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It started small, single-celled organisms in the seas, living off of the basic nutrients that were available. He has appeared on BBC television and radio and NPR's All Things Considered, and has written for The Guardian, The Times, and BBC Science Focus. For better or worse we are a species that is always on the edge, on the edge of immense technological power, or on the edge of complete destruction. Stromatolites—as we have seen, the first visible signs of life on Earth—were colonies of different kinds of bacteria.
Henry Gee’s whistle-stop account of the story of life (and death — lots of death) on Earth is both fun and informative. His poetic prose animates the history of life, from the first bacteria to trilobites to dinosaurs to us. With beautiful exposition, Gee describes the major anatomical, physiological, and behavioral transitions in life’s evolution.
billion years ago, life had spread from the permanent dark of the ocean depths to the sunlit surface waters. Understanding, and learning this is a key to understanding where we are today, and where we are going tomorrow.
All that oxygen scrubbed the air of the carbon dioxide and methane that were keeping Earth warm and launched the first and longest ice age, 300 million years during which the planet became ‘Snowball Earth’, covered from pole to pole with ice. As Gee relates, it was another several billion years before primitive bacteria (prokaryotes) evolved into advanced bacteria (eukaryotes), which accelerated evolution, forming multicellular life forms by 800 million years ago as well as the first animals—sponges.The infant Earth was molten rock that eventually cooled enough for atmospheric water to condense into oceans, and it’s amazing, as the author rightly notes, how quickly it appeared—perhaps 100 million years after the planet formed. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Like, I suspect, most people, I had a distinctly vague conception of the relative timing of many bits of the development and evolution of life - Gee gives us the big picture without ever overwhelming the reader or becoming too summary. However, what is also remarkable is that many animals and birds that could fly, as soon as they found an island where there were no predators and they were safe they lost the ability to fly.
As the bare mountains were thrust skyward, vast quantities of the crust were sucked back into the depths of the Earth in deep ocean trenches at the edges of the tectonic plates. Although artfully avoiding the critical question of how life originated in the first place, and only touching on the issue of whether species are the inevitable results of evolutionary processes or the contingent products of chance events, Gee has nevertheless succeeded in producing a seamless and highly compressed account of life’s grand narrative, spanning its full duration of about 4. Finally, after 4 1/2 billion years of mindless tumult, the Earth gave birth to a species that has become aware of itself.And the human interior, despite its wide variation in acidity and temperature, is, in bacterial terms, a gentle place. Interwoven as it is with geology and climate, life evolves the way Ernest Hemingway said we go broke: “gradually and then suddenly” (1). The earliest living things were no more than membranes stretched across microscopic gaps in rocks, where boiling hot jets of mineral-rich water gushed out from cracks in the ocean floor.
It's a mark of Gee's skill that what could have ended up feeling like an interminable list of different organisms comes across instead as something of a pager turner. I knew there was a bottleneck in human evolution, but Gee pinpoints a marshy area where the remnant survived, and then with a change in climate, they migrated 130,000 years ago, one group ending up on a South African coast, learning to use fish as a protein, and beginning a history of successful cultural development. Birds are relatives of the dinosaurs and when we want to see dinosaurs nowadays, we can see them in birds. Another amazing early vertebrate adaptation was the development of air sacs, which first arose in dinosaurs and are still found in birds.Gee, a prolific natural-history author and a senior editor at the journal Nature, shows us how evolution’s strategy has largely been based on the repurposing of form through biological reconfiguration, rather than on reinvention. Thus, the most crucial vertebrate adaptation may have been the egg, which provides a liquid capsule in which life can unfold on dry land. At times I have felt unable to fathom how insignificant our troubles and tribulations are in the grand scheme of things.
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