Book Reviewed: Infinite Life: The Revolutionary Story of Eggs, Evolution, and Life on Earth by Jules Howard

The song of the egg This book is a biography narrating the history of the biological egg. The author calls this the most unifying and resilient life structure that this planet has ever produced. He narrates the Cambrian explosion (539 – 485 million years ago) when animal life surged into the species. In the earliest period, when eggs were first nursed and cradled, the eggs started forming from water to land through the ancestors of spiders and scorpions, insects, and fish that first walked the shores. This historical journey takes in Triassic ponds (252 - 201 million years ago), and later birds, and early mammals. The history has evolved to the mating amphibians; the rise of maggots and other insect larvae; the marsupials thriving in newly evolved pouches and the rise of the most diminutive egg of a mammal. In spite of all this, the eggs - devoid of the brain are incapable of an instructive thought. Eggs are incapable of knowing their journey, but a full species, even a single-celled organism has the basic instinct to survive, find food (prey), avoid predators, and reproduce. The author explores how evolutionary changes in the egg produced animals and their eco-systems through time. Before the Cambrian Period, before animals as we know them today existed, through the Silurian Period (444 – 419 million years ago) and Devonian Period (419 – 359 million years ago), when coastlines shifted and climates see-sawed; into the Carboniferous (359 – 259 million years ago) era, when bony land animals made advancements across continents. The author hopes that this is re-framing the story of animal evolution through the lens of the egg. Part of the book is the imagination of the author of the ancient palaeobiological times, here the author reminisces how the eggs and possibly earl life forms were evolving in the early Cambrian rivers and lakes. The writing style of the author is engaging; I recommend this book to readers who are interested in evolutionary biology, and the life in the deep past.