A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth
4.6 Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters
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- 10,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
The Royal Society's Science Book of the Year
"[A]n exuberant romp through evolution, like a modern-day Willy Wonka of genetic space. Gee’s grand tour enthusiastically details the narrative underlying life’s erratic and often whimsical exploration of biological form and function.” —Adrian Woolfson, The Washington Post
In the tradition of Richard Dawkins, Bill Bryson, and Simon Winchester—An entertaining and uniquely informed narration of Life's life story.
In the beginning, Earth was an inhospitably alien place—in constant chemical flux, covered with churning seas, crafting its landscape through incessant volcanic eruptions. Amid all this tumult and disaster, life began. 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.
Although these membranes were leaky, the environment within them became different from the raging maelstrom beyond. These havens of order slowly refined the generation of energy, using it to form membrane-bound bubbles that were mostly-faithful copies of their parents—a foamy lather of soap-bubble cells standing as tiny clenched fists, defiant against the lifeless world. Life on this planet has continued in much the same way for millennia, adapting to literally every conceivable setback that living organisms could encounter and thriving, from these humblest beginnings to the thrilling and unlikely story of ourselves.
In A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth, Henry Gee zips through the last 4.6 billion years with infectious enthusiasm and intellectual rigor. Drawing on the very latest scientific understanding and writing in a clear, accessible style, he tells an enlightening tale of survival and persistence that illuminates the delicate balance within which life has always existed.
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Gee (The Accidental Species), a paleontologist and senior editor at the science journal Nature, finds beauty in adversity in this eloquent account of how life evolved on Earth. Gee explains how varied life forms rose to the challenges of changing sea levels, "world-spanning" ice ages, and volcano-induced extinctions, as in the Permian period when the world became "a cauldron of magma." He describes how the giant Pteranodon "cruised the seas... winging between the young and divergent continents" and how ancient mosses and liverworts crept onto barren, wind-scoured coasts that were "as dry and lifeless as the surface of the moon." Early lichen life forms, he explains, were "forged in fire" and "hardened in ice" as they adapted, and Gee spotlights nature's ingenuity as plants sprouted up and creatures began to crawl. Early conifers, for example, engineered a clever response to unfavorable growing conditions (the seed), and the small, lizardlike Westlothiana helped vertebrates make the tricky transition from the sea to arid land with a newly designed "private pond" (the egg). Gee is also a gleeful guide to the lives of early humans who, he notes, responded to ever-harsher living conditions "with larger brains and increasing stores of fat." Action-packed and full of facts, this well-told tale will delight lay readers.
