Leon Vlieger in The Inquisitive Biologist:
In 2016, scuba-diving philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith made a huge splash with his book Other Minds in which he explored the evolutionary origins of a mind quite unlike ours, that of the octopus. In 2020, he followed this up with the altogether more cerebral Metazoa in which he explored the evolution of animal minds more broadly. I reviewed both books favourably. Now, another four years later, Living on Earth is presented retrospectively as the conclusion to this trilogy exploring the origins of intelligence. In a book that is never less than thoughtful, Godfrey-Smith examines how life shapes, and has been shaped by, its environment.
Godfrey-Smith tackles the above theme in three parts. Before delving in, his first chapter provides an additional evocative angle on what he wants to examine: “The history of life is not just a series of new creatures appearing on the stage; the new arrivals change the stage itself” (pp. 6–7). Through their actions, organisms modify their environment and, in more formal terms, he considers “organisms as causes, rather than evolutionary products” (p. 7). To my surprise, despite the fascinating concept, Living on Earth did not impress me as much as the previous two books. In part, the bar has been put so high that I went in with elevated expectations; in part, it wanders quite widely into subjects that seem only tangentially related to its core theme.
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