LIVING ON EARTH

A scientist muses on how living creatures constructed today’s Earth.

Godfrey-Smith, professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney and author of Other Minds and Metazoa, writes that this is the third book in a series. Not straightforward natural history, it’s a thoughtful meditation on how the actions of organisms, even the most primitive (ticks, snails), have generated the world humans have inherited. At the same time, “the portion of Earth occupied by wild nature, its place in the whole, shrinks and recedes.” Life, present for 3.7 of the 4.5 billion years of Earth’s existence, has engineered our planet no less than volcanism and plate tectonics. In the first half of the book, Godfrey-Smith delivers a steady stream of examples of nonhuman life going about its business. Even bacteria learn, communicate, migrate, and build. As evolution proceeds, minds enter the picture. “What are minds doing here?” is a question that preoccupies the author throughout the book. “Minds—through perceptions, thoughts, plans, and intentions—guide action,” he writes. “Actions serve the interests of organisms, and whether this is intended or not, actions can also transform the world.” The second half of the book involves humans, with a heavy emphasis on that perennial favorite, consciousness, which, like so many human accomplishments—e.g., tools, language, engineering—turns out to be well distributed across the animal kingdom. The author ends with a plea to preserve the wild nature that we are now destroying—not from what seems an aesthetic admiration of its beauty, “but a sense of kinship and gratitude.” This is not a history of life. For that, readers should consult David Quammen’s The Tangled Tree, followed by Godfrey-Smith’s previous two books (although he insists that’s not necessary).

Enlightening insights into the natural world and our often perilous relationship to it.