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I am FREEEEE! Free from finals!

Book Quest - 'When Life Nearly Died' by Michael J Benton

This book advertises itself as a book about the end-Permian mass extinction, the biggest mass extinction in the Earth's history.

And the book definitely does talk about it (though having been published in 2004, I'm not sure how much of it is date.) It goes into the nitty gritty of anoxic shales, and which species survived and didn't. But it's not what really about. Which is unfortunate, because it made some sections a slog, when they wouldn't have been if I had more accurate expectations about the book.

What it's really about is: "If there was a point where 90% of species went extinct in a short space of time, why did it take so long for people to notice this?" It's a really interesting question, with a whole bevy of answers from philosophy to geopolitics to the way fossils get preserved. Sometimes the historical sections can get a bit dry: "So this guy from the 1940s went out into the Blahdeblah mountains--" But I feel like the page and a half on a gay Transylvanian motor cycling riding spy paleontologist makes me forgive a lot.

It also spends a surprising amount of time on the KT mass extinction (the one that killed the dinosaurs.) Which does kind of make sense: The KT mass extinction and the discovery of the asteroid impact is what brought a lot of people round to the idea of mass extinction, and the idea of mass extinction being a possibility is necessary to interpret what happened at the end of the Permian as a mass extinction. But it was kinda odd to have so much about a completely different mass extinction.

One of the things I particularly liked is how it looked at how scientist are influenced by each other, and how preconceptions and philosophies actually affect them. One of the big reasons mass extinctions were considered impossible? Charles Lyell popularising uniformitarianism (as opposed to catastrophism), to the point where paleontologists didn't consider the possibility of catastrophes. (Not helped by the fact that a lot of catastrophists were right for the wrong reasons, or just plain wrong.) And it even acknowledged how outside politics can affect the course of science. One of the prerequisites to working out if there was an extinction event at the end of the Permian is finding and agreeing on when the Permian ended-- which took quite some time, because most of the really good Permian-Triassic sediments, the sort you use to say 'There, that's the official start of the Triassic!'... where in China and Russia. And very hard to access as a foreign scientist for a long time.