
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
An iconoclast and best-selling author of both nonfiction and fiction, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has spent a lifetime observing, thinking, and writing about the cultures of animals such as lions, wolves, dogs, deer, and humans. In this compulsively readable book, she provides a plainspoken, big-picture look at the commonality of life on our planet, from the littlest microbes to the largest lizards.
Inspired by the idea of symbiosis in evolution—that all living things evolve in a series of cooperative relationships—Thomas takes readers on a journey through the progression of life. Along the way she shares the universal likenesses, experiences, and environments of "Gaia's creatures," from amoebas in plant soil to the pets we love, from proud primates to Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers on the African savanna. Fervently rejecting "anthropodenial," the notion that nonhuman life does not share characteristics with humans, Thomas instead shows that paramecia can learn, plants can communicate, humans aren't really as special as we think we are—and that it doesn't take a scientist to marvel at the smallest inhabitants of the natural world and their connections to all living things.
A unique voice on anthropology and animal behavior, Thomas challenges scientific convention and the jargon that prevents us all from understanding all living things better. This joyfully written book is a fascinating look at the challenges and behaviors shared by creatures from bacteria to larvae to parasitic fungi, a potted hyacinth to the author herself, and all those in between.
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Table of contents
- COVER front
- Series Page
- Copyright Page
- Table of Contents
- Chapter 1: About This Book
- Chapter 2: Our Bedroom
- Chapter 3: Microbes
- Chapter 4: Protists
- Chapter 5: Fungi
- Chapter 6: Animals
- Chapter 7: Dry Land
- Chapter 8: Lichens
- Chapter 9: Plants
- Chapter 10: Arthropods on Land
- Chapter 11: Vertebrates
- Chapter 12: Amphibians
- Chapter 13: Proto-Mammals
- Chapter 14: Dinosaurs
- Chapter 15: Pterosaurs
- Chapter 16: Crocodiles
- Chapter 17: Birds
- Chapter 18: Mammals
- Chapter 19: From Monkeys to the Missing Link
- Chapter 20: The Line to Homo Sapiens
- Chapter 21: Neandertals
- Chapter 22: Why Do We Look the Way We Look?
- Chapter 23: The San, Formerly Known as Bushmen
- Chapter 24: Gaia’s Rule One: Find a Source of Energy
- Chapter 25: Gaia’s Rule Two: Protect Yourself
- Chapter 26: Gaia’s Rule Three: Reproduce
- Chapter 27: The Present
- Chapter 28: The Future
- Coda
- Acknowledgments