Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28)

Peter Godfrey-Smith sees a different world under the ocean’s surface than most fellow scuba divers, said Barbara Kiser in

The Wall Street Journal. To the Australian philosopher of science, the sight of tropical fish gliding past a forest of waving coral is more than spectacle: “It’s a curtain raiser to a profound scientific drama, in which the lives of quite un-human creatures illuminate deep mysteries about the nature of sentience.” In his new book, the author of an acclaimed 2016 best-seller on octopus cognition expands his scope to consider all multicellular creatures and the many forms of subjectivity they exhibit. Even a shrimp, he tells us, experiences the distinction between self and environment and offers evidence that consciousness in any form can’t be labeled a mental product alone.

“Never have I encountered anything like Metazoa,” said Elizabeth Marshall Thomas in The American Scholar. “There’s no impenetrable jargon anywhere in this marvelous book,” because Godfrey-Smith builds to his complex arguments about the evolution of mind from first-hand encounters with mollusks and octopuses and other creatures, each of which is never an “it” when he can use the more empathetic “he” or “she.” To help us imagine our way into their worlds, he focuses on various evolutionary pathways that cognition has taken since the emergence of the first nervous system, 600 million years ago, in