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

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Life’s evolutionary steps – from the development of a digestive system to the awe of creatures taking to the skies in flight – are conveyed with an up-close intimacy. 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. Life, it seems, cannot help but exploit each new crisis it encounters as an opportunity for diversification. The number of bacterial cells in (and on) a human body is very much greater than the number of human cells in that same body. Gee's descriptions are good, but I really missed having illustrations (for example, he refers to the 'strikingly beautiful' Dickinsonia - I wanted to see a drawing of one).

There then became a very long ice age which created glaciers and salt water out of the sea and onto the land and made more landmass which then allowed more animals to start becoming land creatures. Another masterful aspect of the structure is the way that the first eight chapters build in a kind of crescendo, then the whole thing widens out with first the development of apes, then hominins, then humans and finally looks forward to the future. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. All dinosaurs came from eggs but as they slowly began to evolve they began to move beyond laying eggs and began new ways of reproduction.

And I'm a little doubtful of the assertion 'Within the next few thousand years Homo sapiens will have vanished. The earliest lifeforms were involved in an ocean and beneath an atmosphere, essentially without free oxygen. All the animals which ever existed for 150 million years in the time of the dinosaur, there were a few small creatures underground did eventually become a new form of animal that could feed on grass, and this contains silica which often required teeth cells to grind it down. The infant Earth was very different to the one that we know today, with an atmosphere of an unbreathable fog of methane, carbon dioxide, water vapour, and hydrogen.

Some hundreds of million years from now, Earth will become uninhabitable to even the hardiest organ isms, spelling the final doom for Earth-evolved life—unless, perhaps, some earthlings manage to escape into space first. At times, however, Gee uses anachronistic comparisons or even similes from the technical realm which, to me, remain largely meaningless. Gee says, and as is quoted in the book, this just makes it an even more convincing time to give life everything we have got. He has appeared on BBC television and radio and NPR's All Things Considered, and has written for The Guardian, The Times, and BBC Science Focus.Reading this book is easy, aside from the names of all the unique species of animals discussed, but for those unfamiliar with scientific lingo if you break it down you start to see patterns and pick up on the names. Based on googling the subject, early earth did not have water vapor in the atmosphere as Gee states, but maybe it is a matter of what is “early”. We owe it to ourselves, and to our fellow species, to conserve what we have and to make the best of our brief existence.

Thus, the most crucial vertebrate adaptation may have been the egg, which provides a liquid capsule in which life can unfold on dry land. While we have become accustomed to the relatively benign climate prevailing across much of the planet, Gee reminds us that life on Earth has been repeatedly pockmarked by climatic instability and inhospitality. From the extremely distant past and the start of life itself, to what may be our last battle on this planet, it is poignant and critical to understand where we are now, and why we have the challenges that we face today.All that oxygen scrubbed the air of the carbon dioxide and methane that were keeping Earth warm and launched the first and longest ice age, 300 million years during which the planet became ‘Snowball Earth’, covered from pole to pole with ice. Most disconcerting, perhaps, is the “chilling inhumanity” of the failed experiments in human existence, including the extinct species Homo erectus, which, although resembling us superficially, appeared to lack our elaborate mental capacity. With beautiful exposition, Gee describes the major anatomical, physiological, and behavioral transitions in life’s evolution. Even heavier chemical elements, forged in the final moments of the star’s life—silicon, nickel, sulfur, and iron—were spread far and wide by the explosion.