An iconoclast and best-selling author of both nonfiction and fiction, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has spent a lifetime observing, thinking, and writing about the cultures of animals such as lions, wolves, dogs, deer, and humans. In this compulsively readable book, she provides a plainspoken, big-picture look at the commonality of life on our planet, from the littlest microbes to the largest lizards.
Inspired by the idea of symbiosis in evolutionthat all living things evolve in a series of cooperative relationshipsThomas takes readers on a journey through the progression of life. Along the way she shares the universal likenesses, experiences, and environments of Gaia's creatures, from amoebas in plant soil to the pets we love, from proud primates to Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers on the African savanna. Fervently rejecting anthropodenial, the notion that nonhuman life does not share characteristics with humans, Thomas instead shows that paramecia can learn, plants can communicate, humans aren't really as special as we think we areand that it doesn't take a scientist to marvel at the smallest inhabitants of the natural world and their connections to all living things.
A unique voice on anthropology and animal behavior, Thomas challenges scientific convention and the jargon that prevents us all from understanding all living things better. This joyfully written book is a fascinating look at the challenges and behaviors shared by creatures from bacteria to larvae to parasitic fungi, a potted hyacinth to the author herself, and all those in between.
Contents
1. About This Book
2. Our Bedroom
3. Microbes
4. Protists
5. Fungi
6. Animals
7. Dry Land
8. Lichens
9. Plants
10. Arthropods on Land
11. Vertebrates
12. Amphibians
13. Proto-Mammals
14. Dinosaurs
15. Pterosaurs
16. Crocodiles
17. Birds
18. Mammals
19. From Monkeys to the Missing Link
20. The Line to Homo Sapiens
21. Neandertals
22. Why Do We Look the Way We Look?
23. The San, Formerly Known as Bushmen
24. Gaia’s Rule One: Find a Source of Energy
25. Gaia’s Rule Two: Protect Yourself
26. Gaia’s Rule Three: Reproduce
27. The Present
28. The Future
Coda
Acknowledgments
“Life comes in countless variations, yet all are based on the same biological principles. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas loves them all—from lichens to fungi and from crocodiles to primates—and puts us on a time machine to go back to the turns evolution has taken, many of them surprising, and one of them leading to us.”
—Frans de Waal, author of Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
