An immersive and awe-inspiring exploration of the diversity of life on earth that reveals humans are far from the only intelligent species in our restless, ever-evolving world What does it mean to be alive, to be conscious, to possess a soul? If the Big Bang was an effect without a discernible cause, what does it mean to create meaning--to move through a seemingly arbitrary world with purpose and intelligence? Do we have free will? And if so, are we the only ones? Drawing on modern science and ancient wisdom, Part personal essay, part natural history, part philosophy, this searching examination guides readers through the vastness of life from its emergence on a cellular level to its unfolding into the realms of perception, consciousness, and agency. The result is the profound and revelatory assertion that intelligence is both far more common--and more extraordinary--than we could have ever imagined.

Autorentext

Melanie Challenger writes, researches, and broadcasts on the history of ideas, the history and philosophy of science, and the relationship between humans and the living world. She is the author of How to Be Animal: What It Means to Be Human, among other works, and host of The Psychosphere podcast. She is also an award-winning poet and librettist for opera and oratorios, and a National Geographic Explorer. Melanie is internationally active in bioethics, codirector of Animals in the Room, and vice president of the RSPCA.

Klappentext

A major work of interdisciplinary nonfiction that redefines how we understand life, agency, and intelligence

What does it mean to be alive? The slow contortion of a plant toward light, the dive of hawks toward their prey—these are purposeful actions. But where does that purpose come from, and what does it tell us about who we are?

In Alive, natural philosopher Melanie Challenger draws on biology, philosophy, physics, ecology, and the history of science to reveal a radical truth: to be alive is first and foremost a way of being in a body. From Greenland sharks that can live for half a millennium, to birds that sense the Earth’s magnetic field through their retinas, and even slime molds that solve mazes, this book tells a new story of intelligence in the living world.

A scientifically grounded challenge to the idea that life is either a machine run by genes or an essence separable from the body, Alive restores agency, purpose and meaning to organisms in an age of artificial intelligence and biodiversity loss. By recognizing that our bodies are both how and why we are alive, this book asks what it would mean to live—and to act—with that knowledge.