Godfrey-Smith...is possessed of a prodigious curiosity. His capacity for fascination is both a blessing and a minor curse ... It is easy to get lost in Godfrey-Smith’s thickets of digressions ... Godfrey-Smith makes compelling points about the horrors of factory farming and the urgency of habitat destruction, but these topics are too weighty and complex to squeeze neatly into some 60-odd pages ... Still, Living on Earth is a work of moral philosophy in more ways than one. It is best read, I think, as an ethical exemplar ... Godfrey-Smith is sober, precise and impressively scientifically informed, but even such a no-nonsense thinker cannot resist metaphors of personification when confronted with the riches of the natural world.
Because Godfrey-Smith has devoted so much effort to excavating the origins and cross-species parallels of mental capacities familiar to us, he can afford, without risk of exceptionalism, to point out how we are different ... His willingness to look in unexpected directions keeps the discussion surprising.
There’s no question Godfrey-Smith is an erudite and profound thinker, but he’s not always successful in organizing his ideas in ways that readers will understand. This doesn’t quite fulfill its lofty ambitions.
