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

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this book is like a tldr of earths history - geological history, evolutionary history. the concepts can be so difficult to grasp at times, I felt like wanting to know why a certain thing happened a little bit more, not just read in a sentence. 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 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. Meanwhile, the reader is rewarded with a deeper appreciation of our own place in the grand scheme of life, where even the best-adapted species disappear within a time that is minute on the scale of evolution.

A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters, by Henry Gee, is an interesting little book on the history of life on Earth. Of course, a small book such as this will not, in any way, exhaustively cover any of the topics or lifeforms contained within. It does, however, give a very approachable overview of the subject, and with an extensive source list, and further reading list within, it also gives the reader next steps if they wish to drill down on any one topic. This book examines life as we know it so far, from its earliest theorized state, with cells beginning to cooperate and form more complex structures, to the advent of single cell, and multicellular life, and its slow evolution into more complex and specialized forms. The pursuit of nutrients, and the need to survive both the harsh radiation from the sun, and the changing climate of the Earth, led to numerous innovations for protection, efficient use and storage of energy, and reproduction, amongst other needs. Gee has captivated my attention with this book, giving brief tidbits of information on life from the earliest points in their history, up to the present day. in chapter 3 for example, author uses a tons of extinct species to tell facts of evolutionary history, it becomes difficult to imagine them in a sentence of information, most of them you might have never heard of them. so it made sense to constantly look at Google images to see what he was telling about. majority of facts won't even stay in your head as a lot of these species won't live more than a sentence or two A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth WON the Royal Society Science Book Prize of 2022. ( Video of the awards ceremony.) In writing this book, Henry Gee had a lot to live up to. His earlier title The Accidental Species was a superbly readable and fascinating description of the evolutionary process leading to Homo sapiens. It seemed hard to beat - but he has succeeded with what is inevitably going to be described as a tour-de-force. Dinosaurs, meanwhile, are animals that every child has heard of. These hugely successful creatures filled every evolutionary niche, leaving little room for much else, including the early mammals; it wasn’t until the dinosaurs died out that mammals could ‘burst forth like a well-aged champagne, shaken beforehand, and inexpertly corked’. A profusion of fast-evolving and diversifying mammals took over from the dinosaurs. They included what Gee calls ‘a group of leftovers … an assortment of scrappers that included rats, mice, rabbits, and, seemingly almost as an afterthought, the primates’. These small, swift creatures with forward-facing eyes, inclined to curiosity and exploration, would eventually give rise to Homo sapiens. But the emergence of modern humans could so easily not have happened. Around 200,000 years ago, the last survivors of the species were confined to an oasis on the edge of what is now the Kalahari desert. Yet Homo sapiens squeaked through, saved by a period of warming that turned much of the surface of the planet into rich grassland, teeming with game.From that first foray to the spread of early hominids who later became Homo sapiens, life has persisted, undaunted. A (Very) Short History of Life is an enlightening story of survival, of persistence, illuminating the delicate balance within which life has always existed, and continues to exist today. It is our planet like you’ve never seen it before. At some point before 2 billion years ago, small colonies of bacteria began to adopt the habit of living inside a common membrane.15 It began when a small bacterial cell, called an archaeon,16 found itself dependent on some of the cells around it for vital nutrients. This tiny cell extended tendrils toward its neighbors so they could swap genes and materials more easily. The participants in what had been a freewheeling commune of cells became more and more interdependent. Eukaryotes emerged, quietly and modestly, between around 1,850 and 850 million years ago.22 They started to diversify around 1,200 million years ago into forms recognizable as early single-celled relatives of algae and fungi and into unicellular protists, or what we used to call protozoa.23 For the first time, they ventured away from the sea and colonized freshwater ponds and streams inland.24 Crusts of algae, fungi, and lichens25 began to adorn seashores once bare of life. In plants today, the energy-harvesting pigment is called chlorophyll. Solar energy is used to split water into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen, releasing more energy to drive further chemical reactions. In the earliest days of the Earth, however, the raw materials were just as likely to have been minerals containing iron or sulfur. The best, however, was and remains the most abundant—water. But there was a catch. The photosynthesis of water produces as a waste product a colorless, odorless gas that burns anything it touches. This gas is one of the deadliest substances in the universe. Its name? Free oxygen, or O2.

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." Schade, dass es außer den schematischen Karten der Erdzeitalter keine Illustrationen gibt, die diese Vielfalt auch optisch verdeutlichen, obwohl die für ein Sachbuch durchaus bildhafte Schreibweise doch die Vorstellungskraft anregt. Wer als Kind mit Dinosauriern auf du und du war, ist hier klar im Vorteil. Der Anspruch, das zeigt schon der Titel, ist nicht, das endgültige Buch über die Geschichte des Lebens auf der Erde zu schreiben, sondern einen Abriss in für Laien verständlicher Form zu geben und eine Einordnung zu versuchen. Every time majority of flora and fauna gets wiped out (Five mass extinctions), life always reappeared and took a different direction in the evolutionary path. The story is the same with early life forms, or dinosaurs or proto mammals. The chapter about evolution of hominids is pretty interesting and made me realize how the human history is not even a chapter but a mere footnote in the grand book of life on earth.

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 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."

definitely feels rushed at several chapters (especially chapter 3, 4), with a lot of facts that fit well into the bigger picture, but many of those facts are well forgotten. Another amazing early vertebrate adaptation was the development of air sacs, which first arose in dinosaurs and are still found in birds. This adaptation, which enabled a one-way system of air flow, also doubled as an efficient cooling system for internal organs. To the earliest life, which had evolved in an ocean and beneath an atmosphere essentially without free oxygen, it spelled environmental catastrophe. 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. But oxygen is so potent a force that even a trace spelled disaster to life that had evolved in its absence. These whiffs of oxygen caused the first of many mass extinctions in the Earth’s history, as generation upon generation of living things were burned alive. The signs are already there for those willing to see them. When the habitat becomes degraded such that there are fewer resources to go around; when fertility starts to decline; when the birth rate sinks below the death rate; and when genetic resources are limited—the only way is down. The question is “How fast?”As forests became more and more fragmented owing to climate changes linked to continental drift, primates started to venture into the open grasslands, from where the earliest hominins arose 7 million years ago. Their bipedal stance, notes Gee, made them “almost preternaturally maneuverable.” I can honestly say this book terrified me yet gave me hope at the same time. I know you're probably thinking, really? It's a book about the history of the earth, what exactly are you terrified about? Well, for one, it's truly astounding just how many times the earth has nearly wiped out all life in its existence.