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A review by morgan_blackledge
First Life: Discovering the Connections Between Stars, Planets, and How Life Began by David Deamer
4.0
Nothing is alive, or rather no thing is alive. Life (what ever that is) can only happen as an emergent property of (really) complex systems in (really) special conditions. Life is not a thing, its a process; a special domain of chemistry, which is its self a special domain of physics.
People have a pretty good handle on how the universe emerged from nothing (see A Universe From Nothing: Why there is something rather than nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss). And people have a pretty good handle on how complex life ratchets up from "simpler" life forms (see Darwin). But people don't quite know how (exactly) so called organic life emerged from inorganic stuff. It's like a razor thin barrier of scientific knowledge that, when pierced, will connect these two immense territories of human knowledge (inorganica and organica). This book describes what we currently know (or rather the competing theories) about how life began, from the bottom up perspective of organic chemistry.
This was a game changing read for me. I am coming at evolutionary theory and cell biology from a background in psychology and an interest in neuroscience. The approach to understanding evolutionary theory that I'm most familiar with begins with a curiosity about human behavior (including mentation, affect and and social behavior), and (more or less) attempts to understand brain/body function (down to the molecular level), in an evolutionary context, in order to try to explain, predict and manipulate future animal and human behavior (hopefully for the better).
When you're working backwards through evolutionary theory, somewhere at the bottom of the pickle barrel is the vague question "what exactly is life and how did it all begin"? The answers is equally vague, "life has something to do with reproduction and metabolism, and it began in a warm swamp full of chemicals and lightning struck it, and protoplasm happened, and a long time later, living things got interesting (i.e. multicellular) and then you get people.
This book exploded my former assumptions that the origins of life is a thoroughly understood, simple matter, and that we're on the verge of being able to synthesize cellular organisms from scratch. BTW; it isn't and were not. Even prokaryotic (non nucleic) organisms are so stinking complex that it literally staggers the imagination, particularly when contemplating what it will take to build one of these suckers from scratch. We may be able to "bioengineer" some cool shit by manipulating living cells (see Ventor's amazing work) but that's really different than creating a living cell from chemicals and sparks.
The fact that there is self assembling life at all is a freaking miracle! Words can't express the awe I feel as I write this. Forget about the fact that the human brain has circa 100 billion, networked, communicating and conditionable cells that can share information with billions of other brains. That fact even prokaryotic organisms exist is absolutely nuking my brain after reading this book! I call that a good investment of time and money (16.00 on kindle).
People have a pretty good handle on how the universe emerged from nothing (see A Universe From Nothing: Why there is something rather than nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss). And people have a pretty good handle on how complex life ratchets up from "simpler" life forms (see Darwin). But people don't quite know how (exactly) so called organic life emerged from inorganic stuff. It's like a razor thin barrier of scientific knowledge that, when pierced, will connect these two immense territories of human knowledge (inorganica and organica). This book describes what we currently know (or rather the competing theories) about how life began, from the bottom up perspective of organic chemistry.
This was a game changing read for me. I am coming at evolutionary theory and cell biology from a background in psychology and an interest in neuroscience. The approach to understanding evolutionary theory that I'm most familiar with begins with a curiosity about human behavior (including mentation, affect and and social behavior), and (more or less) attempts to understand brain/body function (down to the molecular level), in an evolutionary context, in order to try to explain, predict and manipulate future animal and human behavior (hopefully for the better).
When you're working backwards through evolutionary theory, somewhere at the bottom of the pickle barrel is the vague question "what exactly is life and how did it all begin"? The answers is equally vague, "life has something to do with reproduction and metabolism, and it began in a warm swamp full of chemicals and lightning struck it, and protoplasm happened, and a long time later, living things got interesting (i.e. multicellular) and then you get people.
This book exploded my former assumptions that the origins of life is a thoroughly understood, simple matter, and that we're on the verge of being able to synthesize cellular organisms from scratch. BTW; it isn't and were not. Even prokaryotic (non nucleic) organisms are so stinking complex that it literally staggers the imagination, particularly when contemplating what it will take to build one of these suckers from scratch. We may be able to "bioengineer" some cool shit by manipulating living cells (see Ventor's amazing work) but that's really different than creating a living cell from chemicals and sparks.
The fact that there is self assembling life at all is a freaking miracle! Words can't express the awe I feel as I write this. Forget about the fact that the human brain has circa 100 billion, networked, communicating and conditionable cells that can share information with billions of other brains. That fact even prokaryotic organisms exist is absolutely nuking my brain after reading this book! I call that a good investment of time and money (16.00 on kindle).