Stephen Baxter has written a novel about human evolution from the very beginning and proceeding to the very end, and by that, I mean the end of the earth. And that is one very ambitious undertaking.
Chapter 1 begins in what would become Montana some 65 million years ago by examining the life of an early mammalian primate the author named Purga, a rodent looking creature, but the great, great … grand parent of all of us. Purga struggles with her environment and with dinosaurs and with the Devil’s Tail, that strange looking light in the sky that seems to never go away and keeps getting bigger. This is a reference to the great comet/meteor that struck off the Yucatan Peninsula that most believe caused the Great Extinction (capitalization is mine) of the dinosaurs and most of life. And Stephen Baxter does an unbelievable job with that event. An almost Alfred Hitchcock rendering of it. The great Alfred Hitchcock could create a scene where the audience knew exactly what was going to happen to a victim but could do absolutely nothing to stop it. So, too, with this devastating comet. Slowly, surely, it approaches and the reader can do nothing to stop it. Baxter does a superb job of raising the reader’s anxiety levels here.
Each subsequent chapter then jumps forward in time, sometimes by several million years, to describe another creature/primate/hominid/ape/prehuman/human, and some type of evolutionary advance physically, intellectually, socially, or a combination thereof. Each time the subject of the chapter struggles with the environment, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
Stephen Baxter warns the reader that this book is mostly a book of Science Fiction, although, as the author states, “[m]uch of it is based on hypothetical reconstructions of the past by experts in the field.” (p. 647). I found that his descriptions of life during these various periods were as plausible as anything else I have read with one or two exceptions. In one chapter he described early man using Neanderthal as a beast of burden, among other uses. I personally find this a bit unlikely, but then, this is a book of Science Fiction, not a text book. I also found no use for his epilogue. I loved the book’s regular ending and feel it should have stopped there. If anyone else has already read this book and can explain to me the purpose of that epilogue I would be indebted.
A magnificent accomplishment but be prepared for a serious read. Over 600 pages of smaller type. ( )

Plenty of infodump, boring as hell and not credible ( )

I very much enjoyed this journey through time and how evolution has shaped and could potentially shape our future. ( )

Like his fellow Englishman Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Baxter favors stories about the grandest scales of space and time, beginnings and ultimates. In this long novel from 2002, his theme is evolution. His protagonist is the taxonomic order Primates, or rather that subset which comprises the ancestors and descendants of modern human beings. Beginning in the Cretaceous period and ending in Earth's distant future, this story is much bigger than a novel could really convey, though Baxter does well.

In a brief prologue set in 2031 CE we meet paleontologist Joan Useb, traveling to a conference in Australia. The book's first major division, "Ancestors", then begins 65 million years before today. Purga is a member of the Purgatorius genus. She is small, shrewlike, and in constant danger from dinosaurs and starvation. Can she survive? No, wrong question; every creature dies. Rather, can she pass her genes on to subsequent generations to become one of the ancestors of humans? Without her, there'll be no us. She loses offspring and mates to her harsh world, then lives through the last day of the Cretaceous, as a giant comet causes the mass extinction that ends the reign of the dinosaurs. Baxter devotes a long, exciting chapter to that terrible day - but Purga lives to see one of her daughters reach reproductive age in the new era. She will be one of the many-times-great grandmothers of Joan Useb and every other human.

Two million years later, our next character is a squirrel-like plesiadapid, roaming the trees to feed her pups. Dinosaurs have been replaced by mammalian predators, and Plesi must make a choice between her own survival and that of one of her offspring. Most of Baxter's protagonists are female, and this choice, between existing offspring and future fertility, is one of his motifs. The primates value motherly love, but evolution doesn't care.

The book proceeds this way chapter by chapter, each one closer to our time. In each a new protagonist faces a cusp in geological history - new predators, new body plans, continental drift and climate change. Not all are our direct ancestors. At its end a short interlude brings us to Joan in 2031 again; she's concerned about climate change. Meanwhile a giant volcano is awakening on the Pacific Rim.

The book's second major division is "Humans". These are the hominims, beginning with homo erectus, and eventually, modern humans. One and a half million years before the present, the young woman named Far runs swiftly over the plains of a drying, cooling Africa. With a smaller brain than ours, she has words but not yet language. Separated from her family by mishap, she survives danger from other hominim kinds, and eventually joins a new band of her species. Baxter does the Dawn Age trope better than most authors have, although here as elsewhere in the novel there are many infodumps while Far has her adventures. The world and its animals are described at length under pressure from the environment and other creatures. Another of Baxter's motifs is that of boastful, hierarchical males contributing rather less to the groups' survival than clans of patient, cooperating females. Would be interesting to learn what modern primatologists think of this idea. A content warning is needed for several instances of another primate activity, rape.

Again the chapters march through the eras, and protagonists meet turning points in how the world works. Neanderthals meet modern humans 127,000 years before the present. In a pivotal chapter 60,000 years ago, the human called Mother invents art, shamanism, and genocide, dominating her region. This seems to squeeze rather too much into a single lifetime, but Baxter has a lot of change to cover. Humans settle Australia and drive most of its large animals to extinction. In Ice Age Europe, modern humans have a last encounter with Neanderthals. In the Middle East, agriculturalists drive out the healthier, happier, more egalitarian hunter-gatherers. In 482 CE, an aging Roman aristocrat is fascinated by the bones of extinct creatures, and misses signs of growing barbarity in his society.

The last chapter of "Humans" is set at Joan's 2031 conference, where she tries to convince her fellow academics to fight harder against climate change. Modern people have dominion over the material world, and even their own genome - but primate behavior has not gone away, and a terrorist group threatens. The chapter ends with Joan giving birth to a daughter as the giant volcano erupts, tipping Earth's balance in a new direction. The great die-back is passed over in a couple of sentences.

The final major division is "Descendants". An initial chapter has a group of 21st-century people awakening from high-tech hibernation. They find an England gone back to wilderness, populated by humans who have little technology. I found this chapter contrived and wonder why it didn't follow the earlier pattern. It at least resolutely avoids one trope - the group's only woman is not having the Eve role that one of the men wants to press on her.

In the next chapter, after 30 million years, one descendant species lives high in trees in Africa, to avoid the rodent-derived predators that have evolved to replace the ones we killed off. A woman is separated from her clan, and undergoes a tour of this strangely different world, including several human-derived species. One such lives underground in a manner like that of social insects, and another, elephantine herbivores, is herded by mouse-derived social predators. Humans have lost their brief reign as Earth's most powerful beings. Oh, and another asteroid is on its way.

These late chapters, for me, bring to mind that Baxter also references another of his English predecessors, Olaf Stapledon, who also wrote about the changes life undergoes over long stretches of time. This chapter at 30 million-years is titled "the kingdom of the rats", echoing a section of Stapledon's Darkness and the Light. Our heroine here is called Remembrance, in ironic contrast to her limited memory. Evolution has selected for other attributes. We will have many descendants, but none again will share our large brains, linguistic skills, and abstract thinking.

The final chapter is set in New Pangaea, 500 million years after today. The continents have again joined into a single, hot desert. The sun's slow brightening allows few large organisms to live. Our last protagonist, Ultimate, journeys to the shore of a dried-out sea, then turns back. The reference here is to a chapter of yet another Englishman, in H. G. Wells's The Time Machine - but Ultimate can only go back to the weird tree that shelters her and the other remaining primates. Eventually, even bacteria will die on the baking Earth. Their DNA may reach worlds forming around newborn stars.

Baxter adds an epilogue showing Joan Useb twenty years after the volcanic eruption. She and her daughter are living in the Galapagos Islands, managing their reduced world well enough. We can imagine more years of life for them - and after all, no primate lives forever.

I don't know enough about paleontology to judge how plausible Baxter's stories are. He references several advisors in an afterword, but it would be nice to have the sort of references section that Peter Watts usually has. The arc of the story convinces. I do question whether humans' large brains would disappear; they certainly have been advantageous in lots of environments until now.

Many of the earlier reviewers here at LibraryThing really hated this book. All that death and misery to get to glorious us, only for us to fail and return our descendants to evolution's terrible wheel. I found it exhilarating; the grandest of stories, well within the tradition of British SF - and tragedy is best, after all. And if evolution, the machinery of the world we live in, doesn't supply us with stories we like, we can still write our own. ( )

In the musical 1776, Col. Thomas McKean says of General Washington's reports from the field, reporting everything that's gone wrong since the last report, "That man could depress a hyena." This seems to be a fair comment on many of Baxter's books, and Evolution is no exception.

Spoilers ahead.

The frame story concerns Joan Useb, a paleontologist who, in 2031, has organized a major interdisciplinary conference with the covert goal of sparking a movement to do something effective about saving the biosphere. The only amusement to be found in the frame story are the nasty Tuckerizations of two well-known British fans, Gregory Pickersgill and Alison Scott. Pickersgill is a radical anti-globalization activist, the charismatic leader of a splinter Christian sect, the core around which the umbrella organization "Fourth World" has formed. (Or so it is believed. It turns out that Pickersgill doesn't exist; he's just a cover identity for someone even more extreme and unpleasant.) Alison Scott at least gets to exist; she's a genetic engineer who sells her services to the very wealthy, to give their children advantages rather than curing disease. She's so focussed on money and showmanship that she even uses her own offspring as walking advertisements for what she can do for your next child, if you can pay enough.

The main body of the book is better. It's necessarily episodic, covering the evolution of primates from a rodent-like creature during and after the last days of the dinosaurs, through a monkey-like creature 500 million years from now that's fully symbiotic with a tree. "Fully symbiotic," in this case, means that the Tree provides a good deal more than shelter. It produces a specialized root that attaches to the bellies of these last primates, providing not just nourishment and psychotropic drugs, but genetic mixing and control of reproduction. The primates in return bring nutrients to the Tree that it can't obtain otherwise, and carry its seeds to favorable ground. Along the way, Baxter does some interesting things, imagining plausible forms that aren't represented in the necessarily patchy fossil record, such as an elaborate dinosaurs-and-primates ecology in Antarctica, fifty-five million years after the presumed extinction of the dinosaurs--an ecology first frozen into extinction and then ground up beyond the possibility of fossilization by the advancing icecap. This is an utterly grim extinction event, of course, with all the species dying out entirely rather than evolving into something else, but that's Baxter for you.

As exemplified by the dinosaurs and primates in Antarctica sequence, Baxter does not confine himself solely to the direct line of descent from little Purgatorius to humans. We also get to see the hypothetical, but plausible, harrowing adventure of the monkey-like critters that get accidentally rafted across the Atlantic to become the ancestors of the monkeys of South America, and other plausible but unrecorded species.

Eventually, though, we do get to the more or less direct and recent ancestors of humans--the first ape to lead his troop ou t onto the African savannah as the forests shrink, homo erectus, neanderthals, Cro-Magnon, early civilized humans. Amongst the neanderthals, we get a story that is at once encouraging and grim: a little band of neanderthals, led by a man called Pebble, st ruggling to survive, forms an alliance with a pair of wandering almost-Cro-Magnon, Harpoon and Ko-Ko. First they trade, then they learn some of each other's best tricks, then they combine their efforts to cross over to an island, wipe out the remnant of homo erectus living there, and seize it for themselves. Baxter does depict the two kinds as mutually fertile, which I think is currently not the opinion of scientists, but that's a minor point, considering that opinion on that has changed more than once.

Once we get to unambiguously modern humans, though, we're in trouble. It's good (I think) that Baxter makes the point that primitive humans who believed they were living in harmony with nature actually did a devasting job on their prey species. There's some amusement value in reading the description of the First Fan:

"She had always been isolated, even as a child. She could not throw herself into the games of chase and wrestling and chattering that the other youngsters had indulged in, or their adolescent sexual experiments. It was always as if the others knew how to behave, what do do, how to laugh and cry--how to fit in, a mystery she could never share. Her restless inventiveness in such a conservative culture--and her habit of trying to figure out why things happened, how they worked--didn't make her any more popular." (page 292)

Alas, this woman, Mother, who invents conscious thought as a tool for something other than social interaction, and consequently invents a variety of other useful tools (in a reversal of the old depiction of men inventing tools almost certainly invented and used by women, who did most of the foraging and gathering, Baxter has Mother invent the spear-thrower, something far more likely to have been invented by the men who did most of the hunting) becomes obsessively fixated on the death of her son, invents gods, religion, life after death, black magic, and human sacrifice. Baxter assigns the whole thing to one emotionally unbalanced woman, and portrays it all in relentlessly negative terms, even while conceding that this nasty invention caught on and survived because it conveyed survival benefits to its adopters. It's all downhill from there, as far as human character goes. On page 322, we're told:

"And just as they were able to believe that things, weapons or animals or the sky, were in some way people, it wasn't a hard leap to make to believe that some people were no more than things. The old categories had broken down. In attacking the river folk they werent killing humans, people like themselves. The river folk, for all their technical cleverness with fire and clay, had no such belief. It was a weapon they could not match. And this small but vicious conflict set a pattern that would be repeated again and again in the long, bloody ages to come. And there it is, folks, the roots of the Holocaust right there at the dawn of civilization, with the invention of religion."

The problem with this is that Baxter has already shown us repeatedly, in earlier episodes in the Evolution of Humans, that it's nonsense. Time and again he has shown us early hominids and pre-hominids regarding strangers of same or similar species as creatures to be killed. Over and over again the men, the boys, and sometimes even the young girls are killed, and maybe the adult or near-adult females are kept for breeding purposes. The great mental breakthrough that Pebble and Harpoon made, in the early morning of genus Homo, was the possibility of active cooperation with other bands. The great mental breakthrough Harpoon's ancestors had made, back at the very dawn of genus Homo, was the invention of trade as a possible means of relating to humans from other bands.

And what's striking and different about raids that Mother's followers make on other bands, is not that they kill most of the members of the band. The thing Mother's followers do that's different is that first, they make peaceful contact with the band to find out what neat new technology they have, and then, when they do attack, they spare not only the adult and near-adult females, but also some of the adult males, the ones who are the experts in the most interesting bits of new technology that the _target band has. What's different about Mother's followers is not that they have found a way to regard other people as things, but that they have found reasons other than sexual exploitation to forcibly add people to their band rather than kill them. For Mother's people, other people are useful or dangerous precisely because they are people, with knowledge and skills of their own, rather than just rival animals competing for the same resources. What makes them more dangerous is not that they have new talent for dehumanizing other people (earlier varieties of hominid didn't need to dehumanize people because it never occurred to them that hominids not members of their own band were people), but the fact that their killing technology gets a lot better.

Eventually , of course, we catch up to the frame story, and the downfall of Homo sapiens without ever having gotten humans even as far as Mars. After all, how could such a loser species do anything really grand? Post-collapse, it apparently takes only a thousand years or so for humans to completely lose the power of speech. An interesting detail from this point on is that Baxter, who never used the words "man" and "woman" to describe males and females of primate species until he got to genus Homo, does not stop using it as he describes the steadily more primitive and degraded post-Homo varieties of primate. Thus we have a primate evolved to live pretty much exactly like a naked mole rat, referred to as "mole woman," but only after Baxter has gone to great lengths to emphasize the fact that these "mole folk" have no higher consiousness at all, and virtually no brains.

All in all, it's a depressing, negative view of humans and evolution, and evidently intended to be. Avoid this one.
( )

Fun speculation about the evolution of humanity, individual and mind and the question of who is the crown of creation. The answer: there is none. Baxter's outlook is pretty depressing when is comes to mankind; degeneration is what expects us, new species will take over as the environment will change. ( )

Interesting in its scope, but I don't much care for his style. It's a little too direct in places. ( )

As a rollicking science fiction tale, this book may leave the reader scratching their head. It is more a series of interrelated short stories and vignettes given from the viewpoint of creatures stretching back in time from the first tiny mammals to survive the impact which took out the dinosaurs, to the present, to the distant future when our planet is trashed and our sun has expanded to re-absorb the Earth.

What this story -does- do more clearly than all the snoozer science textbooks we were forced to read in high school and college is take the various critical turning points of evolution, when some new adaptation or trait emerged to help our species evolve into the species we know of as homo sapiens today. And each of those vignettes is interesting, fully explained, and will leave the lay-reader with a thorough understanding of how we ended up where we are today.

And then Baxter journeys into our future...

With the same thoroughness, Baxter takes us through various plausibilities, extrapolating the choices we are making as a species today to ignore environmental degradation, civil unrest, aggression, and carries our species forward into the distant future, building upon the framework he built in the first half of the book to get us where we are evolutionarily speaking today, to show us where we are headed in the future ... and it is not pretty.

This book stayed with me for a long time after I read it. We're all screwed!!!

4 Evolutionary Monkeys ( )

99.9% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct. What if anything makes us special? And what does the future hold for us a species?

This novel tackles those questions in an ambitious 600+ collection of chronological vignettes. These cover the proto-simian creature Purgatorius, early primates like notharctus, hominids such as australopithecines & Homo erectus, Neanderthals, modern day humans, and imagined future possibilities for our kind. There's plenty of scientific exposition and speculation to mull over on the long journey. (Also generous amounts of sex and violence, but I suppose that's par for the course.)

PS: I found the description of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction (the one that got the dinosaurs) to be particularly riveting. Several theories exist regarding the cause, but Baxter goes with the most popular scenario: asteroid impact. Those who like apocalyptic fiction should particularly enjoy this chapter. ( )

In a word, depressing. Baxter evidently has no faith in life of any kind, as he depicts all sentient beings as immediately impacting their environment in the most destructive manner possible. He doesn´t consider that there were ever communities (human or otherwise) that were able to exist sustainably with the environment. Or maybe he just ignores them since they don´t fit into his altogether pessimistic worldview. The encounters with predator after predator became absurd after awhile, and were tiresome before that. There was one episode spanning about 3 pages where a post-human escaped her homicidal "cousins" in the trees, ran into a giant rat-beast on the forest floor, and escaped into the tree-tops only to be plucked by a giant finch. I get the point Mr. Baxter: animal existence is perilous.

The problem with a book that only considers humanity from a species perspective is that you don´t take into account perhaps life´s most incredible achievement: individuality. Baxter´s unconvincing proposal that perhaps it´s not too bad to lose our intellect and become enslaved to giant rats or killer trees (afterall, they protect our survival as a species) completely disregards everything important about human nature. A purely biological view of evolution misses the possibility that the mind is the true launchpad for the next evolutionary step.

The "afterword" which explains that most of the book may not even be based on fact would have been useful as a foreword. It was difficult to tell how much of his book Baxter intended to be taken as fact, a confusion which I imagine was intentional. That makes it all the stranger when you have him inventing things like air whales and whip-wielding dinosaurs. He seems to want to have his book be two different things at the same time, but ends up de-legitimizing the fact and shafting the fiction. Ultimately, as a human being, the most interesting parts for me were the stories about all of the pre- and immediately post-humans, stories which only occupied about 200 of the 600 pages. The rest of the stories of primates and rats and mole-people just got kind of boring. Imaginative to be sure, but repetitive.

Last but by no means least annoying was Baxter´s bizarre fixation on excrement, especially feces. What began as an interesting documentation of animal behavior became downright strange when he moved into the human societies and people were still excreting all over the place, every few pages. I feel bad for him, because in the world Baxter apparently inhabits, every living person and animal he knows shits and pisses themselves when frightened, hurt, or dying. It must be a stinky existence he leads. ( )

I got through about 100 pages of this book, but lost the will to continue. The novel goes back to the time of the dinosaurs and we are presented with animals with names, back stories and a family life; not my cup of tea. ( )

I'm sorry to say that I'm not going to finish this book. It started out just fine, but after only a few pages I began to struggle. The book reads a little bit like a documentary. And in most cases documentaries are ok to watch for as long as there is nothing more interesting to do or read. It isn't like the book is badly written, it just couldn't appeal to me!

I really wanted to love this book, as the concept is very nice. However, ultimately the first 2/3 of the book is rather repetitive, longwinded and not that interesting if you're already familiar with most of the science he is trying to explain. The last 1/3 ('future') I liked better, though is rather bleak, similar to 'flood' in a way. ( )

This is for the Kindle version of the following book.

I just finished "Evolution" by Stephen Baxter.

I had to struggle to keep reading it for the first 1/3rd of it. When I looked down and saw I was only at 37%, I couldn't believe it...

However, perseverance paid off. The book is wonderful, I wish I had the words.

This is what I learned.....yes, there is lots of fiction, I know...but listen up:

From the beginning of time, to the far future, the earth and its inhabitants will go thru constant changes.

Whether by humans or animals, the eco system will be changed, destroyed, and recover........altho not in a way we may wish.

This will/can happen in many ways.....by overgrazing, climate change, bacterial infection, natural catastrophes, stupid humans with their finger on the red button, we reside on a living planet, that still hasn't stopped moving around.

People and animals will adapt. The strongest will survive, the weakest will die out......completely.

This has happened over and over and over, and will continue to happen....until our sun novas and the Earth itself will die. People will continue to evolve as well, and adapt to those changing conditions.

The story has some wonderful future scenarios. What a wonderful storyteller! ( )

Fun fictional accounting of our past and future evolution. ( )

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.

.................................................................................................................. ( )

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/nonfiction/evolution.htm

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. ( )

In Evolution Baxter takes the reader on another of his epic explorations of the human condition. Here we follow the primates, from the earlist mouse sized hole dwellers in the age of dinosaurs all the way through the sweep of human genetic history ending with a strange primate/tree symbiosis in the distant future.

Baxter points out that this is a work of fiction, not a textbook of human evolution. The creatures that spring from his imagination in both the distant past and the far future all well rounded and though provoking.

My only criticism of Evolution is it's size, at just short of 800 pages it did get a little samey in parts. ( )

SF novel.