Evolution: The Long Journey Home

By Karley Low and Jeri Travis

Evolution: The Long Journey Home was written for anyone who believes in their heart and soul that God exists, but questions or disagrees with religious dogma. I understand science, physics, mathematics, and evolution. There is no denying the truth of these topics. I dont feel my belief in God contradicts any of these subjects. I expect the day that physics proves the existence of God. That day is closer than most realize.
I understand the mathematical odds of humans being the only intelligent life there is. There must be other beings out there. I truly believe there are, and that they are tied to God as well.
Evolution: The Long Journey Home is a story that holds many truths. God exists and He loves us being the greatest.
In all ways I hope your journey is a blessed one.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Jul 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781452517377

Karley Low

My qualifications are somewhat limited. I hold no titles or doctorates. My only degree is in naturalistic medicine, earned 30 years ago. I have educated myself on many different topics. I have always worked but find the time to pursue many a subject. I have studied many religions and feel that most carry truths. Physics and natural science are two of my favorites. I believe we need to continue learning all our lives. I live in Phoenix, Arizona with my two tiny black cats. The beauty of this entire state is truly amazing—from pretty Prescott and the spiritual red rocks of Sedona up to frosty Flagstaff. My parents live up the street in Sun City West, and a brother and his family are here as well. My son and daughter-in-law live in Prescott; and a sister, brother-in-law, and niece live in Kentucky.

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Copyright © 2014 Jeri Travis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

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ISBN: 978-1-4525-1736-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-1738-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-1737-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014908437

Balboa Press rev. date: 07/08/2014

Table of Contents

1. The Days of Jey

2. Trinity

3. The Journey Begins

4. The Slowing

5. The Joy

6. The Priestess – 15,300 BC

7. The Temple – 5076 BC

8. The Queen – 1985 BC

9. The Washerwoman – AD 79

10. The Servant – AD 299

11. The Black Death – AD 1350

12. The Tribe – AD 1670

13. The Minister – AD 1780

14. The Doctor – AD 1930

15. Father’s View

16. The Homecoming

17. Assessing My Past Lives

18. The Descent

19. The Contemplation

20. The Change

21. The Camp

22. Armageddon

23. The Second Coming

24. The Advancement

25. Level One

26. Level Two

27. Level Three

28. Level Four

29. Level Five

30. Level Six

31. Level Seven

32. Omega

33. Trinny

34. Jey’s Return

Thank you, Rosalie and Jerry Travis, Mom and Dad, for making me the person I am today.

You raised me well.

To Beth, I would not be here if it weren’t for you.

To Al, I’ll miss you every day until we meet again.

A special thank-you to Melanie Noe. I couldn’t have finished without you.

Preface

I found this poem when I was twelve years old and have kept a copy ever since. It is a work that moved my heart and mind in a new direction, making me consider the possibility of reincarnation and the magical joy of finding a soul mate. I thought it would be a wonderful prelude to this story.

My hope is that Evolution gives you a different way of looking at reality—a better, happier way. As we grow up, life loses much of the magic of our youth. There is so much more magic than we realize. In Evolution, I ponder God, reincarnation, evolution, extraterrestrials, and our place in the great plan of life.

I have always known that God exists and anticipate a day in our future when science proves what I already know to be true. I believe that when a unified theory of physics is postulated God will be in the equation. My belief is the greatest comfort and joy of my life. I would love to spread this comfort to others. That is the true inspiration for this story.

Evolution

Langdon Smith, 1895

When you were a tadpole and I was a fish,

In the Paleozoic time, and side-by-side on the ebbing tide

We sprawled through the ooze and slime, or skittered with many a caudal flip

Through the depths of the Cambrian fen, my heart was rife with the joy of life,

For I loved you even then.

Mindless we lived and mindless we loved, and mindless at last we died;

And deep in the rift of the Caradock Drift we slumbered side-by-side.

The world turned on in the lathe of time, the hot lands heaved a main,

Till we caught our breath from the womb of death,

And crept into light again.

We were amphibians, scaled and tailed, and drab as a dead man’s hand;

We coiled at ease ’neath, the dripping trees, or trailed through the mud and sand,

Croaking and blind, with our three clawed feet, writing a language dumb,

With never a spark in the empty dark,

To hint of a life to come.

Yet happy we lived, and happy we loved, and happy we died once more;

Our forms were rolled in the clinging mold of a Neocomian shore.

The eons came, and the eons fled,

And the sleep that wrapped us fast was riven away in a newer day,

And the night of death was passed.

Then light and swift through the jungle trees, we swung in our airy flight,

Or breathed in the balms of the fronded palms in the hush of the moonless night,

And, Oh! What beautiful years were these, when our hearts clung each to each;

When life was filled, and our senses thrilled.

In the first faint dawn of speech.

Thus life by life, and love by love, we passed through the cycles strange,

And breath by breath, and death by death, we followed the chain of change.

Till there came a time in the law of life

When over the nursing sod, the shadows broke, and the sole awoke.

In a strange, dim dream of God.

I was hewed like an auroch bull, and tusked like the great cave bear;

And you, my sweet, from head to feet, were gowned in your glorious hair.

Deep in the gloom of a fireless cave, when night fell over the plain,

And the moon hung red o’er the riverbed,

We mumbled the bones of the slain.

I flaked a flint to a cutting edge and shaped it with brutish craft;

I broke a shank from the woodland dank, and fitted it head to haft.

Then I hid me close to the reedy tarn, where the mammoth came to drink;

Through brawn and a bone I drove the stone,

And slew him on the brink.

I carved that fight on a reindeer bone, and with rude and hairy hand;

I pictured his fall on the cavern wall that men might understand.

For we lived by blood, and the right of might, ere human laws were drawn,

And the age of sin did not begin

Till our brutal tusks were gone.

And that was a million years ago in a time that no man knows;

Yet here tonight in the mellow light, we sit at Delmonico’s.

Your eyes are as black as the Devon Springs, your hair is as black as jet;

Your years are few, your life is new,

Your soul untried, and yet–

Our trail is on the Kimmeridge clay, and the scarp of the Purbeck Flags;

We left our bones in the bagshot stones, and deep in the Coraline crags.

Our love is old, our lives are old, and death shall come again;

Should it come today, what man may say

We shall not live again?

God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds, and furnished them wings to fly;

He sowed our spawn in the world’s dim dawn, and I know that it shall not die.

Though cities have sprung above the graves where the crooked-boned men made war,

And the ox-wain creaks o’er the buried caves where the mummied mammoths are.

Then as we linger at luncheon here,

O’er many a dainty dish

Let us drink anew

To the time when you

Were a tadpole and I was a fish.

CHAPTER 1

The Days of Jey

The beautiful sun streams in my window as I slowly open my eyes. As my sleepy senses awaken, I sit up, stretch, and yawn. Another day in paradise begins.

I imagine myself perfectly groomed and dressed in my favorite indigo suit, and I am. My dark hair is now wound in a long braid down my strong back. I could be in the dining room simply by thinking of it, but instead I walk to the stairs and descend using my physical form. We are taught from an early age that while we can do or have anything merely by using our minds, we need to utilize our physical forms as well. To live only by the mind reduces the quality of our lives to the point that life loses all meaning.

I am one of a long-lived race. Our history goes back to the very beginning of all there is. In the beginning we evolved from primitive forms. As time went on, we evolved into beings that stood upright, bipeds. We eventually became humanoid in all our forms. We have evolved through many eons, and now change comes rarely. We live in a structured, peaceful society. We are governed by our priests and a council of elders, and we live by a set of rules called the teachings. Life is truly paradise; at least, I hope it is.

I hear my mother’s lilting voice calling up the stairs, Jey, breakfast is ready. I love my mom, but sometimes she takes the teachings too seriously. Though she could sense me coming down the stairs, she still needed to speak to me.

My little sister comes bouncing up to me as I enter the dining room. She hugs me and says, Morning, Jey-Jey. As I look down at her I can see the beautiful woman she’s turning into, a perfect blending of my mother’s pale skin and red hair and my father’s dark-reddish skin and black hair. Trinny stares up at me with her beautiful green eyes, her strawberry blonde hair pulled back at her ears. Today she is wearing a crown of white flowers, and her attire is in shades of green. Earth tones have always been her favorite, and she chooses a different flower from her gardens each day to adorn her hair.

Breakfast with my mom and sister is one of my favorite times of the day. The view from our dining area is amazing. I stare out to the expanse of our parcel. Our home is built on the highest point of our property, and the scene from the dining room is panoramic. We are on a cleared plateau complete with a huge pond and perfect landscaping. The weather is warm and tropical. As I look to the distance, the green lushness of jungle rolls on for as far as the eye can see. The rising sun gives a shining hue to it all. Mother says that we are always closest to God in the early morning, and looking at this beautiful scene with my loving family, I believe she is right.

Trinny’s happy chatter brings me out of my reverie. The conversation is usually light and playful, but today is different. I will be sixteen in a couple of months, and my studies have become increasingly intense. My stress has affected my mood, and my family feels it as well. In our society, when a person turns sixteen, he or she goes through a trial—a test. It’s called the journey. As my day of journey approaches, my apprehension grows. While my studies have advanced, no one speaks about the journey. Even my parents will only say it’s a personal experience, different for each individual. It is the most profound experience any of us will ever go through, yet no one speaks of it. My fear and frustration grow with each passing day.

The breakfast conversation starts off light and playful, Scrabble with no dictionary rules. Suddenly it turns to cutthroat cribbage, and my opponent has miscounted by eight coming down Home Street. My mother follows all the teachings to the letter. She can recite every quote, and she follows all the scripts. My sister, being young, is still an angel, believing every word my parents say. As an informed youth, I realize that not all of the teachings may be right. I get tired of the elders proclaiming their rules as all there is. No proof, only the teachings. Elders all conforming, no thought, almost a brainless response to life. The more I learn in my studies, the more I doubt. There are all these teachings but no reasoning behind them; there is only this unreasonable faith. Is it a brainless society or a brainwashed society? The young are awakening to the truth. We are not willing to follow the teachings blindly as our elders do. We feel we are a new breed, smarter than the elders.

My mom and sister know my opinions, and they disagree wholeheartedly and usually very loudly. Today’s breakfast conversation is as heated as any we’ve had. I watch as my mother’s face flushes almost as red as her long, flowing hair. Her temper is always apparent, and often it’s quite fiery. I try to explain to my mom that I am sick of the teachings and that I don’t want to go to my studies today. My mom says that with my journey coming up, I cannot miss any of my studies. I argue that missing one day wouldn’t affect my journey. It would be one day of playtime, like I had in my youth. My mom’s response is, Yesterday is but a memory; tomorrow but a dream. We must do what is right today, for today is all there is.

Well, it looks like I’m off to my studies. When Mother quotes the scripts, it is always the final word.

I walk to my studies today—anything to put them off as long as possible. The walk to my school is a nice hike. Because we live on the hill, it always an easy slope, and the path winds through some of the most beautiful scenes we could imagine. Because we design the landscape we live in, beauty is everywhere. The fauna is thick and diverse. Birds of every hue flit from tree to tree. Bushes shake as small animals rustle around. We no longer need to eat the flesh of animals; we simply manipulate molecules and build the food we need. We have memories and traditions and still eat meat, but no animal ever dies to feed us. With habitat being so plentiful, wildlife of all kinds thrives. A vivid pack of yellow finches decides to investigate me. They have no fear and follow me down the path. This truly is paradise. The path winds to the bottom of the plateau, and now I gaze up at the cliffs that tower over the path. The path to town levels off and my mind begins to wander.

I take this time to contemplate the journey. I should probably avoid this line of thought; all it does is increase my fear. I can’t help wondering what the journey is all about. They call it a journey, but the candidates enter the cathedral and reemerge months or even years later. Where do they go? How can it be a journey in the cathedral? Why is it months for some, years for others? And why, why, why can’t anyone give me some clue as to what to expect?

A couple of my friends and I have pondered these questions. We are all turning sixteen in the next few months, and we are all afraid. We all suspect there is a reason no one talks about his or her journey. We have begun to wonder if it might have something to do with the elders’ unfounded faith in the teachings. Many of us have begun to question the truth of the teachings. Our scholars are aware of our increasing doubts, yet they offer no explanations, no rationales, nothing. They don’t seem the least bit concerned about us questioning their faith. This really bothers us. All we want is the truth, and we know they are holding something back. We have begun to consider the possibility that the journey is some type of brainwashing. It would certainly explain the elders’ unwavering belief.

While I worry about being brainwashed, I have a hard time believing this could be done to anyone in our society. Our minds are extremely powerful. We are immortal, and the power of our minds increases as we age. It seems anything done to us at sixteen years old could not affect us for the many years we live. But then my mind worries again. Maybe the brainwashing is a one-time thing that affects us for the rest of our lives. If someone could just give me a hint about what to expect on my journey, maybe some of my fear would be relieved.

At last, I arrive at the cathedral and this nerve-racking train of thought can finally end, for now.

CHAPTER 2

Trinity

Only recently have I disliked my studies. With my journey coming up, I feel the need to relax and have the final fun of youth. The pressure of my upcoming journey and the reality of my adult life to follow make me long for the simplicity of childhood. While I dislike the teachings, they are but a small part of my studies. I learn many other things as well: the history of our race, science, mathematics, and my least favorite, language. I find each subject to be interesting and worthwhile. Even the tedious rules of language has its merits

The teachings are the simplest studies we have. Many are basic expressions of common sense that can be summed up in just a few words: do what is right, be honest and trustworthy, and be kind and loving to everyone you come in contact with. When I put it like that, I realize our disbelief might be unfounded. A brainwashing conspiracy would not be built on such simple ideas. I suppose what bothers us most about the teachings is the lack of proof or reasoning behind them. History, science, math, and language are all very structured, with reasoning and proof to back them up. They make sense. While the basic ideas behind the teachings need no proof, many of the nuances sound made up. No one questions these, though. Any time I ask an elder for an explanation, the response is always the same: You’ll understand after you’ve had your journey.

There are times when I tire of even the basic teachings. In our society, every person receives different gifts. Some receive intelligence, charm, or physical beauty. For others, the gifts are much harder to discern. To be loving and kind to everyone you meet can be a real chore. I often feel like I break the honesty rule every time I encounter a wretched individual. My mother tells me it will be easier for me after my journey. I highly doubt anything could make me love many of the people I meet. I find it hard to believe brainwashing could change my feelings as well. Who knows what the brainwashing will change? Only those who have been through the journey, and they’re not talking. And now I’m ending my day just as I began it: worrying.

My fear begins to rise like the high tide, and suddenly my little sister, Trinny, appears next to me. Hey, Jey-Jey. Thought I’d walk you home.

Trinny has always been a different child, even by our society’s standards. When she was very young, we assumed she was severely disabled. She never used her mind to accomplish even the simplest of tasks. Young children utilize their minds whenever they want. They must be taught to live in the physical realm, to use their bodies and hands as tools. The first time we realized Trinny could use her mind power, she amazed us all. While we are immortal, we can be severely injured, to the point we might as well be dead. Father travels to geologically important planets for work, and he is often far, far away. He once traveled to the planet we originated from, a small blue planet called Earth. We now live on

Reviews for Evolution

[billhall · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

One of Baxter's books on biological themes. Basically it is a set of short stories, mostly about human ancestors from before the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary and the extinction of the dinosaurs, with a few of stories about human descendents. As usual for Baxter, his science is generally quite good even when he is working outside his comfort zone (Astrophysics).However, again as seems to be the case with several of his books that I have read, his long term outlook is very pessimistic. Personally, I hope that human rationality will overcome most obstacles. Baxter seems to enjoy exploring the loss of rationality. At times I found the anthropomorphism of non-sentient creatures a bit much as they faced crises in their lives - but that was unavoidable given the nature of the book. In terms of ideas I would give it five stars, but as a good read it was too flat and bordering on boring, thus my overall rating of three stars.In one point, Baxter suggests that a major feature of domestication is a dumbing down of the domesticated animals, and gives domestic chickens as an example. Baxter's picture is probably reasonably true for many domestic animals - e.g., cattle and the like, but chooks are not a good example of the point he is making! As the host for several generations of ISA Brown chickens (hybrid between Rhode Island Red and White Leghorn) purchased as pullets from a small farm where they are only penned. On my 5 acre property the hens have complete freedom (except they return to and are shut in a fox-proof pen overnight). my experience with these birds is that quite the opposite of being bird-brains, hens seem to have evolved great intelligence to stay ahead of and cope with their human hosts. Chickens that are allowed freedom to develop their personalities are at least intellectually equivalent to dogs or cats (we have had several of each on the property). Aside from being totally alert to what humans do, hens are astonishingly alert and attend closely to any gardening activities and keep track of everything going on in the property. When they want feeding they will find a human, coming into the house if needs be, and make themselves known. They also seem to recognize that the cost they pay for human protection is the provision of eggs. The hens go to great lengths to find places to hide their eggs from crows (who are smart enough to track a hen for hours), but they lay their eggs in a conspicuous place inside the human house whenever they can get in via a door, window or cat flap. One has decided that the appropriate place is in the middle of the family bed! Another regularly used the top of the 5' high entertainment unit! Fortunately, the ladies seem to be reasonably house trained. We rarely have to clean up any droppings.One of Baxter's stories I agree with is that one line of carnivorous dinosaurs actually became tool makers and developed language in order to hunt large herbivores, but went extinct along with their prey due to climate change. As a close observer of wild birds as well as domestic ones (i.e., the surviving dinosaurs), I am convinced that dinosaur brain architecture may have been a lot more efficient than is the case for mammalian brains. Some examples: African grey parrots have the demonstrated ability to more than a hundred human words and use them to construct simple sentences. New Caladonian Crows show demonstrable tool making capabilities in the lab (i.e., to bend a wire into shape to pull a treasure out of a hole). Other corvids have been able to work out how to use supplied ropes and pulleys to gain access to treasures. In my own front yard, I have seen a possibly bored wild galah (a medium sized parrot related to the cockatoos) lie on its back to free its feet so it could play frisbie with a plastic pot plant saucer. For their size and limited manipulation capabilities, at least some birds exhibit an awesome intelligence.In any event, there is a lot in Baxter's novel, Evolution, to think about. And, as a one time professional evolutionary biologist who did my PhD thesis studying species formation in vertebrates, there is very little in the biological basis for his stories that i would criticise. Unfortunately, the book is more an interesting academic exercise than a novel with a strong central plot and gripping story line that you can't put down.

[brakketh-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I very much enjoyed this journey through time and how evolution has shaped and could potentially shape our future.

[liscarey · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

In the musical 1776, Col. Thomas McKean says of General Washington's reports from the field, reporting everything that's gone wrong since the last report, "That man could depress a hyena." This seems to be a fair comment on many of Baxter's books, and Evolution is no exception.

Spoilers ahead.

The frame story concerns Joan Useb, a paleontologist who, in 2031, has organized a major interdisciplinary conference with the covert goal of sparking a movement to do something effective about saving the biosphere. The only amusement to be found in the frame story are the nasty Tuckerizations of two well-known British fans, Gregory Pickersgill and Alison Scott. Pickersgill is a radical anti-globalization activist, the charismatic leader of a splinter Christian sect, the core around which the umbrella organization "Fourth World" has formed. (Or so it is believed. It turns out that Pickersgill doesn't exist; he's just a cover identity for someone even more extreme and unpleasant.) Alison Scott at least gets to exist; she's a genetic engineer who sells her services to the very wealthy, to give their children advantages rather than curing disease. She's so focussed on money and showmanship that she even uses her own offspring as walking advertisements for what she can do for your next child, if you can pay enough.

The main body of the book is better. It's necessarily episodic, covering the evolution of primates from a rodent-like creature during and after the last days of the dinosaurs, through a monkey-like creature 500 million years from now that's fully symbiotic with a tree. "Fully symbiotic," in this case, means that the Tree provides a good deal more than shelter. It produces a specialized root that attaches to the bellies of these last primates, providing not just nourishment and psychotropic drugs, but genetic mixing and control of reproduction. The primates in return bring nutrients to the Tree that it can't obtain otherwise, and carry its seeds to favorable ground. Along the way, Baxter does some interesting things, imagining plausible forms that aren't represented in the necessarily patchy fossil record, such as an elaborate dinosaurs-and-primates ecology in Antarctica, fifty-five million years after the presumed extinction of the dinosaurs--an ecology first frozen into extinction and then ground up beyond the possibility of fossilization by the advancing icecap. This is an utterly grim extinction event, of course, with all the species dying out entirely rather than evolving into something else, but that's Baxter for you.

As exemplified by the dinosaurs and primates in Antarctica sequence, Baxter does not confine himself solely to the direct line of descent from little Purgatorius to humans. We also get to see the hypothetical, but plausible, harrowing adventure of the monkey-like critters that get accidentally rafted across the Atlantic to become the ancestors of the monkeys of South America, and other plausible but unrecorded species.

Eventually, though, we do get to the more or less direct and recent ancestors of humans--the first ape to lead his troop ou t onto the African savannah as the forests shrink, homo erectus, neanderthals, Cro-Magnon, early civilized humans. Amongst the neanderthals, we get a story that is at once encouraging and grim: a little band of neanderthals, led by a man called Pebble, st ruggling to survive, forms an alliance with a pair of wandering almost-Cro-Magnon, Harpoon and Ko-Ko. First they trade, then they learn some of each other's best tricks, then they combine their efforts to cross over to an island, wipe out the remnant of homo erectus living there, and seize it for themselves. Baxter does depict the two kinds as mutually fertile, which I think is currently not the opinion of scientists, but that's a minor point, considering that opinion on that has changed more than once.

Once we get to unambiguously modern humans, though, we're in trouble. It's good (I think) that Baxter makes the point that primitive humans who believed they were living in harmony with nature actually did a devasting job on their prey species. There's some amusement value in reading the description of the First Fan:

"She had always been isolated, even as a child. She could not throw herself into the games of chase and wrestling and chattering that the other youngsters had indulged in, or their adolescent sexual experiments. It was always as if the others knew how to behave, what do do, how to laugh and cry--how to fit in, a mystery she could never share. Her restless inventiveness in such a conservative culture--and her habit of trying to figure out why things happened, how they worked--didn't make her any more popular." (page 292)

Alas, this woman, Mother, who invents conscious thought as a tool for something other than social interaction, and consequently invents a variety of other useful tools (in a reversal of the old depiction of men inventing tools almost certainly invented and used by women, who did most of the foraging and gathering, Baxter has Mother invent the spear-thrower, something far more likely to have been invented by the men who did most of the hunting) becomes obsessively fixated on the death of her son, invents gods, religion, life after death, black magic, and human sacrifice. Baxter assigns the whole thing to one emotionally unbalanced woman, and portrays it all in relentlessly negative terms, even while conceding that this nasty invention caught on and survived because it conveyed survival benefits to its adopters. It's all downhill from there, as far as human character goes. On page 322, we're told:

"And just as they were able to believe that things, weapons or animals or the sky, were in some way people, it wasn't a hard leap to make to believe that some people were no more than things. The old categories had broken down. In attacking the river folk they werent killing humans, people like themselves. The river folk, for all their technical cleverness with fire and clay, had no such belief. It was a weapon they could not match. And this small but vicious conflict set a pattern that would be repeated again and again in the long, bloody ages to come. And there it is, folks, the roots of the Holocaust right there at the dawn of civilization, with the invention of religion."

The problem with this is that Baxter has already shown us repeatedly, in earlier episodes in the Evolution of Humans, that it's nonsense. Time and again he has shown us early hominids and pre-hominids regarding strangers of same or similar species as creatures to be killed. Over and over again the men, the boys, and sometimes even the young girls are killed, and maybe the adult or near-adult females are kept for breeding purposes. The great mental breakthrough that Pebble and Harpoon made, in the early morning of genus Homo, was the possibility of active cooperation with other bands. The great mental breakthrough Harpoon's ancestors had made, back at the very dawn of genus Homo, was the invention of trade as a possible means of relating to humans from other bands.

And what's striking and different about raids that Mother's followers make on other bands, is not that they kill most of the members of the band. The thing Mother's followers do that's different is that first, they make peaceful contact with the band to find out what neat new technology they have, and then, when they do attack, they spare not only the adult and near-adult females, but also some of the adult males, the ones who are the experts in the most interesting bits of new technology that the target band has. What's different about Mother's followers is not that they have found a way to regard other people as things, but that they have found reasons other than sexual exploitation to forcibly add people to their band rather than kill them. For Mother's people, other people are useful or dangerous precisely because they are people, with knowledge and skills of their own, rather than just rival animals competing for the same resources. What makes them more dangerous is not that they have new talent for dehumanizing other people (earlier varieties of hominid didn't need to dehumanize people because it never occurred to them that hominids not members of their own band were people), but the fact that their killing technology gets a lot better.

Eventually , of course, we catch up to the frame story, and the downfall of Homo sapiens without ever having gotten humans even as far as Mars. After all, how could such a loser species do anything really grand? Post-collapse, it apparently takes only a thousand years or so for humans to completely lose the power of speech. An interesting detail from this point on is that Baxter, who never used the words "man" and "woman" to describe males and females of primate species until he got to genus Homo, does not stop using it as he describes the steadily more primitive and degraded post-Homo varieties of primate. Thus we have a primate evolved to live pretty much exactly like a naked mole rat, referred to as "mole woman," but only after Baxter has gone to great lengths to emphasize the fact that these "mole folk" have no higher consiousness at all, and virtually no brains.

All in all, it's a depressing, negative view of humans and evolution, and evidently intended to be. Avoid this one.

[yorkshiresoul · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In Evolution Baxter takes the reader on another of his epic explorations of the human condition. Here we follow the primates, from the earlist mouse sized hole dwellers in the age of dinosaurs all the way through the sweep of human genetic history ending with a strange primate/tree symbiosis in the distant future.Baxter points out that this is a work of fiction, not a textbook of human evolution. The creatures that spring from his imagination in both the distant past and the far future all well rounded and though provoking.My only criticism of Evolution is it's size, at just short of 800 pages it did get a little samey in parts.

[reading_fox · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Having read Baxter's Titan and disliked it so much I'd forsworn reading any more of his, he received many recommendations from others I thought I'd try something else of his, as I came across it cheaply.Annoying anthromorphic at times it's a long spanning diverse series of chapters jumping across time, giving a clearly fictional but realistically based tracing of evolution descendants.The tale opens 65million years ago with a proto-primate hiding amongst the vegetation in a world dominanted by dinosaurs. Until an asteroid strike dramatically alters the climate, and our fortunate primate happens to be in a place to survive. - this becomes a familiar theme. The next creature some 30 million years ago is a slightly more advanced proto-primate competing with rodents (again a familiar theme). And so on and so on in increasingly humanoid and then human factions. Each iteration focuses on an specific individual and their life choices - food, mates and society. A few moments of their youth, looking for a mate, coping with society and sometimes how they meet their end after reproducing. Many of these Individuals are female though there are some males too. The most recognisably human are a historian living at the end of Roman times, followed by some near future speculation in 2130, although the story doesn't end there.There are a few bad points though. Although Baxter specifically states that the more animal creatures aren’t self aware and don't have names he then goes ahead to name them, and give them personalities. There is obviously a lot of reference to bodily functions, which occasionally makes unpleasant reading. Worst of all is Baxter's complete invention of a few species - tool using dinosaurs being the most egregious. And while this is obviously a work of fiction, such additions detract from the basic evolutionary accuracy of the rest. It would be interesting to compare this against the known descent recorded something like Dawkins' Ancestor's Tale. The future speculations are far more reasonable - even if unlikely. The other major failing is the assumption that mutations in one individual provide a population of descendants sufficiently large to impact an entire species. This seems unlikely as although rare mutations are unlikely to occur widely, an individual doesn't have that much impact of a species.Obviously the characters being so short lived, allows little room for development of them, but the continual time jumps aren't too disorientating once you've got into the right frame of mind. The writing in each chapter flows quite nicely. With interspersed geographical descriptions of weathering and tectonic movements - again speculating on effects this might have at an individual level.Overall enjoyably readable speculation with some interesting thoughts on the future of the human race its minor faults can be overlooked...................................................................................................................

[pferdina · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very interesting attempt to trace the whole of human evolution, starting with the earliest primates in the time of the dinosaurs, through modern humans, and continuing to what may be after us. Although obviously fiction, this work contains much that is true, or true-enough, and gives the reader a useful perspective with which to think about our history and our future.

[anna_erishkigal · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As a rollicking science fiction tale, this book may leave the reader scratching their head. It is more a series of interrelated short stories and vignettes given from the viewpoint of creatures stretching back in time from the first tiny mammals to survive the impact which took out the dinosaurs, to the present, to the distant future when our planet is trashed and our sun has expanded to re-absorb the Earth.What this story -does- do more clearly than all the snoozer science textbooks we were forced to read in high school and college is take the various critical turning points of evolution, when some new adaptation or trait emerged to help our species evolve into the species we know of as homo sapiens today. And each of those vignettes is interesting, fully explained, and will leave the lay-reader with a thorough understanding of how we ended up where we are today.And then Baxter journeys into our future...With the same thoroughness, Baxter takes us through various plausibilities, extrapolating the choices we are making as a species today to ignore environmental degradation, civil unrest, aggression, and carries our species forward into the distant future, building upon the framework he built in the first half of the book to get us where we are evolutionarily speaking today, to show us where we are headed in the future ... and it is not pretty.This book stayed with me for a long time after I read it. We're all screwed!!!4 Evolutionary Monkeys

[blake.rosser · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

In a word, depressing. Baxter evidently has no faith in life of any kind, as he depicts all sentient beings as immediately impacting their environment in the most destructive manner possible. He doesn´t consider that there were ever communities (human or otherwise) that were able to exist sustainably with the environment. Or maybe he just ignores them since they don´t fit into his altogether pessimistic worldview. The encounters with predator after predator became absurd after awhile, and were tiresome before that. There was one episode spanning about 3 pages where a post-human escaped her homicidal "cousins" in the trees, ran into a giant rat-beast on the forest floor, and escaped into the tree-tops only to be plucked by a giant finch. I get the point Mr. Baxter: animal existence is perilous.

The problem with a book that only considers humanity from a species perspective is that you don´t take into account perhaps life´s most incredible achievement: individuality. Baxter´s unconvincing proposal that perhaps it´s not too bad to lose our intellect and become enslaved to giant rats or killer trees (afterall, they protect our survival as a species) completely disregards everything important about human nature. A purely biological view of evolution misses the possibility that the mind is the true launchpad for the next evolutionary step.

The "afterword" which explains that most of the book may not even be based on fact would have been useful as a foreword. It was difficult to tell how much of his book Baxter intended to be taken as fact, a confusion which I imagine was intentional. That makes it all the stranger when you have him inventing things like air whales and whip-wielding dinosaurs. He seems to want to have his book be two different things at the same time, but ends up de-legitimizing the fact and shafting the fiction. Ultimately, as a human being, the most interesting parts for me were the stories about all of the pre- and immediately post-humans, stories which only occupied about 200 of the 600 pages. The rest of the stories of primates and rats and mole-people just got kind of boring. Imaginative to be sure, but repetitive.

Last but by no means least annoying was Baxter´s bizarre fixation on excrement, especially feces. What began as an interesting documentation of animal behavior became downright strange when he moved into the human societies and people were still excreting all over the place, every few pages. I feel bad for him, because in the world Baxter apparently inhabits, every living person and animal he knows shits and pisses themselves when frightened, hurt, or dying. It must be a stinky existence he leads.

[deusxmachina-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fun speculation about the evolution of humanity, individual and mind and the question of who is the crown of creation. The answer: there is none. Baxter's outlook is pretty depressing when is comes to mankind; degeneration is what expects us, new species will take over as the environment will change.

[saturnloft · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

99.9% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct. What if anything makes us special? And what does the future hold for us a species?This novel tackles those questions in an ambitious 600+ collection of chronological vignettes. These cover the proto-simian creature Purgatorius, early primates like notharctus, hominids such as australopithecines & Homo erectus, Neanderthals, modern day humans, and imagined future possibilities for our kind. There's plenty of scientific exposition and speculation to mull over on the long journey. (Also generous amounts of sex and violence, but I suppose that's par for the course.)PS: I found the description of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction (the one that got the dinosaurs) to be particularly riveting. Several theories exist regarding the cause, but Baxter goes with the most popular scenario: asteroid impact. Those who like apocalyptic fiction should particularly enjoy this chapter.

[desertgrandma_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is for the Kindle version of the following book.I just finished "Evolution" by Stephen Baxter.I had to struggle to keep reading it for the first 1/3rd of it. When I looked down and saw I was only at 37%, I couldn't believe it...However, perseverance paid off. The book is wonderful, I wish I had the words.This is what I learned.....yes, there is lots of fiction, I know...but listen up:From the beginning of time, to the far future, the earth and its inhabitants will go thru constant changes.Whether by humans or animals, the eco system will be changed, destroyed, and recover........altho not in a way we may wish.This will/can happen in many ways.....by overgrazing, climate change, bacterial infection, natural catastrophes, stupid humans with their finger on the red button, we reside on a living planet, that still hasn't stopped moving around.People and animals will adapt. The strongest will survive, the weakest will die out......completely.This has happened over and over and over, and will continue to happen....until our sun novas and the Earth itself will die. People will continue to evolve as well, and adapt to those changing conditions.The story has some wonderful future scenarios. What a wonderful storyteller!

[sander314_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I really wanted to love this book, as the concept is very nice. However, ultimately the first 2/3 of the book is rather repetitive, longwinded and not that interesting if you're already familiar with most of the science he is trying to explain. The last 1/3 ('future') I liked better, though is rather bleak, similar to 'flood' in a way.

[ylazear_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Great book. Really explains men.

[jgolomb_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fun fictional accounting of our past and future evolution.