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kamreadsandrecsFor a while now, I've been rather hooked on the concept of evolution. I've been tolerably familiar with it, of course, since it's at the heart of a lot of sci-fi, but it was only recently that I really decided to learn what it was all about. I started out by reading The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins, recommended to me by Hope ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
coffeebased, who suggested it as a great introduction to the concept of evolution as understood in contemporary science.
Now, Hope has a very high reputation with me when it comes to books, plus she's a biologist to boot, so when she suggested I try out The Greatest Show on Earth I knew I'd be getting something good to read, and I was right. Dawkins's book is probably the very best introduction to the concept of evolution I have ever encountered. The jargon rate is pretty low, and Dawkins's prose is lucid and easy to read. While some readers might find his opinions on religion discomfiting (Dawkins is a very vocal atheist - one of the most vocal in the scientific community), his science is excellent, and is capable of making the reader ask some very important questions about evolution and its impact on life on earth.
The Greatest Show on Earth whetted my appetite for more - more science, actually. It reminded me that right alongside literature and history, I also have a deep abiding love for biology - in fact, one of my very earliest dream jobs was to be a paleontologist. And now that I had The Greatest Show on Earth on my shelf, I wanted more books on evolution, and just biology in general, really.
An enormous chance to do some serious digging-around came during the Book Fair last September. While I was also keeping an eye out for great literary reads, I was also looking for great science books - not textbooks, of course, but popular science books, as they're called. And, while digging through a back shelf at the National Bookstore booth, I found Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution by Nick Lane.
The entire premise of Life Ascending is that Lane lists the ten most important evolutionary developments that have shaped life on Earth into what it is now - evolution's "inventions," as the title implies, though Lane is careful to define how he uses the word "invention" in his Introduction, lest the reader make the mistake of assuming that there is a higher power driving evolution. Lane tries to ensure that his book steers well clear of the concept of Intelligent Design, which he opposes, though not as vociferously as Dawkins.
At any rate, Lane lists the following as the ten greatest inventions of evolution: life itself (obviously), DNA, photosynthesis, the complex cell, sex, movement, sight, hot blood, consciousness, and death. Each one has a chapter of its own, wherein Lane explains in-depth why he believes that the subject in question might be considered one of the ten greatest inventions of evolution, and the chapters are arranged so that the previous chapter leads up to the next, and builds upon the previous one. Since Lane is a biochemist, his views on evolution come from a biochemical perspective, but he expands upon that by including insights drawn from geology, paleontology, physics, medicine and psychology - a good thing, since even he admits that he is not an expert in everything, but that does not mean he can't expand on his knowledge by drawing upon other sources. Lane also utilizes illustrations - a great help, particularly for someone who might get lost in the technical terms he employs (like me).
The result is an interesting survey of what does appear to be the ten most important things to have come out of evolution, very different from Dawkins's book, but not in a bad way. In fact, Life Ascending builds on what Dawkins wrote about, focusing instead on the biochemical side of things. This is a very enlightening way of looking at evolution. By trying to understand the core biochemical processes that lie at the heart of evolution, Lane offers an interesting perspective: the "micro" supporting the "macro" of evolutionary processes.
Although the first chapters are interesting in their own way - not to mention they form the basis for the other chapters - it is the later chapters that may prove the most interesting to readers. I found the last four chapters - Sight, Hot Blood, Consciousness, and Death - to be more interesting than the ones before them, even the chapter on Sex. Not to say that the other chapters aren't interesting, but these chapters contained information that kept me thoroughly fascinated.
For example, the chapter on Sight not only explained the evolution of sight and the organ that allows it to happen in the first place, but it revealed an interesting fact regarding how humans see color - or imagine they see it. Apparently, red is an imaginary color, because it is the result of two different signals from two kinds of cone cell in the eyes. One of these cells "sees" green, and the other "sees" in the yellowish-green scale. That's right: the eye has no specialized cone cell that "sees" only red. To "see" red, the brain receives no signal from the green cone, but a fading signal from the yellowish-green one. This registers to us as the color red. Lane states (in one of the endnotes) that this is the power of the imagination at work, that the brain is capable of seeing a color that, scientifically speaking, really isn't there.
The chapter Hot Blood was equally fascinating because it focused on a question that has intrigued me since I was young: were the dinosaurs hot-blooded, or cold-blooded? Of course, Lane problematizes the terms "hot-blooded" and "cold-blooded" based on the terminology preferred (or not preferred) by scientists, but that's besides the point. That it dealt with dinosaurs in the first place was enough to keep me reading. Well, the question of hot or cold blood was interesting too, but still: dinosaurs. He also addresses the question of whether or not birds are the direct evolutionary descendants of dinosaurs, which is another question that has interested me since I learned of the theory years ago.
The chapters Consciousness and Death will, I am sure, raise the most questions and cause the most introspection in readers. These are two topics that are usually reserved for literature, philosophy and religion. People tend to get uncomfortable when science gets near them. But Lane dares to approach them with a scientific mind, and while his discussion of consciousness being the result of evolution still raises more questions than it answers, his discussion of death offers one very large and potentially controversial bomb regarding the question of human immortality - or at least, extending the human lifespan beyond current extremes.
Now, as interesting as this book is, it does have its problems. My biggest issue is with the jargon. Life Ascending is not a fast read, unless one is already familiar with biochemistry and hence can get around the jargon with ease. To be sure, Lane is a pretty good writer, and he does try to make his material as friendly and approachable to the average reader as possible, but there is simply no getting around the technical stuff. Lane tries his best by explaining difficult terms in layman's language, and the book does have quite a few illustrations and photographs, which do help with understanding, but it takes a while to actually digest everything.
The first chapters, in particular, can be difficult to wrap one's head around. I had to take my time with the chapter Origin of Life, which proved to be a bit of a hurdle given all the large concepts that Lane was throwing my way while I was reading it. Again, this isn't to say that Lane's a bad writer; he's a pretty good one (albeit not as lucid as Dawkins). It's just that the concepts he's trying to get the reader to understand aren't all that "average" to begin with, so the average reader has to go slow, or risk missing something important.
Despite that issue, though, I still think Life Ascending is a great book, taking a look at topics and ideas, controversial or otherwise, in an attempt to explain just which mechanisms and processes allowed - and still allow - life to flourish on this lovely blue marble we call home. I do recommend, though, that the reader get a copy of Dawkins's The Greatest Show on Earth, and reading that one first, to help gain a proper understanding of what just evolution is in the first place. Life Ascending is a step up in the "reading skills" department, as it were, and it will read somewhat more smoothly if The Greatest Show on Earth is read first.
coffeebased, who suggested it as a great introduction to the concept of evolution as understood in contemporary science.Now, Hope has a very high reputation with me when it comes to books, plus she's a biologist to boot, so when she suggested I try out The Greatest Show on Earth I knew I'd be getting something good to read, and I was right. Dawkins's book is probably the very best introduction to the concept of evolution I have ever encountered. The jargon rate is pretty low, and Dawkins's prose is lucid and easy to read. While some readers might find his opinions on religion discomfiting (Dawkins is a very vocal atheist - one of the most vocal in the scientific community), his science is excellent, and is capable of making the reader ask some very important questions about evolution and its impact on life on earth.
The Greatest Show on Earth whetted my appetite for more - more science, actually. It reminded me that right alongside literature and history, I also have a deep abiding love for biology - in fact, one of my very earliest dream jobs was to be a paleontologist. And now that I had The Greatest Show on Earth on my shelf, I wanted more books on evolution, and just biology in general, really.
An enormous chance to do some serious digging-around came during the Book Fair last September. While I was also keeping an eye out for great literary reads, I was also looking for great science books - not textbooks, of course, but popular science books, as they're called. And, while digging through a back shelf at the National Bookstore booth, I found Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution by Nick Lane.
The entire premise of Life Ascending is that Lane lists the ten most important evolutionary developments that have shaped life on Earth into what it is now - evolution's "inventions," as the title implies, though Lane is careful to define how he uses the word "invention" in his Introduction, lest the reader make the mistake of assuming that there is a higher power driving evolution. Lane tries to ensure that his book steers well clear of the concept of Intelligent Design, which he opposes, though not as vociferously as Dawkins.
At any rate, Lane lists the following as the ten greatest inventions of evolution: life itself (obviously), DNA, photosynthesis, the complex cell, sex, movement, sight, hot blood, consciousness, and death. Each one has a chapter of its own, wherein Lane explains in-depth why he believes that the subject in question might be considered one of the ten greatest inventions of evolution, and the chapters are arranged so that the previous chapter leads up to the next, and builds upon the previous one. Since Lane is a biochemist, his views on evolution come from a biochemical perspective, but he expands upon that by including insights drawn from geology, paleontology, physics, medicine and psychology - a good thing, since even he admits that he is not an expert in everything, but that does not mean he can't expand on his knowledge by drawing upon other sources. Lane also utilizes illustrations - a great help, particularly for someone who might get lost in the technical terms he employs (like me).
The result is an interesting survey of what does appear to be the ten most important things to have come out of evolution, very different from Dawkins's book, but not in a bad way. In fact, Life Ascending builds on what Dawkins wrote about, focusing instead on the biochemical side of things. This is a very enlightening way of looking at evolution. By trying to understand the core biochemical processes that lie at the heart of evolution, Lane offers an interesting perspective: the "micro" supporting the "macro" of evolutionary processes.
Although the first chapters are interesting in their own way - not to mention they form the basis for the other chapters - it is the later chapters that may prove the most interesting to readers. I found the last four chapters - Sight, Hot Blood, Consciousness, and Death - to be more interesting than the ones before them, even the chapter on Sex. Not to say that the other chapters aren't interesting, but these chapters contained information that kept me thoroughly fascinated.
For example, the chapter on Sight not only explained the evolution of sight and the organ that allows it to happen in the first place, but it revealed an interesting fact regarding how humans see color - or imagine they see it. Apparently, red is an imaginary color, because it is the result of two different signals from two kinds of cone cell in the eyes. One of these cells "sees" green, and the other "sees" in the yellowish-green scale. That's right: the eye has no specialized cone cell that "sees" only red. To "see" red, the brain receives no signal from the green cone, but a fading signal from the yellowish-green one. This registers to us as the color red. Lane states (in one of the endnotes) that this is the power of the imagination at work, that the brain is capable of seeing a color that, scientifically speaking, really isn't there.
The chapter Hot Blood was equally fascinating because it focused on a question that has intrigued me since I was young: were the dinosaurs hot-blooded, or cold-blooded? Of course, Lane problematizes the terms "hot-blooded" and "cold-blooded" based on the terminology preferred (or not preferred) by scientists, but that's besides the point. That it dealt with dinosaurs in the first place was enough to keep me reading. Well, the question of hot or cold blood was interesting too, but still: dinosaurs. He also addresses the question of whether or not birds are the direct evolutionary descendants of dinosaurs, which is another question that has interested me since I learned of the theory years ago.
The chapters Consciousness and Death will, I am sure, raise the most questions and cause the most introspection in readers. These are two topics that are usually reserved for literature, philosophy and religion. People tend to get uncomfortable when science gets near them. But Lane dares to approach them with a scientific mind, and while his discussion of consciousness being the result of evolution still raises more questions than it answers, his discussion of death offers one very large and potentially controversial bomb regarding the question of human immortality - or at least, extending the human lifespan beyond current extremes.
Now, as interesting as this book is, it does have its problems. My biggest issue is with the jargon. Life Ascending is not a fast read, unless one is already familiar with biochemistry and hence can get around the jargon with ease. To be sure, Lane is a pretty good writer, and he does try to make his material as friendly and approachable to the average reader as possible, but there is simply no getting around the technical stuff. Lane tries his best by explaining difficult terms in layman's language, and the book does have quite a few illustrations and photographs, which do help with understanding, but it takes a while to actually digest everything.
The first chapters, in particular, can be difficult to wrap one's head around. I had to take my time with the chapter Origin of Life, which proved to be a bit of a hurdle given all the large concepts that Lane was throwing my way while I was reading it. Again, this isn't to say that Lane's a bad writer; he's a pretty good one (albeit not as lucid as Dawkins). It's just that the concepts he's trying to get the reader to understand aren't all that "average" to begin with, so the average reader has to go slow, or risk missing something important.
Despite that issue, though, I still think Life Ascending is a great book, taking a look at topics and ideas, controversial or otherwise, in an attempt to explain just which mechanisms and processes allowed - and still allow - life to flourish on this lovely blue marble we call home. I do recommend, though, that the reader get a copy of Dawkins's The Greatest Show on Earth, and reading that one first, to help gain a proper understanding of what just evolution is in the first place. Life Ascending is a step up in the "reading skills" department, as it were, and it will read somewhat more smoothly if The Greatest Show on Earth is read first.
