
Living on Earth
Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World
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Narrated by:
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Mitch Riley
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Peter Godfrey-Smith
About this listen
Long-listed, Washington Post Best Books of the Year, 2024
"Listening to Godfrey-Smith's exploration of animal consciousness will rattle every nook and cranny of your brain with an onslaught of interesting questions...the author leaves listeners with a radical new perspective."—AudioFile on Metazoa
This program is read by the author.
The bestselling author of Other Minds shows how we and our ancestors have reinvented our planet.
If the history of the Earth were compressed down to a year, our species would arise in the last thirty minutes or so of the final hour. But life itself is not such a late arrival: It has existed on Earth for something like 3.7 billion years—most of our planet’s history and over a quarter of the age of the universe (as far as we can tell).
What have these organisms—bacteria, animals, plants, and the rest—done in all this time? In Living on Earth, the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith proposes a new way of understanding how the actions of living beings have shaped our planet. Where his acclaimed books Other Minds and Metazoa explored the riddle of how conscious minds came to exist on Earth, Living on Earth turns to what happens when we look at the mind from another side—when we come to see organisms as active causes, not merely as results of the evolutionary process. The planet we inhabit is significantly the work of other living beings, who shaped the environments that we ourselves later transformed.
To that end, Godfrey-Smith takes us on a grand tour of the history of life on earth. He visits Rwandan gorillas and Australian bowerbirds, returns to coral reefs and octopus dens, considers the impact of language and writing, and weighs the responsibilities our unique powers bring with them, as they relate to factory farming, habitat preservation, climate change, and the use of animals in experiments. Ranging from the seas to the forests, and from animate matter’s first appearance to its future extinction, Godfrey-Smith offers a novel picture of the course of life on Earth and how we might meet the challenges of our time, the Anthropocene.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
©2024 Peter Godfrey-Smith (P)2024 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"A thoughtful meditation on how the actions of organisms, even the most primitive (ticks, snails), have generated the world humans have inherited . . . [Full of] enlightening insights into the natural world and our often perilous relationship to it."—Kirkus Reviews
"Living on Earth is a hugely important book. The final installment in Peter Godfrey-Smith's essential trilogy, it give us a sweeping, careful, and courageous exploration of a natural world suffused with life, with minds, and perhaps with consciousness too. Godfrey-Smith writes with grace, humility, and wisdom about a dizzying array of topics, from the distant past to the far future, from the deep ocean to the frontiers of technology. The picture he paints reaffirms our continuity with the natural world, and impresses on us the urgency of the choices we now face.”—Anil Seth, director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex and author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
"Only Peter Godfrey-Smith could write this book. It offers a vast, kaleidoscopic, and immensely thought-provoking overview of the development of life on Earth, with special attention to humanity's place in the bigger picture. We are often told that human beings are part of the natural world, but rarely is the mutual influence between people and the rest of our shared ecosystem spelled out with such care."—Sean Carroll, professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of Quanta and Fields
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Theory and Reality
- An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science
- By: Peter Godfrey-Smith
- Narrated by: Matthew Lloyd Davies
- Length: 10 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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How does science work? Does it tell us what the world is "really" like? What makes it different from other ways of understanding the universe? In Theory and Reality, Peter Godfrey-Smith addresses these questions by taking the listener on a grand tour of 100 years of debate about science. The result is a completely accessible introduction to the main themes of the philosophy of science.
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First 75% Really Great. Last Part Not as Much.
- By Market Maven on 10-04-20
What listeners say about Living on Earth
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- Anonymous User
- 12-19-24
Worth every minute…
Learned so much and appreciated author’s concerns, considerations and thoughtful awareness for all…
interesting and educational too! An excellent read/listen.
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- Steve Gross
- 12-18-24
Brilliantly written. Brilliantly narrated
An absolutely wonderful portrait of life on Planet Earth. And the narration was equally wonderful. So I absolutely recommend Living on Earth to everyone. I feel the same way about the first two books in the trilogy: Other Minds and Metazoa. But as with those other two I have one it-would-have-been-perfect-if-only. .. kind of complaint: I was left feeling that Godfrey-Smith had been trying to impart some brilliant overarching lesson, one that I was unable to grasp—almost, but, sad to say, one I never quite got.
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