Sunday, March 25, 2007

Etalon - The Book of Life

Stephen Jay Gould, General Editor

The Book of Life

An Illustrated History of the Evolution of Life on Earth, Second Edition


A new edition of the beautifully illustrated depiction of the dramatic story of survival and extinction.

The Book of Life is a uniquely ambitious combination of art and science. Presented here is the story of life on Earth, a compelling drama of survival and extinction spanning over 600 million years. The text, under the general editorship of best-selling author Stephen Jay Gould, offers a thorough tour of the best research on evolution; the story is brilliantly illuminated throughout with paintings and line drawings. Never before have the varied forms of the past been so lavishly or so fully depicted—many for the first time.

Our story begins with a period of billions of years when single-celled bacteria reigned alone on the Earth. Then came an explosion of life and the staggering oceanic diversity of the Cambrian period, which we know from the strange flowering plants and compelling creatures found fossilized in Canada's Burgess Shale.

It took over 100,000,000 years for life as captured in the Burgess Shale to make its way onto dry land. Now we begin to see a dramatic array of amphibians, reptiles, insects nearer in form to those we know and, of course, dinosaurs.

The history of the Earth is punctuated with catastrophes. Fortunately, our mammalian ancestors survived the catastrophe that ended the dinosaurs' time—probably caused by the impact of a giant comet—and so inherited the Earth. These small, resilient animals of so many millions of years ago evolved into an enormous range of mammals, including our remote ancestors and ourselves. Readers will learn the controversial story of the emergence of modern humans, genetically similar to the apes but endowed to shape the world as no other creature has.

As the narrative unfolds, we learn about changes on the planet's surface and in its atmosphere: the role of climate, land movements, and plant life. We discover the chains of survival that link species, how animals adapted to the food available, the causes and consequences of mass extinctions, and finally the impact of creatures, especially humans, on the environment.

Throughout The Book of Life we meet the dedicated scientists and gifted amateurs who have found, puzzled over, and interpreted the evidence of evolution all over the world.

In his opening chapter, Stephen Jay Gould offers us a look into ourselves, a species unwilling to abandon its own centrality as the ordering principle of life's history. Drawing out a history of the iconography of nature, Gould reveals the curious biases of the human view of the natural world.

The Book of Life builds a bridge of knowledge, bringing the frontiers of science and what we know of life's history to all of us who wish to come closer to our beginnings and know more of who we are.



Stephen Jay Gould is the best-selling author of numerous books. He lives in New York City.
Book of Life

Also available in paperback



Also Available:
The Mismeasure of Man

Mismeasure of Man




2001 / Cloth / ISBN 0-393-05003-3 / 256 pages / 9" x 12" / Science

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