Explaining Life Through Evolution

By: Prosanta Chakrabarty

Narrated by: Alexander Thomas

The story of four billion years of life on EarthLooking forward to a book that explains life? Well, here it is! Explaining Life Through Evolution opens a window to the four billion year history of the millions of species we see on this planet. This book does not simply narrate the story of evolution: It brings to light who we are and where we came from. As humans we often focus on identifying our differences, no matter how small; Prosanta Chakrabarty demystifies our perceived differences and emphasizes our similarities. As more and more people take ancestry tests, sending their DNA samples and money to genealogy testing centres, we need to be educated on what the results actually mean scientifically; and we all have to decide together what it means socially. He thinks we should be celebrating the fact that our diversity comes from the same little drops of water and sunlight, each of us just shining a little differently as seen through the prism of evolution.Prosanta encourages us to think of life as being like a book, one that is always in the making. What we see living around us today are just the last few pages. If we look out on to the millions of species that we share this planet with we can trace their histories, and ours, back through nearly four billion years of evolution. We can also think of all the living things around as the young leaves on an ancient and gigantic 'Tree of Life', all of us connected by invisible branches not just to each other, but to our extinct relatives and our evolutionary ancestors.Evocative, comprehensive and thought-provoking, this is a book which will compel you to reimagine life.

Great book for students of evolution

I’ve taught two discussions of an undergraduate evolution course using this book. Chakrabarty is informative, interesting, and really funny (if you like really dry humor). The examples used to describe evolution here are mostly anecdotal, which makes it really accessible for students. However, to really put pieces together and develop a fundamental understanding of the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory, this is best read alongside a course. If you aren’t enrolled in an evolution course, it would be a nice supplement to the free Yale evolution course on YouTube.

Such a Disappointment

I was hoping for an update on the well known & widely accepted idea of Evolution. Instead we get a mishmash of anecdotal factoids with no central definition of Evolution and how we know what happened. A large segment deteriorates into virtue signaling in vaguely connected effects of genetics- better dealt with in a book on population genetics.

Seek other, much better books to explain what Evolution is, how it works, and how we think it is true.