Living on Earth - by Peter Godfrey-Smith (Hardcover)

About the Book

"A philosopher's examination of how animal and plant life has shaped the history of our planet"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"[Godfrey-Smith] is possessed of a prodigious curiosity . . . His delight in the natural world is infectious, and Living on Earth brims with intriguing and endearing novelties . . . It is best read, I think, as an ethical exemplar: a model of the sort of attitude that we ought to adopt in our dealings with nonhuman life . . . [Godfrey-Smith's] luscious and amazed language befits the treasures that we have been vouchsafed and that we have so badly betrayed." --Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post

"[Living on Earth] beautifully describes how birds, octopuses, and even fish can lead lives full of 'richness, ' in which past events give meaning to future ones . . . Godfrey-Smith doesn't just want to understand [a] way of looking at the world. He wants us to feel it, and to experience ourselves within it." --Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker

"Living on Earth is consistently rewarding, packed with insights and invitations to reflect, and blessed with some exquisite writing . . . Godfrey-Smith insists on identifying with nature instead of standing outside as steward: and on 'gratitude and a sense of kinship' with the process that delivered our species into the world." --Philip Ball, The Guardian

"Godfrey-Smith does not use the word miracle in the title of his ambitious new book, Living on Earth, but there is scarcely a page that does not recount one. His subject is the astounding creativity of life, not just to evolve ever-new forms, but to continually remake the planet that hosts it." --Richard Schiffman, Undark

"A thoughtful meditation on how the actions of organisms, even the most primitive (ticks, snails), have generated the world humans have inherited . . . [Full of] enlightening insights into the natural world and our often perilous relationship to it." --Kirkus Reviews

"Godfrey-Smith finds a purpose for philosophy and ethics in the discussion of biology . . . Attention-grabbing . . . Particularly poignant are his musings on human relationships with animals." --Booklist

"Godfrey-Smith charts the evolution of plants and animals, showing how each break from the 'tree of life' reflects the changing environment and eventually also shapes it . . . In this clever, compassionate and often deeply moving book, he encourages us to consider not just how we got here, but where we choose to go next." --Elle Hunt, New Scientist

"Elegant . . . Eye-opening . . . Delightful." --Veronika Meduna, New Zealand Listener

"Living on Earth is a hugely important book. The final installment in Peter Godfrey-Smith's essential trilogy, it give us a sweeping, careful, and courageous exploration of a natural world suffused with life, with minds, and perhaps with consciousness too. Godfrey-Smith writes with grace, humility, and wisdom about a dizzying array of topics, from the distant past to the far future, from the deep ocean to the frontiers of technology. The picture he paints reaffirms our continuity with the natural world, and impresses on us the urgency of the choices we now face." --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, with special attention to humanity's place in the bigger picture. We are often told that human beings are part of the natural world, but rarely is the mutual influence between people and the rest of our shared ecosystem spelled out with such care." --Sean Carroll, professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of Quanta and Fields

"In Living on Earth, Peter Godfrey-Smith once again 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. This book offers lucid and thoughtful discussions of the urgent ethical questions about our relationships to other animals." --Alison Gopnik, professor at the University of California, Berkeley and author of The Gardener and the Carpenter

"Strap in as Peter Godfrey-Smith takes us on a dazzling exploration of the planet's diverse tenants, all of whom sculpted the environment we'd later inherit and transform. 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

"Peter Godfrey-Smith not only reviews science, he probes it. In his hands this always 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

About the Author

Peter Godfrey-Smith is the author of the bestselling Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, which has been published in more than twenty languages, and Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind. His other books include Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science and Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, which won the 2010 Lakatos Award. He is a professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney.