OVER the years, palaeontologist Peter Ward has become an able populariser of the Earth’s history and a big-picture thinker who pulls together diverse threads to weave intriguing theories about the history of life on Earth and the potential for life on other planets. Among his most provocative ideas is that simple life may be common in the universe, but complex organisms are extremely rare, a position well argued in an earlier book written with Donald Brownlee, Rare Earth: Why complex life is uncommon in the universe.
In Out of Thin Air, Ward offers another bold hypothesis: that variations…
