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

Fortey, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375401199 ISBN 13: 9780375401190

Publisher: Knopf, 1998

Synopsis

By one of Britain's most gifted scientists: a magnificently daring and compulsively readable account of life on Earth (from the "big bang" to the advent of man), based entirely on the most original of all sources--the evidence of fossils.
With excitement and driving intelligence, Richard Fortey guides us from the barren globe spinning in space, through the very earliest signs of life in the sulphurous hot springs and volcanic vents of the young planet, the appearance of cells, the slow creation of an atmosphere and the evolution of myriad forms of plants and animals that could then be sustained, including the magnificent era of the dinosaurs, and on to the last moment before the debut of Homo sapiens.
Ranging across multiple scientific disciplines, explicating in wonderfully clear and refreshing prose their findings and arguments--about the origins of life, the causes of species extinctions and the first appearance of man--Fortey weaves this history out of the most delicate traceries left in rock, stone and earth. He also explains how, on each aspect of nature and life, scientists have reached the understanding we have today, who made the key discoveries, who their opponents were and why certain ideas won.
Brimful of wit, fascinating personal experience and high scholarship, this book may well be our best introduction yet to the complex history of life on Earth.


A Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection   With 32 pages of photographs

About this title

About the Author

Richard Fortey is a senior palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London. He is the author of several books, including Fossils: A Key to the Past and The Hidden Landscape, which was named the Natural World Book of the Year in 1993. In 1997 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

From the Back Cover

Praise from England for Richard Fortey's Life

"Life is a great joy to read . . . Fortey's narrative jumps from an obscure primeval mollusc to a piece of poetry, to an intellectual fashion; from an arid Australian desert to a quick walk in Charles Darwin's garden and then back to the strange histories that are written in rocks . . .
He writes powerfully and simply, and is, it seems, almost overwhelmed with a sense of beauty and intellectual excitement, and never-ending discovery."
--Minette Marrin, Literary Review

"Fortey leads us in a dance through time that is enthralling . . . I will turn to this book again and again for its richness of detail. Its breadth and readability are complemented by the cohesiveness of its narrative, a happy characteristic lacking in nearly all current scientific
writing . . . I strongly recommend you read this book."
--Lynn Margulis, Times Higher Education Supplement

"The tale of the evolution of animals and plants of all shapes and sizes, their invasion of land, continental drift, mass extinctions, and the rise of mammals, including humans . . . Fortey says that Darwin's view of the natural world informs his narrative as pervasively as grammar does a novel. His prose, like Darwin's, is spare, confident, and unadorned. As his impressive synthesis of evolution unfolds, a distant world is brought to life."
--The Economist

"This marvellous book works as a biography of all of us (and, as he points out, all cauliflowers too) by an opinionated biographer whose eye for detail and analogy across a huge range of reference uncovers all kinds of intelligible unity for the reader."
--Francis Spufford, Evening Standard

From the Inside Flap

By one of Britain's most gifted scientists: a magnificently daring and compulsively readable account of life on Earth (from the "big bang" to the advent of man), based entirely on the most original of all sources--the evidence of fossils.<br>With excitement and driving intelligence, Richard Fortey guides us from the barren globe spinning in space, through the very earliest signs of life in the sulphurous hot springs and volcanic vents of the young planet, the appearance of cells, the slow creation of an atmosphere and the evolution of myriad forms of plants and animals that could then be sustained, including the magnificent era of the dinosaurs, and on to the last moment before the debut of Homo sapiens.<br>Ranging across multiple scientific disciplines, explicating in wonderfully clear and refreshing prose their findings and arguments--about the origins of life, the causes of species extinctions and the first appearance of man--Fortey weaves this history out of the most delicate traceries left in rock, stone and earth. He also explains how, on each aspect of nature and life, scientists have reached the understanding we have today, who made the key discoveries, who their opponents were and why certain ideas won. <br>Brimful of wit, fascinating personal experience and high scholarship, this book may well be our best introduction yet to the complex history of life on Earth.<br><br><br>A Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection With 32 pages of photographs

Reviews

"The narrative of life requires a scale of thousands to millions of years, acting over a drama of more than 3,000 million years." It is a grand narrative, told grandly by Fortey, a senior paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Drawing on a great breadth of knowledge, he flavors the narrative with illuminating and often surprising analogies and quotations from the likes of Pope, Swift and Yeats. His story takes life from the first single-celled organisms to prehistoric humans--over "the vast tract of time after the Sun blazed into heat ... and before humans started making pots, building ceremonial centres, and recording the details of their daily transactions on pottery slabs."

The story of the creatures great and small who have graced the planet then and now, and of the scientists who have studied them, marvelously told by a senior paleontologist at London's Natural History Museum. No armchair analyst, Fortey punctuates his narrative with vivid personal accounts of his own experiences, beginning as a Cambridge undergraduate when he collected fossil trilobites along a fierce and windswept shore in Spitzbergen. What follows are richly detailed chapters that chronicle the emergence of algae and other one-cell plants that populated the oceans, creating a groundswell of nutrients and sediments vital to life at all successive stages. He is quick to acknowledge the role of chance, the possibility that later life forms might have been completely different had one or another earlier organism held sway. He also neatly dispatches common errors, such as Hoyles panspermia theory. He deals with human origins with equal finesse, giving credit to important research, putting past controversies about evolution into cultural context, and reminding us that new discoveries may rewrite ideas about human evolution yet again. Forteys narrative offers a number of wonderful set-pieces, including his description of the explosion of new life forms during the Cambrian era. And he nicely mingles small, telling details with a clear overview, as in his description of the fossil record in the British county of Devon, whose lake and mountain basin deposits offer ``a kind of temporal schizophrenia'' (which defines the ``Devonian'' period when life moved landward). ``There is sight and insight,'' Fortey comments admiringly about a colleague at one point. The same can be said about Fortey himself. His wonderful description of the emergence and proliferation of life on earth combines the vision of a scientist with an intimate knowledge of the fossil record with the insight of a scholar for masterful interpretation. (24 pages photos, not seen) (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The diversity of Earth's evolutionary history are preserved in its stones. Fortney enlivens this broad paleontological survey with anecdotes from his own fossil-hunting expeditions.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Fortey, senior paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, writes about time and the origins and evolution of life with a sure sense of narrative structure and felicitous metaphoric finesse. He begins with a personal account of an Arctic expedition he participated in during the late 1960s and forges a connection between an individual life and life-at-large. This link allows him the freedom to wax poetic and philosophical and to spice his lucid and energetically visualized chronicle of life's elaboration with anecdotes both poignant and humorous. He begins by marveling over the earth's "stone diary," the rich yet spotty fossil record of the progression from the simplest and smallest of organisms to the largest and most complex, then launches into a vivid imagining of life's beginning, which took place, not in the quiet, "small pond" Darwin envisioned, but rather in "something approximating the medieval idea of Hell." He praises bacteria for their intrinsic role in a world "full of symbiosis," then muses over the magic of chance that sparked photosynthesis, the process essential to the existence of animals as well as plants. The higher Fortey climbs up the spiraling ladder of life, the more obvious the interconnectedness of all life-forms becomes and the more spellbound his readers grow, sharing his awe in the earth's beauty and complexity. Donna Seaman

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

   Salterella dodged between the icebergs. While the small boat bucked and tossed, I hung over its side, peering down into the clear Arctic waters. I had not known that there could be such density of life. This frigid sea was a speckled mass of organisms. Tiny copepod crustaceans, looking like so many animated peas, beat their way in their thousands through the surface waters, feeding on plankton that I knew must be there, but which could not be seen without a microscope. There were jellyfish of every size: white, gently pulsing discs as delicate as spun glass; small pink barrage balloons decked with beating cilia, which appeared to be solid--but became gelatinous and impalpable if grasped from the water; an occasional orange monster with tentacles that promised evil stings for fish or mammal. They drifted in their millions, swirling and beating against the dumb tides, concealing purpose in contractions as instinctive as breathing, like protoplasmic lungs dilating and constricting in primitive obedience to the prompting of the currents. Behind the nearest iceberg arctic terns beat and hung in the air, peering down as I was, but with so much more precision, then darting to retrieve some living morsel from the sea. The ice floes were stained pink with their droppings.

   Salterella was tackling a stretch of sea, Hinlopenstretet, between the islands of Spitsbergen and Nordauslandet far beyond the Arctic Circle at 80 degrees north. Ice floes had melted in the summer thaw, sculpted by the vagaries of weather into plates or crags, or simulacra of giants. On the waterline they were notched deeply by the sea, lapped by insistent waves, and just occasionally one would teeter into instability, cracking and keeling over with a great resigned splash which sent waves to make our small boat buck and grind against the smaller fragments of ice. It was true: the greater part of an ice floe was always beneath the sea, and you approached too close at your peril. If you looked down, you could see the bluish mass curving down into the deeps, while jellyfish skimmed hidden protuberances with impunity. Little Salterella sought the spaces between the floes. Her wooden construction was designed to cope with ice. Winds herded floes into clots that could become almost impenetrable. Then, suddenly, patches of clear water would allow rapid progress, and the bleat of the motor sent little auks and black guillemots fluttering low across the sea to plunder the rich waters elsewhere. In the distance a mysterious coastline lay low on the horizon. Glaciers ran straight down to the sea. Ice cliffs groaned or barked to signal the inexorable creep of sheets of ancient ice. The boat seemed like an interloper.

   I was twenty-one and on my first expedition. Cambridge University had a tradition of sending young geologists to Spitsbergen. For a young naturalist it was very heaven. Here there were birds on every side that had only existed as pictures in bird books. The sea, the profligate sea, was a shimmering textbook of zoology. There seemed nothing to interfere with the joy of observation, no end to knowledge, no possibility that any discovery should be less than astounding.

   The boat comprised two crew and several scientists, including myself and Geoff. We had already suffered in the old whaling vessel which had carried us from Norway, a switchback ride across the Barents Sea all the way to Spitsbergen. Few on board could face the whale-meat stew. Our expedition leader was the worst sailor of all, having disappeared below decks just after leaving the Norwegian port of Boda, and only reappearing a week later when we reached the base at Longyearbyen.

   Geoff and I were to live together for weeks in a small tent, watching our beards grow from speckled patches to whiskers worthy of a Victorian paterfamilias. Together, we were in search of ancient fossils. An expedition from the previous year had stopped off to replenish their water supplies from a melt stream running off the great glacier of Valhallfonna in this remote and unwelcoming northern part of the archipelago. To everyone's surprise, the crew had picked up lumps of dark limestone on the beach that teemed with fossils: trilobites and brachiopods and many unrecognizable things besides. Nobody knew that fossil remains of such animals existed in this part of Spitsbergen. It was all completely new. But there had been no time to investigate that year because the Arctic night was closing in. Perpetual dusk was soon replaced by perpetual night. The few lumps of rock were brought back to Cambridge, and were studied by the great Professor Whittington, who pronounced them very interesting. Thus it was that two students came to be sitting side by side on Salterella looking at swarming jellyfish, and in such serendipitous ways lives are decided. It was 1967. "All You Need Is Love" was top of the hit parade, and stayed there for the whole expedition.

   Expeditions are curious things. They last for weeks or sometimes months, during which time they acquire a life of their own, a structure, like a drama. Members of the expedition get to play roles, and the most curious aspect of all is that it is impossible to predict in advance quite what those roles will be. People have to get on together; there is simply no choice. Even pathological personalities have to survive the whole affair. There is, of course, the leader--well, there has to be--who has managed many of these things before. Of an evening, he recounts tales of blizzards past that make the present one seem tame. He knows stories of Nordenskjold and the other great men, who did it all with pemmican and huskies. He legitimizes the whole experience by accommodating the current namby-pamby lot within a great tradition. If you follow in the footsteps of giants, don't you walk taller yourself?

   Then there is the expedition joker. He is not necessarily the wittiest man in the party, but he has a knack of igniting humour. Every member of the expedition likes to have him around in the evening. He has a generous gift of appreciating the humour of others, puffing up a glancing remark into hilarity, keeping flagging conversations alive, massaging morale. It is impossible to recall the humour that keeps an expedition afloat. It is concocted by the joker out of nothing and vanishes once more into nothing, but while it is there it seems to be the best thing in the world. The expedition's Practical Man knows how to fix a paraffin stove, or an engine. He can splice a broken guy rope. He can take out splinters, make splints; he can build machines from bits of wire and bottle tops. He is a wonder, as his ham-fisted friends who rely on him never tire of reiterating. I dare say that in ordinary life in suburbia Practical Man may seem a bit of a dullard, but when the outboard engine is failing among the ice floes he has his moment of glory. My own role, a modest one, was that of chef. Our food was nearly all dried: peas, onions, potatoes, rice, oats. Worst of all was the meat bar, 200 grams of dried protein which had to be reconstituted with hot water and which stayed insipid no matter what ingredients you added. Hours of ingenuity went into spinning these ingredients into something spectacular. I tried meat balls, curry, shepherd's pie, patties, pasties and pastries. I bashed them flat, or stuffed them with onion and peas. I married meat bars with oats. I was left undisturbed to follow my arcane trade, which was good news for one incapable of peering at an engine without exhibiting patent confusion. While Practical Man did his vital stuff, the leader led, and the joker cheered up the bystanders, the cook could be quietly abandoned to try to fabricate an onion souffle with powdered milk, flour, yeast extract and dried shallots.

   The oddest role in the expedition is that of the scapegoat. His function is to take the blame for everything that goes wrong. A lost wrench? The scapegoat had it last. A leaking tent? You know who damaged the lining. Unexpected bad weather? Whose turn was it to check the weather forecast? Poor scapegoat. Unlike Practical Man, who can usually be identified in advance, there is no telling who will finish up as scapegoat. However, scapegoats have one thing in common: they never realize they are the scapegoat. They tend to be bumptious and self-confident types, convinced equally of their rectitude and their popularity. The scapegoat's function is, however, vital. He personifies mischance. Rather than curse fate, or wonder whether some god is playing tricks on a despised humanity, the scapegoat domesticates and humanizes misfortune. With the scapegoat there, nothing really bad can happen. And if the choice of scapegoat is as it should be, even he is unaware of the role he is playing. Peter enjoyed his expedition to Spitsbergen enormously, unaware that he was being blamed for everything from metal fatigue to blizzards. In this way an expedition defines its members. The identification of parts ensures the success of the whole, a formal intimacy is established, and the job gets done.

    Geoff and I were eventually dropped off on to the shore of Hinlopenstretet, just the two of us, leaving behind our expedition roles, to find the fossils that had excited the previous year's collectors. It did not take long. In a couple of minutes there was a trilobite showing up all black on a white limestone slab. A few moments later there was another, and then another. The place was prolific! We danced around picking up any piece of rock that attracted our attention. Every rock fragment seemed to have something. This was the delight that animated Howard Carter at the tomb of King Tutankhamun. Nobody had ever seen these creatures before. Our eyes were the first to peer at the primeval rocks, to understand something of the ancient cargo they bore, to wonder at the preservation of extinct creatures on a bleak Arctic shore. In that harsh place there must have been something oddly incongruous about the...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375401199
• ISBN 13: 9780375401190
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368