The Story of Evolution

The Story of Evolution by Steve Jenkins is an information book for 8 year olds that explains where every living thing came from, starting with bacteria in the sea.

What happens

It works in short titled chunks. Millions and millions. In the beginning. The first life. Each one is a handful of sentences and then you are on to the next.

The opening stretch is a timeline. The first single-celled organisms at 3.8 billion years ago. Jellyfish and worms at 600 million. Trilobites, armoured fish, the first things to crawl out onto land, dinosaurs, then us at 130,000 years ago.

Then it doubles back and explains why any of it happened, which is where Darwin comes in. Five years on the Beagle. The Galapagos finches, all descended from the same two birds, with a different beak on every island depending on what there was to eat.

This book never leaves an idea floating.

Natural selection gets a whole page as an example. A mother frog lays 3,000 eggs. Ten of them make it as far as being frogs. The book then tells you exactly what happens to each of those ten, one by one, until two are left. One of them is a good jumper. The other has sharp eyesight.

Same again for mutation. Here is a fish like its parents. Here is a white one, easy for a predator to spot. Here is a spotted one, hard to see on a pebbly stream bed. Guess which two are still around.

Facts your reader will repeat at you for a week. There are about 300,000 known kinds of beetle. Horseshoe crabs have been here for 350 million years. Of every 100 species that have ever lived, 99 have gone.

And the bit at the end that lands hardest. Squash the earth's whole history into one day and life turns up at 4.47 in the morning, the dinosaurs die out at 11.39 at night, and modern humans appear two seconds before midnight.

Two pages to be ready for. The frog page is blunt about death. It lists eaten by a fox, eaten by a snake, starved, in a row, because that is the point being made.

And the last section says plainly that the earth is in another mass extinction right now, that we are causing it, and that half the species alive today could be gone within a hundred years. If your reader is already worried about the state of things, read that one together rather than leaving them with it.

What to read next

Expect the facts to start arriving across the dinner table. When they do, My Weird School Fast Facts: Pizza, Peanut Butter, and Pickles is a completely different subject with exactly the same habit. Two characters argue their way through food facts, like which vegetable was once thought to be poisonous.