One of the Washington Post's 50 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024 The bestselling author of Other Minds shows how we and our ancestors have reinvented our planet. If the history of the Earth were compressed down to a year, our species would arise in the last thirty minutes or so of the final hour. But life itself is not such a late arrival: It has existed on Earth for something like 3.7 billion years-most of our planet's history and over a quarter of the age of the universe (as far as we can tell). What have these organisms-bacteria, animals, plants, and the rest-done in all this time? In Living on Earth, the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith proposes a new way of understanding how the actions of living beings have shaped our planet. Where his acclaimed books Other Minds and Metazoa explored the riddle of how conscious minds came to exist on Earth, Living on Earth turns to what happens when we look at the mind from another side-when we come to see organisms as active causes, not merely as results of the evolutionary process. The planet we inhabit is significantly the work of other living beings, who shaped the environments that we ourselves later transformed. To that end, Godfrey-Smith takes us on a grand tour of the history of life on earth. He visits Rwandan gorillas and Australian bowerbirds, returns to coral reefs and octopus dens, considers the impact of language and writing, and weighs the responsibilities our unique powers bring with them, as they relate to factory farming, habitat preservation, climate change, and the use of animals in experiments. Ranging from the seas to the forests, and from animate matter's first appearance to its future extinction, Godfrey-Smith offers a novel picture of the course of life on Earth and how we might meet the challenges of our time, the Anthropocene.
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'An exquisite account of intelligence across species ... Living on Earth is consistently rewarding, packed with insights and invitations to reflect, and blessed with some exquisite writing' Guardian
'Clever, compassionate and often deeply moving ... An excellent finale to an ambitious trilogy exploring the evolution of intelligence' New Scientist
'Wide-ranging ... [and] dynamic ... An extraordinary journey' Observer
'Godfrey-Smith is overflowing with new ways of looking at old issues, and it is always a pleasure to be introduced to them' Literary Review
'A hugely important book ... Sweeping, careful, and courageous ... Godfrey-Smith writes with grace, humility, and wisdom' Anil Seth, director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex and author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
'Only Peter Godfrey-Smith could write this book. It offers a vast, kaleidoscopic, and immensely thought-provoking overview of the development of life on Earth' Sean Carroll, professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of Quanta and Fields
'In Living on Earth, Peter Godfrey-Smith combines vivid and compelling descriptions of the natural world, unexpectedly fascinating scientific results, and philosophical arguments that are exceptionally clear and accessible as well as deep and profound' Alison Gopnik, professor at the University of California, Berkeley and author of The Gardener and the Carpenter
'An essential read for understanding the legacy of the spot we're standing in right now, and its future' David Eagleman, neuroscientist at Stanford University and author of Incognito and Livewired
'Yields rich new insights on the nature of life' Michael S. Gazzaniga, professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of The Consciousness Instinct
'Clever, compassionate and often deeply moving ... An excellent finale to an ambitious trilogy exploring the evolution of intelligence' New Scientist
'Wide-ranging ... [and] dynamic ... An extraordinary journey' Observer
'Godfrey-Smith is overflowing with new ways of looking at old issues, and it is always a pleasure to be introduced to them' Literary Review
'A hugely important book ... Sweeping, careful, and courageous ... Godfrey-Smith writes with grace, humility, and wisdom' Anil Seth, director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex and author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
'Only Peter Godfrey-Smith could write this book. It offers a vast, kaleidoscopic, and immensely thought-provoking overview of the development of life on Earth' Sean Carroll, professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of Quanta and Fields
'In Living on Earth, Peter Godfrey-Smith combines vivid and compelling descriptions of the natural world, unexpectedly fascinating scientific results, and philosophical arguments that are exceptionally clear and accessible as well as deep and profound' Alison Gopnik, professor at the University of California, Berkeley and author of The Gardener and the Carpenter
'An essential read for understanding the legacy of the spot we're standing in right now, and its future' David Eagleman, neuroscientist at Stanford University and author of Incognito and Livewired
'Yields rich new insights on the nature of life' Michael S. Gazzaniga, professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of The Consciousness Instinct