When I saw the title of the book I had been asked to review Death on Earth: Adventures in Evolution and Mortality I was apprehensive. I assumed that the book would be another treatise on the much flogged concept of Darwinian adaptive evolution: the superior importance of population and species survival over the death of any individual of a species. But what really got my interest was the introduction and the first chapter that discussed the concept of death as envisioned as a cessation of Life; and the rational of defining life and the misunderstanding that till now exist in our definition of ‘What is Life??’. Though the book essentially reinforces the tenets of Biology and Darwin’s theory of evolution, it is the rendition of these concepts in a delightfully entertaining way that makes the book worth reading. In the book, Jules Howard has very effectively dealt with the biological processes that are essential for living but which society skirts around and considers taboo. The only two events that any organism that is born will definitely perform is that it will excrete and it will die!! The book explores both mortality and defecation in all living species in a wonderfully humorous but at the same time thoughtprovoking way. The author places death as an essential process required for the propagation of life in the biosphere.
November 2016, volume 40, No 11