The book follows the evolution of mankind as it shapes survivingPurgatorius into tree dwellers, remoulds a group that drifts from Africa to a New World on a raft formed out of debris, and confronting others with a terrible dead end as ice clamps down on Antarctica. The stream of DNA runs on elsewhere, where ape-like creatures in North Africa are forced out of their diminishing forests to come across grasslands where their distant descendants will later run joyously. At one point, hominids become sapient, and go on to develop technology, including an evolving universal constructor machine that goes to Mars and multiplies, and in an act of global ecophagy consumes Mars by converting the planet into a mass of machinery that leaves the Solar system in search of new planets to assimilate. Human extinction also occurs in the book, as well as the end of planet Earth and the rebirth of life on another planet. Also to be found in Evolution are ponderous Romans, sapient dinosaurs, the last of the wild Neanderthals, a primate who witnesses the extinction of the dinosaurs, symbiotic primate-tree relationships, mole people, and primates who live on a Mars-like Earth. The final chapter witnesses the final fate of the last primate and the descendants of the replicator machines sent to Mars that are implied to have reached sentience and colonized the galaxy. In the epilogue, Joan Useb discusses the philosophy of evolution with her daughter Lucy as they weather the aftermath of Rabaul on the Galapagos, where Charles Darwin made his observations leading to his landmark theory.
Reception
reviewing for Publishers Weekly stated "here is a rigorously constructed hard SF novel where the question is not whether humanity will reach the stars but how it will survive its own worst tendencies." Kirkus Reviews called this novel "glum, dyspeptic, and depressing." Jackie Cassada said in her review for Library Journal that "spanning more than 165 million years and encompassing the entire planet, Baxter's ambitious saga provides both an exercise in painless paleontology and superb storytelling." Evolution has been compared to Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men and Baxter has acknowledged Stapledon's influence.
