Customer Reviews

Instant Biology: From Single Cells to Human Beings, and Beyond

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

 

 

I idly picked up this book expecting it to be a member of the disgusting clan of "Thirteen dimension string theory in a week for the totally clueless." Instead it is a fascinating overview of biological science, complete with humor, history and wonderful imagery. It makes you wonder why biology is not one of the hottest conversation topics around, once you begin to appreciate the complexity of living organisms. It contains more facts than the average popular science book and is wonderfully written. While you're reading this one, check out his "Life Itself," which goes into great and fascinating detail on the cell.

I majored in Physics so all other sciences seem like also-rans to me. Chemistry is a sort of trade-school subject and bio is just an exercise in labeling things. Or so I thought. This book starts at the molecular level and builds up to forests. Every step connects neatly with the ones before and after to show that biology is truly a scientific field, not just jars of glop. I was impressed and fascinated.

He does a great job of reviewing all that stuff you slept through during high school biology! The analogies are reasonable and helpful for those that have no understanding of the subject. Reviews many important issues from A to Z

For [money] you'll have a hard time finding a better intro to Biology. The illustrations are great, it goes into surprising depth in a wide variety of subjects with amazing clarity. How this book does not have 5 stars needs explanation. Look at the other reviews... see the one about evolution not being true. There you go :) .

I bought this book so I could help my high school son learn biology. The book the school gives to the kids is poorly written, needlessly technical and vague.

Instant Biology refreshed my memory of college biology. It was fun, humorous and fascinating--a bit like an episode of NOVA.

I gave a copy of the book to my son's biology teacher. I highly recommend it.

Rarely does a book live up to the back cover blurb or in this case the title. Rensberger crammed tons of micro facts into 200 pages. He uses metaphors like "wolf in sheep's clothing" to explain how virus trick their way into human cells. He explains that in AIDS transmission the retrovirus is given a free ticket into the DNA of the T-cell.

This book covers the essentials of biology in abbreviated fashion, showing the food webs that link all minerals, plants and animals together. Plants can store energy in the form of fat for later use or animals can digest that fat for their use-it doesn't matter-one life is like another. He tells how all life is solar powered (except for the deep sea archaea). The book takes many of the mysteries out of living cells, asserting that cell replication is but a reaction of chemical shape shifting, and explains in detail how DNA/RNA does its thing to produce proteins.

The overall picture I got from the book was of a human creature designed to shape the assembly of all the pieces that make up itself. Pick your metaphor, Boyce says, hand in glove, lock and key, wrench and nut or lego blocks-nothing would transpire in the cell, maintenance or replication, if the shape of the proteins did not fit together. Some of the facts were amazing: that all life, plant and animal uses the same genetic code in codifying its past structure. The former bacteria, mitochondrion, "is like a universal battery that fits all devices within a cell." Cellular membranes are constructed of shapes like heads and tails-one end liking water and one end hating water-similar to the tropism of plant leaves seeking sunlight. What one learns from reading this book is that our conscious self is but a driver of one's car-like body, knowing little of what is constantly occurring under the hood.

As an introductory book for the layman, Rensberger's Instant Biology does a more than adequate job. There is a less than expected emphasis on phylogenetics, which some will miss, and there is certainly an overemphasis on the controversial theory of evolution (which Resenberg strongly supports), but otherwise I found the book to be enjoyable, very engaging, and informative.

The author deserves credit for taking a complex subject and presenting it in such a way that those without a science background will not only understand, but enjoy.

Having said that, it is a frustrating and absolutely alarming to see all of Rensberger's good efforts wasted in the last chapter on evolution.

Rensberger begins by telling us that evolution is a fact, accepted by all biologists. True enough, but he doesn't let on that he is speaking only of micro-evolution, minor variations within a species, which is observable both in the fossil record and modern experiments. It gets worse from there.

Not only does Rensberger misrepresent the fossil record as having substantiated evolution - and here is speaking of macroevolution, the ascent of all animal life from a common ancestor - he actually goes so far as to claim that life was created through random processes.

The author informs us that since we know life arose almost immediately after the crust of the earth cooled, it must be a fairly simple process - so simple that he even suggests life probably arose spontaneously several times. Yet his only evidence for this is that we know life on this planet began right after the crust cooled. This is circular reasoning at it's worst, made all the more malicious because it takes unfair advantage of a novice audience.

Rensberger tells us that amino acids, the building blocks of life, have been formed through random processes in laboratory experiments. What he neglects to say (and this is inexcusable) is that the amino acids synthesized through random means are actually racemates, which cannot bond to form biologically proteins. The type of optical purity required for biological organisms can only be synthesized under a highly intelligent and controlled process.

The author also leaves the reader with the impression that amino acids can wash together and bond in water. Every junior chemist knows, however, that a molecule of water must be released in every bond, and that water is much more likely to dilute or breakdown peptide chains that to form them. Getting the exact sequence of the 21 different types into chains of hundreds or thousands at just the right time is, reasonably speaking, just not possible under random conditions.

There is a level of responsibility that a scientist should be expected to uphold when presenting scientific concepts to non-scientific readers. Rensberger shuns this responsibility by using deceptive half-truths and unqualified speculation to support his personal beliefs.