The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy - What Animals on Earth Reveal about Aliens - and Ourselves (Paperback)

Reviews

Reviewed by Tanya K. - 6 December 2022

The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy purports to be an examination of what life must be like, and how it works - on earth and in the rest of the universe. However, in my opinion, Kershenbaum has failed to do this topic justice. Interested readers should rather seek out The Equations of Life: How Physics Shapes Evolution by Charles S. Cockell, which provides a better written and better argued hypothesis that the laws of physics narrowly constrain how life can evolve, making evolution's outcomes predictable to a certain extent.  Kershenbaum tried something similar, but focused on animal biology (no plants or fungi were featured in this book). He tries to extrapolate what we know of Earthling biology, to the biology of off-world species. Each chapter broadly outlines a particular characteristic - movement, communication, intelligence, sociality, information, language, artificial intelligence, and what does it mean to be human. Kershenbaum describes the sequence of events that lead to the evolution of humans, which he asserts is the pinnacle of life on Earth (after all - no other species has built spaceships or has language). He then states that a similar sequence of events must lead to the evolution of intelligent aliens (who would build spaceships - no mention of the necessity of opposable thumbs to build spaceships was made in the whole book, which I thought rather strange). The result is a broad, superficial, and lackluster, summary of high school biology classes, with a minimal hand wave to possible alien life on other planets, accompanied by too many assumptions, which he asserts as true, but doesn't sufficiently demonstrate why they must be true throughout the galaxy. While I'm willing to agree that a large portion (but probably not all) of alien life will resemble Earth-life (i.e. the same as us but different), I did not find Kershenbaum's conclusion well written or argued, nor did I agree with all his assumptions, which I found lacking in terms of adequate research or just did not agree with. He ignores slime molds, which would turn some of his stated assumptions on their head. The sections on morphology and physiology are adequate, but the more fuzzy sections on language, sociality, complexity are narrow-minded and full of cherry-picked definitions and fuzzy reasoning. The chapter on artificial intelligence (AI) is mind-boggling (and not in a good way). I also found Kershenbaum's perspective to be particularly anthropocentric and lacking imagination. This book was disappointing. In short: Aliens will be the same as us, but different🙄. So go watch some Star Trek if you want aliens. PS. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if Kershenbaum's book was a prescribed book for his first year collage class in the hopes that mentioning aliens in the title and text will make his students want to read it. Helpful hint: The epilogue summarises the whole book.