Togetherness

A wondrous, eye-opening exploration of the surprising ways life is interconnected

Everything on earth hinges on relationships: animals and bacteria, the soil and its microbes, plants and the molecules floating in the air. Though many of these partnerships are subtle, life as we know it wouldn’t exist without them.

In Togetherness, evolutionary biologist Rowan Hooper leads us into the fascinating, otherworldly spaces where these relationships, known as symbiosis, occur—the earth’s rich underbrush, murky ocean depths, the human body’s complex architecture—to uncover the poetry of life’s greatest collaborations. Moths rely on sloths for reproduction, orchids partner with fungi, and humans negotiate our own relationships with the biosphere, all illustrating William Blake’s claim that “Every thing that lives / Lives not alone.”

Dazzling, immensely clever, and suffused with wonder, Togetherness illuminates ideas about evolution, agriculture, climate change, sustainability, and humanity, explaining why symbiosis is such an important key to understanding ourselves and the world beyond."I think this may be one of those rare books that's a classic upon its publication. It calmly and comprehensively helps you see the world in a very new and hopeful way, and I think the insights apply to our social and political life. We were, all of us, built for contact." —Bill McKibben, author Here Comes the SunROWAN HOOPER is podcast editor at New Scientist and host of the New Scientist Weekly podcast. He has a PhD in evolutionary biology and worked in a conservation biology lab in Japan for five years, before joining The Japan Times in Tokyo and later taking up a fellowship in a physics lab at Trinity College Dublin. His writing has appeared in The Economist, The Guardian, Wired, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, and he is the author of Superhuman and How to Spend a Trillion Dollars. He lives in London with his partner and two daughters.