The Variety of Life: A Survey and a Celebration of All the Creatures That Have Ever Lived

Professor Tudge has done all of us a great service with this terrific book. He lays out a clear way for generalists to get a basic understanding on the way life on this planet is related at present and into the past to our best understanding of life's origins.He explains a variety of classification systems (and some specialists might disagree with his characterizations - but that is a smallish point to those of us who aren't specialists) and provides wonderful illustrations that give us a broad sweep of how the branches flow together in the past. He explains the current limits of our understanding. And he has a wonderful treatment of the Domains as currently understood - Bacteria, Archae, and Eucarya. Obviously, most of the book is on Eucarya because that is most interesting to us humans, but the bulk of life on earth is bacteria and that is kind of interesting to understand. This book really updates my understanding of what I was taught in 7th grade biology too many years ago. I think every bright high school student ought to read it as well as anyone who wants to understand the amazing range of life now living and that has lived on this earth. You won't look at your life here the same way ever again.

Colin Tudge has produced a remarkable book that captures the complexities of the Earth's biota. Probably already somewhat out of date (phylogenic studies are producing new results at a fantastic rate) this book is still a necessary reference for biologists everywhere. The old two-kingdom concept, which gave way to a five-kingdom concept, is now a multi-kingdom concept. At the very least we should have six kingdoms- Animalia, Fungi, Plantae, Protoctista, Archaebacteria and Eubacteria. The exact final number is yet to be decided. However, it can be easily argued that the Protoctista and the Bacteria could be broken into even more kingdoms and indeed several authors now talk of at least three domains, containing procaryote (bacterial) and eucaryote kingdoms.All of this is primarily a result of studies on DNA and other chemicals of life. This research has especially shown the bacterial and "single-celled" organism world to be much more complex than anyone ever thought. From slime molds to cyanobacteria and oak trees to humans, the variation on life on this planet is what fascinates biologists. Tudge's book is a very good review of this extreme diversity and gives us a very good reason to avoid destroying it! Read this book if you are interested in the diversity of life on Earth.

This book pulls together an enormous amount of information and makes it digestible to the average undergraduate - no small feat. It's scope is magnificent, as is its treatment of fundamental concepts of evolution. Although I think there are some problems with the sections on extinct birds and cetaceans (based on new discoveries), Tudge does as well as anybody could in defining outgroups and sister taxa, always erring on the conservative side. I think the most novel and thought-provoking portion of the text concerns the number of kingdoms we might now wish to recognize - I discuss Tudge's reasoning for this with my biology undergraduates and it never fails to make an impression. A splendid accomplishment, and I'm waiting eagerly for a second edition, and a third, and so on. Well done Dr. Tudge, and sincere thanks.

This book is an amazing read. With clear, concise and lyrical prose Colin Tudge accomplishes what I've always sought in my education--a well rounded synthesis of biological theories and principles explained in context of the diversity of life. This book gave me the perspectives and deeper insights about systematics needed to become a good naturalist and ecologist--perspective that weren't explicitly taught in my college biology courses. The phylogenetic tree illustrations are a brilliant, accessible reference. In today's world where molecular biology and reductionistic perspectives dominate our understanding of life, Tudge successfully brings back the importance to understanding and appreciating the whole organism.

This book is about breadth, not depth. From the perspective of this book, Passeriformes are about as interesting as all of the little rodents scurrying around, regardless of what birders think about them. And the book DOES explicitly place lice in their proper perspective, to correct an error made by another reviewer. There are all kinds of interesting small articles that treat particularly interesting aspects of certain groups of organisms: a vertable gold mind of fascinating relationships. Don't go to this book to find out about particular plants an animals, but to find out about the vast diversity of life on this planet and how it all relates together.