What do you think?
Rate this book
Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys
“If you have any interest in life beyond your own, you should read this book.”
—Paul R. Ehrlich, author of The Dominant Animal Biologist Rob Dunn’s Every Little Thing is the story of man’s obsessive quest to catalog life, from nanobacteria to new monkeys. In the tradition of E.O. Wilson, this engaging and fascinating work of popular science follows humanity’s unending quest to discover every living thing in our natural world—from the unimaginably small in the most inhospitable of places on earth to the unimaginably far away in the unexplored canals on Mars.
—Paul R. Ehrlich, author of The Dominant Animal Biologist Rob Dunn’s Every Little Thing is the story of man’s obsessive quest to catalog life, from nanobacteria to new monkeys. In the tradition of E.O. Wilson, this engaging and fascinating work of popular science follows humanity’s unending quest to discover every living thing in our natural world—from the unimaginably small in the most inhospitable of places on earth to the unimaginably far away in the unexplored canals on Mars.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published December 2, 2008
50 people are currently reading
806 people want to read
About the author
Rob Dunn
17 books151 followersRobert Dunn is a biologist, writer and professor in the Department of Applied Ecology at North Carolina State University.
He has written several books and his science essays have appeared at magazines such as BBC Wildlife Magazine, Scientific American, Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic and others. He has become known for efforts to involve the public as citizen scientists.
Dunn's writings have considered the quest to find new superheavy elements, why men are bald, how modern chickens evolved, whether a virus can make a person fat, the beauty of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the biology of insect eggs, the secret lives of cats, the theory of ecological medicine, why the way we think about calories is wrong, and why monkeys (and once upon a time, human women) tend to give birth at night.
Ph.D., Ecology and Evolution, University of Connecticut (2003). He was a Fulbright fellow in Australia. He is currently the William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor at NC State University.
{more at Wikipedia}
He has written several books and his science essays have appeared at magazines such as BBC Wildlife Magazine, Scientific American, Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic and others. He has become known for efforts to involve the public as citizen scientists.
Dunn's writings have considered the quest to find new superheavy elements, why men are bald, how modern chickens evolved, whether a virus can make a person fat, the beauty of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the biology of insect eggs, the secret lives of cats, the theory of ecological medicine, why the way we think about calories is wrong, and why monkeys (and once upon a time, human women) tend to give birth at night.
Ph.D., Ecology and Evolution, University of Connecticut (2003). He was a Fulbright fellow in Australia. He is currently the William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor at NC State University.
{more at Wikipedia}
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 48 reviews
April 27, 2009
I really enjoyed this book, which looks at scientists through the ages, many of whom are more than a little bit dotty. Especially Linnaeus, of course. I learned a lot about archaea and nanobacteria (or maybe nanons, the jury's still out on the ultimate nomenclature), but mostly this book is about hubris, about the depth and breadth of our ignorance, and about those visionaries clutching guttering candles in the dark. Dunn is humorous without being snarky, respectful without being obsequious, and a damn fine writer. He points out with a certain degree of asperity how, in science, it seems true that whatever everyone knows for certain is sure to be proven false later. Highly recommended for anyone interested in life itself, in all its mysterious and magnificent forms, of which we may be the least interesting after all.
June 4, 2016
Science education so often takes the grandest discoveries about the nature of life and the universe and turns them into a litany of boring facts completely lacking in the human element. The fact that the continents move is actually amazing, and the idea was widely considered so outlandish as to be impossible until actually very recently. But by the time I was in science classes it was fed to us as just one more thing we had to learn. The idea that the archaea are distinct from bacteria never seemed significant to me in any way because it was just presented as a fact to memorize: "three domains of life: archaea, bacteria, and eukarya" (and the first two seemed interchangeable in every way). But in this book, Dunn does a fantastic job of putting the discovery of archaea in its proper dramatic lighting: we've found a whole new kind of life! That nobody knew anything about before! Completely distinct from everything we've ever seen! (But with fewer exclamation points.) There are tons of examples like this in the book: I never thought I'd be interested in reading a chapter about bacteria, but Dunn makes the story of Leeuwenhoek seeing them for the first time positively engrossing. Even telling you that, I feel like you're still going to be thinking "that doesn't sound very interesting... it's about bacteria?", because that's what I would be thinking if I were you, but I promise: I'm not any more interested in bacteria than you are, and it was fascinating.
Speaking of science education, we have this problem in this country: why don't people believe in evolution, or acknowledge global warming, or trust science in general? I think it's because we don't understand how science works. When we are taught these things as facts from on high that we should accept on the basis of authority ("scientists believe it and therefore so should you") then it seems perfectly reasonable to reply "but scientists are sometimes wrong" and to choose to accept instead the alternate beliefs of a different authority in our lives, and probably one who we may trust more than some abstract collection of "scientists". If we all had a better understanding for and appreciation of the way science works -- some ideas are wrong, some ideas are right, the job of a scientist is to figure out which are which, and to do so via actual observation of the real world, and what matters in determining whether something is true or not is not consensus but evidence, and the only way that we know scientific ideas are sometimes wrong in the first place is because other scientists have disproven those ideas BY USING SCIENCE -- then it would be much harder to choose not to accept scientific conclusions, because we would realize that science is just observation, and not trusting "science" is the same as not trusting your eyes. In order to be convinced these statements are true, we need to be educated in not just the litany of facts, but in the stories behind the discoveries of and proofs of those facts: how we know what we know.
Fortunately for us, telling the stories behind the discoveries and the theoretical revolutions not only leads to a better understanding of the way science works, but is also way more entertaining. This is the human element that is missing from the litany-of-facts model of education. These stories are fascinating: people seeing things they can't explain, things that will change the way we see the world and our place in it, and then through more and more observation discovering explanations for these mysteries. People love narratives; we are innately attracted to them. This book shows how exciting discovering something new always is, and in retrospect it's kind of amazing that these mind-blowing, world-altering discoveries so often get reduced in regular science education to a boring litany.
So if you don't feel like you would be interested in a book about the history of human efforts to catalog and identify all the species ("a whole book about taxonomy?"), I understand the feeling. But I urge you to give this one a try. Being based in narratives, it reads like Malcolm Gladwell, but the discoveries described in this book describe the nature of existence on a much larger scale.
Speaking of science education, we have this problem in this country: why don't people believe in evolution, or acknowledge global warming, or trust science in general? I think it's because we don't understand how science works. When we are taught these things as facts from on high that we should accept on the basis of authority ("scientists believe it and therefore so should you") then it seems perfectly reasonable to reply "but scientists are sometimes wrong" and to choose to accept instead the alternate beliefs of a different authority in our lives, and probably one who we may trust more than some abstract collection of "scientists". If we all had a better understanding for and appreciation of the way science works -- some ideas are wrong, some ideas are right, the job of a scientist is to figure out which are which, and to do so via actual observation of the real world, and what matters in determining whether something is true or not is not consensus but evidence, and the only way that we know scientific ideas are sometimes wrong in the first place is because other scientists have disproven those ideas BY USING SCIENCE -- then it would be much harder to choose not to accept scientific conclusions, because we would realize that science is just observation, and not trusting "science" is the same as not trusting your eyes. In order to be convinced these statements are true, we need to be educated in not just the litany of facts, but in the stories behind the discoveries of and proofs of those facts: how we know what we know.
Fortunately for us, telling the stories behind the discoveries and the theoretical revolutions not only leads to a better understanding of the way science works, but is also way more entertaining. This is the human element that is missing from the litany-of-facts model of education. These stories are fascinating: people seeing things they can't explain, things that will change the way we see the world and our place in it, and then through more and more observation discovering explanations for these mysteries. People love narratives; we are innately attracted to them. This book shows how exciting discovering something new always is, and in retrospect it's kind of amazing that these mind-blowing, world-altering discoveries so often get reduced in regular science education to a boring litany.
So if you don't feel like you would be interested in a book about the history of human efforts to catalog and identify all the species ("a whole book about taxonomy?"), I understand the feeling. But I urge you to give this one a try. Being based in narratives, it reads like Malcolm Gladwell, but the discoveries described in this book describe the nature of existence on a much larger scale.
May 29, 2014
Other than stealing the title from a classic, Dunn presents an acceptable original work telling of discovery and hardship in science.
May 1, 2022
The author does takes us through a journey of how humans, (at least in the western science tradition), have gone around understanding the biological entities around them and how that understanding has changed drastically due to new ideas and discoveries.
April 11, 2024
I've come back to this book, some years after reading it. (Actually I was looking for some material about muscle fibres which is actually in Nick Lane's book, "Life Ascending"....but came across this as I searched...hence the current review). I must say, a really fascinating book. On the surface it is an attempt to say something about the documentation of all the living species on earth. A project begun thousands of years ago, at least, by Aristotle...and probably others before him. But as EO Wilson says in the preface: "While it is true that perhaps 80 percent of the flowering plants and 95 percent of the species of birds are known, only a small fraction of the far greater diversity of insects and other invertebrate animals have been discovered. Fewer than 10 percent of fungi and many fewer than one percent of microorganisms are known. Of the species known, less than a tenth of a percent have been studied in any depth-and even then across only part of the range of their entire biology". So it's clearly a big project.
One attempt to get a bit of a handle on the dimensions of the problem was initiated by Terry Irwin in 1979 in Panama where he fogged some trees with insecticide and caught the insects that fell out of the tree on sheets below. He was mainly interested in Carabid beetles but what Erwin saw and what he wondered about was not just the carabid beetles. The animals that had fallen before him were dense, diverse, and, it became clear, mostly unknown..... For two or three years, Erwin sorted the beetles collected in those first trees. There were so many specimens that many of the things that weren't beetles rotted before they could even be processed. Erwin had fogged nineteen trees in total. He had enough specimens, enough new species, to last many years, perhaps his entire life.
Erwin is often remembered for predicting there might be 30 million species on Earth. His prediction was actually bolder. He had predicted 30 million species of tropical forest arthropods. He refrained from making the additional prediction of how many total species live on Earth...... The immediate response to Terry Erwin's paper was silence...... Responses to Erwin's estimate fell into three categories: wonder (Lowman's response), consternation, or outright aggression.
Most people probably responded with wonder!' But the aggressors wrote papers and were more vocal both in print and at meetings".....It's interesting how the "establishment" of scientists fights off new ideas. I guess this is healthy. It means that any new idea really has to prove itself before becoming the new paradigm.
The following is a series of extracts from the book that particularly caught my attention:
"DNA barcoding is a method by which small sections of mitochondrial DNA from specimens are used to identify, rapidly, what a species is and roughly where it belongs on the evolutionary tree. The method was and remains controversial....... When Hebert barcoded Astraptes fulgerator, the barcoding indicated there were at least ten genetically distinct species. The lineage had evolved and diverged but had done so without noticeable changes in adult morphology. The butterflies all looked the same. Once distinguished though, the species stories became clear. The different species seemed to favor different food plants and, now that they were known, their biology could be studied in greater detail.
Janzen goes on, as ferociously as ever, trying. He has barcoded about eighty thousand specimens from Guanacaste. Paul Hebert has barcoded about half a million specimens, including many that have been sent to him by the Great Smoky Mountains National Park ATBI. Janzen and Hebert are now trying to find $150 million to jump-start the world project.
There are somewhere around two million named species on Earth, and there is no complete list even of those species. Perhaps ninety percent of such named species have been studied only once, when they were collected and named. Nothing else is known about these species other than a basic description of their physical structure, their morphology, and the name we have superimposed upon them. Even the European earwig, which you might find under a paving stone on your way to work (and which was, of course, named by Linnaeus), is virtually unknown. It was revealed last year that this earwig has an extra penis in the case of damage to the first.
Lynn Margulis came to the conclusion that key organs of eukaryote cells (mitochondria, chloroplasts, flagella, cilia, and centrioles) had their origins in ancient bacteria engulfed by another cell. As already mentioned, it had recently been discovered that mitochondria and chloroplasts had DNA (most of "our" DNA is in our cells' nuclei).
Woese ran to tell Wolfe, saying, as Wolfe remembers, "these methanogens are not bacteria." Wolfe told Woese they had to be. "Of course they are bacteria; they look like bacteria... Now, calm down; come out of orbit.".... but the result was getting more and more clear: the methanogens were very different. Once "a second methanogen was characterized and showed itself to be related to the first, there was no doubt" that they had found a new form of life, Woese would later say. This form of life had been different from the others, bacteria and eukaryotes, for a very long time..... The New York Times ran the headline, "Scientists Discover a Form of Life That Predates Higher Or-ganisms," on the front page of the November 2, 1977 edition..... The fats in the cells of archaea and bacteria differ, as do the sugars and proteins. Some of the composition of archaea more closely resembles that of eukaryotes than it does that of bacteria, but most of the differences are simply unique. The houses are built to similar specifications, but of different materials. In most cases, the composition of archaeal cells differs in ways that make them tougher, more resistant to heat, cold, and other extremes.
Woese reconstructed the tree of life and in doing so studied the TRNA in archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes.......If Margulis were right that our mitochondria had once been free-living microbes, their rRNA should be more similar to that of other microbes than it is to the rRNA in our nucleus. And it was. Here was almost unassailable support for Mar-gulis. The mitochondria and even chloroplasts could be mapped onto Woese's tree of life, as easily as if they were still free-living microbes living in the ground.
The life at the vent was thriving not on derivatives of the sun, but on the chemicals released from the vents. Those chemicals included hydrogen sulfide, but, as time and more research would tell, also a variety of other chemicals. Here then was the first example of an ecological realm based almost entirely on energy from the Earth itself....... Before photosynthesis evolved, all living realms used chemical energy, the Earth's energy.
When one scales down to the size of the fossil microbes in the Martian rock, interpretation becomes art. One is up against the limits of microscopy. Forms that are obvious at bigger scales become open to interpretation, vulnerable to preconceived ideas about what is and is not possible. Even scanning electron microscopy is not high enough in magnification to see such small shapes well.
Most microbiologists still believe that there are lower physiological, or simply physical, limits to the possible size of a living cell. If you take an E. coli bacteria cell and pare it down to the bare minimum of necessary genes and parts, the DNA, RNA, and ribosomes alone are big enough to require a cell at least two hundred nanometers....... One hundred nanometers, the biggest dimension of both Kajander's nanobacteria and McKay's Martian microbes remained, to most, too small...... Nanobacteria have now been associated with many diseases, a sort of who's who of bodily bad news: rheumatoid arthritis, cholecystolithiasis, coinfections with HIV, various cancers, Alzheimer's disease, prostatitis, and even lowly periodontal disease. The work on links between nanobacteria and kidney stones in particular has been the subject of research by scientists at the Mayo Clinic and elsewhere...... Then it happened. In 1998, Kajander and Cificioglu isolated RNA from one of their samples. The RNA indicated the nanobacteria were a kind of proteobacteria and so suggested the possibility of billions of proteobacteria, all smaller than it had been predicted...... another team showed that the RNA Kajander had found most closely resembled that of a bacterium common on laboratory equipment." The results appeared contaminated...... At least to Kajander's knowledge, no grants have been awarded for work on nanobacteria in eight years...... The more common and problematic nanobacteria are, the more money Nanobac stands to make. Therefore, Kajander and Ciftcioglu had a financial incentive to find nanobacteria in more and more places.
We have many questions yet to resolve: When, and how many. times, did life evolve on Earth? Did life first evolve on Earth? Has it evolved elsewhere? What are the hottest, coldest, or most extreme conditions where life can live? Is there life in the magma at the center of the Earth (or even: Is there magma at the center of the Earth)? What are the smallest species? Is there a limit to how big species can be? Can life evolve without DNA? Does such life already exist on Earth? Do bacteria make oil and coal? Which kinds of species (bacteria, archaea, vertebrates, plants?) represent the majority of the weight of life on Earth? Do the species on Earth account for all of life in the universe?
Is Earth just one of a million planets with life? Do species disperse from Earth to other planets?
Not one of these questions is ridiculous, and not one of them is even close to being answered.
In Sweden, all of the multicellular species will be named by 2021. I can think of no more apt statement of how far we still have to go. In the country where Linnaeus, 250 years ago, was bent on naming everything in the world, we are only just now getting to name every multicellular Swedish thing..... Dan Janzen, upon hearing of the project, reminded a reporter that as many species could be found in the Guanacaste Reserve in Costa Rica, where he continues to toil, as in all of Sweden.
.... No one in Sweden has said anything about describing all of the bacteria, archaea, viruses, protists, extinct life, or even, for that matter, distinct evolutionary units. It is not in the cards. It is too much. Maybe Ulf is right that we will fill in the last unknown species of multicellular creatures in Sweden in a few dozen years. Maybe we will then move on to the microbes. Maybe we will even someday name all the species of archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes in the world.
But I doubt it".
Personally, I was a bit disappointed that Dunn didn't even seem to try the exercise of estimating the total number of species in the world: How many fungi, How many archea, how many bacteria. how many insects, etc. He seems content to say something like there are two million named species but makes no estimates or even guesses about the total number of species. (Though, as is pointed out in the book, even the concept of differentiable species is being questioned and it's being suggested that we should be looking more at the DNA trails and accounting on the basis of DNA differences).
Dunn dabbles into nanobacteria (though I thought some Australians at UniQueensland were absolute pioneers in this field. And into astrobiology and there is some interesting history there about some of the apostles that Linnaeus sent out ...and din't really support of give due credit. However, he seems to totally ignore the viruses. I guess, viruses are very hard to pin down to species because they morph so fast....but it seems like huge field for systematics of some sort (likewise with bacteriophage).
I also find myself wondering how it is possible to find billions of dollars per day to wage a ware in Ukraine and similarly in Gaza where a single plane can cost hundreds of millions of dollars but finding $150 million to catalogue "all" the species on earth seems beyond reach. (Actually, I'm sure that once we start on even the fungi, we will realise that much more than $150 million is needed).
Overall, a fascinating book and I enjoyed it very much...even if I am left with many questions. Five stars from me.
One attempt to get a bit of a handle on the dimensions of the problem was initiated by Terry Irwin in 1979 in Panama where he fogged some trees with insecticide and caught the insects that fell out of the tree on sheets below. He was mainly interested in Carabid beetles but what Erwin saw and what he wondered about was not just the carabid beetles. The animals that had fallen before him were dense, diverse, and, it became clear, mostly unknown..... For two or three years, Erwin sorted the beetles collected in those first trees. There were so many specimens that many of the things that weren't beetles rotted before they could even be processed. Erwin had fogged nineteen trees in total. He had enough specimens, enough new species, to last many years, perhaps his entire life.
Erwin is often remembered for predicting there might be 30 million species on Earth. His prediction was actually bolder. He had predicted 30 million species of tropical forest arthropods. He refrained from making the additional prediction of how many total species live on Earth...... The immediate response to Terry Erwin's paper was silence...... Responses to Erwin's estimate fell into three categories: wonder (Lowman's response), consternation, or outright aggression.
Most people probably responded with wonder!' But the aggressors wrote papers and were more vocal both in print and at meetings".....It's interesting how the "establishment" of scientists fights off new ideas. I guess this is healthy. It means that any new idea really has to prove itself before becoming the new paradigm.
The following is a series of extracts from the book that particularly caught my attention:
"DNA barcoding is a method by which small sections of mitochondrial DNA from specimens are used to identify, rapidly, what a species is and roughly where it belongs on the evolutionary tree. The method was and remains controversial....... When Hebert barcoded Astraptes fulgerator, the barcoding indicated there were at least ten genetically distinct species. The lineage had evolved and diverged but had done so without noticeable changes in adult morphology. The butterflies all looked the same. Once distinguished though, the species stories became clear. The different species seemed to favor different food plants and, now that they were known, their biology could be studied in greater detail.
Janzen goes on, as ferociously as ever, trying. He has barcoded about eighty thousand specimens from Guanacaste. Paul Hebert has barcoded about half a million specimens, including many that have been sent to him by the Great Smoky Mountains National Park ATBI. Janzen and Hebert are now trying to find $150 million to jump-start the world project.
There are somewhere around two million named species on Earth, and there is no complete list even of those species. Perhaps ninety percent of such named species have been studied only once, when they were collected and named. Nothing else is known about these species other than a basic description of their physical structure, their morphology, and the name we have superimposed upon them. Even the European earwig, which you might find under a paving stone on your way to work (and which was, of course, named by Linnaeus), is virtually unknown. It was revealed last year that this earwig has an extra penis in the case of damage to the first.
Lynn Margulis came to the conclusion that key organs of eukaryote cells (mitochondria, chloroplasts, flagella, cilia, and centrioles) had their origins in ancient bacteria engulfed by another cell. As already mentioned, it had recently been discovered that mitochondria and chloroplasts had DNA (most of "our" DNA is in our cells' nuclei).
Woese ran to tell Wolfe, saying, as Wolfe remembers, "these methanogens are not bacteria." Wolfe told Woese they had to be. "Of course they are bacteria; they look like bacteria... Now, calm down; come out of orbit.".... but the result was getting more and more clear: the methanogens were very different. Once "a second methanogen was characterized and showed itself to be related to the first, there was no doubt" that they had found a new form of life, Woese would later say. This form of life had been different from the others, bacteria and eukaryotes, for a very long time..... The New York Times ran the headline, "Scientists Discover a Form of Life That Predates Higher Or-ganisms," on the front page of the November 2, 1977 edition..... The fats in the cells of archaea and bacteria differ, as do the sugars and proteins. Some of the composition of archaea more closely resembles that of eukaryotes than it does that of bacteria, but most of the differences are simply unique. The houses are built to similar specifications, but of different materials. In most cases, the composition of archaeal cells differs in ways that make them tougher, more resistant to heat, cold, and other extremes.
Woese reconstructed the tree of life and in doing so studied the TRNA in archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes.......If Margulis were right that our mitochondria had once been free-living microbes, their rRNA should be more similar to that of other microbes than it is to the rRNA in our nucleus. And it was. Here was almost unassailable support for Mar-gulis. The mitochondria and even chloroplasts could be mapped onto Woese's tree of life, as easily as if they were still free-living microbes living in the ground.
The life at the vent was thriving not on derivatives of the sun, but on the chemicals released from the vents. Those chemicals included hydrogen sulfide, but, as time and more research would tell, also a variety of other chemicals. Here then was the first example of an ecological realm based almost entirely on energy from the Earth itself....... Before photosynthesis evolved, all living realms used chemical energy, the Earth's energy.
When one scales down to the size of the fossil microbes in the Martian rock, interpretation becomes art. One is up against the limits of microscopy. Forms that are obvious at bigger scales become open to interpretation, vulnerable to preconceived ideas about what is and is not possible. Even scanning electron microscopy is not high enough in magnification to see such small shapes well.
Most microbiologists still believe that there are lower physiological, or simply physical, limits to the possible size of a living cell. If you take an E. coli bacteria cell and pare it down to the bare minimum of necessary genes and parts, the DNA, RNA, and ribosomes alone are big enough to require a cell at least two hundred nanometers....... One hundred nanometers, the biggest dimension of both Kajander's nanobacteria and McKay's Martian microbes remained, to most, too small...... Nanobacteria have now been associated with many diseases, a sort of who's who of bodily bad news: rheumatoid arthritis, cholecystolithiasis, coinfections with HIV, various cancers, Alzheimer's disease, prostatitis, and even lowly periodontal disease. The work on links between nanobacteria and kidney stones in particular has been the subject of research by scientists at the Mayo Clinic and elsewhere...... Then it happened. In 1998, Kajander and Cificioglu isolated RNA from one of their samples. The RNA indicated the nanobacteria were a kind of proteobacteria and so suggested the possibility of billions of proteobacteria, all smaller than it had been predicted...... another team showed that the RNA Kajander had found most closely resembled that of a bacterium common on laboratory equipment." The results appeared contaminated...... At least to Kajander's knowledge, no grants have been awarded for work on nanobacteria in eight years...... The more common and problematic nanobacteria are, the more money Nanobac stands to make. Therefore, Kajander and Ciftcioglu had a financial incentive to find nanobacteria in more and more places.
We have many questions yet to resolve: When, and how many. times, did life evolve on Earth? Did life first evolve on Earth? Has it evolved elsewhere? What are the hottest, coldest, or most extreme conditions where life can live? Is there life in the magma at the center of the Earth (or even: Is there magma at the center of the Earth)? What are the smallest species? Is there a limit to how big species can be? Can life evolve without DNA? Does such life already exist on Earth? Do bacteria make oil and coal? Which kinds of species (bacteria, archaea, vertebrates, plants?) represent the majority of the weight of life on Earth? Do the species on Earth account for all of life in the universe?
Is Earth just one of a million planets with life? Do species disperse from Earth to other planets?
Not one of these questions is ridiculous, and not one of them is even close to being answered.
In Sweden, all of the multicellular species will be named by 2021. I can think of no more apt statement of how far we still have to go. In the country where Linnaeus, 250 years ago, was bent on naming everything in the world, we are only just now getting to name every multicellular Swedish thing..... Dan Janzen, upon hearing of the project, reminded a reporter that as many species could be found in the Guanacaste Reserve in Costa Rica, where he continues to toil, as in all of Sweden.
.... No one in Sweden has said anything about describing all of the bacteria, archaea, viruses, protists, extinct life, or even, for that matter, distinct evolutionary units. It is not in the cards. It is too much. Maybe Ulf is right that we will fill in the last unknown species of multicellular creatures in Sweden in a few dozen years. Maybe we will then move on to the microbes. Maybe we will even someday name all the species of archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes in the world.
But I doubt it".
Personally, I was a bit disappointed that Dunn didn't even seem to try the exercise of estimating the total number of species in the world: How many fungi, How many archea, how many bacteria. how many insects, etc. He seems content to say something like there are two million named species but makes no estimates or even guesses about the total number of species. (Though, as is pointed out in the book, even the concept of differentiable species is being questioned and it's being suggested that we should be looking more at the DNA trails and accounting on the basis of DNA differences).
Dunn dabbles into nanobacteria (though I thought some Australians at UniQueensland were absolute pioneers in this field. And into astrobiology and there is some interesting history there about some of the apostles that Linnaeus sent out ...and din't really support of give due credit. However, he seems to totally ignore the viruses. I guess, viruses are very hard to pin down to species because they morph so fast....but it seems like huge field for systematics of some sort (likewise with bacteriophage).
I also find myself wondering how it is possible to find billions of dollars per day to wage a ware in Ukraine and similarly in Gaza where a single plane can cost hundreds of millions of dollars but finding $150 million to catalogue "all" the species on earth seems beyond reach. (Actually, I'm sure that once we start on even the fungi, we will realise that much more than $150 million is needed).
Overall, a fascinating book and I enjoyed it very much...even if I am left with many questions. Five stars from me.
December 3, 2018
I discovered Rob Dunn while researching the Stop Fossil Fuels biological annihilation page. I greatly enjoyed his article on the perhaps foolhardy attempt to estimate the number of global species. His humorous yet informative approach convinced me to read Every Living Thing. The subtitle—Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, From Nanobacteria to New Monkeys—only superficially summarizes the scope.
The book does indeed portray the work—and, frequently, in laugh-out-loud moments, the quirks—of scientists from Carl Linnaeus to Carl Sagan, with dozens in between. (Including, disproportionately, at least three more "Carls.") But the underlying theme is awe of and love for biological life, in all its frequently unbelievable, unimaginable, and incomprehensible richness.
June 23, 2011
What really hooked me on this book was the topic. I have always felt (and am glad to not be alone in this regard) that the world wherein the very small reside is far under represented in scientific literature. Considering the vast number of Bacteria and Archaea that exist it always astounds me how little coverage they get in Biology textbooks and the like. I absolutely adored Dunns descriptions of Leeuwenhoeks unique and ecstatic feelings of observing things in the realm of the very small and I think the author really captures the excitement that surrounds the exploration of our world and the discoveries of life. He touches on a lot of subjects from the hardly explored depths of our oceans to our hopes of life in outer space, it really gives you a feeling of being connected to other life. You can tell that this author values life highly and loves it in its every form. I can't tell you how much this viewpoint is lacking in many realms and am glad to see someone take up the cause!
March 12, 2009
This was a great book. There are all kinds of bits of biology history and information interwoven throughout the book-- yet its told in such a story-telling manner, that I kept wanting to read and never put it down. Also, it's a wonderful perspective on what science research is, and how its so much more than just a bunch of facts that we memorize in high school or college. I think its a must-read book for anyone considering pursing the sciences post high school. Though also a very good read for anyone.
April 18, 2020
A well written, general reader-friendly account of some of the scientists who sought to understand and document the extent of diversity of life on earth (and to some extent, beyond), and the criticisms they faced in doing so. Not sure “man” was needed in the subtitle as one of the most prominent figures is a woman! Briefly tells the stories of some of the big names in biology, from Linnaeus, Bates, Wallace, to Margulis, Sagan, Woese, with some other pioneering entomologists thrown in the mix with Erwin and Janzen. A fun, fast read!
December 4, 2020
Lots of facts in this book, a decent review of the status of categorizing living things. Not a memorable book even though the writer is good and the stories enjoyable. I'm writing this review many years later and had to skim the book to remember it at all. The subject is still moving along, sorting out every living thing as we watch them disappear from our overused, overcrowded human centered planet.
July 6, 2022
I've read a lot of Dunn's books and I have to say this is not one of my favorites. It's well written and there's a lot to learn, but I did not find it overall as engrossing as usual. There was a lot of emphasis on molecular biology and much of it was over my head. His approach here was to focus on different
pioneering scientists and some were more intriguing than others. Still worth reading, but a few chapters can be a slog.
pioneering scientists and some were more intriguing than others. Still worth reading, but a few chapters can be a slog.
August 20, 2025
Rob Dunn does a great job of taking a deep dive (sometimes literally) into the history of the classification and discovery of living things. Starting with Lineaus and his efforts to name and classify, he moves through to modern day discoveries of new bacteria in increasingly (supposedly) inhospitable places and the search for extra-terrestrial life.
The topic is so huge that this book just scratches the surface, but provides great insights into the brightest minds of past and present.
The topic is so huge that this book just scratches the surface, but provides great insights into the brightest minds of past and present.
March 28, 2020
When I started reading this book, I was expecting a popular introduction into taxonomy and systematics. But the chapters took a surprising turn and focused on the endosymbiosis theory of Margulis and the discovery of Archaea by Woese. In the end, Dunn even considers life on other planets. A great read!
August 14, 2018
Great book, starting with Linnaeus and the binomial system and working up to astrobiologists and even so-called nanobacteria. While some of the ideas seem to be on the fringes of science, that is all part of the author’s theme, that today’s crackpots may be tomorrow’s crackpots
March 31, 2020
I chose this after really enjoying Never Home Alone, but, boy, is it dry. On the one hand, it was great to read before bed because I was so tired/bored I fell asleep after just a few pages, but on the other hand I have read 60 pages in 18 days, so... giving up on this one.
February 16, 2019
full of "learn something new every day" information. fascinating.
December 28, 2019
Good prose, good jokes, fascinating story of the quest to expand our understanding of the natural world. Would read more by this author.
March 22, 2020
It was not terrible, but I have enjoyed his other books much more. He is a great author, but this one missed the mark.
Read
November 18, 2020DNF'd 16%
April 6, 2021
I absolutely loved this book. Dunn is a fantastic writer.
February 7, 2022
The beauty of the book was showing just how poorly we've done in cataloging life on this planet. I really had no idea about the deep earth bacteria . . .
May 4, 2022
3.5 stars.
October 17, 2025
Quite enjoyable! 🦠
December 6, 2025
Worthy interesting read
Humorous and factual this book details theories on the beginning of life in a manner for the non scientific. Be sure to read his notes at the end
Humorous and factual this book details theories on the beginning of life in a manner for the non scientific. Be sure to read his notes at the end
stopped-reading
January 9, 2026I think I just got bored. My husband thought it was one of the best books he read this year.
Read
September 1, 2012This book came recommended by a colleague. The author explores the personalities of biological discovery, especially those associated with taxonomy and biodiversity. Including Linnaeus, Antonine von Leeuwenhoek, Terry Erwin, Dan Janzen, Lynn Margulis, Carl Sagan, Carl Woese, Craig Venter, Frank Drake and others. While the beginning held my attention, I found my mind wandering through the final section on "life in space". This may because the earlier parts are based in evidence and physical discovery, while the parts about life on Mars and SETI are more speculation. By far the most interesting chapter was "Finding an Ant-Riding Beetle", about the social parasite research of Carl Rettenmeyer, who passed away in 2009. As always, I'm drawn more to such details of biological discovery rather than the broad themes, and this book has both. I was also excited by "Symbiotic Cells on the Seafloor", where Dunn describes the discovery of deep ocean vents and their sulfur based ecosystems. I had never before understood that the Riftia tubeworms were like alien plants, drawing energy from their bacteria endosymbiotes, which like some parody of the overworld chloroplasts digest elemental sulfur compounds and give the tubeworms carbon.
There aren't many popular science books out there on taxonomy and systematics, and while the author may be overly broad in his subject matter (I would have liked to see a more narrow approach), the people and their personal battles shine through in his writing. Rob Dunn is writing from within the profession, so unlike other books which inevitably miss the point (see Yoon's Naming Nature), Dunn hits it right on: despite all our strides since the 18th century, we are a long way from describing the overwhelming diversity of this planet. Biology continues to be a magic well; the more you draw from it, the more there is to draw. And it never runs empty.
There aren't many popular science books out there on taxonomy and systematics, and while the author may be overly broad in his subject matter (I would have liked to see a more narrow approach), the people and their personal battles shine through in his writing. Rob Dunn is writing from within the profession, so unlike other books which inevitably miss the point (see Yoon's Naming Nature), Dunn hits it right on: despite all our strides since the 18th century, we are a long way from describing the overwhelming diversity of this planet. Biology continues to be a magic well; the more you draw from it, the more there is to draw. And it never runs empty.
February 20, 2014
Many people may remember hearing the name Carl Linnaeus from a biology class they took at one point time. He's the man who gave the binomial nomenclature system for classifying life. Unless you continued to study the sciences, there's a good chance you haven't thought about him in quite some time.
Linnaeus was obsessed with naming the natural world around him. In his life he named over 10,000 species and if you live in the northern hemisphere then nearly every animal you see on a daily basis was named by him. Linnaeus despaired however, because he was under the impression that he was almost finished and there would soon be nothing left to name. Today we know how wrong he was, just one acre of Costa Rican rainforest contains well over 10,000 unique species of life and worldwide there are millions upon millions we have not yet discovered or named.
This book gives you a good insight into the people who tackle this challenge, and what drives and motivates them. People who search for life at the bottom of the sea, or on other planets.
A great book for anyone who has ever wondered about the diversity of life on this planet.
Linnaeus was obsessed with naming the natural world around him. In his life he named over 10,000 species and if you live in the northern hemisphere then nearly every animal you see on a daily basis was named by him. Linnaeus despaired however, because he was under the impression that he was almost finished and there would soon be nothing left to name. Today we know how wrong he was, just one acre of Costa Rican rainforest contains well over 10,000 unique species of life and worldwide there are millions upon millions we have not yet discovered or named.
This book gives you a good insight into the people who tackle this challenge, and what drives and motivates them. People who search for life at the bottom of the sea, or on other planets.
A great book for anyone who has ever wondered about the diversity of life on this planet.
May 2, 2009
For the most part I really enjoyed this. Dunn's focus was: the more you look at the life that surrounds us, the more you'll find. My background is in biology, but I never really thought about the whole spectrum of life as a whole this way before, as my focus in school and professionally has necessarily always been a relatively narrow range of life. It was kind of mind boggling. My only real issue was that I found his excessive footnotes pretty annoying: either the information should have been important enough to include in the main text, or the editor should have just red-inked them. I honestly just started ignoring them. I found the section on exobiology a little tiresome, just because that's outside of my realm of interest, though it was obviously an area that needed to be addressed given the book's thesis. Overall, Dunn's writing style was very readable and certainly not overly technical, so I'd recommend this to anyone even casually interested in natural history or biology.
February 5, 2009
This book is a readable retracing of the classification of life from the Enlightenment to the present. The author does not attempt to be exhaustive, but focuses on crucial characters and controversies that have led to major revisions in the way we view the world. Dunn makes a compelling case that how we classify and organize living organisms is crucial to understanding our attitude toward our environment and our place in the universe. Enjoyable, understandable for the average educated reader. I once considered becoming a biologist, and this book reminded me why.
October 20, 2009
Every Living Thing tells the story of the push to understand more about the quantity and diversity of life in the universe. It is simultaneously humorous and fascinating with gossipy histories of science giants (Linnaeus comes off a cowardly, manipulative genius) and accounts of forms of life like beetles (and the mites that live on them) who masquerade as army ants in the rain forests of Central America. It's a quick read that just might inspire one to get a microscope and explore.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 48 reviews