To see accurate pricing, please choose your delivery country.
 
 
United States
£ GBP
All Shops

British Wildlife

8 issues per year 84 pages per issue Subscription only

British Wildlife is the leading natural history magazine in the UK, providing essential reading for both enthusiast and professional naturalists and wildlife conservationists. Published eight times a year, British Wildlife bridges the gap between popular writing and scientific literature through a combination of long-form articles, regular columns and reports, book reviews and letters.

Subscriptions from £33 per year

Conservation Land Management

4 issues per year 44 pages per issue Subscription only

Conservation Land Management (CLM) is a quarterly magazine that is widely regarded as essential reading for all who are involved in land management for nature conservation, across the British Isles. CLM includes long-form articles, events listings, publication reviews, new product information and updates, reports of conferences and letters.

Subscriptions from £26 per year
Good Reads  Evolutionary Biology  Evolution

Metazoa Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness

Popular Science Nature Writing
By: Peter Godfrey-Smith(Author), Alberto Rava(Illustrator), Rebecca Gelernter(Illustrator)
345 pages, 8 plates wtih colour photos; b/w illustrations
NHBS
Author of the bestseller Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith returns to the topic of subjective experience, consciousness and minds, charting the evolution of life's ability to behold itself.
Metazoa
Click to have a closer look
Select version
Average customer review
  • Metazoa ISBN: 9780008321239 Paperback Jul 2021 In stock
    £7.50 £10.99
    #252819
  • Metazoa ISBN: 9780008321192 Hardback Oct 2020 Out of Print #249475
Selected version: £7.50
About this book Customer reviews Related titles Recommended titles

About this book

Dip below the ocean's surface and you are soon confronted by forms of life that could not seem more foreign to our own: sea sponges, soft corals and flower-like worms, whose rooted bodies and intricate geometry are more reminiscent of plant life than anything recognisably animal. Yet these creatures are our cousins. As fellow members of the animal kingdom – the Metazoa – they can teach us about the evolutionary origins of not only our bodies but also our minds.

In his acclaimed book, Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith explored the mind of the octopus – the closest thing to an intelligent alien on Earth. In Metazoa, he expands his inquiry to animals at large, investigating the evolution of experience with the assistance of far-flung species. Godfrey-Smith shows that the appearance of the first animal body form well over half a billion years ago was a profound innovation that set life upon a new path. He charts the ways that subsequent evolutionary developments – eyes that track, for example, and bodies that move through and manipulate the environment – shaped the lives of animals. Following the evolutionary paths of a glass sponge, soft coral, banded shrimp, octopus and fish, then moving onto land and the world of insects, birds and primates like ourselves, Metazoa gathers these stories together to bridge the gap between matter and mind and address one of the most important philosophical questions: what is the origin of consciousness?

Combining vivid animal encounters with philosophy and biology, Metazoa reveals the impossibility of separating the evolution of our minds from the evolution of animals themselves.

Customer Reviews (1)

  • Stimulating, but more cerebral than Other Minds
    By Leon (NHBS Catalogue Editor) 28 Jan 2021 Written for Hardback


    In 2016, the scuba-diving philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith wrote Other Minds where he explored the mind of the octopus – I reviewed it right before reading this book. Its bestseller status, including translations in more than 20 languages, was not entirely unpredictable. Octopuses are a sexy topic. Four years later, he explores animal minds further with Metazoa, with the tour now also including sponges, corals, shrimp, insects, fish, and mammals. Godfrey-Smith convinced me he is no one-trick pony when it comes to writing a good book, though this one is more cerebral than its predecessor.

    Subjective experience, sentience, consciousness – Godfrey-Smith uses these terms fairly interchangeably here, writing that “our present understanding is not good enough to insist on one language or another” (p. 19). Whatever you prefer to call it, what this book builds toward is a picture of gradualism: these did not just pop into existence out of nowhere, but gradually came more and more into focus during the evolution of life. He admits that this puts him at odds with currently popular ideas in philosophy. The first chapter, then, does an excellent job at situating the reader. It provides an introduction to the history of thinking on minds in humans and other animals. One problem is that you will find a wild variety of views, from panpsychism holding that everything down to atoms is sentient to some degree, to those who see it as something exclusively human. And one can argue, pretty much without impunity, for anything in between. Godfrey-Smith’s approach is one of biological materialism, that is, he is convinced that these mental phenomena are manifestations, rather than results, of more basic biological, chemical, and physical activities. “Brain processes are not causes of thoughts and experiences, they are thoughts and experiences” (p. 20). This introduction also highlights the complexity of this project (i.e. understanding the mind) and the fact that many questions will remain unanswered by the end of the book.

    The above is the broad brushstrokes picture of Metazoa: minds evolved gradually. But how far back do we have to go see the first steps in this process? My impression is that he situates it further back in time than Feinberg and Mallatt did in The Ancient Origins of Consciousness (a far more technical book than this). Godfrey-Smith starts with sponges and the basics of neurobiology: how ion channels in cell membranes can result in chain reactions known as action potentials by which neurons communicate. His descriptions of the inner workings of cells and how things work very differently on a nanoscale compared to our everyday experience, are evocative.

    Other than pumping water through their body, sponges do not do very much by animal standards. A game-changer that arrived with cnidarians (corals, anemones, and jellyfish) was that of muscle-driven action. On the philosophical side of things this means exploring the concepts of agency and its complement subjectivity. But it also allows Godfrey-Smith to revisit and re-examine the Ediacaran (~635-540 million years ago) and the now widely accepted divisions in it. Life, it seems, was still in the process of getting the hang of this whole multicellularity business, ramping up to the Cambrian and its explosion of lifeforms, though he shows himself pleasantly up-to-date by highlighting the ongoing discussion on how sudden this explosion actually was.

    That notwithstanding, while the cnidarians were strong on the agency-side of things, the next important group, the arthropods, evolved a good deal more of sensing and thus subjectivity. Shrimp, crabs, and other crustaceans are festooned with antennae and other sensors. With sensing and acting on a multicellular level came new complications and an increased need to tell self from other. Writes Godfrey-Smith: “It gives rise to a new way of being in the world. It involves the establishment of a point of view, a perspective in a new sense.” (p. 87). And if I have grasped his line of thinking so far, this is where concepts such as agency and an animal experiencing itself as a subject in the world come into increasingly sharp focus.

    The octopus chapter retreads some of Other Minds but also adds new insights. In particular, octopuses, with their hybrid centralised-decentralised nervous system, are less integrated than arthropods. Just in case you were entertaining the idea that evolution is goal-directed, nature throws the octopus at you as an example of a life form moving in a different direction.

    Most of the book focuses on early marine invertebrate groups, with vertebrates only coming into the picture about two-thirds in. These are pretty heady chapters. Starting with fish, we find the centralised brain typical of vertebrates. One particularly interesting aspect is the degree to which the left and right halves of the brain are connected. Mammals, excluding marsupials, have a strong connection via a thick nerve bundle known as the corpus callosum. The connection between brain halves is much weaker in other vertebrates. Godfrey-Smith uses observations made on human split-brain patients, where it seems there are two minds housed in one body, to ponder what this means for the experience of being a fish or a reptile.

    Godfrey-Smith leaves the reader with plenty of fascinating questions. There are several strong points to his narrative. First is his grasp of evolutionary biology. Despite the book’s organisation, he repeatedly reminds readers that just because animals such as sponges and corals are simpler in their organisation, they are not more primitive. The living members of these groups have been subjected to as much evolutionary time as us. They are our cousins, not our forebears. Second is that the same care for the reader shines through as in Other Minds; in the way he explains things, the way he regularly zooms out to take stock of where in the story he is. He tries his hardest to make sure that you do not get lost. And thirdly, some of his observations made during scuba-diving are incredibly funny. That said, you will find no illustrations of the different invertebrate nervous systems and vertebrate brains through evolutionary time – as a philosopher, this is a level of detail he leaves for neurobiologists.

    Compared to Other Minds, Metazoa dives deeper into neurological and philosophical topics: qualia, pain, emotions, types of memory, and others. It is, altogether, a more challenging book, though in a stimulating way. I am not sure it will have the same wide appeal as Other Minds, but for those readers interested in joining him on his quest to understand the evolution of mind, consciousness, and subjective experience, Godfrey-Smith delivers in spades.
    3 of 3 found this helpful - Was this helpful to you? Yes No
Popular Science Nature Writing
By: Peter Godfrey-Smith(Author), Alberto Rava(Illustrator), Rebecca Gelernter(Illustrator)
345 pages, 8 plates wtih colour photos; b/w illustrations
NHBS
Author of the bestseller Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith returns to the topic of subjective experience, consciousness and minds, charting the evolution of life's ability to behold itself.
Media reviews

– 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

Current promotions
New and Forthcoming BooksNHBS Moth TrapBritish Wildlife MagazineBuyers Guides