Living on Earth

Long-listed, Washington Post Best Books of the Year, 2024 "Listening to Godfrey-Smith's exploration of animal consciousness will rattle every nook and cranny of your brain with an onslaught of interesting questions...the author leaves listeners with a radical new perspective."—AudioFile on Metazoa This program is read by the author. The bestselling author of Other Minds shows how we and our ancestors have reinvented our planet. If the history of the Earth were compressed down to a year, our species would arise in the last thirty minutes or so of the final hour. But life itself is not such a late arrival: It has existed on Earth for something like 3.7 billion years—most of our planet’s history and over a quarter of the age of the universe (as far as we can tell). What have these organisms—bacteria, animals, plants, and the rest—done in all this time? In Living on Earth, the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith proposes a new way of understanding how the actions of living beings hav