjoyable and educational read. Wait till you get to the final chapter and learn how in 0.5-1 billion years the rising solar output, combined with the progressive removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, will turn the earth into a windblown desert hellscape!
