Montana Tech Books

The best part of the book is the causal linkage of several episodes of willpower and sheer determination by humans' "evolutionary ancestors." It is a saga on a grand time scale, if not space scale, reminiscent of classics such as Asimov's Foundation series (though "Evolution" pales in comparison to this series).

The worst part of the book, and this is in some sense a back-handed compliment to Baxter, is that it seems to have made evolution more credible to non-scientists and non-biologists. It is ironic that fictionalized accounts should have such an effect on what should be a scientific endeavor to demonstrate evolution. The problems with evolution are easily searched via the internet. Even within the discourse of the book, humans don't quite fit the evolutionary narrative. Throughout the book, the tight interplay of adaptation and environment is constantly evoked -- unnecessary functions wither away, and necessary functions evolve on cue. However, humans have clearly overadapted, unequivocally transcending environment and necessity.

If I were Baxter, and even if I were the most ardent evolutionist (which I am not), I would have added a forward in the book that states clearly that this is a book of fiction, and that while evolutionary theory is controversial, the statement that the theory has prominent scientists on both sides of the fence is not.

This is probably the best book I've read in a long time. As a dedicated Darwinist and Baxter fan, I grabbed this book the second I saw it. The stories stretch from the far past of Pangeae into the far future of New Pangeae and the ultimate destruction of Earth. I immersed myself in the characters, from lowly Purga all the way to poor, lowly Ultimate. My favorite concepts were the Hunters of Pangeae and the sky whale creatures. The entire book was like a wonderful painting of humanity's history as a species and a culture.

My only complaint is that at times the stories were hard to work through and I found myself rushing to finish them, this soon stopped when I reached the final three stories about humanity's descendants. Creation-scientists shouldn't read this; their blood pressure's high enough as it is.

I picked this one up on a whim, and found it to be one of the best I've read in a very long time. The level of geological, archaeological, and other scientific detail, and the creation of character and plot from the dust of the past reminded me of the early books of Jean Auel's Earth's Children series, and of Raptor Red, another great book. Baxter is a good scientist, and a great storyteller!

"Evolution" is an inspiring tale of plausible speculation in the framework of current scientific thought about human development. Many reviewers have commented on the broad scope, so I will instead comment on the inspirations I took from the book and some of its most memorable moments.

I had never grasped the real time-scales that evolution involves. Early in the book, Baxter points out carefully the differences in cognitive development between us and his characters. Through a careful series of traceries, he depicts just how slow brain development was in pre-history. When a character finally realizes he can crack a nut between two stones, Baxter points out that it took 25 million years for that idea to develop from the idea of beating a nut against a tree.

Another major lesson I take from the book is the fragility of archaeological evidence. Baxter plays with that fragility, asking the reader whether there would be any record whatever if dinosaurs used wood tools. Good question! The evidence we have of prehistory is extremely small, very much like the view we see of distant stars through a telescope. Baxter makes the point that for everything we can see, there are many things unseen.

All in all, one of the best hard-science-fiction books I have ever read, in the same class as Harry Harrison's masterwork "West of Eden".

I would recommend that you not finish this book. The foundations of the book, with it's historical, geological/biological background, are interesting: Baxter builds upon true science and tries to give interesting reasons and logic to the development of life.

However, I suggest that you just stop reading once you get to the modern era, as you will probably be disappointed with the change in tone of the book otherwise. Without the historical scientific backing to make his story believable, Baxter fails to use a rigorous logic and science and the story becomes inplausible.

The next section talks about the shortcomings of the books final chapters, and as such may reveal things about the story (the chapters are all relatively independent, however, so there isn't really much to spoil):
If enough humans survived to split into at least 4 different species, enough would have survived to rebuild civilization, even if they didn't remember any of their technology and had to start from scratch. Baxter doesn't give any reasoning for the change, and seems like he just wants to gloss over the current period of Earth's history. After arguing for the benefits of brain size for all mammals during the 'tough times' of the ice ages, it is difficult to accept that humans would give up the feature that made them the dangerous predator in Earth's history.

I feel the biggest mistake on Baxter's part, however, was trivializing the events on Mars. I expected that he would talk about the posibility of a machine ecosystem, evolving along the same lines as a biological system, over millions of years. However he glosses over the possible story and has them fly off on fusion drives they somehow invented in a few thousand years. I believe that this part of the story deserved a few chapters instead of the few paragraphs it got, and would have been a much more satisfactory ending. Either that or an exploration of humanity's more likely path of evolution: where we control our own genes and progress.

Overall, the ending seems like a few chapters of detritus tacked on to a solid 80% of a book.