📖 Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life by Jason Roberts (Book Summary & Key Takeaways)
Introduction - The Unfinished Map of Life Jason Roberts opens the book with a startling truth: despite centuries of exploration, classification, and scientific progress, humanity has barely scratched the surface of Earth’s biodiversity. The introduction sets the emotional and intellectual tone of the book - a blend of awe, urgency, and existential questioning. Roberts frames the central paradox: We live in an age of unprecedented scientific capability. Yet we remain profoundly ignorant about most of the life forms that share this planet with us. He describes the “catalogue of life” as humanity’s greatest unfinished project - a map with vast blank spaces, not unlike the early maps of the world that labeled unknown regions as terra incognita . Except this time, the unknown is not geography but biology. The introduction also establishes the stakes: Every species we fail to discover is a story erased, a medicine never found, an ecological thread cut before we even knew it existed. ...