Great book. Really explains men. ( )

Annoyingly anthropomorphic at times, it's a series of diverse chapters jumping across long spans of time, giving a clearly fictional but realistically based tracing of evolutionary descendants.

I read Baxter's Titan a while ago and found it so bad I forswore reading any more of his. However I found a cheap copy of this, and remembered that he'd received many recommendations from others, so I thought I'd try it. It's quite readable, much improved from Titan, even though it doesn't really feature any characters as such.

The tale opens 65million years ago with a proto-primate hiding amongst the vegetation in a world dominanted by dinosaurs. Until an asteroid strike dramatically alters the climate, and our fortunate primate happens to be in a place to survive. - this becomes a familiar theme. The next creature some 30 million years ago is a slightly more advanced proto-primate competing with rodents (again a familiar theme). And so on and so on in increasingly humanoid and then human factions. Each iteration focuses on an specific individual and their life choices - food, mates and society. A few moments of their youth, looking for a mate, coping with society and sometimes how they meet their end after reproducing. Many of these Individuals are female though there are some males too. The most recognisably human are a historian living at the end of Roman times, followed by some near future speculation in 2130, although the story doesn't end there.

There are a few bad points though. Although Baxter specifically states that the more animal creatures aren’t self aware and don't have names he then goes ahead to name them, and give them personalities. There is obviously a lot of reference to bodily functions, which occasionally makes unpleasant reading. Worst of all is Baxter's complete invention of a few species - tool using dinosaurs being the most egregious. And while this is obviously a work of fiction, such additions detract from the basic evolutionary accuracy of the rest. It would be interesting to compare this against the known descent recorded something like Dawkins' Ancestor's Tale. The future speculations are far more reasonable - even if unlikely. The other major failing is the assumption that mutations in one individual provide a population of descendants sufficiently large to impact an entire species. This seems unlikely as although rare mutations are unlikely to occur widely, an individual doesn't have that much impact of a species.

Obviously the characters being so short lived, allows little room for development of them, but the continual time jumps aren't too disorientating once you've got into the right frame of mind. The writing in each chapter flows quite nicely. With interspersed geographical descriptions of weathering and tectonic movements - again speculating on effects this might have at an individual level.

Overall, enjoyably readable speculation, with some interesting thoughts on the future of the human race. Its minor faults can be overlooked.

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A very interesting attempt to trace the whole of human evolution, starting with the earliest primates in the time of the dinosaurs, through modern humans, and continuing to what may be after us. Although obviously fiction, this work contains much that is true, or true-enough, and gives the reader a useful perspective with which to think about our history and our future. ( )

One of Baxter's books on biological themes. Basically it is a set of short stories, mostly about human ancestors from before the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary and the extinction of the dinosaurs, with a few of stories about human descendents. As usual for Baxter, his science is generally quite good even when he is working outside his comfort zone (Astrophysics).

However, again as seems to be the case with several of his books that I have read, his long term outlook is very pessimistic. Personally, I hope that human rationality will overcome most obstacles. Baxter seems to enjoy exploring the loss of rationality. At times I found the anthropomorphism of non-sentient creatures a bit much as they faced crises in their lives - but that was unavoidable given the nature of the book. In terms of ideas I would give it five stars, but as a good read it was too flat and bordering on boring, thus my overall rating of three stars.

In one point, Baxter suggests that a major feature of domestication is a dumbing down of the domesticated animals, and gives domestic chickens as an example. Baxter's picture is probably reasonably true for many domestic animals - e.g., cattle and the like, but chooks are not a good example of the point he is making!

As the host for several generations of ISA Brown chickens (hybrid between Rhode Island Red and White Leghorn) purchased as pullets from a small farm where they are only penned. On my 5 acre property the hens have complete freedom (except they return to and are shut in a fox-proof pen overnight). my experience with these birds is that quite the opposite of being bird-brains, hens seem to have evolved great intelligence to stay ahead of and cope with their human hosts. Chickens that are allowed freedom to develop their personalities are at least intellectually equivalent to dogs or cats (we have had several of each on the property). Aside from being totally alert to what humans do, hens are astonishingly alert and attend closely to any gardening activities and keep track of everything going on in the property. When they want feeding they will find a human, coming into the house if needs be, and make themselves known. They also seem to recognize that the cost they pay for human protection is the provision of eggs. The hens go to great lengths to find places to hide their eggs from crows (who are smart enough to track a hen for hours), but they lay their eggs in a conspicuous place inside the human house whenever they can get in via a door, window or cat flap. One has decided that the appropriate place is in the middle of the family bed! Another regularly used the top of the 5' high entertainment unit! Fortunately, the ladies seem to be reasonably house trained. We rarely have to clean up any droppings.

One of Baxter's stories I agree with is that one line of carnivorous dinosaurs actually became tool makers and developed language in order to hunt large herbivores, but went extinct along with their prey due to climate change. As a close observer of wild birds as well as domestic ones (i.e., the surviving dinosaurs), I am convinced that dinosaur brain architecture may have been a lot more efficient than is the case for mammalian brains.

Some examples: African grey parrots have the demonstrated ability to more than a hundred human words and use them to construct simple sentences. New Caladonian Crows show demonstrable tool making capabilities in the lab (i.e., to bend a wire into shape to pull a treasure out of a hole). Other corvids have been able to work out how to use supplied ropes and pulleys to gain access to treasures. In my own front yard, I have seen a possibly bored wild galah (a medium sized parrot related to the cockatoos) lie on its back to free its feet so it could play frisbie with a plastic pot plant saucer. For their size and limited manipulation capabilities, at least some birds exhibit an awesome intelligence.

In any event, there is a lot in Baxter's novel, Evolution, to think about. And, as a one time professional evolutionary biologist who did my PhD thesis studying species formation in vertebrates, there is very little in the biological basis for his stories that i would criticise. Unfortunately, the book is more an interesting academic exercise than a novel with a strong central plot and gripping story line that you can't put down. ( )

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfict...

Clocking in at 584 pages, this novel takes us from the age of the dinosaurs to the Earth's far future through around twenty vignettes of life on our planet. Crammed with detail, huge in vision, it will certainly appeal to the thoughtful New Scientist reader and to the millions who have enjoyed the recent BBC series about dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures.

However well-researched and detailed, I confess it didn't leave me completely satisfied. The supposed link between the individual chapters is that this is the story of one single strand of DNA, which at one point is encoded in the cells of the palaeontologist Joan Useb in the framing narrative, set in 2031. Well, it clearly isn't so. There's no way she could be descended from Jurassic tool-using dinosaurs, from the first New World monkeys, or from the exotic Antarctic fauna of the Pleistocene; and while she could well be descended from several of the human era characters, there are pretty strong indications that she is not an ancestor of the post-humans in the later chapters.

Shorn of its central conceit, the book becomes mostly a series of speculative essays about the past or future. The author says firmly that this novel is "not intended to be a textbook" -- it might have been better if it were, as we would have some basis for judging which of the many authorial asides are daring speculation as opposed to conventional wisdom. I would also have liked some maps of the drifting continents, and indeed some pictures of the various creatures; my visual imagination is not strong enough to reconstruct them to my own satisfaction from the author's description, especially when some chapters, particularly those set in the unfashionable Cenozoic Era, seemed to have a dozen new species in the first few pages. The cover image combining globe with outline hominid skull is striking, beautiful even, but uninformative.

The first section of the book, beginning with the cometary impact that killed the dinosaurs, faces the problem that, without anthropomorphising inappropriately, it is difficult to get readers to identify with non-human and non-intelligent characters. Instead the protagonists are subjected to ecological disasters of various natures which they survive, or don't as the case may be. Rather too often we get editorialising on the lines of "little did they know how significant this would be..." A lot of the "viewpoint" characters are female, but it seems that only the males have orgasms, a trend that continues throughout the book.

The central set of chapters, set in the human era, links a diverse set of stories of the development of culture and technology through a supposed common biological lineage demonstrated by the names Ja-ahn, Ejan, Jana, Jo-on, Jahna, Juna and presumably also Joan Useb over a period of tens of thousands of years. Apart from the geographical improbability of a single line of descent through all the chapters, I have a somewhat technical linguistic gripe: the sound often spelt "J" in English is one of the most mutable of phonemes, and I'd be surprised to learn of any examples of a language where we know it to have been stable even over a single millennium.

Apart from that, the human chapters are the best-written. Baxter's vision of the future post-2031 is pessimistic and bleak, with one superbly grim episode where a British military cell emerges after a hibernation which they thought would be only for a few decades to find the world changed beyond recognition. In the end, rather than our biological descendants, the real heirs of humanity seem to be robotic interplanetary explorers, and I'd have liked to read a bit more about them.

Evolution aims to be a darker version of a history of the world a la Wells, Shaw, Stapledon, and so on. This kind of thing has been done much better before, including by Baxter himself in The Time Ships, his superb homage to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. The value added here is Baxter's extensive research into current biology which basically gives the book its interest. But, as with much hard sf, I am left dubious about whether the book's scientific accuracy contributes anything to its value as a work of literature. ( )