Customer Reviews

Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature

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Many theories have been proposed for the origin of life on earth. All are highly speculative. Some are silly and others, more interesting, are perhaps even capable of being tested. In a class of its own, and at first glance a cop-out, is the hypothesis that life did not originate on earth at all, but was 'seeded' from outer space. First put forward seriously by the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius about 100 years ago and generally known as 'panspermia', the hypothesis is explored with wit and style in this book by Francis Crick. What it achieves is that it solves the embarrassing problem of how, within a few billion years after the earth cooled, extraordinary complex forms of self-reproducing entities appeared on earth. The price paid for this achievement is, of course, is that it begs the question entirely of how reproduction and metabolism could arise in the first place. Overall, I would rate the book as informative and thought-provoking. I recommend reading this book along with 'Origins' by Shapiro: that reviews, also wittily, the case for and against various theories for the origin of life ON earth.

While many advances have been made in molecular biology/genomics since it's release in 1981, Life Itself gives any reader a unique, entertaining overview and perspective on the problem of how we got here. In short, an excellent and thought provoking book that even I (your average molecular biology student) can understand and recomend to your average creationist.

This book is brilliant. Its perspective on time, matter, the universe, our lives, and aliens is all interesting and clear. What's funny about Francis Crick is that he's insanely clear while insanely deep and intelligent. He comes up with great metaphors for complex and abstract thoughts that make them simple and fun to read. This book will blow your mind and make you think. I am not totally sold on this book's wisdom, but it sure beats the religious takes on how we got here. "And god said, 'Let there be Crick!'"

Francis Crick (1916-2004) was a British molecular biologist, physicist, and neuroscientist, who was jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. In later years, Crick has been exploring more "philosophical" areas of science (see his books such as Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul and What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery, as well as the present book).

Crick states that "life is probably a happy accident which, even in the extended laboratory of the planet's surface, is likely to have taken many millions of years to occur." (pg. 39) Then he admits, "Life, from this point of view, is an infinitely rare event, and yet we see it teeming all around us. How can such rare things be so common?" (pg. 53) He states, "An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going." (pg. 88)

But rather than a "miracle," Crick writes in the Preface, "In this book I explore a variant of panspermia which Leslie Orgel and I suggested a few years ago. To avoid damage, the microorganisms are supposed to have traveled in the head of an unmanned spaceship sent to earth by a higher civilization which had developed elsewhere some billions of years ago. This spaceship was unmanned so that its range would be as great as possible. Life started here when these organisms were dripped into the primitive ocean and began to multiply." He later restates this theory, "Directed Panspermia--postulates that the roots of our form of life go back to another place in the universe, almost certainly another planet; that it had reached a very advanced form there before anything much had started here; and that life here was seeded by microorganisms sent on some form of spaceship by an advanced civilization."

Why would an advanced civilization have sent out such a ship? "there may have been reasons for them to believe they could even survive in the short run. Perhaps they had found a neighboring star was set on a collision course with theirs--not a very likely event in most parts of a galaxy but more than likely near the galactic center.... Without doubt they would have planned to colonize neighboring planets, but this may have proved to be a technological achievement of extreme difficulty ... they may have realized that their chances of success were small and that they had to make contingency plans against repeated failures of this kind.... microorganisms similar to our bacteria would have been a good choice to be the colonists sent to start life in a distant place." (pg. 120-122)

Obviously, direct evidence of such a theory is lacking. He then suggests, "Perhaps a better approach might be to ask what special features we might hope to see in the fossil record if Directed Panspermia had indeed occurred. The main difference would be that microorganisms should appear here suddenly, without any evidence for prebiotic systems or very primitive organisms." (pg. 144)

``An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have to have been satisfied to get it going.'' Does anyone have the next paragraph to hand? A friend of mine wants to know. (-: