Living on Earth by Peter Godfrey-Smith review – animal magic

When Charles Darwin enlisted for his formative voyage on the Beagle in 1831, his role was primarily not that of a naturalist but a geologist. He developed his theory of evolution by natural selection with a keen eye on the interactions of the living and the geological world, recognising that life on Earth could transform the very environment that shapes it.

In Living on Earth, philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith takes up that theme, offering “a history of organisms as causes, rather than evolutionary products” to create “a picture of an Earth continually changing because of what living things do”. While the actors in this tale include bacteria, birds and octopuses, a substantial proportion of the book focuses on the creatures that are transforming the environment like no other: us. In examining our minds, cultures and ethics (or lack thereof) towards other species, Godfrey-Smith seeks to embed us within what Darwin called “one grand system” and to find a vision of how our increasingly technological societies might be woven into that great chain of being. Living on Earth is consistently rewarding, packed with insights and invitations to reflect, and blessed with some exquisite writing.

Behaviour is best understood by trying to get inside the animal mind

Godfrey-Smith presents the book as the conclusion of a trilogy that began with Other Minds , with its particular focus on the octopus, and continued with Metazoa , which looked at the evolution of cognitive complexity and subjective experience in animals. Like many biologists and zoologists, he is convinced that “felt or conscious experience is probably widespread in animals” – which makes him a passionate advocate of animal rights. His focus on what animals (like us) do to their environment is often bound to questions of mind and agency: we are not, in this view, mere automata or vehicles for genes but are driven by independent goals and purposes.

A constant theme in these books is the way in which minds and goals are shaped and conditioned by the circumstances in which they arise. It is unlikely that dolphins will ever evolve complex technologies and cultures, in part because what you can do on land and in the sea differs (try hammering a nail underwater); dolphins and octopuses therefore have little use for tools. Reefs are dominated by animals such as corals and bryozoans that do plant-like things – or rather, the land-based distinctions between animals that move and act and plants that stand still and grow are less relevant under the sea.

“Actions”, says Godfrey-Smith, “emanate from points of view, from the peculiar angle that each animal has on things”. Behaviour is then best understood not as response to external stimuli but by trying to get inside the animal mind. It’s an attitude Godfrey-Smith attributes to the German-Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll, who coined the notion of the Umwelt as the world accessible to an organism through perception and action – a collection, one might say, of what it finds meaningful. What’s missing from that picture, he adds, is others: no creature goes around in a solipsistic perceptual bubble, but exists in relation to other entities.

How should we do that? Precisely because Godfrey-Smith has devoted so much effort to excavating the origins and cross-species parallels of mental capacities familiar to us, he can afford, without risk of exceptionalism, to point out how we are different. Plenty of animals exist in complex social structures, but human culture is something else. In particular, we have open-ended, syntactically rich language, as opposed to the small, fixed lexicon of signals deployed even by our closest evolutionary cousins. Language and social organisation have fed back on one another to boost not just what we can do but what we can imagine doing. The actions of our ancestors shifted from being habit-based to plan-based: as Godfrey-Smith says, “a shift in the causal processes by which things get done in the world”. Thence our alarming power now to dominate the biosphere and alter the environment on a planetary scale.

While Godfrey-Smith’s ruminations on the implications for the ethics of our interactions with other animals, especially in conservation, farming and medical experiments, point predictably towards “must do better”, his willingness to look in unexpected directions keeps the discussion surprising. Might there be a moral case for active intervention in “wild” nature to reduce suffering caused by predators? Should we welcome the prospect of our own extinction for the greater good of the planet? (He is not so pessimistic.) Is there an ethical case for the quest for immortality? In the end, Godfrey-Smith insists on identifying with nature instead of standing outside as steward: and on “gratitude and a sense of kinship” with the process that delivered our species into the world.

• Living on Earth: Life, Consciousness and the Making of the Natural World by Peter Godfrey-Smith is published by William Collins (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.