Just Finished Reading: The History of Life – A Very Short Introduction by Michael J Benton

Even I’m thinking that I should be reading science based books other than from the, actually excellent, VSI Series. Anyway we are were we are [grin].

As the book covers the last 4 billion years of life on Earth in 166 pages you would be correct if you referred to it as a bit of a romp. Rather sensibly the author decided to hit the highlights, or rather the turning points, in evolution starting naturally with the origin of life itself. Of course we know very little about this – or at least there is little confirmed knowledge of the event (or more likely series of events) – so he’s forced to speculate. After that he moves onto the more understood origin of that most important aspect of life – sex. The sharing of genes and the subsequent explosion in variation greatly increased the speed of evolution and the diversification of all types of life. The next highlight was the origin of skeletons. An internal support structure allowed larger creatures to appear and laid the ground work (pun intended) for the next leap forward – the invasion of the land. The author then moved onto flight before exploring several of the mass extinctions that seem to periodically almost wipe the slate clean. They are deeply fascinating events and, if the figures hold up, we may in fact be living through another mass extinction event right now. The last two chapters covered the rise of modern ecosystems – in the form that most of us would recognise and, rather inevitably, ended with the origin of humans.

This was very much an introduction to a very large subject indeed and, because of the shortness of the book reduced to giving the reader flavours and hints of things to follow up in further, deeper, reading. Life on Earth is something you could quite easily study for the rest of your life so you really shouldn’t expect that this book would be enough to learn very much from – except maybe what a huge subject it is. If you are new to this area then use this book as an eye-opener. If you haven’t studied this subject use it as a refresher course. Those who already have significant knowledge of this area should use it as a pleasant way to spend a few hours rather like listening to a well know piece of music enjoying it for its familiarity as much as for anything else. Recommended.