A senior editor at Nature, Gee argues for an "anti-narrative, anti-historic" view of the vast, incomprehensible expanse of geological and evolutionary time, in order to put forward the thinking tool - rather than full-blown science - of cladistics. The logic goes like this: assuming that all life shares a common ancestor, then all living species are cousins, situated at the tips of the branches of the evolutionary tree. But because ancestral lineages are unprovable in the gap-ridden and often misleading fossil record, cladistics instead makes comparisons between living organisms and indeed fossils. This produces branching "cladograms" which are not genealogies but comparisons of multiple, shared characteristics - in an attempt to pin down ancestry rather than convergence of form.
Gee varies between passages of beautiful writing and cheesy lecture-room humour, but this is a stout defense of a field which, in its earliest days, caused old-school evolutionary profs to rear up on their hind legs in indignation.