living on earth
Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Living on Earth — a book that reads life not as evolution’s passive product but as an active cause shaping the planet.
I read Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Living on Earth. The author of Other Minds and Metazoa, but this time pulling the lens out from animal minds to planet scale. The book reads organisms not as evolution’s passive products but as active causes that shape the atmosphere, soil, other species and their evolution — coral polyps building their reefs, photosynthesis redrawing the gas balance of the surface. From there it moves to animal minds where sensing and acting meet, and ends on the ethics of humans being one of those Earth-shaping forces.