Customer Reviews

Early Life (A Series of books in biology)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I wish this book were available as a normal paperback. I really like nearly everything about it. Understanding Margulis on the origin of Meiosis is so much easier with line drawings! If you are interested in Margulis's ideas about the serial endosymbiont theory and how the eukaryotic cell arose, it's hard to do better than "Early Life." The clarity of this book is wonderful. Why a "missed opportunity"? Despite the fact that this is a new edition with Michael F. Dolan, the science appears not to have been updated. For example, Margulis thought an "aggressive" bacterium such as Bdellovibrio might have invaded cells to form mitochondria. Genomic research has shown that mitochondria came from a Rickettsia species. In illustrations, Bdellovibrio is still shown and the Rickettsia connection is not mentioned. Does Margulis completely reject evidence from nucleic acid sequencing?

Evidently -- because the biggest "hole" in this book is a complete lack of recognition that the Archaea are something completely different from Bacteria. Margulis makes a friendly mention of Carl Woese in the introduction of the new edition, as if his research were the only stone in the massive structure that shows Archaea are a separate domain of life. It is not just the rRNA's that are different (as Woese showed) -- the membrane lipids are different, the Archaea have histones (like eukaryotes) and some have multiple chromosomes (like eukaryotes). Lumping them with other "prokaryotes" in spite of the current state of science is nothing less than a willful act of ignorance, and it's too bad that this book is damaged by her prejudices. I hope some day that a third edition will include modern scientific discoveries. And I hope that some day her "Five Kingdoms" will be updated to "Six." But somehow I doubt it will happen.

This book follows the Margulis tradition of clarity. Margulis, ably co-authored by Dolan begins in the Archean Eon, 3.9 billion years ago and explains how first, bacteria and then, nucleated cells evolved into the multitude of complex plants and animals that first appear in the Cambrian period and whose descendants continue to today. The evolution process from simple bacterial prokaryotic (no nucleus) cell to complex eukaryotic (with a nucleus) cell is explained mainly by symbiogenesis and less so by spontaneous mutations and the Darwinian "survival of the fittest"--a theory Margulis has championed for years and which I fervently believe is correct, but which is still disputed by many orthodox biologists. The text and diagrams are clear but this book is definitely college level.
Barry D. Brown

I wanted to give 4.5 since it becomes too technical here and there. But otherthan that full points to Lynn.

Hinting that mitochondria was a prokaryote, and that symbiosis resulted in its incorporation is provocative idea, backed by the evidence of its inactivity in presence of bacteria-killing antibiotics.

The turning point in life, switching from anerobic to aerobic metbolism is neatly explained. Sure its a turning point, there is 18 times more energy(ATP) in aerobic metabolism!.

The evolution of eukaryotes, and the evolution of sex are nicely presented.

Anyway, to find more of such interesting things better to read the book.

Many years ago I was assigned one chapter in this book for a microbiology course. Instead I couldn't stop until I'd read it all. It was really good.

This book on early life delves persuasively into the chemistry of ancestral prokaryotes. Although Carl Woese's three-kingdom classification system is presently scientifically fashionable, archea (archeobacteria) are morphologically identical to other bacteria, and so the wisdom of giving them their own kingdom, despite their RNA differences (and RNA changes over evolutionary time) is debatable.

This book provided nothing that wasn't already obvious in biology. I read this book on my own initiative, being in a microbial ecology class, with the expectation that I would gain some terrific insights into the development of the basic metabolic processes that make life function today. Instead, I received a long-winded retrospective narrative that commented on events already evident in life today. "One day, bacteria developed glycolysis, and it has been popular ever since." Thanks, Margulis, for such keen insight. Want to inform me that bacteria somehow use lipids in their membranes?

Absurdly general and simplistic, that tells a reader things he/she already knows. Is there no speculation about how photosynthesis *might* have developed?

that that last reviewer did not know what the bleep they were talking about. Yes, this is a very good book but, listen, my mum, Lynn was the one who put the idea of "seme" in Microcosmos! Where people (and Richard Dawkins was one!) get off "mind-reading" who writes which part of a co-authored book is beyond me. The writer was correct, however, that this is a very good book, perhaps the best, for a nuts-and-bolts overview of early life. Now for some fluff: Check out our new book Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species--if you like it, Frank (or whatever your name is) be sure to credit the good parts to me! Also check out Up From Dragons: The Evolution of Human Intelligence and Into the Cool: The Thermodynamics of Life (forthcoming) if you are curious...