Evolution

This novel works! I'd admired Baxter's work with Arthur C. Clarke, especially THE LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS, but had found some of his ventures as a solo author, even the admirable "Manifold" novels, somewhat less inspiring. EVOLUTION marks Baxter's emergence as a writer not only of scope, but of maturity and grace. If his future writings bear out this promise, he will take his place on Charles Sheffield's vacant throne. Perhaps it helped that the subject of evolution is one that has the profoundest religious significance to me. Even as a child I couldn't understand how someone could be deeply religious and NOT believe in evolution, not love it! Evolution--cosmic, geological, biological, the time's arrow of entropy, all its manifestations--still seems to me, nearing age 70, the most liberating and beautiful method God (or whatever preceded the Big Bang) could have chosen for the universe. My conviction of evolution's rightness is why, as an adult, I chose to follow Alfred North Whitehead's theology of evolution, which some call Process Philosophy and others Panentheism. This does not mean "intelligent design." To the contrary, evolution implies choice, error, contradiction, repeated failure and rare success (if any)--the scientific method writ large--but it may be the only process that can allow ample freedom of will for all beings to work out our various destinies within a largely deterministic universe of narrow physical parameters. Stephen Baxter shares the all-encompassing evolutionary vision, which makes his book worthy to be shelved alongside William Olaf Stapledon's essential (and profoundly theological) future histories, THE LAST AND FIRST MEN and THE STAR MAKER. Baxter uses novelistic devices more than Stapledon did--in a recurring cliff-hanger story set in our near future, and in vignettes moving through time to describe critical world events defining the lives of our far-distant ancestors and far-future descendants. The ending is tragic, and to be true it has to be. The earth is not eternal, nor is the universe itself, so how can we primates expect to go on forever? Our primate brains are as capable of meanness and destruction as of altruism and beauty. And in 2005, after the events of the past few years, it seems eminently possible for human greed and stupidity to bring an abrupt end to the great experiment called humanity. Knowing the final end, however, Baxter shows us that even the tiny-brained and weak can run a praiseworthy race under the most oppressive conditions, and that the struggle of life carries within it an intrinsic divinity called "evolution."

This is a pretty mature look at evolution, its driving forces, and its ultimate results. We start at the time of the Chixculub meteorite with a small primate of the species Purgatorium and continue until far far into the future. Readers of Stapleton's Last and First Men will recognize the scope. The style is somewhat, suspiciously so actually, reminicent of the BBC television series' Walking With Dinosaurs, Beasts, and Cavemen. Professor Jack Cohen, well-known and respected, in SF circles, has helped checking the facts. The science is up to 2002 standards. The only recent thing I see missing is the connection between development of language and our loss of thick body hair (this meant that kids could no longer cling on to their mothers, and they had to develop a new way of keeping track of each other). The rise and fall of humankind is presented in a few snapshots of more or less important moments in our development. The author makes it clear that it is fiction by adding some highly speculative accounts of tool-using dinosaurs and giant-giant flying dinosaurs. Baxter has some interesting ideas, like that the advent of true language (subject-verb-object) went hand in hand with the discovery of reasoning and deduction, and, incidentally, with mysticism/religion. The book is not a brainless praise of development. The theme of the book is one of ultimate doom: when we became truly human (=discovering analysis) we also sowed the seeds of our own destruction. Baxter feels that we reached our apex during the last glaciation, when we still lived in a certain harmony with our surroundings. With the advent of agriculture the book takes on a distinctively more gloomy note. The post-apocalyptic world he describes is truly nightmarish, but, unfortunately, extremely believeable. He gives a nice touch of doom when he lets the Monolith of "2001" fame appear towards the *end* of the book.

In novel form, Baxter presents here what everyone should understand, our origins, wrote in an interesting and entertaining way, in contrast to textbooks that are often wrote in a dry, academic style. Beautifully written, Baxter traces our mammalian past, beginning with a small primate Baxter named Purga, living in the time of the dinosaurs, and then on up to the present time and into the future as well. Each chapter is a story about an animal(s), and how it has evolved and interacts with others and it's environment. These stories are fascinating indeed, little glimpses into our primate past, and how evolution has shaped us into what we are now through the relentless selection process. As millions of years pass after the great extinction event caused about 65 million years ago by a great comet (most likely), each story is about an animal or groups of animals as they become more and more human.Mammals in later times entered into group living to help ensure their survival, the corresponding social dynamics did spurr the development of larger and more complex brains, eventually giving rise to full consciousness. Baxter did a great job here, as everywhere in this novel, and his illustration of the concept of deceit as a by-product of consciousness was brilliant. At least one other reviewer speculated as to what message Stephen Baxter is trying to get across to us. One reviewer wrote that perhaps the message is that if we don't master spaceflight and get off this planet we will de-evolve into lower life forms. Well, mabe, but even though I am a supporter of our space program I think perhaps not. I believe the primary message is to dramaticize the 'fact' of evolution to the general public with a well written and informative novel, teaching the fundamentals in an entertaining way, a refreshing breath of rational thought. Indeed, in our world there are many influences pulling us this way and that, the vast majority are not worthy or rational, Baxter seems to me to be trying to counter this. We live in a society where the vast majority of people are incapable of true independent thought, lead around by our so-called 'leaders' who themselves are largely incapable of independent thought, as they were put in power by the ignorant masses in the first place. The recent movie FAHRENHEIT 9-11 is a great expose' on this. In my own community there are even people who believe that the Earth is only about 6000 years old and that the extinction of the dinosaurs was aided from hunting by humans!!! I know this sounds harsh, and it is, I believe Baxter's primary message in this novel is to get through to at least a few people with the truth about our past, that our time is but a snapshot in a vast era of billions of years, and that, if you believe Baxter to the fullest, we are just animals, however intelligent, imbedded in an ecosystem as we always have been. Baxter also covers the emergence of 'belief' systems due to evolutionary advantage, and our propensity for them,

Stephen Baxter gives us a epic tale, to show mankind where it came from and where it might be going. Starting over 65 million years ago he paints us a picture of our evolution, making sure to detail each and ever major point along the pathway where earlier primates had to make a choice. As he follows our DNA, from tiny primates, to tree-climbing apes, to tool making hominids and finally to early man, he shows us what problems we faced, how we solved them and how that shaped our body and mind.By doing so he also shows, with no forgiveness or pity, just how dangerous and ruthless we could be, even before we invented atomic bombs and machine guns. Soon we're are in the year 2031 and people realize that we need to change. NOW, not in a couple years, not in a few decades, but RIGHT NOW.After 2031 humans continue to evlove, along side fast breeding rats, jumping rabbits, flexible pigs, hungry goats, some developing new ways of life or returning to old designs that have tested true over the millions of years. But all the animals and plants are fighting for their rightful place on the aging Earth. The latter part of the book is in fact very much like a mixture of Dougal Dixon's two books, "Man After Man" and "After Man", where complex relationships form between the new animals and plants, sometimes more complex than just the simple predator and prey relationships. Even mankind splits up into different forms, some which work better than others.The book is based on rock hard science, with fantastic ideas of the author's own mixed in. It is sometimes funny, sometimes tragic and always imaginative.Yet it is also a warning. We might already be too late to change ANYTHING.

At over 640 pages, Evolution-by award winning author Stephen Baxter, a trained engineer with degrees from Cambridge and South-Ampton Universities-may not be exactly the sort of light reading one may think to bring to the beach this summer; however, its underling warning for the Human species may be a reminder of that other book concerning beaches. Evolution is perhaps the most interesting novel I have come across concerning the fate of humanity if we stay on our current course. But, rather than offer the reader the usual, overblown apocalyptic Sci Fi novel, or beating us over the head with a righteous morality play, Evolution takes the scientific route toward offering a subtle but very effective message. That message: We'd better begin to learn to cooperate as well as we compete or we Homo-Sapiens have already passed our prime.Evolution begins 65 Million Years ago when the comet which ended the reign of the dinosaurs on Earth was as bright in the sky as the sun. Baxter shows us the "lifestyle" of some of the late Cretaceous reptiles & birds from the "point of view" of the first primates-mousy little fur balls which hid from the thunder lizards by burrowing underground in the forests. Baxter names each animal we encounter-again, as the primates would see them-to give us a sense of the primates' existence and "state of mind"-as simple as some of those early minds were. This interesting technique allows the reader to partly identify with what occurs to these creatures on their road to modernity. We experience what it means to be human by what it meant to be each of these creatures in an ever changing environment. In essence, Evolution is a story of existence, adaptation, survival and extinction. By the time we get to what we may call modern humanity-around the time of the fall of the Roman Empire-we see how humanity's potential to become more than "just another animal fighting for survival" lies in our ability to cooperate and inhibit our more competitive, territorial and destructive natures. As humans fill the ecosystem like swarms of insects-something Baxter points out drove us away from our primate origins and into a much too complex existence-there needs to be created a new way of living, for the ways of old have depleted the earth's resources, severely altered the atmosphere, polluted the land and water, and sent to their extinction hundreds and thousands of species of animal. Evolution does what no other such novel has done; it lets you view humanity from the inside. It lets one see from where we came, and spends most of its pages in the deep past so that one has a resonating feel for our biological history. Baxter spends very little time in the present and near future, a time when Earth finally fights back against the human "virus" and humanity collapses upon, and in spite of itself. The concluding chapters take us 50 to 500 million years into the future to where we learn what life post-humanity might be like. Humans themselve