History of Life

by Richard Cowen

This text is designed for students and anyone else with an interest in the history of life on our planet. The author describes the biological evolution of Earth’s organisms, and reconstructs their adaptations to the life they led, and the ecology and environment in which they functioned. On the grand scale, Earth is a constantly changing planet, continually presenting organisms with challenges. Changing geography, climate, atmosphere, oceanic and land environments set a stage in which organisms interact with their environments and one another, with evolutionary change an inevitable result. The organisms themselves in turn can change global environments: oxygen in our atmosphere is all produced by photosynthesis, for example. The interplay between a changing Earth and its evolving organisms is the underlying theme of the book.
 
The book has a dedicated website which explores additional enriching information and discussion, and provides or points to the art for the book and many other images useful for teaching. See: .

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, History, Biology, Evolution

324 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1975

Reviews

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loving it, right from the preface which talks about how we decide what we know in science:

I’ve suggested some of my own. You can accept these or not, as you wish. The question you face is that of a jury member: is this idea sound “beyond all reasonable doubt?” If you don’t accept an explanation for an event, you can leave it as an abominable mystery, with no explanation at all, or you can suggest a better explanation yourself.
There is one caution, however. No-one is allowed to dream up any old explanation for past events. A scientific suggestion (a hypothesis) has to fit the available evidence, and it has to fit with the laws of physics and chemistry, and with the principles of biology, ecology, and engineering that have been pieced together over the past 200 years of scientific investigation.
There’s yet another wrinkle. A jury decides on a case, once and for all, with the evidence available. But in science, the jury is always out, and new evidence comes in all the time. You may have to change a verdict—without regret, because you made the best (wrong) decision you could based on the old evidence. Some of the ideas in the earlier editions are wrong, and you won’t find them here; you’ll find better ones. Sometimes the new answer is more complex, sometimes it is simpler. Always, however, the new idea fits the evidence better. That’s simply the way science works: not on belief, not on emotional clinging to a favorite idea (even if it is your own), but on evidence.
I never expect to be able to write the final solution to the major questions about the history of life, but I do expect to be able to provide better answers this year than I could last year. If my lectures are the same this year as they were last year, then something is wrong with our science, or something is wrong with me. Paleontology is exciting because it is advancing so quickly.

[Diane Wheat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book. There are many good illustrative pictures included. The author is thorough in describing the creatures that lived on this planet long ago. Good introductory book. Now that I have a good base of knowledge I’d like to find more in depth books about the different periods in earths history.

[Codrin]

This text is designed for students and anyone else with an interest in the history of life on our planet. The author describes the biological evolution of Earth’s organisms, and reconstructs their adaptations to the life they led, and the ecology and environment in which they functioned. On the grand scale, Earth is a constantly changing planet, continually presenting organisms with challenges. Changing geography, climate, atmosphere, oceanic and land environments set a stage in which organisms interact with their environments and one another, with evolutionary change an inevitable result. The organisms themselves in turn can change global environments: oxygen in our atmosphere is all produced by photosynthesis, for example. The interplay between a changing Earth and its evolving organisms is the underlying theme of the book.



The book has a dedicated website which explores additional enriching information and discussion, and provides or points to the art for the book and many other images useful for teaching. See: www.wiley.com/go/cowen/historyoflife.

**

[Usfromdk · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a way this is one of the books I've been looking for for at least a few years. What I mean by this is not that I knew the title of the book and that I had a difficult time finding a copy of the book; rather, I wanted to read a great book about the topics covered in this book, and a book like this one was precisely the sort of book I was hoping to find.

I was slightly worried at the beginning of this book that the coverage would be too superficial and that it would be 'too popular-science-y' for my taste. I quickly realized that that was not the case. Don't be deceived by the relatively low page count; this book is quite dense and it has a lot of content, and most of that content is simply great.

In short, this is a wonderful book about the history of life on Earth, and I highly recommend it.