The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language [Hardcover]

John Maynard Smith (Author), Eï¿1/2rs Szathmï¿1/2ry (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0198504934 | ISBN-13: 978-0198504931 | Publication Date: May 13, 1999

When John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary published The Major Transitions in Evolution, it was seen as a major work in biology. Nature hailed it as a book of "grand and daunting sweep.... A splendid and rewarding tour de force." And New Scientist wrote that it captured "the essence of modern biology," calling it "an extremely significant book which, as a bonus, is very readable."
Now, in The Origins of Life, Maynard Smith and Szathmary have completely rewritten Transitions to bring their ideas to a wider audience of general readers. Here is a brilliant, state-of-the-art account of how life evolved on earth, focusing primarily on six major transitions--dramatic breakthroughs in the way that information was passed between generations. The authors offer illuminating explorations of the origin of life itself, the arrival of the first cells with nuclei, the first reproduction by sexual means, the appearance of multicellular plants and animals, the emergence of cooperation and of animal societies, and the birth of language.
The Origins of Life represents the thinking of two leading scientists on questions that engage us all--how life began and how it gradually evolved from tiny invisible cells into whales and trees and human beings.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Life is a long, strange trip, and in The Origins of Life, John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry blast you through its three-and-a-half-billion-year history at breathtaking pace.

Life, we learn, is information, transmitted in ever more intricate ways across the generations. Self-replicating chemicals walled themselves into cells, organized themselves into regimented communities of chromosomes, swapped notes with other populations to become sexual, cloned themselves to form multicellular colonies called organisms, got together with other colonies to form societies, and, eventually, in the case of one particular ape, developed the ability to put this whole story down on paper.

For those evolutionists brought up on the theory of "red queens" and "self genes," Origins provides a complementary crash course in the practical nuts-and-bolts biology behind the headlines. The authors describe the technical problems involved in the transition from one stage to another, and explain the ingenious and often fortuitous steps that natural selection took to overcome them. For example, the rigid walls of the first cells gave way to more flexible membranes that could engulf food particles and incorporate "little organs" such as mitochondria. A "cytoskeleton" of filaments and tubules was needed to maintain the cell's integrity, and--presto!--this structure was the perfect motorway for intracellular traffic, ideal for shearing the cell apart during cloning, and provided the earliest means of locomotion, such as the tail of sperm.

With this attention to detail, the book requires careful reading--but it's worth it. Maynard Smith and Szathmáry's book makes you realize just how lucky you are to be alive. --Oliver Curry, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly

How did life on Earth go from individual molecules in hot carbon soup to viral spirals, to cells, to sex cells, to us? Smith and Szathmary's The Major Transitions in Evolution (1995), addressed to other evolutionary biologists, responded to this question by reviewing Darwinism through the lens of information theory. The authors' new work brings nonexpert readers an "account of the evolution of complexity," of changes in the ways "genetic information... is stored, transmitted and translated." Smith and Szathmary (professors, respectively, at the University of Sussex, England, and the Collegium Budapest, Hungary) apply their model to periods in the history of life, from the era of the first self-replicating molecules to the advent of chromosomes and thence to cells and cell walls, sexual differentiation and mating, symbiosis between species, animal societies and symbolic speech. Directing their interest in information transfer to biological processes and epochs, they cover topics ranging from the definition of life (why do we not call fire "alive"?) to the basis of tribal warfare. Moving speedily from epoch to epoch, fueled by a few important concepts (such as the division of labor) and explaining all the genetics they use, Smith and Szathmary show "just how difficult it has been to evolve complex organisms whose genes co-operate rather than compete." A chapter on sex offers several theories of how it arose; a later chapter examines the origins of our built-in ways of understanding and generating grammatical sentences in our native languages. Compact, dense, formidable yet accessible, this book exposes readers to the cutting edge in theoretical evolutionary biology.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press (May 13, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0198504934
• ISBN-13: 978-0198504931
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #747,681 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Information transmission from genes to memes, December 23, 2000

By 

Stephen A. Haines (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language (Paperback)

Readers cruising through the wealth of books on evolution that have appeared in recent years will see one name [after Darwin] appearing almost universally. Either found in the text or the Bibliography, the name of John Maynard Smith stands ubiquitous. There's a good reason for such respect - Maynard Smith is both a capable scientist and strong presenter of science. This book, brief as it is, stands out as a prime example of his skilled writing hand. His collaborator, Eors Szathmary an Hungarian chemist, has clearly provided a wealth of resource information on many aspects of how life's mechanisms determined the path of evolution of early life. This is their second association, and it's a splendid result of the merger of two disciplines.

This work, like their previous book, puts to rest the idea that evolution by natural selection is a 'group' or species phenomenon. Evolution works at individual levels. An animal, cell or even a gene - how it operates, survives and replicates. For all these elements to function successfully and pass their behaviours on to succeeding generations, a wealth of mechanisms must occur without serious hitch. Maynard Smith and Szathmary take us through these biological steps with unsurpassed clarity. Yet with all this wealth of detail, the reader finds nothing obscure or confusing in their descriptions.

This book starts with descriptions of attempts to understand how life started. Now that it is understand that life's history is but a bit less than the existence of our planet, the beginnings of life must be a chemical phenomenon. Maynard Smith and Szathmary show how these reactions occurred and how they originated the steps leading to the complex life forms sharing the globe with us today. If their text wasn't clear enough [and it definitely is that] the accompanying line drawings spell out graphically how chemistry drove, and is driving, life's forces. Those seeking a wealth of information on various species will be disappointed. What this pair superbly depict are the mechanisms uniform over all life.

Discussions of evolution cannot avoid addressing that creature who considers all life to have been created to ultimately produce it - the human being. The pair depart from their basic concept here by addressing human society. And rightly so. The ability of humans to modify their environment utilize powers that overcome the chemical basis by which we live. This ability rests on the use of language to convey ideas. No other animal possesses this capacity and the authors conclude this work with some ideas about the future course of human evolution and the role language will play in it. The major factor will be Dawkins' idea of the meme. They see memes as a Lamarckian element in human culture, guiding the path of our ongoing development. Clearly, a required companion volume to this book is Susan Blackmore's THE MEME MACHINE.

This is a superb summation of evolution's workings and a must read for anyone wishing a start in the mechanics of life. Please buy, read and point your friends to this seminal effort.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Origins of Life, March 26, 2000

By 

Atheen M. Wilson "Atheen" (Mpls, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language (Hardcover)

For a small book this one is very densely packed; almost too densely packed. Although parts of the work are probably a little too technical for the non-professional, they may be much too general for the expert--ie. the transition from the non-living chemical replicators to living organisms. This means both types of reader will probably be left dissatisfied. Topics included are a definition of what is "alive," where life might have evolved if not on earth itself, the increasing complexity of living things, etc, all subjects really too great to be covered adequately in so small a space even for the nontechnical reader. In general there are probably better written books on these topics.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Non-specialist version of Major Transitions in Evolution, June 22, 2001

By 

Betty (Palo Alto, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language (Hardcover)

As stated in the preface, this book presents to a general readership the same ideas as the authors' 1995 book "The Major Transitions in Evolution." I found it still challenging, but richly rewarding. The most interesting questions in evolution deal with the evolution of new levels of organization. The authors identify only eight such transitions starting from cooperating collections of replicating molecules up through multicellular organisms, colonies of ants and bees, and finally human societies with language. Anyone interested in the question of how cooperation evolved in human societies needs to also understand how cooperation evolved in the other seven transitions. This appears to be the definitive work on that subject that is accessible to a non-specialist.