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Henry Gee
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Une (très) brève histoire de la vie sur Terre
Henry Gee
- Lattes
- Essais Et Documents
- 13 Mars 2024
- 9782709672771
L'histoire est palpitante. C'est la nôtre. Premier obstacle : le feu. Il y a 4,6 milliards d'années, notre planète était un océan de lave, sans cesse percutée par d'autres astéroïdes, au point de projeter une partie de la Terre dans l'espace. C'est pourquoi elle fut d'abord entourée d'anneaux comme Saturne !
Puis vint un autre obstacle : la glace. Lorsque la Terre refroidit, la vapeur se condensa et il plut pendant des millions d'années, suffisamment longtemps pour créer des bassines d'eau - les océans.
Henry Gee réussit le pari fou de raconter la naissance de la Terre, des premières cellules, des dinosaures jusqu'à l'hégémonie de l'Homo sapiens, avec la précision du scientifique mais aussi l'enchantement du conteur.
Résultat : une mine de découvertes sensationnelles. Par exemple, ce sont les grands-mères qui ont sauvé notre espèce. Contrairement aux autres animaux, les bébés humains sont incapables de se débrouiller seuls, alors nous avons appris à vivre passé l'âge de procréer, afin de les élever. Ce sont les groupes dont les femmes ménopausées s'occupaient des enfants qui survécurent !
On apprend aussi que l'évolution n'a été possible qu'au prix de cataclysmes : ce sont les météorites, les éruptions volcaniques et l'extinction des espèces qui ont poussé la vie vers la persévérance. Pour qu'il y ait vie, il fallait la survie.
C'est ainsi qu'Henry Gee fait de l'histoire de la Terre une épopée passionnante et parfois poétique. Qui aimera lire ce livre ? Tout le monde ! C'est le biologiste Jared Diamond, prix Pulitzer 1998, qui le dit. -
A (VERY) SHORT HISTORY OF LIFE ON EARTH - 4.6 BILLION YEARS IN 12 CHAPTERS
Henry Gee
- Picador Uk
- 15 Septembre 2022
- 9781529060584
Don''t miss this delightful, concise, sweeping masterpiece! Gee brilliantly condenses the entire, improbable, astonishing history of life on earth - all 5 billion years - into a charming, zippy and scientifically accurate yarn.>
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For billions of years, Earth was an inhospitably alien place - covered with churning seas, slowly crafting its landscape by way of incessant volcanic eruptions, the atmosphere in a constant state of chemical flux. And yet, despite facing literally every conceivable setback that living organisms could encounter, life has been extinguished and picked itself up to evolve again. Life has learned and adapted and continued through the billions of years that followed. It has weathered fire and ice. Slimes begat sponges, who through billions of years of complex evolution and adaptation grew a backbone, braved the unknown of pitiless shores, and sought an existence beyond the sea. From that first foray to the spread of early hominids who later became Homo sapiens , life has persisted, undaunted. A (Very) Short History of Life is an enlightening story of survival, of persistence, illuminating the delicate balance within which life has always existed, and continues to exist today. It is our planet like you''ve never seen it before. Life teems through Henry Gee''s lyrical prose - colossal supercontinents drift, collide, and coalesce, fashioning the face of the planet as we know it today. Creatures are engagingly personified, from ''gregarious'' bacteria populating the seas to duelling dinosaurs in the Triassic period to magnificent mammals with the future in their (newly evolved) grasp. Those long extinct, almost alien early life forms are resurrected in evocative detail. Life''s evolutionary steps - from the development of a digestive system to the awe of creatures taking to the skies in flight - are conveyed with an alluring, up-close intimacy.
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Nouv.
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE HUMAN EMPIRE ; WHY OUR SPECIES IS ON THE EDGE OF EXTINCTION
Henry Gee
- Picador Uk
- 13 Mars 2025
- 9781035032242
''A marvellously engaging writer'' - The Times
From the winner of the 2022 Royal Society Science Book Prize, a thrilling and thought-provoking account of the rise and fall of humankind.
For the first time in over ten millennia, the rate of human population growth is slowing down. The global population is forecast to begin declining in the second half of this century, and in 10,000 years'' time, our species will likely be extinct.
In The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire, Henry Gee shows how we arrived at this crucial moment in our history, beginning his story deep in the palaeolithic past and charting our dramatic rise from one species of human among many - teetering on the edge of extinction for more than a hundred millennia - to the most dominant animal to ever live on Earth.
But rapid climate change, a stagnating global economy, falling birth rates and an unexplainable decline in average human sperm count are combining to make our chances for longevity increasingly slim. There could be a way forward, but the launch window is narrow.
Gee argues that unless Homo sapiens establishes successful colonies in space within the next two centuries, our species is likely to stay earthbound and will have vanished entirely within another 10,000 years, bringing the seven-million-year story of the human lineage to an end.
Drawing on a dazzling array of the latest scientific research, Gee tells the extraordinary story of humanity with characteristic warmth and wit, and suggests how our exceptional species might avoid its tragic fate.
