Customer Reviews

Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

A book which attempts to cover four billion years in less than four hundred pages is going to have to be a survey aimed at the general reader. If you like serious scientific tomes which discourage humour and a bit of artistic license in written presentations-- this is not for you. Fortney's book is an engaging and enjoyable read that gives insight into the development of life on earth and the scientific field of paleontology. His gifts for constructing an accessible and often charming narrative, quoting poets and bards, noting geniuses and quacks, is a great tribute to English educational system-- which here has developed a devoted scientific mind, obviously entranced by his subject matter, who can express himself with elegance, comprehension, wit and some self deprecation, a refreshing attribute for a scientist.

It is refreshing to read a book like this: a scientific book for the layman, but one that does not take for granted that its readers are ignorant or stupid. This is not a book for scientists or specialists, but for ordinary people, scientifically literate but only to some degree, who are curious about about the origin and evolution of Life, who ever wondered how was Earth like in the first years of its history, and in later periods, when our planet was still an alien place. This book does just that, taking us to sweltering Carboniferous forests, to oceans teeming with life and deserted land, to landscapes inhabited by strange animals, the like of which exist no more. It explains us how, step by tiny step, life changed the face of the Earth. I was not bothered by the personal references or apparent digressions; all these served as examples to illustrate different points. I was indeed bothered however by the lack of charts. For example, an chart illustrating the different geological eras would have been useful: not all of us know by heart the exact order of the geological periods, and sometimes it is easy to get lost. I ended up copying such a chart from an encyclopedia and keeping the slip of paper inside the book, for reference. It would also have been interesting to have charts (like the cladistic charts of which there are some examples), illustrating how different species are related.

The title of this book, "Life: A natural history of four billion years of life on Earth," was a great selling point for me. As an invertebrate zoologist I have an ongoing interest in learning more about where life came from, how it is interrelated, and how and when the diversity of life around us came into being. Of course, no one has definitive explanations for those kinds of topics, but I was looking forward to reading Fortey's views on the natural history of life.

As I began reading I soon became disillusioned with Fortey's approach. If he wanted to write his autobiography, wedged in here and there among his main topic, why in the world didn't he tip off the reader by having a better subtitle? I did press on and complete the book, and found it to have meaningful content and thought-provoking ideas, but after all was said and done I was left wanting.

Fortey deserves commendation for undertaking such a massive topic, in 322pp no less! As I read through his account in search of information that would provide me with a clue to the framework he uses to understand the natural history of life on earth, I felt like I hit speed bump after speed bump in the form of occasionally interesting, but often meaningless, diversions. I'm sorry, but I could really care less, for example, what a hotel traditionally frequented by paleontologists serves for breakfast, or Fortey's personal reflections on Australian ponds where "the jolly swagman rested his tuckerbag"!

Don't get me wrong, those are wonderful literary side steps in this largely scientific work, but for me they were only distractions rather than useful contributions to the work.

Fortey does do a great job in some areas...for example, he does a super job of tying together plate tectonics and continent formations, break-ups, and movements as they affect the history of life. He also does a grand job of telling the basics of what kinds of things one can learn about life and the state of the earth from the fossil and other geologic records. But even so, there is too little meat here for the scientist, and there is too little support in the form of graphs, illustrations, etc., to allow most non-professionals to keep up with what's happening. That point is evidenced by the fact that Fortey introduces many little-known, though important, animals by their scientific names, but provides no supporting illustrations to let the reader know or confirm what Fortey is talking about.

There are a few chapters that, in my opinion, Fortey got "right." Those are the chapters he said that he was loathe to write -- the chapters about dinosaurs. Fortey did a masterful job of describing this period of history, as well as the underlying major controversies and players behind those controversies. He did not accomplish those things in most of the other sections of the book.

To sum things up, Fortey did what a water color painter, Terry Madden, tells his students to do -- that is, to use the largest brush you can manage. Fortey used a large brush supported by limited detail work here and there -- not enough detail to make this book a must have for professionals, and too little on the explanation side to make this an essential book for the non-professional.

If you are looking for a great book that provides a synopsis on the natural history of life on earth, there are better offerings. If you are looking for autobiographical accounts of scientists or works where the author likes to sidestep and let you in on his daydreams and poetic reflections, this book may suffice for you.

It seems to me, though, that Fortey failed to identify his audience, as well as his ultimate goal in writing the book. There are good parts, and disappointments.

Failing to find the middle ground resulted in what was, for me, only about a 3-star experience.

Alan Holyoak, Dept of Biology, Manchester College, IN

It's hard to imagine a more ambitious project than writing a natural history of the first four billion years of life on earth. It's even harder to imagine writing it for the interested layperson without making too many oversimplifications or leaving out too much important detail in a book with just over 300 pages. Richard Fortey has risen to the occasion though, and in the process has created a book that's engaging and highly worth reading.

You might expect a book like this to be mechanistic, starting at the beginning and cranking by rote through the sequence of events that constitute the earth's history. Fortey doesn't do this. In a cordial and poetic style he first introduces us to the real world of paleontology. A world of dirt, grime and fierce winds on forsaken beaches bordering forgotten islands of the far north. This is where Fortey began his carrier, and where he made a first mark in the study of extinct organisms from earth's ancient past. This first chapter is important because it reminds us that our knowledge of earth's history has come in fitful starts in which chance and luck have played a central roll. Only a fraction of all creatures leave fossilized remains, only a fraction of those are ever found, and even then they must be interpreted through the preconceptions of scientists. The miracle is that we know anything at all - but we do, and what a story it is.

Having introduced the working of paleontology, Fortey devotes the second chapter to the origin of the first life forms. This chapter is of necessity the most barren of all. We still don't understand the origin of life, though there have been remarkable strides in recent years. The author describes the central importance of carbon and the fact many carbon-based molecules necessary for life are found in extraterrestrial objects (but he does not advocate the idea that first life was extraterrestrial). He makes a strong point for the proposition that all life originated with a common ancestor.

Much of Fortey's discussions about first life discuss the roll that life played in creating our current environment. The atmosphere is literally a created thing, with the oxygen we breathe constituting a poisonous gas given off by the first organisms on earth. This makes creatures like the chemolithoautotrophic hyperthermophiles a little more understandable - first life evolved in an environment that we today would find very inhospitable - and vise versa.

From here the book pretty much follows in chronological order with the Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian and Carboniferous periods. The author explains how life first evolved in the seas, how it flourished, about extinction, and the eventual migration of life onto land. Fortey does not simply recite history, though. He has a style that brings these ancient animals and ecosystems to life. I particularly enjoyed his recollection of conodonts. Conodonts are tooth-like objects of calcium phosphate that were used for years as a type of natural chronometer. They belonged to an extinct aquatic animal. They changed as the animal evolved over time and their presence in sedimentary deposits thus enabled scientists to date the rocks in which they were found. The problem was, nobody knew what animal the conodonts belonged too. There was much speculation, and Fortey's telling of the story and its eventual resolution is typical of the way he brings the subject to life.

Through all the narrative Fortey does a reasonably good job of helping the reader understand that life did not march onward and upward along a directed path. This is a common misunderstanding, and one that chronological narratives often give. Life did not emerge from the seas and then rise to the air. Rather, like an expanding gas, life evolved to fill unoccupied niches. The simplest and oldest life forms still flourish, and if longevity is the measure by which life is accounted, then we are just upstarts with our few-million-year presence on earth.

There is, of course, the story of the dinosaurs. The neat twist offered by Fortey is to show how our understanding and perception of the dinosaurs has changed over time. He compares what we know of them today with how we perceived them years ago. I found this particularly interesting because I can recall as a little boy reading how dinosaurs were slow, had two brains (one in the head and one in the tail) and had to live in water to support their weight. Observing how our perceptions of dinosaurs have change so dramatically in my lifetime is a real-life dramatization of science at work.

The dinosaurs have changed our understanding of evolution as well. In times past dinosaurs were synonymous with failure to evolve and change - they disappeared because they were outmoded. Fortey explains how luck and chance are essential parts of the evolutionary process. The dinosaurs were superbly adapted animals. They are gone because of bad luck - a bolide from space - and we are here because some nondescript little mammals just happened to be lucky enough have the right equipment for surviving in the new environment. What had been good for survival changed in an instant, and changed the course of evolution.

The book ends with a chapter describing the search for our past and an epilogue on chance and evolution. This is a pretty brief chapter that summarizes the fossil evidence for human evolution and describes our earliest ancestors down to roughly the last ice age.

I truly enjoyed reading this book. It is well written and it has a useful glossary and a very complete index. The style of writing is informative yet colorful and full of imagery. Written by someone with an obvious zest for life - "Life" is a top-caliber book and one you won't regret investing the time to read and savor.

Duwayne Anderson, February 22, 2000

It didn't take me very long to figure out that the author had left out of this otherwise engaging and enlightening book the one thing that would prove most helpful to its readers struggling to put this vast amount of information in context- a chart showing the names of the various eras and periods. (The copy I read came from the library, and I took the liberty of creating a chart of the chronology in Excel, cribbed from "What Evolution Is" by Ernst Mayr, and leaving a copy of it on page 1 for the next reader.) Compounding this difficulty is Mr. Fortey's relatively haphazard organization of the material and sparse leavening of information that helps place it in context. For example, at one point in the book, he references dates of 2.5 billion years, and suddenly the book jumps to the Cambrian era of roughly 850 million years ago, with no real attempt to impress that scale upon the reader.

The author almost deliberately seems to have wanted to avoid the burden of actually `educating' his audience, preferring instead to plop down next to him or her at some far-off pub and tell stories, leading a meandering tour of the best spots here and there. The tour is in chronological order, but never is the necessity of actually knowing the relative chronology foisted onto the reader. It almost feels as though to Dr. Fortey, `education' is a dirty word - too much the dull, plodding stuff of daily life and not much fun.

But I disagree with this approach - though this book was written for a non-professional audience, it is still, I presume, an audience that would like to feel they have learned something. Not being able to place most of the insights in this book into a context or framework undercut this goal and he compounded this error through a circumambulatory writing style, replete with cryptic-sounding creatures whose place in life's strata is fleshed out only sparsely. Additionally, though there are three sections of black and white photographs, there were a number of places where a simple diagram or some other graphic would have done wonders for my comprehension.

Nevertheless, through my frustration at this book's failings, I was able to glean some worthwhile insight from this book. And while no one would accuse Dr. Fortey of crafting clear, readable and professional prose, his words do allow his natural enthusiasm (and a bit of hubris) to show through. I was delighted at some of the windows which Dr. Fortey opens onto the methods and history of paleontology, and fascinated by his discussion of recent thinking on which creature first struck out onto the land after billions of years in the water. All in all, one could do worse, but as I am beginning to read "Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth" by Andrew Knoll, it is already clear to me that one could also do a good deal better.

While many books focus exclusively on dinosaurs (not that I don't love them to death mind you) they often fail to discuss those plants and animals that shared their world, as well as came before and after this mighty creatures. Fortey in a wonderful, informative, well-written, and highly readable book details the history of life on earth from its origin to the last ice age. He brings to light (and life) many topics not as well known to the popular follower of things paleontological, such as the discovery of diverse faunas in the late Precambrian, debates over the nature and importance of the Burgess Shale fauna, and issues over the origination of the first land vertebrates. He discusses in an authoritative but easily understood manner some of the lesser known but none the less important organims in earth's past, many of which are I weren't familiar with, such as graptolites and conodonts.

Fortey intersperses his wonderful text with personal ancedotes from his years in the field - he is an expert on all things trilobite - as well as asides from the history of paleonotology as a science. Not distracting, but fun to read and really show how paleontology exists as a field and a profession.

I found the book quite delightful and highly recommend it. I look forward to reading his book on trilobites, which I am sure is excellent as well. Fortey shows there is more to prehistoric life than dinosaurs (though he does cover them too), and what wonderful life that was.

Successfully melding personal adventure with good science and skilled narrative techniques,
Fortey's book compels attention. "An Unauthorized Biography" is a telling catch phrase
conveying the idea that paleontology is a dynamic science. New ideas emerge almost with
every fossil discovery and dogmatic thoughts have no place in the science. As a professional
paleontologist [ i almost said "practicing", but his approach is far to serious for that!]. he has
all the qualifications to relate this story. With the growing number of general level books on
the development of life being released recently, it's difficult to choose among them. This book
certainly ranks among the top choices.

Quite simply, this book is what it claims to be: a history of 3 500 million years of earth's plant
and animal inhabitants. Fortey achieves masterful balance between presenting general
themes with illustrative details. In one example, he shows the value of mites in soil
development and what their loss would mean to global environment. The unspoken message
about the use of pesticides is a silent outcry for us to recognize such details.

Merged with the scientific work of many researchers are Fortey's accounts of his personal
experiences as a paleontologist. His scenario of the scientific conference makes compelling
reading for anyone wishing to grasp the underlying themes of scientific conflicts. Reaching
beyond his own work, he introduces us to many noteworthy colleagues. Few are criticized
for the value of their work, but their personal habits are subjected to pointed comments.
None of these are out of place; Fortey clearly mourns the loss of colleagues who would have
continued producing welcome results had they not been lost. On the other hand, some
contemporaries are given short shrift: although Graham Cairns Smith's proposal of clay
crystals providing the template for replicating molecules is well described, his name appears
neither in the text nor the brief bibliography.

Fortey's chapter on mammalian evolution among the finest in print. His awareness is global,
not limited to a few well-known sites. He ranges over both time and place with skilled ease,
giving the reader vivid pictures of scenarios in life's past. He's comfortable with geology,
biology and genetics. In particular, the Australian conditions over time are well drawn, an
exception to many of the books of this genre. Australia, of course, brings up the issue of
marsupials contrasted with placentals. The adaptive strengths of marsupials should have
given them a competitive edge with placental species, but remained mostly isolated on the
island continent.

Wow. It is a tomb, but I couldn't put it down! I am long out of college, and I don't buy textbooks. I read magazines for my science. Every once in a while, I'll purchase a summary book like this to pull the subject together in my mind. This book did an admirable job.

There really is alot to like about Richard Fortey's book about the first 4 billion years of life on Earth. His style is very readable. I liked his uses of metaphors and similies when describing what an ancient animal looked like or did. While not a textbook and definately a bit thin for the amount of time he covered, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in our ancient past.
And while I do recommend the book, there are a few minor problems here. The first one was the fact that there is no table to know what time period he is referring to. I had to find one online, which is not that hard to do. Also, near the end of the book, Mr. Fortey seemed to be more interested in the conflicts between the scientists than the history of life at times. I understand that our knowledge of fossils and the new ways of dating and analyzing fossils causes us to re-examine older finds, but he basically didn't outline any development of the dinosaurs throughout the Mesozoic. Instead, he focussed more on the experts' fights with one another. I thought he did that too with the mammals during the Cenozoic, although not as much.
But those are minor problems that should not cause anyone to shy away from this book. It is a good, well written book that any non-expert can read and understand.

Fortey pulls off a tour de force, compressing billions of years of development into quickly read pages. His explanations are great for the layman (such as myself) who lacks the biological underpinnings to fully understand the transformative process. I learned the context into which life grew and expanded, and I feel as if I gained quite a lot of insight into the periodic throes of disaster and explosion that have characterized the history of life.

My only real criticism is his treatment of the latest stages of life, which appear to be quite cursory compared to his true areas of interest: trilobites and other sea creatures. However, I forgive him this: it's hard to talk about human evolution concisely, but I need to read more about that area.

I also recommend Fortey's "Trilobite" as a great title, even if you knew nothing about the creatures. I didn't even know their name was literal: three lobes.