A (Very) Short History of Life On Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Chapters

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Another reason for the downturn in population growth is economic. Politicians strive for relentless economic growth, but this is not sustainable in a world where resources are finite. H. sapiens already sequesters between 25 and 40 percent of net primary productivity—that is, the organic matter that plants create out of air, water and sunshine. As well as being bad news for the millions of other species on our planet that rely on this matter, such sequestration might be having deleterious effects on human economic prospects. People nowadays have to work harder and longer to maintain the standards of living enjoyed by their parents, if such standards are even obtainable. Indeed, there is growing evidence that economic productivity has stalled or even declined globally in the past 20 years. One result could be that people are putting off having children, perhaps so long that their own fertility starts to decline. It was the tendency of bacteria to form communities of different species that led to the next great evolutionary innovation. Bacteria took group living to the next level—the nucleated cell. The way the book is formatted you move forward through time with the Earth as it starts out in the earliest and then move forward. Each chapter is nicely grouped and none stand out as being overwhelming or unnecessary. I loved that as he moved through the evolution Henry Gee didn’t just focus on the animal life, he looked at the plant life as well. There were interesting facts I didn’t know and none of the science was too technical. There was always an explanation to help the layman to understand subjects they might not have encountered. Readers should be chastened at his conclusion, shared by most scientists, that Homo sapiens is making its habitat—the Earth—progressively less habitable and will become extinct in a few thousand years. Gee writes lucid, accessible prose."

definitely feels rushed at several chapters (especially chapter 3, 4), with a lot of facts that fit well into the bigger picture, but many of those facts are well forgotten. A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth WON the Royal Society Science Book Prize of 2022. ( Video of the awards ceremony.) 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 If you have already watched David Attenborough’s Life/Origin of life or Neil deGrasse’s Cosmos docuseries like me, then this book will act as a fantastic recap of the complex history of life on earth. If you haven’t watched the above-mentioned docuseries, then this book will be an absolute delight for anybody interested in natural history. Also, I highly recommend watching these awesome docuseries in the soothing voice of Mr. Attenborough and Mr. Tyson. With authority, humor, and detail, Gee, a paleontologist and senior editor of Nature, traces the progression of life on earth from its initial stirrings...readers will find this eye-opening book compelling for years to come."Henry Gee’s whistle-stop account of the story of life (and death — lots of death) on Earth is both fun and informative. Even better, it goes beyond the natural human inclination to see ourselves as special and puts us in our proper place in the cosmic scheme of things." To the earliest life, which had evolved in an ocean and beneath an atmosphere essentially without free oxygen, it spelled environmental catastrophe. To set the matter into perspective, however, when cyanobacteria were making their first essays into oxygenic photosynthesis—3 billion years ago or more—there was rarely enough free oxygen at any time to count as more than a minor trace pollutant. But oxygen is so potent a force that even a trace spelled disaster to life that had evolved in its absence. These whiffs of oxygen caused the first of many mass extinctions in the Earth’s history, as generation upon generation of living things were burned alive. Exhilaratingly whizzes through billions of years . . . Gee is a marvellously engaging writer, juggling humour, precision, polemic and poetry to enrich his impossibly telescoped account . . . [making] clear sense out of very complex narratives' - The Times Viewed from the kind of wide-angle perspective that Gee opens up, our human presence looks vanishingly insignificant. And yet we have huge significance as the first and only species to be aware of itself. We owe it to ourselves, and to our fellow species, to conserve what we have and to make the best of our brief existence. For People Who Devour Books

Every time majority of flora and fauna gets wiped out (Five mass extinctions), life always reappeared and took a different direction in the evolutionary path. The story is the same with early life forms, or dinosaurs or proto mammals. The chapter about evolution of hominids is pretty interesting and made me realize how the human history is not even a chapter but a mere footnote in the grand book of life on earth. At some point before 2 billion years ago, small colonies of bacteria began to adopt the habit of living inside a common membrane.15 It began when a small bacterial cell, called an archaeon,16 found itself dependent on some of the cells around it for vital nutrients. This tiny cell extended tendrils toward its neighbors so they could swap genes and materials more easily. The participants in what had been a freewheeling commune of cells became more and more interdependent. There was a whole lot of information here that was new to me, as we follow the development of life in manifold ways, both in the different ways this happened but also in the way that everything fits together. This is one of the best things about the book. 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. I think everyone will enjoy this book, especially those who get most of their reading done in smallish instalments on a speeding train or a lumbering bus, and students of cosmology, geology, zoology, or biology will learn a lot, and the evocative prose will absolutely delight even the most precise readers.

Henry Gee makes the kaleidoscopically changing canvas of life understandable and exciting. Who will enjoy reading this book? - Everybody!' Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel

From that first foray to the spread of early hominids who later became Homo sapiens, life has persisted, undaunted. A (Very) Short History of Life is an enlightening story of survival, of persistence, illuminating the delicate balance within which life has always existed, and continues to exist today. It is our planet like you’ve never seen it before. Speculating on the future of life on Earth, Dr Gee proposes an interesting idea for how all life may eventually go extinct on this planet. Even as individuals age and eventually die, so too, do species and indeed, even entire planets. On one hand, predicting the future is not possible, but the overall familiarity of Dr Gee’s idea of the universality of aging makes it understandable and weirdly satisfying. In Dr Gee’s view, watching all life wink out may be like watching a film run in reverse, where complexity declines, and the ability to evolve into new species diminishes until there’s nothing left alive as even the planet itself dies.The evolution of the nucleus allowed for a more organized system of reproduction. Bacterial cells generally reproduce by dividing in half to create two identical copies of the parent cell. Variation from the addition of extra genetic material is piecemeal and haphazard. So where does the hope come in? Well, I don't want to spoil it too much, but he goes into if the Earth continues on its trend that it has for all time, likely we humans won't see some of the truly big cataclysmic events (definitely not in my lifetime anyway). So that's somewhat comforting. Although it doesn't relieve us of the responsibility for doing better now so that current conditions stay relatively sane.