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A review by savaging
Life on Earth by David Attenborough
3.0
An old book, but if you're itching to hear David Attenborough's voice in your head while you read about sea cucumbers and ancient millipedes as long as cows, then this is your book.
I most relished the chapters on invertebrates and "primitive" organisms. Also, some surprising firsts: "courtship" was first practiced by ancient scorpions, and the penis was invented by the earliest reptiles (a water-tight egg, able to stay on land without drying out, required internal fertilization).
I'm not a biologist, but I'm pretty sure some of the information on the evolution of bacteria, archaeobacteria, algae, fungus, and protists would be considered out-of-date. Also: do scientists still think the most recent land-based relative of the whale was an insectivore? And sadly: Attenborough claims that insects are so successful a species has never been exterminated by humans -- to which we can now answer the Levuana Moth, Cascade Funnel-web Spider, Rocky-Mountain Locust, and several butterflies that have gone down with the rainforests.
There are cultural hold-overs in the descriptions of sex in the book (all females are described in passive terms, all males in active), but the real stomach-squirm came at the end, when David held forth on the evolution of humans. This section is heavy on "Man the hunter" talk -- though, like many an outdated anthropologist, Attenborough also wants to use male pronouns when discussing the invention of agriculture (we are to assume that men were bravely spearing down charismatic megafauna, while the ladies did some trivial berry-picking and seed-gathering, but somehow in between kills the dudes figured out they could plant some of those seeds the women were grinding all day). The worst of it, though, is his sloppy connection between modern hunter-gatherers and earlier Homo forms, assuming "primitive" people now living in New Guinea can teach us more about European cavemen than Europeans can. Cue the patronizing romanticism that asserts hunter-gatherers live in "perfect harmony with nature," coupled with pictures of actual humans in all their "exotic" bodypaint. It's the last little chapter, and doesn't destroy the beauty of the rest of the book for me -- but Attenborough's maybe the most powerful and well-respected naturalist and conservationist alive, and his continued neocolonialist perspective (see that time he argued we shouldn't be sending food aid to Africa, because it only exacerbates overpopulation) doesn't help the movement.
I most relished the chapters on invertebrates and "primitive" organisms. Also, some surprising firsts: "courtship" was first practiced by ancient scorpions, and the penis was invented by the earliest reptiles (a water-tight egg, able to stay on land without drying out, required internal fertilization).
I'm not a biologist, but I'm pretty sure some of the information on the evolution of bacteria, archaeobacteria, algae, fungus, and protists would be considered out-of-date. Also: do scientists still think the most recent land-based relative of the whale was an insectivore? And sadly: Attenborough claims that insects are so successful a species has never been exterminated by humans -- to which we can now answer the Levuana Moth, Cascade Funnel-web Spider, Rocky-Mountain Locust, and several butterflies that have gone down with the rainforests.
There are cultural hold-overs in the descriptions of sex in the book (all females are described in passive terms, all males in active), but the real stomach-squirm came at the end, when David held forth on the evolution of humans. This section is heavy on "Man the hunter" talk -- though, like many an outdated anthropologist, Attenborough also wants to use male pronouns when discussing the invention of agriculture (we are to assume that men were bravely spearing down charismatic megafauna, while the ladies did some trivial berry-picking and seed-gathering, but somehow in between kills the dudes figured out they could plant some of those seeds the women were grinding all day). The worst of it, though, is his sloppy connection between modern hunter-gatherers and earlier Homo forms, assuming "primitive" people now living in New Guinea can teach us more about European cavemen than Europeans can. Cue the patronizing romanticism that asserts hunter-gatherers live in "perfect harmony with nature," coupled with pictures of actual humans in all their "exotic" bodypaint. It's the last little chapter, and doesn't destroy the beauty of the rest of the book for me -- but Attenborough's maybe the most powerful and well-respected naturalist and conservationist alive, and his continued neocolonialist perspective (see that time he argued we shouldn't be sending food aid to Africa, because it only exacerbates overpopulation) doesn't help the movement.