Metazoa Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness

– A Times and Sunday Times Book of the Year
– A BBC Science Focus Book of the Month

"This gentle approach won a wide readership for Godfrey-Smith's last book and deserves to do the same for this. But perhaps his exploratory style is well-suited, not just to the general reader, but to the problem of consciousness itself"
– Times Literary Supplement

"Enthralling [...] A rather winning combination of not once ever making readers feel as if they are being lectured to; rather, it is the sensation of joining a wise, ever-patient friend on a time-traveling tour of the cognitive experiences of animals [...] Metazoa brings an extraordinary and astute look at our own mind's essential link to the animal world"
– Aimee Nezhukumatathil, New York Times

"A profound scientific drama, in which the lives of quite un-human creatures illuminate deep mysteries about the nature of sentience, and what it means to possess a mind [...] In Metazoa, the scuba-diving historian and philosopher of science tackles these questions with eloquent boldness [...] As in Other Minds, Mr Godfrey-Smith recounts close encounters with marine fauna, gleaned from years of diving off the Australian coast. These have an electric immediacy [...] Evocative [and] gripping"
– Barbara Kiser, Wall Street Journal

"Peter Godfrey-Smith writes and thinks like no one else that I know of. He's well immersed in the science of life, a deep-diver into the philosophical implications of the factual world –
and a writer so skillful he can give a reader chills. Metazoa is his deepest dive to date on what life is, what life means; how we understand what we understand; and how we might continue peeling and peering into the many layers of remaining mystery, to further appreciate the astonishments of existence"
– Carl Safina, author of Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace