Islands in the Cosmos: The Evolution of Life on Land

by Dale A. Russell

How is it that we came to be here? The search for answers to that question has preoccupied humans for millennia. Scientists have sought clues in the genes of living things, in the physical environments of Earth from mountaintops to the depths of the ocean, in the chemistry of this world and those nearby, in the tiniest particles of matter, and in the deepest reaches of space. In Islands of the Cosmos, Dale A. Russell traces a path from the dawn of the universe to speculations about our future on this planet. He centers his story on the physical and biological processes in evolution, which interact to favor more successful, and eliminate less successful, forms of life. Marvelously, these processes reveal latent possibilities in life's basic structure, and propel a major evolutionary theme: the increasing proficiency of biological function. It remains to be seen whether the human form can survive the dynamic processes that brought it into existence. Yet the emergence of the ability to acquire knowledge from experience, to optimize behavior, to conceptualize, to distinguish "good" from "bad" behavior all hint at an evolutionary outcome that science is only beginning to understand.

Genres: Biology

481 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 23, 2009

Reviews

[Gendou · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is a perfect example of sophisticated nonsense. It's written entirely in the passive voice. The author makes salubrious use of his extensive vocabulary to camouflage the paucity of content. In other words, the book is bullshit. Russell writes like a total phoney. He even admits in the very beginning he takes a "controversial" perspective. This is code for fringe views and pseudoscience. It's really hard to understand what is the thesis of the book. He seems to think humans are at the apex of the evolutionary ladder. Which is bullshit. He seems to think information travels backwards in time because quantum mechanics and hand waving. The worst part about this book is that every point is argued from a soft rhetoric so common in philosophy but so useless in a scientific discipline such as evolutionary biology. Conclusions are drawn from false analogies, hasty generalizations, and other such fallacies instead of from reason. Don't read this book unless you want to have a laugh at a childish aping of learned, scientific discussion.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Deep History told in a concise, relatively engaging way (it is a book of science after-all so it’s mostly a long essay to propose and back-up a rather simple – even obvious – but also somewhat heretical hypothesis), with short chapters making the abundance of information easier to digest. I like the author’s style; he doesn’t dumb it down and builds his case with a very thorough foundation in explaining the intricacies of Earth’s amazing (probably too amazing for coincidence) evolution.

And that’s the heretical part in a nutshell, that Life evolves in unequal ways across time and space (for instance life evolving in competition/cooperation with other life forms leads to an accelerated pace while life evolving in natural selection to physical environmental pressures/conditions evolves at steady rates). The implication is that Life is self-organizing and self-generating (and thus not "random"). Personally, I find it refreshing to have a reputable scientist exploring this line of thinking, as science without it is increasingly intellectually (and spiritually) stunted. I’m a little surprised that it hasn’t been done more, but perhaps Russell’s expertise in the long time frames of paleontology made these creative leaps more likely, anyways, good for him. Now I’m intrigued to research how well his ideas were received, and if he was blacklisted within his field as a result.