Time-Life Understanding Science and Nature: Evolution of Life

This book offers an excellent introduction to the history of life on our planet, and the natural processes that have produced life’s diversity. Filled with large colorful illustrations and clear explanatory text, it is suitable for adolescents and adults. Its coverage encompasses the process of evolution as well as evolution’s products – the animals, plants, and microbes that have populated our world over the past 3.5 billion years.

The first of the book’s chapters is entitled “Evolution of Species,” and considers what species are, how many are thought to exist, and how they form, as well as concepts of natural selection and adaptation. Chapter 2, “When Life Began” describes formation of the earth, origins of life, the show more first living things, how cells arose, and how multicellular life evolved. Chapter 3 is titled “The Paleozoic Dawn of Modern Life” and recounts the origins of backboned animals, early fishes, jaws, invasion of the land by plants and animals, the first flying animals (insects), and early amphibians and reptiles. Chapter 4, “When Dinosaurs Ruled” explores the Mesozoic Era. Although dinosaur biology necessarily gets much attention, many other groups are also explored including birds, mammal- like reptiles, ammonites, flowering plants, and the (non-dinosaurian) reptiles of the sea and air. Chapter 5, imprecisely entitled “The Humans Arrive” actually explores the entire Cenozoic. It considers various types of mammals (notably horses, bats, whales, elephants), as well as the early hominids and our own species. Chapter 6 is called “Scientific Proofs of Evolution” and considers evidence from embryology, structural similarity (homology), convergent evolution, and the independent evolution of Australian mammals. I found this chapter a bit disappointing only because it could have cited so many other lines of evidence, including behavioral homologies, genetic similarities, experimental evidence, and the fossil record itself. However, this is a minor criticism given that all chapters in this book offer implicit evidence of the evolution of life.

Having been published in 1992, this book is of course not current (this issue is the only reason for my not awarding 4 stars). Viewing this book, it is striking to realize how much more we have learned about the process of evolution and about the history of particular plant and animal groups, including our own relatives, the extinct hominids. Nonetheless, Evolution of Life provides a fine introduction to the subject, one likely to spark the interest of any reader who picks it up. show less