Life Changing: How are Altering Life on Earth

by Helen Pilcher

Synopsis:

For the last three billion years or so, life on Earth was shaped by natural forces. Evolution tended to happen slowly, with species crafted across millennia. Then, a few hundred thousand years ago, along came a bolshie, big-brained, bipedal primate we now call Homo sapiens, and with that, the Earth's natural history came to an abrupt end. We are now living through the post-natural phase, where humans have become the leading force shaping evolution.

This thought-provoking book considers the many ways that we've altered the DNA of living things and changed the fate of life on earth. We have carved chihuahuas from wolves and fancy chickens from jungle fowl. We've added spider genes to goats and coral genes to tropical fish. It's possible to buy genetically-modified pets, eat genetically-modified fish and watch cloned ponies thunder up and down the polo field.

Now, as our global dominance grows, our influence extends far beyond these species. As we warm our world and radically reshape the biosphere, we affect the evolution of all living things, near and far, from the emergence of novel hybrids such as the pizzly bear, to the entirely new strains of animals and plants that are evolving at breakneck speed to cope with their altered environment.

In Life Changing, Helen introduces us to these post-natural creations and talks to the scientists who create, study and tend to them. At a time when the future of so many species is uncertain, we meet some of the conservationists seeking to steer evolution onto firmer footings with novel methods like the 'spermcopter', coral IVF and plans to release wild elephants into Denmark. Helen explores the changing relationship between humans and the natural world, and reveals how, with evidence-based thinking, humans can help life change for the better.

Helen Pilcher’s Life Changing is a book about how humans have altered other life on earth, deliberately and accidentally, covering topics like the domestication of animals, cloning, genetic engineering, extinction and conservation. None of it came as a huge surprise to me, but it was written in a very readable way, and it was kinda useful to have this kind of thing gathered and grouped together (rather than read separately in books about conservation, animal domestication, etc, all separate from one another).

Throughout, Pilcher tries to keep it light, despite the sometimes-heavy topics: sometimes the humour worked for me, sometimes less so; I wouldn’t call it laugh out loud funny, but it does keep things fairly casual (and sometimes helps to make her point, e.g. when she jokingly refers to her dog as a genetically engineered creature: essentially, he is).

It’ll probably be pretty familiar if you’ve read similar books on the topic before, but it’s accessible and a reasonably easy read. There’s no numbered footnotes or even a numbered bibliography, though, for those who would prefer to be able to fact check: it’s veeeery much on the light end of popular science, in that sense.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)