The One Minute Geographer: One of the Best Science Books I Have Read
The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
I’ll start this post by asking: How prescient can one person be? Completing this book in 1940, de Chardin could not have predicted the Internet, but if you read about his concept of the “noosphere,” you realize that if he were alive today (b. 1881; d. 1955) he would look at the Internet and say “That’s it! I knew it would be something like that!”
If you read science books and have not yet read Teilhard, you know what you need to do. Right or wrong, De Chardin, a French Jesuit priest, is one of the few scholars who have even attempted to come up with an answer to the unanswerable question “what is the goal of evolution?” Few books I have read attempt to deal with such BIG thoughts.
Rather than attempt to summarize his thinking, I’ll just try to catalog some of the things that in my opinion he predicted or prefigured in his work:
The very modern idea of the “Anthropocene” — the idea that the much of the modern geological era is due to human influence. Most recently this idea was promoted by Erle Ellis and others around 2012…
