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

by Henry Gee Narrated by Henry Gee

Overview

The Royal Society's Science Book of the Year

"...Henry Gee presents a pithy, fascinating account of the stages of biological evolution. He's a deliberate, engaged narrator whose slow pacing will require adaptation. This and creative background music and sound effects (dinosaur sounds?) create a meditative and friendly listening experience. From spineless water creatures and egg-laying reptiles to mammals and the great apes, the concise details associated with each evolutionary advance give this audiobook a generous texture."- AudioFile

"[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.

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press

Editorial Reviews

DECEMBER 2022 - AudioFile

Once past the earth’s geophysical origins and the eventual rise of single-cell organisms, paleontologist Henry Gee presents a pithy, fascinating account of the stages of biological evolution. He’s a deliberate, engaged narrator whose slow pacing will require adaptation. This and creative background music and sound effects (dinosaur sounds?) create a meditative and friendly listening experience. From spineless water creatures and egg-laying reptiles to mammals and the great apes, the concise details associated with each evolutionary advance give this audiobook a generous texture. Highlights include the author’s lucid descriptions of how functional advances in sensory physiology improved the way mammals interacted with the world and each other—information that makes the entire process sound even more improbable and miraculous. T.W. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

09/13/2021

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. (Nov.)

From the Publisher

"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."

—Booklist (starred)

"A lively, lyrical history."

—Nature

"Gee finds beauty in adversity in this eloquent account of how life evolved on Earth....Action-packed and full of facts, this well-told tale will delight lay readers."

—Publishers Weekly

"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."

—Kirkus

"A dazzling, beguiling story told at an exhilarating pace...[a] hugely enjoyable page turner."

—Literary Review

"[Gee] plunges us back in time but also casts us back to a juvenile state of wonder. If you're prone to fleeting moments in the midst of daily tasks in which you stop to question how all this precious life came to be, the answers can be found conveniently packed within these pages."

—Geographical

"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."

—John Gribbin, author of The Scientists and In Search of Schrodinger's Cat

"This is now the best book available about the huge changes in our planet and its living creatures, over the billions of years of the Earth’s existence. Continents have merged and broken up; massive volcanic eruptions have repeatedly reset the clock of evolution; temperatures, atmospheric gases, and sea levels have undergone big swings; and new ways of life have evolved. Henry Gee makes this kaleidoscopically changing canvas of life understandable and exciting. Who will enjoy reading this book? Everybody!"

—Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Upheaval

"Don’t miss this delightful, concise, sweeping masterpiece! Gee brilliantly condenses the entire, improbable, astonishing history of life on earth—all 5 billion years—into a charming, zippy and scientifically accurate yarn. I honestly couldn’t put this book down, and you won’t either."

—Daniel E. Lieberman, Edwin M. Lerner II professor of Biological Sciences, Harvard University and author of Exercised

"A scintillating, fast-paced waltz through four billion years of evolution, from one of our leading science writers. As a senior editor at Nature, Henry Gee has had a front-row seat to the most important fossil discoveries of the last quarter century. His poetic prose animates the history of life, from the first bacteria to trilobites to dinosaurs to us."

—Steve Brusatte, paleontologist, University of Edinburgh and New York Times bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

Library Journal

06/01/2021

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DECEMBER 2022 - AudioFile

Once past the earth’s geophysical origins and the eventual rise of single-cell organisms, paleontologist Henry Gee presents a pithy, fascinating account of the stages of biological evolution. He’s a deliberate, engaged narrator whose slow pacing will require adaptation. This and creative background music and sound effects (dinosaur sounds?) create a meditative and friendly listening experience. From spineless water creatures and egg-laying reptiles to mammals and the great apes, the concise details associated with each evolutionary advance give this audiobook a generous texture. Highlights include the author’s lucid descriptions of how functional advances in sensory physiology improved the way mammals interacted with the world and each other—information that makes the entire process sound even more improbable and miraculous. T.W. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2021-08-28
The title tells it all.

Nature senior editor Gee spends only two pages on the beginning of Earth, when a cloud of dust circling the sun coalesced into a planet about 4.6 billion years ago. 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. Early Earth lacked oxygen, so there was no ozone layer in the upper atmosphere to block the sun’s ultraviolet rays, which sterilized everything above the surface of the sea. Consequently, primitive bacteria lived deep in the ocean for at least 1 billion years until some evolved pigments that absorbed these rays to produce sugar. This was photosynthesis. Its fiercely reactive waste product, oxygen, produced the first mass extinction of life that had evolved in its absence. 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. Life moved onto land 500 million years ago and broke its dependence on the sea not through legs (some fish have legs) but with hard-shelled eggs and seeds. Racing through dinosaurs and mammals, Gee introduce apes less than two-thirds into the text and hominins a few pages later. 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. For a primer on evolution, readers might prefer Andrew Knoll’s A Brief History of Earth (2021) for one reason: illustrations. Gee writes lucid, accessible prose, but readers of his thorough descriptions of long-extinct creatures or explanations of how body parts evolved will yearn in vain for pictures.

A serviceable history of life that one wishes were more comprehensive.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177236360
Publisher:	Macmillan Audio
Publication date:	11/09/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	506,754

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