About this item
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.
About the Author
PETER GODFREY-SMITH is a professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Metazoa and the bestselling Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life, which was shortlisted for the 2017 Royal Society Science Book Prize and has since been published in more than twenty languages. He is also the author of four other books, including Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science and Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, which won the 2010 Lakatos Award for an outstanding work on the philosophy of science.
