The History of Life

A Very Short Introduction

By: Michael J. Benton

Narrated by: Peter Larkin

Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins

Publisher's summary

Here is the extraordinary story of the unfolding of life on Earth, told by Michael J. Benton, a world-renowned authority on biodiversity. Ranging over four billion years, Benton weaves together the latest findings on fossils, earth history, evolutionary biology, and many other fields to highlight the great leaps that enabled life to evolve from microbe to human - big breakthroughs that made whole new ways of life possible - including cell division and multicellularity, hard skeletons, the move to land, the origin of forests, the move to the air. He describes the mass extinctions, especially the Permian, that obliterated 90 percent of life, and he sheds light on the origins of human beings and of the many hominids that went before us. He ends by pointing out that studying the past helps us to predict the future: What happens if the atmosphere warms by five degrees? What happens if we destroy much of the biodiversity on Earth? These things have happened before, Benton notes. We need only look to the distant past to know the future of life on Earth.

©2008 Michael J. Benton (P)2021 Tantor

Language too complex for an intro

The author tells a short, coherent story, but his language is weighed down by the jargon dominant in his field.