It’s Week 4 of Nonfiction November and Rebekah @ She Seeks Nonfiction is hosting. The topic is worldview shapers:

“One of the greatest things about reading nonfiction is learning all kinds of things about our world which you never would have known without it. There’s the intriguing, the beautiful, the appalling, and the profound. What nonfiction book or books have impacted the way you see the world in a powerful way? Is there one book that made you rethink everything? Do you think there is a book that should be required reading for everyone?“

I read two books back-to-back earlier this year that were definitely worldview shapers for me. They’d make a good book pairing too except they’re both nonfiction.

They’re about life but from very different extremes: extinction and evolution. (The links below point to my reviews.)

The Ends of the World

The Ends of the World:
Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and
Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions
By Peter Brannen
Ecco, New York, 2017

You might think a 290-page deep dive into mass extinction would be the most depressing book ever. But The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen is a fascinating walk through half a billion years of the history of life on Earth.

I don’t know about you, but I can barely remember what happened last week. Brannen does a beautiful job conveying the enormous stretches of “deep time” during which Earth has experienced five great mass extinctions. He describes the amazing and sometimes frightening life forms that lived in each era and the cataclysmic events that wiped most of them out.

It’s a warning that today we humans are tampering with fundamental earth systems, especially the carbon cycle, in a way that could cause – may already be causing – another mass extinction, including our own.

The Ends of the World is also about beginnings. After each mass extinction Brannen shows how life blooms again with extraordinary vitality and resilience.

It’s true: “life finds a way.”

Some Assembly Required

Some Assembly Required:
Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA
By Neil Shubin
Pantheon Books, New York, 2020

I had a nagging question after reading about those mass extinctions: how could life reemerge with such vigor, diversity and, dare I say, speed? (A few million years is fast in geologic time.)

Some Assembly Required by Neil Shubin is a perfect follow up to The Ends of the World. It’s about the genetic mechanisms that drive evolution. It’s about how life evolves in all its forms and varieties.

He makes the case that evolution occurs through changes in when and where various genes are active. How does the giraffe’s neck get so long? By elongating the time during which the genes controlling neck growth are active.

Shubin describes how genomes have developed by combining and repurposing genes, by incorporating and by co-opting genetic material from invading viruses. And he shows that there’s a constant battle going on within our genes to control which ones are active, where they’re active and for how long.

Some Assembly Required is exciting and exuberant and beautifully presents how DNA and evolution have created the amazing diversity and resilience of life on Earth.

Thanks for reading.