Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World - Hardcover

Godfrey-Smith, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374189935 ISBN 13: 9780374189938

Verlag: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

One of the Washington Post's 50 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024

The bestselling author of Other Minds shows how we and our ancestors have reinvented our planet.

If the history of the Earth were compressed down to a year, our species would arise in the last thirty minutes or so of the final hour. But life itself is not such a late arrival: It has existed on Earth for something like 3.7 billion years—most of our planet’s history and over a quarter of the age of the universe (as far as we can tell).

What have these organisms—bacteria, animals, plants, and the rest—done in all this time? In Living on Earth, the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith proposes a new way of understanding how the actions of living beings have shaped our planet. Where his acclaimed books Other Minds and Metazoa explored the riddle of how conscious minds came to exist on Earth, Living on Earth turns to what happens when we look at the mind from another side—when we come to see organisms as active causes, not merely as results of the evolutionary process. The planet we inhabit is significantly the work of other living beings, who shaped the environments that we ourselves later transformed.

To that end, Godfrey-Smith takes us on a grand tour of the history of life on earth. He visits Rwandan gorillas and Australian bowerbirds, returns to coral reefs and octopus dens, considers the impact of language and writing, and weighs the responsibilities our unique powers bring with them, as they relate to factory farming, habitat preservation, climate change, and the use of animals in experiments. Ranging from the seas to the forests, and from animate matter’s first appearance to its future extinction, Godfrey-Smith offers a novel picture of the course of life on Earth and how we might meet the challenges of our time, the Anthropocene.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Godfrey-Smith is the author of the bestselling Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, which has been published in more than twenty languages, and Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind. His other books include Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science and Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, which won the 2010 Lakatos Award. He is a professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0374189935
• ISBN 13: 9780374189938
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 322
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Macmillan Publishers International Limited; generalproductsafety@macmillan.com; ; (1st Floor, The Liffey Trust Centre, 117-126 Sheriff Street Upper, Dublin 1; Dublin; Irland