2024 was a year in which I managed to read and review 38 books. What follows is my personal top 5 of the most impactful, most beautiful, and most thought-provoking books I read this year.

1. Jay Matternes: Paleoartist and Wildlife Painter

I instantly fell in love with Jay Matternes’s palaeoart when I encountered it in Visions of Lost Worlds. Science historian Richard Milner spent eight years on this fully authorised career retrospective by Abbeville Press, and it is full of mesmerising palaeo- and wildlife art by an underrecognized master of the genre. Read more…

2. Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life

I read this book as part of a still-ongoing review series. Author Jason Roberts writes an epic history of taxonomy across three centuries that charts the lives, works, and legacy of Linnaeus and Buffon. Published by Riverrun, it quickly became a personal favourite for introducing me to a new intellectual hero. Read more…

3. Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World

What a killer title. I was stoked the moment Profile Books announced this one. Fun, fascinating, and always with one eye firmly on the facts, conservation biologist and marine ecologist Joe Roman shows how animals shape ecosystems through their everyday activities. Read more…

4. Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death

Princeton University Press published this translation from the Spanish original by philosopher Susana Monsó where she provides an exceedingly interesting take on how animals understand death. Playing Possum manages to be both accessible to a general audience and relevant to specialists by showing why comparative thanatology still has a whole lot of growing up to do. Read more…

5. Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication

Zoologist Arik Kershenbaum joins Viking Books to deliver Why Animals Talk: a highly stimulating and thought-provoking exercise in decentering the human experience and trying to understand animals on their terms. Read more…

In the category “also-ran”, honorary mention goes to Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will and Alfie & Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe. I would have loved to include these deeply impressive books as well, except that they were technically published in 2023. If you are looking for more recommendations, do check out my earlier top 5s or browse the archive which lists all reviews.

Finally, some announcements. First, I realise the total number of books read this year is the lowest it has ever been. It is not that I am losing interest, but simply that the same processes of intensification I mentioned last year are still in effect. I am spending more time with each book, taking more notes, doing more background research, drawing on more accumulated knowledge, and writing longer reviews. Second, I intend to continue doing more two- and three-parters and go back to relevant earlier books when touching on certain topics. I hope readers are enjoying the digressions into yesteryear’s books. Once I am finally in control of my to-be-read pile, I hope to feature the occasional classic from decades ago that I keep coming across and have since acquired. Third, you might have noticed that I have abandoned certain social media platforms: their business tactics and management were becoming insufferable. I am really enjoying the crowd on Mastodon, so find me there or sign up here to get email notifications of every new review. I have also opened a Ko-fi account and would like to once again thank the readers who made some very generous donations there: you know who you are. Lastly, I would love to have your feedback! This blog has been running for over seven years now and I am only a few posts away from review #500. I am doing a fair amount of maintenance on older reviews, cleaning up broken links and streamlining the layout I have settled on. I have toyed with ideas such as audio versions of reviews, author interviews, or a newsletter. What would you like to see more or less of?

This is the second of a three-part review on the history of taxonomy. Having just read Gunnar Broberg’s biography of Linnaeus, I now turn to Every Living Thing. Linnaeus was not the only seventeenth-century scholar trying to get to grips with life’s diversity; French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (Buffon hereafter) was another. Though the two men never met, their ideas did. Author Jason Roberts provides a biography of Linnaeus and Buffon, writing an epic history of their work and intellectual legacy. It has quickly become one of my favourite books this year for introducing me to a new scientific hero.

Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life, written by Jason Roberts, published by Riverrun (a Quercus Books imprint) in April 2024 (hardback, 411 pages)

Every Living Thing is divided into three parts and 29 fairly short chapters. In the first two parts, Roberts charts the lives and works of Linnaeus and Buffon, alternating between the two as he goes. Having just finished Broberg’s Linnaeus biography, I could not resist immediately checking his reference section: The Man Who Organized Nature is not among them, though he has consulted two of Broberg’s other works. The timing of this checks out though. Broberg’s book was published in the USA in July 2023 while Roberts’s appeared in April 2024; likely Every Living Thing was already in production when Broberg’s book appeared. Though Roberts has not accessed the Swedish sources that Broberg was able to read, he has consulted several of the Linnaeus biographies Broberg recommended, including more “recent” ones such as Rausing-Koerner’s 1999 Linnaeus: Nature and Nation and Blunt’s 2001 Linnaeus: The Compleat Naturalist. Roberts’s coverage of Linnaeus follows the major beats of his life but leaves out much of the extraneous detail that Broberg provided, focusing on his taxonomical ideas. He also gives more context and helps readers by inserting tangents to explain historical and biological concepts.

It quickly becomes apparent that Broberg was respectful, even mild, just reporting the facts of Linnaeus’s life but rarely passing judgment. Roberts has no such reservations, calling him out for arrogantly inserting “vast exaggeration [and] sheer fiction” (p. 76) into his Lapland travel account, denying his daughters an education “to a degree unusual even by the misogynistic standards of the day” (p. 193), and imposing with “monumental self-assurance” (p. 153) his binomial system on botany. More so than Broberg, he covers the students Linnaeus “with characteristic immodesty” (p. 135) called his apostles who were sent on collecting expeditions to uncharted parts of the world with often fatal outcomes. True, Roberts adds, they went willingly and were not the only ones to do so at the time, but “the first wave of Linnaeus’s apostles produced an extraordinary number of harsh lessons, and cautionary tales” (p. 168). Roberts particularly holds Linnaeus’s feet to the fire regarding his scientific racism, allowing me to return to the pin I put in my last review. “Later apologists have attempted to absolve Linnaeus of racism” (p. 180), but not Roberts. When in the tenth edition of Systema Naturae Linnaeus added prejudiced descriptions to his previous four categories of humans, it was “a spectacular act of ignorance masquerading as savantry” (p. 181). Sure, as The Myth of Race also documented, Blumenbach later added Caucasians to the list and declared them superior while Cuvier amplified the message, but make no mistake, Roberts writes, modern race science “has a genealogy that can be traced directly to the pages of Systema Naturae” (p. 181).

“Broberg was respectful, even mild, just reporting the facts of Linnaeus’s life but rarely passing judgment. Roberts has no such reservations.”

In contrast, Buffon (1707–1788) emerges from this book in a far more positive light. For background, he inherited a fortune at age 10 and by 1739 was nominated as intendant of the Jardin du Roi, gaining both the ear and the financial support of King Louis XV^[1]. That was vital for the project that would dominate the rest of his life: Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière. Intended as an encyclopedia of all creation, he wrote 36 large and painstakingly detailed volumes, covering the mineral kingdom and part of the animal kingdom (the birds and quadrupeds). His handpicked successor Comte de Lacépède would write another eight.

Like Linnaeus, Buffon was a polymath and became captivated by life’s diversity, but that is where the resemblances end. I admit to knowing little about him before reading this book but, ye gods, he was a fascinating character! He was the morally more upstanding person of the two, vocally opposing slavery and treating the women who crossed his path as equals. At home, “Buffon designed a life of maximum efficiency” (p. 64), having his valet wake him up at 5 AM every day (even if it meant being dragged out of bed) for a strictly scheduled day of writing in his spartan room, with breaks for meals and some socializing. It was a lifestyle he would stick to for the next 50(!) years, delighting in his “rigorous cultivation of solitary focus” (p. 66).

As if that quirk was not enough to endear Buffon to me, his thinking was decades if not centuries ahead of his time. In his writings, he speculated about extinction, common descent and the evolution of species, the cellular basis of life, the finitude of natural resources, and an impending epoch of humans. Roberts provides relevant context to explain the rhetorical safeguards Buffon employed to sidestep royal and church censors, “insulating what he knew to be dangerous ideas by making them islands of text in a sea of general observations about ospreys and otters” (p. 198). Roberts is careful to avoid grand claims: Buffon might have speculated about, for example, the physical basis of inheritance, but it would be “overreach to claim that [he] had foreseen DNA and RNA” (p. 338). He also disentangles the “thicket of significant linguistic differences between Buffon’s era and ours” (p. 199), pointing out that e.g. evolution as we understand it had not yet been coined. Even so, Darwin admitted that Buffon’s ideas were “laughably like mine” (p. xi) and the Anthropocene Working Group was so struck by the parallels between their proposal and Buffon’s epoch of humans that they commissioned an English translation of his 1774 essay The Epochs of Nature.

“I admit to knowing little about [Buffon] before reading this book but, ye gods, he was a fascinating character!”

Of relevance to the history of taxonomy, and the leitmotif of this book, is the rivalry between the ideas of these two men. Roberts captures the contrast beautifully early on: “To Linnaeus’s mind, nature was a noun. All species remained as created during Genesis, representing an unchanging tableau. To Buffon, nature was a verb, a swirl of constant change” (p. 7). Linnaeus, like most naturalists at the time, believed in the fixity of species. Effectively an intellectual hangover from the biblical account of Genesis, the species we see today had always been there, unchanged since their creation: “the Maker had long since put away His tools and closed up His workshop” (p. 72). Our now-familiar concepts of evolution and extinction were basically blasphemy, implying that Creation was imperfect. As such, Linnaeus was convinced that the number of species was finite and cataloguing them was an achievable if time-consuming prospect; his adherents are also referred to here as systematists. Buffon went against the grain and was a complexist. He believed that species evolved and went extinct, even if he did not yet know how. Their differences reflected a deep philosophical divide. Linnaeus believed in absolute universal truths, in Aristotelian essences, with species being real entities. Buffon, in contrast, wrote how systems and methods were “the scaffolding of science, and not science itself” (p. 120), with Linnaeus “mistaking the scaffolding for the edifice” (p. 121). Systematics and species were useful concepts but also human constructs and thus inherently flawed.

Roberts’s biographical account in the first two parts is told with verve. What further elevated the book for me is that he leaves himself a comfortable 110 pages in part 3 to describe what happened next and what the relevance of their ideas is to us today. It is a satisfying way to conclude this book, also as some reviewers complained that Broberg omitted this from his Linnaeus biography. The grand arc that Roberts traces is that, after his death, Buffon’s ideas were quickly sidelined by Linnaeus’s adherents but over time have regained their significance. He takes you through the French Revolution and its aftermath, giving terribly interesting profiles of famous naturalists who embraced Buffon’s ideas to various degrees such as Geoffroy, Lamarck, Cuvier, and Agassiz. He also discusses Britain’s lukewarm reception and then slow acceptance of Linnaeus’s ideas, with his collections ending up in the hands of James Edward Smith who founded the Linnean Society of London in 1788. Simultaneously, Buffon influenced other Brits including Darwin and the remarkable Huxley family—both Thomas Henry Huxley (“Darwin’s Bulldog”) and his grandson Julian Huxley who lived through the rise of genetics.

“[Roberts] leaves himself a comfortable 110 pages […] to describe what happened next and what the relevance of their ideas is to us today. It is a satisfying way to conclude this book.”

Today, Linnaeus’s taxonomical hierarchy has started to creak under the sheer magnitude of the planet’s biodiversity and has increasingly been abandoned, leaving just binomial nomenclature and a hierarchy of categorical ranks. My next review of Ragan’s Kingdoms, Empires, & Domains examines one example of what it struggles with: how to deal with other high-level groupings such as corals, sponges, fungi, and microbes that are neither animal nor plant. Buffon’s observation, that life is like a web or network instead of a thread, seems more relevant than ever. Meanwhile, species concepts remain troublesome beasts, and some scholars propose we consider species “snapshots rather than static points“, which hews closer to Buffon’s idea they are “an entity of reason rather than a physical fact” (p. 352).

Though Roberts is not a science historian, he has done his homework, going back to source material wherever possible. He is not shy to judge both men by modern standards with Buffon emerging as the clear moral victor. In the absence of more recent books, Roberts has convinced me to seek out Jacques Roger’s 1997 biography. He leaves ample space to discuss the aftermath and modern relevance of their ideas, which is a welcome stroke of brilliance. If you are new to the history of taxonomy, I have no hesitation in recommending that you start here; Broberg’s book is a more advanced text on a more circumscribed topic that will make for good follow-up reading.

One final brief aside: some may wonder how this book compares to Rob Dunn’s 2009 book by the same name that also dealt with “Man’s Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life“. Having quickly perused it, it gives a broader history of taxonomy that is not focused on Linnaeus and Buffon (the latter is not even mentioned); includes modern figures such as Lynn Margulis, Carl Woese, and Terry Erwin; and also talks about e.g. marine biology and astrobiology. The two comfortably exist side by side.

1. ↑ Roberts seems to be mixing up his dates here, alternately referring to Louis XIV and XV. The former died in 1715 when Buffon was still a child.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

Every Living Thing

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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History will forever associate Charles Darwin with the theory of evolution, but the idea was in the air. Had not Darwin published his famous book, someone else would have likely snatched the prize. Husband-and-wife duo John and Mary Gribbin here examine the wider milieu in which Darwin operated and the many thinkers who preceded him. Given their previous collaborations, the first two parts of On the Origin of Evolution read like a well-oiled machine, but the book falters when they turn their eyes to the legacy of Darwin’s ideas.

On the Origin of Evolution: Tracing ‘Darwin’s Dangerous Idea’ from Aristotle to DNA, written by John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin, published in Europe by William Collins (a HarperCollins imprint) in November 2020 (hardback, 288 pages)

When you study the history of science, it seems there is just no way around Aristotle. In the context of this book, his legacy is the idea of the great chain of being: the notion that life can be ordered from simple to complex forms, with humans at the top as creation’s crowning glory. It was readily adopted by Christian thinkers and hamstrung evolutionary thinking for millennia.

Still, as the first third of this book shows, some people did ponder both man’s place in nature and the relationships between living beings. Liberally quoting from their writings, the authors introduce you to notable characters and their brilliant early flashes of insight. For example, Thomas Aquinas, writing in the 13th century, allowed for species to develop in their striving for perfection but rejected the idea of new ones arising after God’s act of creation. Fossils were long misunderstood, neither recognized as ancient nor as the remains of extinct creatures. I was therefore particularly fascinated by 17th-century British polymath Robert Hooke who may well have been one of the first to recognize fossils for what they were. His ideas on species formation and extinction seem prescient. In the 1770s, Lord Monboddo already argued that humans descended from apes. And yet, the dots were not connected into a bigger picture. Particular sticking points were extinction and the age of the Earth, a puzzle to which James Hutton and other geologists would later contribute much.

When the book gets to Darwin, the tempo slows right down and the middle third of the book examines Darwin’s life and simultaneous developments around him. The Gribbins sketch how Darwin, ever careful, worked on his ideas for decades, also because he felt that, as a geologist, one could not “examine the question of species who has not minutely described many” (p. 134). Something he subsequently spent years on. The history of how Alfred Russel Wallace later came to similar conclusions and ran them past Darwin in a letter, and how Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker presented both their work at a meeting of the Linnean Society, is well-known. What the Gribbins here clarify is that, if it seems strange to us now that Wallace’s letter was publicly presented by a third party without his consent, this was the custom of the time. Communications of scientific interest were expected to be made public as quickly as possible. Various quotes from Wallace indeed show nothing but a man who was very chuffed to have his work mentioned alongside Darwin’s.

“[…] the first two parts of On the Origin of Evolution read like a well-oiled machine, [numerous] details left me with the impression that the authors have been meticulous […]”

The Gribbins also pay attention to Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather) and relevant contemporaries such as Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck and Georges Cuvier. They give Lamarck his due and note the irony of him accepting evolution but denying extinction, and Cuvier denying evolution but accepting extinction. If the two had not ended up bitter enemies they might have put two and two together. Another lesser-known figure who came tantalisingly close, and virtually coined the term natural selection, was arborist Patrick Matthew who buried his thoughts in the appendix to a book on naval timber. Darwin was unaware of his work despite Matthew’s later public charges, the Gribbins write. Other notable details are a public admission to a change of heart over whether a letter from Darwin to Wallace was intended to warn Wallace off. The Gribbins used to think so, but are now persuaded it was not. They also clarify the oft-repeated factoid of On the Origin of Species selling out on the day of publication: “this is only true in the sense that all the copies had been bought up by the bookshops, ready to sell on to their customers” (p. 166). An observation that, working for a bookseller myself, rings true. These and other details left me with the impression that the authors have been meticulous up to this point. (I admit this is a risky thing to say; whole academic careers have been built on studying Wallace and Darwin’s lives, so cue people more knowledgeable than myself pointing out errors next).

On the Origin of Evolution competes for your attention with Rebecca Stott’s 2012 book Darwin’s Ghosts, which similarly traced Darwin’s intellectual forebears. That book ended with the above-mentioned presentation at the Linnean Society, so the Gribbins have the opportunity to set themselves apart with the last third of their book, which examines the development of Darwin’s ideas by later scientists. Although I enjoyed the book up to this point, the last part is where it fell a bit flat for me.

The Gribbins weave their narrative through the work of Gregor Mendel and its triple rediscovery decades later; the discovery of the structure of DNA, honouring the long course described in Unravelling the Double Helix; and the discovery of how DNA codes for amino acids. It touches on horizontal gene transfer, epigenetics, and twin studies and the discovery of polygenic traits. All important topics for sure, but they omit so many others as to make this part of their history rather haphazard.

“[…] the last third of their book, which examines the development of Darwin’s ideas by later scientists. […] omits so many [topics] as to make this part of their history rather haphazard.”

Two oversights stand out. They discuss how extinction ultimately became accepted but leave out the next chapter: the mass-extinction debates, which was a conflict between uniformitarianism and catastrophism. Similarly, they recognize Wallace as the grandfather of biogeography but leave out how the long-resisted idea of plate tectonics explained palaeobiogeographic patterns. Basically, they completely ignore the rise of palaeobiology and its contributions to evolution. Beyond these, they mention horizontal gene transfer, but not Carl Woese and his proposal of a Last Universal Common Ancestor. They feature Thomas Hunt Morgan’s research on Drosophila, but not the emergence of evolutionary developmental biology. They profile Barbara McClintock’s struggle to get her discovery of mobile genetic elements accepted but not Lynn Margulis‘s struggle to get endosymbiosis recognized. And although the Sources and Further Reading section lists other major thinkers, there is no discussion of, say, Ernst Mayr and the problem with species definitions, the work of Stephen Jay Gould, or the debate on levels of selection. Sexual selection and phylogenetics are completely absent.

They cram this last part in a mere 70 pages while repeatedly mentioning not being able to go deeper. I am not sure why. At 253 pages of text, the book is not particularly long. Had they spent another 50 or even 100 pages, I feel they could have done it more justice. I will be the first to concur that writing such an overview is challenging. Part of the problem, I think, is that the authors (John a science journalist with a PhD in astrophysics, Mary a teacher) do not have a thorough background in (molecular) biology and reach into unfamiliar territory, as evidenced by some elementary mistakes. On p. 218 they mention DNA contains three purines and one pyrimidine, and correct themselves two sentences later (there are two of each). They mix up the DNA base pairs on p. 226 (CT and AG pairs) but get it right on p. 227. And on p. 244 they mention the human genome consists of 6 billion base pairs which is double the actual number. Anyone who has had to study Alberts’s brick will have had these facts drummed into them, but their acknowledgements are silent on whether fellow biologists provided feedback on the manuscript. Now, I do not want to blow a few factual errors out of proportion, but together with the brevity of the material included, and the many other topics not covered, this last part left me less than satisfied.

Overall then, this book is an excellent introduction to the history of evolution before and up to Darwin that retains important detail despite being relatively brief. I was less impressed with the coverage on the developments since Darwin, which would benefit from supplementary reading. I hope a future review of The Black Box of Biology will fill in some of the blanks regarding molecular biology.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

On the Origin of Evolution

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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After three previous books in this format on fossils, rocks, and dinosaurs, geologist and palaeontologist Donald R. Prothero here tackles the story of evolution in 25 notable discoveries. More so than the previous trio, this book tries to be a servant to two masters, resulting in a mixed bag.

The Story of Evolution in 25 Discoveries: The Evidence and the People Who Found It, written by Donald R. Prothero, published by Columbia University Press in December 2020 (hardback, 360 pages)

Prothero has organised The Story of Evolution in 25 Discoveries in a logical fashion. After convincing the reader that the universe and our planet are, indeed, really old, he considers some of Darwin’s lines of evidence for evolution, followed by several great transitions in evolution as revealed by the fossil record, more recent evidence from genetics and molecular biology, and, of course, evidence for the evolution of humans.

As in his previous books, Prothero manages to dig up some remarkable stories. For example, Darwin initially mistook the finches on the Galápagos for wrens, blackbirds, and other species. Only when he handed them to the famous ornithologist John Gould for a second opinion did it become clear that these were all finch species adapted to local conditions on the different islands. It later fell to others such as Peter and Rosemary Grant to do the long-term studies that elevated them to the icon of evolution they have become. Meanwhile, Othniel Charles Marsh’s monograph on primitive birds that still had teeth was unexpectedly branded a waste of taxpayer’s money when US congress was looking for excuses to cut funding to the US Geological Survey in the 1890s.

In many places, Prothero is careful and balanced in his coverage. He highlights the contribution of the historically overlooked Alfred Russel Wallace who independently hit on the idea of natural selection after Darwin had already been labouring on it for decades. And while Ernst Haeckel was accused of fraud over his famous drawings showing the embryonic development of different vertebrates, Prothero explains how there is a kernel of truth to Haeckel’s claim that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, even if “he may have been a bit overzealous in his drawings” (p. 69). On Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck and his ideas, Prothero clarifies how there was much more to him than the caricature of the “guy who got evolution wrong” (p. 198) that he became.

“In many places, Prothero is careful and balanced in his coverage […] he clarifies how there was much more to Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck […] than the caricature of the “guy who got evolution wrong””

There are classic topics such as convergent evolution, the evolution of the eye, and Lynn Margulis and her theory of endosymbiosis. The relatively young branch of evolutionary developmental biology and the discovery of Hox genes showed that, actually, yes, nature does make leaps and does not always result in slow and gradual changes. Throughout, Prothero repeatedly reminds you that the evolutionary relationships between organisms are like a bush, and not a linear progression from primitive to more advanced creatures. He explains that evolution does not always result in perfect adaptations—they only have to be good enough to help in producing the next generation. And he points out that natural selection can only ever work with the material at hand, resulting in many jury-rigged contrivances, including in humans.

Now, Prothero is also a noted sceptic. A good deal of this book has the secondary aim of showing that creationism is an utterly flawed idea and that the evidence for evolution reveals no traces of intelligent design whatsoever. The thing is, he already did this exercise in Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, so does it need repeating? He spends no fewer than seven chapters here on examples of transitional fossils that provide a detailed picture of fish leaving the water, whales returning to it, birds evolving from dinosaurs, giraffes evolving longer necks and elephants longer trunks, horses losing their toes and snakes their legs, and turtles acquiring shells. You almost get the feeling that he just cannot help himself.

I have few gripes with the topics that Prothero chose to include here, but I felt somewhat disappointed by all the topics he left out as a consequence of this secondary mission. Two notable omissions are the process of domestication, even though Darwin used numerous examples of it in On the Origin of Species and then wrote a separate book about it. The same is true for Darwin’s other big idea: there is no mention of sexual selection, sperm competition, or mate choice.

“[…] this book has the secondary aim of showing that creationism is an utterly flawed idea […] but I felt somewhat disappointed by all the topics he left out as a consequence […]”

Beyond these, there is little on speciation and biodiversity, the formation of higher taxa, or the difficulty with species concepts. Epigenetics is mentioned, but not by name. The textbook example of the peppered moth is included, but there is no further discussion on camouflage, mimicry, or warning signals. Richard Dawkins has to make do with two brief mentions, but there is nothing about the different levels of selection, whether selfish genes or group selection. And I am sure Prothero could have beautifully explained the difference between the modern and extended syntheses.

The focus on convincing the reader of the evidence against design raises the question of who this book is written for. For evolutionary biologists like myself, Prothero is preaching to the choir, while creationists are unlikely to pick this book up. The best this might achieve is to remind biologists of the evidence for evolution if we ever find ourselves debating creationists.

Prothero is a fantastic science communicator, and I really enjoy this format of 25 vignettes by which to examine the many facets of a topic. The material that he did choose to include is written with verve and balance. In my opinion, however, the dual motive underlying The Story of Evolution in 25 Discoveries means that he left out many relevant topics and has written a book of narrower focus than the title might suggest.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

The Story of Evolution in 25 Discoveries

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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Life most likely originated in the oceans, and it is to oceans that astronomers are looking to find life elsewhere in the universe. With the publication last year of Kevin Peter Hand’s Alien Oceans, I decided this was the right time to finally review Ocean Worlds, a book that I have been very keen to read ever since buying it some years ago. This, then, is the first of a two-part dive into the story of oceans on Earth and elsewhere.

Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and other Planets, written by Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams, published by Oxford Press in December 2017 (paperback, 302 pages)

Palaeobiologists Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams have previously collaborated on The Goldilocks Planet. Here, they provide a deep history of our oceans. As soon as I tucked in, it became clear that they go deeper than Eelco Rohling did in the previously reviewed The Oceans: A Deep History, a book that focused heavily on palaeoclimatology. Even though most of the action in Ocean Worlds takes place on Earth, and the wider universe is only considered in the opening and closing two chapters, the book is characterised by an almost cosmic perspective on the subject. The writing of Zalasiewicz and Williams is such that I felt as if was surveying major developments in the history of our universe from an elevated, slightly detached, almost omniscient position. The result is thrilling and at times awe-inspiring. What follows are some of the big questions and outrageously fascinating topics they consider.

To have an ocean we first need water. Hydrogen was an immediate byproduct of the Big Bang. Oxygen, however, did not appear until after the universe had gone through its first cycle of stars being born and dying, as its creation required nuclear fusion. Likely, the formation of water had to wait for a few hundred million years, though some have argued it could have started much sooner. As is usual when dealing with processes that took place in such a distant past, opinions are divided and there are several reasonable scenarios.

“the book is characterised by an almost cosmic perspective on the subject […] The result is thrilling and at times awe-inspiring.”

With water present in the universe, how did Earth acquire its oceans? After all, “There is a wild card here, which surely had an impact” (p. 18). We have good evidence that our proto-Earth, called Tellus by some, was hit by a small planetoid, Theia, with the resulting debris forming our current Earth–Moon system. This event would likely have obliterated what early oceans we had, if any. Various authors have proposed that certain meteorites (carbonaceous chondrites) or comets might have subsequently been water’s cosmic delivery vehicle.

However it got here, the first major effect it had was kick-starting plate tectonics. The early Earth was hot, but without the lubrication provided by water, the heat-venting mechanism of plate tectonics was not in place. How did molten rock make its way to the surface? Some scientists argue that it was through simple vertical conduits, so-called heat pipes, which would have made for a radically different surface topography: “the fundamental proportions of land area and ocean area […] would have been utterly different to today’s familiar patterns” (p. 34). Though, again, this idea is contested by others. The puzzle of when plate tectonics started, possibly 3 billion years ago, relies on truly ancient rocks, 3.5 to 3.8 billion years old, of which we have precious few remaining in places such as Australia and Greenland.

Beyond those earliest days, Ocean Worlds has much interesting material about later episodes. Life likely started in the oceans, this much I knew, but these were iron seas. Water without oxygen can hold large amounts of dissolved iron, and early organisms used this in their biochemistry to generate energy. This was the realm of the Archaea: the salt-tolerant, heat-loving, chemoautotrophic microbes for whom oxygen was poison and the Great Oxygenation Event murder. It was also a time when banded iron formations (BIFs) were built up, relevant to us today as they formed the ore deposits providing most of our iron and steel. Though, as clarified here, their formation was anything but straightforward. Other fascinating episodes are the Messinian Salinity Crisis, some 5.6 million years ago, when the Mediterranean repeatedly dried up, leaving behind kilometre-thick salt layers that reduced global ocean salinity.

“However it got here, the first major effect [water] had was kick-starting plate tectonics.”

Of course, a book about oceans has to consider current human impacts. With due diligence, the authors tackle the problems of overfishing, shifting baselines, trawling, litter, ocean warming, oxygen loss, and acidification, and conclude that: “there currently seems not the faintest chance of stopping carbon emissions over many decades, let alone overnight” (p. 191). Does this sound gloomy? I prefer the word “sobering”. Consider, they write, that the “more-than-tripling of human population” (p. 183) was enabled by the invention of the Haber–Bosch process and the plentiful artificial fertiliser it made available. To this, they add geologist Peter Haff’s argument of the technosphere that resonated with me. “The 7 billion humans on Earth today are kept alive only through the continuous action of an enormous, globally interlinked system of transport and communication, metabolized by the use of vast amounts of energy […] Without it, most of us would not be alive—and therefore we are forced to keep it going” (p. 197).

If that was not sobering enough, what really made me feel small was when they pulled back from our timescale and the current “brief ecological wrecking spree” (p. 195), to the long-term future. Our oceans are not forever. As the Sun grows hotter they will evaporate, though the “end of the oceans is not likely to be simple” (p. 207). Whether through a moist greenhouse phase where water is gently siphoned off into space by solar winds, or a runaway greenhouse hot enough to melt rock, a dry future awaits, and plate tectonics will once again grind to a halt. As this process “is unlikely to simply just stop, smoothly and without fuss” (p. 211), expect some extraordinary landscapes.

“Our oceans are not forever. […] Whether through a moist greenhouse phase where water is gently siphoned off into space by solar winds, or a runaway greenhouse hot enough to melt rock, a dry future awaits.”

Amidst these grand, cosmic scenes, the authors highlight the human stories behind this research. Such as the pioneering contributions to oceanography by the people on board the HMS Challenger expedition, the mapping of the seafloor by Marie Tharp, or the work of Wally Broecker who established a link between ocean currents and rapid climatic changes. And while Svante Arrhenius is better remembered for linking historical changes in carbon dioxide concentrations to past ice ages, both he and Fritz Haber tried to extract gold from sea water. Unsuccessfully, I might add.

In the last two chapters, the authors turn their gaze to the skies once more, discussing past and present oceans inside and outside of our solar system. With the many discovered by the Kepler space telescope, “We are on the verge of not just a new chapter in oceanography—or exo-oceanography, if you like—but of setting up an entirely new library of oceans, for the diversity and complexity of cosmic oceans will be beyond anything that we can dream of” (p. 264).

I explore this topic more in-depth in my review of Alien Oceans. But, as a warming-up exercise and a proper deep history of oceans, Ocean Worlds is a fantastic book that strikes the right balance. Zalasiewicz and Williams present fascinating science with enviable ease, without smoothing over the fact that science is rarely a straightforward affair, proceeding by means of conflicting scenarios and competing hypotheses. The deep-time perspective and big questions asked make this one awe-inspiring book.

Ocean Worlds

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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