Life On Earth – David Attenborough, 1979 ★★★★

Mother Nature Displays Her Charms

Phylum-hopping from microbes to coral reefs to orangutans, David Attenborough offers what may well be one of the most engaging tours ever taken of the natural world in this, a companion volume to his celebrated BBC series. The book details the evolutionary path of all earthly life, from prehistoric plants to present-day man.

Do you know that orchids may attract pollen-carrying insects by impersonating sex partners, or even carrion?

That a frog chorus can fill a swamp with a greater diversity of sound than one would get in a concert hall?

That a shearwater bird was taken from Wales to Boston and managed to fly itself back home?

“Had butterflies been color-blind and bees without a delicate sense of smell, man would have been denied some of the greatest delights that the natural world has to offer,” he writes.

Is it possible biology could really be so charming? Not really. Attenborough explains time and again that evolution and nature are cruel mistresses, and any sense one might have of progress in life’s development, of intelligent design or even a friendly guiding hand, is merely a construct divorced from any evidence on fossilized display. “Such trends are clearer in the minds of men than they are in the rocks,” he concludes.

The world Attenborough presents, time and time again, is very much one of dog-eat-dog, or numerous variations along this theme. Animals develop strategies for survival which become defining physical characteristics and defensive mechanisms, but ultimately serve little apparent purpose beyond producing offspring and providing calories for other creatures who devour them without mercy.

But the main takeaway you may get from Life On Earth is less slaughterhouse than wonderland, a result of Attenborough's winning manner. He’s not much different than the person you might have seen on the TV program, starting each episode with a story around a particular creature, then pulling back to describe what its progress across the centuries reveals about the nature of evolution. His style is buoyant, curious, sometimes even humorous.

In detailing the case of the sloth, Attenborough notes how it rarely descends from the trees, where it is safe from nearly all predators and enjoys a regular supply of food. Yet sometimes it does tred upon the ground, for reasons perhaps connected to mating yet little understood: “No student of animal behavior has yet been brave enough to contemplate the days and nights of stupefying inactivity that would have to be endured by anyone who wants to find out more about a sloth’s private life.”

The book contains a number of fantastic color photos taken on expeditions by Attenborough himself. These tie in nicely to the various natural life forms then being discussed.

David Attenborough gets close to a couple of friendly mountain gorillas in this still image from the companion BBC television series for Life On Earth. Attenborough notes the gorillas, while typically shy of humans, have no real enemies and a vegetable diet that makes them placid company when they aren't threatened. [Image from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1051927/Richard-Attenborough-How-I-ended-signing-womens-breasts-brother-David-tickled-gorillas-chests.html]

The book includes some lengthy discussions of fossils of the earliest known life forms, including segmented worms and brachiopods which developed horny shells over the course of a hundred million years. “Many species developed a hole at the hinge end of one of the valves through which the worm-like stalk emerged to fasten the animal into the mud,” Attenborough writes. “This gave the shell the look of an inverted Roman oil lamp, with the stalk as a wick, and so the group as a whole gained the name of lamp-shells.”

Other, more advanced but extinct life forms include the trilobite, whose remains can be found in the once-ocean-covered desert wastes of Morocco Attenborough spends some time investigating. In the southwestern United States, Attenborough addresses the story of dinosaurs.

I was surprised to read him dismiss the idea that the dinosaurs were destroyed by a sudden cataclysm, the asteroid theory that was already in circulation in the 1970s and seems more popular today. In this 1979 account, Attenborough points out that if there had been some sudden environmental catastrophe, “it was only the dinosaurs that disappeared.” His theory rests more on land-mass movements and temperature drops, which not only caused mass extinction but forced surviving creatures to adopt in ways that transformed their basic nature.

Time and again, Attenborough returns to the theme of practicality driving how animals find their niches in the tree of life. Why do some birds fly, while others, less common but still in evidence on various continents, don’t? It comes back to the fact that in some parts of the world, such as New Zealand, home of the kiwis, the kakapos, and the takahes, there was no need to fly from predators as there were no such threats until the arrival of man.

“This relapse to a ground-living life is an indication of the great demands that flying puts on a bird’s energies and the amount of food it needs in consequence,” Attenborough writes. “If life can be led in safety on the ground, then this is a much easier option and the birds take it.”

The final chapters are less focused this way as the life forms Attenborough describes become more complex and seemingly harder to summarize. By the time we get to man, Attenborough offers some banal anecdotes regarding communication and its role in our species’ ascendency, detailing a visit to a New Guinea tribe living in Stone Age isolation. Some pleasantries are exchanged, with Attenborough expounding on the art of “the eyebrow flash” and how it, like the smile, can be interpreted as early indications of a desire for peaceful co-existence. Charming, yes, but it is also the only time the book comes across as too light and reductive for its own good.

Most of the way, what you get here is a fine, easy-to-read primer into the nature of life as we know it. Certainly worth having, especially for those of us who never found the subject much fun.