|
Evolution | 
 enlarge | Author: Stephen Baxter
Publisher: Del Rey
Category: Book
List Price: $7.99
Buy Used: $0.01
You Save: $7.98 (100%)
New (27) Used (35) from $0.01
Rating:  69 reviews
Sales Rank: 83306
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Pages: 656
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 6.7 x 4.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 0345457838
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780345457837
ASIN: 0345457838
Publication Date: February 3, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy!
| |
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
Following up his cosmic Manifold series, Stephen Baxter peers back on a more prosaic history in the worthy yet uneven Evolution. The book is nothing less than a novelization of human evolution, a mega-Michener treatment of 65 million years starring a host of smart, furry primates representing Homo sapiens's ancestry. Each stage of our ancestry is represented by a character of progressively increasing intelligence, empathy, and brain size, who must survive predation and other perils long enough to keep the natural-selection ball rolling. While Baxter carefully follows some widely accepted theories of evolution--punctuated equilibrium, for instance--he also strays from the known in postulating air whales and sentient, tool-wielding dinosaurs. And why not? There's nothing in the fossil record to contradict his musings about those things, or about the first instances of mammalian altruism and deception, which he also lets us observe. From little Purga, a shrewlike mammal scurrying under the feet of ankylosaurs, all the way through Ultimate, the last human descendant, Baxter adds drama and a strong story arc to our past and future. But he spends too much time on details of the various prehumans' lives, which can become repetitive: fight, mate, die, ad infinitum. And readers eager for a science-fictional adventure will only find satisfaction in the posthuman chapters at the end. Despite these flaws, Evolution grips the attention with an epoch-spanning tale of the random changes that rule our genetic heritage. Recommended. --Therese Littleton
Product Description
Stretching from the distant past into the remote future, from primordial Earth to the stars, Evolution is a soaring symphony of struggle, extinction, and survival; a dazzling epic that combines a dozen scientific disciplines and a cast of unforgettable characters to convey the grand drama of evolution in all its awesome majesty and rigorous beauty. Sixty-five million years ago, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, there lived a small mammal, a proto-primate of the species Purgatorius. From this humble beginning, Baxter traces the human lineage forward through time. The adventure that unfolds is a gripping odyssey governed by chance and competition, a perilous journey to an uncertain destination along a route beset by sudden and catastrophic upheavals. It is a route that ends, for most species, in stagnation or extinction. Why should humanity escape this fate?
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 64 more reviews...
A reasonably engaging piece of science fiction (not fact) August 17, 2008
J. Chen
The best part of the book is the causal linkage of several episodes of willpower and sheer determination by humans' "evolutionary ancestors." It is a saga on a grand time scale, if not space scale, reminiscent of classics such as Asimov's Foundation series (though "Evolution" pales in comparison to this series).
The worst part of the book, and this is in some sense a back-handed compliment to Baxter, is that it seems to have made evolution more credible to non-scientists and non-biologists. It is ironic that fictionalized accounts should have such an effect on what should be a scientific endeavor to demonstrate evolution. The problems with evolution are easily searched via the internet. Even within the discourse of the book, humans don't quite fit the evolutionary narrative. Throughout the book, the tight interplay of adaptation and environment is constantly evoked -- unnecessary functions wither away, and necessary functions evolve on cue. However, humans have clearly overadapted, unequivocally transcending environment and necessity.
If I were Baxter, and even if I were the most ardent evolutionist (which I am not), I would have added a forward in the book that states clearly that this is a book of fiction, and that while evolutionary theory is controversial, the statement that the theory has prominent scientists on both sides of the fence is not.
A Stunning Vision June 10, 2008
beammeup (Cedar Park, TX USA)
This is probably the best book I've read in a long time. As a dedicated Darwinist and Baxter fan, I grabbed this book the second I saw it. The stories stretch from the far past of Pangeae into the far future of New Pangeae and the ultimate destruction of Earth. I immersed myself in the characters, from lowly Purga all the way to poor, lowly Ultimate. My favorite concepts were the Hunters of Pangeae and the sky whale creatures. The entire book was like a wonderful painting of humanity's history as a species and a culture.
My only complaint is that at times the stories were hard to work through and I found myself rushing to finish them, this soon stopped when I reached the final three stories about humanity's descendants. Creation-scientists shouldn't read this; their blood pressure's high enough as it is.
 Unputdownable! April 23, 2008
Nina Waite (Silicon Valley CA)
I picked this one up on a whim, and found it to be one of the best I've read in a very long time. The level of geological, archaeological, and other scientific detail, and the creation of character and plot from the dust of the past reminded me of the early books of Jean Auel's Earth's Children series, and of Raptor Red, another great book. Baxter is a good scientist, and a great storyteller!
 Interesting Overall, but a disappointing ending. February 19, 2008
Chris Meyers (Seattle, WA USA)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
I would recommend that you not finish this book. The foundations of the book, with it's historical, geological/biological background, are interesting: Baxter builds upon true science and tries to give interesting reasons and logic to the development of life.
However, I suggest that you just stop reading once you get to the modern era, as you will probably be disappointed with the change in tone of the book otherwise. Without the historical scientific backing to make his story believable, Baxter fails to use a rigorous logic and science and the story becomes inplausible.
The next section talks about the shortcomings of the books final chapters, and as such may reveal things about the story (the chapters are all relatively independent, however, so there isn't really much to spoil):
If enough humans survived to split into at least 4 different species, enough would have survived to rebuild civilization, even if they didn't remember any of their technology and had to start from scratch. Baxter doesn't give any reasoning for the change, and seems like he just wants to gloss over the current period of Earth's history. After arguing for the benefits of brain size for all mammals during the 'tough times' of the ice ages, it is difficult to accept that humans would give up the feature that made them the dangerous predator in Earth's history.
I feel the biggest mistake on Baxter's part, however, was trivializing the events on Mars. I expected that he would talk about the posibility of a machine ecosystem, evolving along the same lines as a biological system, over millions of years. However he glosses over the possible story and has them fly off on fusion drives they somehow invented in a few thousand years. I believe that this part of the story deserved a few chapters instead of the few paragraphs it got, and would have been a much more satisfactory ending. Either that or an exploration of humanity's more likely path of evolution: where we control our own genes and progress.
Overall, the ending seems like a few chapters of detritus tacked on to a solid 80% of a book.
making paleontology come alive! February 9, 2008
Alva L. Couch (Woburn, MA United States)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
"Evolution" is an inspiring tale of plausible speculation in the framework of current scientific thought about human development. Many reviewers have commented on the broad scope, so I will instead comment on the inspirations I took from the book and some of its most memorable moments.
I had never grasped the real time-scales that evolution involves. Early in the book, Baxter points out carefully the differences in cognitive development between us and his characters. Through a careful series of traceries, he depicts just how slow brain development was in pre-history. When a character finally realizes he can crack a nut between two stones, Baxter points out that it took 25 million years for that idea to develop from the idea of beating a nut against a tree.
Another major lesson I take from the book is the fragility of archaeological evidence. Baxter plays with that fragility, asking the reader whether there would be any record whatever if dinosaurs used wood tools. Good question! The evidence we have of prehistory is extremely small, very much like the view we see of distant stars through a telescope. Baxter makes the point that for everything we can see, there are many things unseen.
All in all, one of the best hard-science-fiction books I have ever read, in the same class as Harry Harrison's masterwork "West of Eden".
|
|
|
Can't find the right gift? Try a Gift Certificate
| |
