Customer Reviews

The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language

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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.

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.

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.

I didn't learn much new from this book - most all of the material is covered, in more depth, in other books on the origin of life. Also, some main transitions were discussed but mostly in a summary manner - the supporting details were absent or scarce. Most explanations were conceptual. For instance, for autocatalysis the authors state that a series of reactions occurs where molecule A catalyzes the production of molecule B, which catalyzes the production of molecule C, which catalyzes the production of molecule D, which then catalyzes the production of 2 molecules of A (each of which then begins the series of reactions anew). Therefore, the reaction pathway has the capability of exponential growth. However, what molecules A, B, C, and D are and how they are involved in the origin of life is not mentioned. As another reviewer noted, the title is a bit misleading as the origin of life itself is not covered in depth - the subtitle is more appropriate than the title itself. Still, the book gives the reader current information on the origin of life and contains no obvious flaws or outdated notions (that is why I rated it higher than a 2). I believe this is a dumbed-down, if you will, version of a book the authors produced a couple of years ago - personally, I wish I had gotten the other version.

Fantastic book. Compared to many other books on evolution and biology, I found this to be one of the easiest to understand. It is simply and well written and gives the reader a good idea of the evolution of life. It allows the reader to understand how life could have arose out of physical and chemical processes and shows clearly how many of the things we consider to have arisen out of the mind of a great deity actually have an elegant developmental history that cannot be disputed.

The book explains, convinvingly, how each transition is solidly built upon the foundations of the previous transitions (replicating molecules/ populations of molecules in protocells to RNA as gene and enzyme/specialization to DNA and protien enzyme to Primate societeis/Human societies with language). Despite a few things we yet do not understand fully (for example, how a complex backbone for RNA can possibly evolve, given the absence of enzymes) the reader will be able to see that the authors' admissions of the absence of scraps of concrete evidence here and there (plausible theories and scenarios have been proposed) is a subject for furthur inquiry and experimentation, the 1% of evidence they do not have in the face of 99% of fact that has been proven through rigourous experimentation.

In response to a previous review about the book not giving an answer to how individual genes could have been activated to give cells the properties they have, the authors have proposed that individuals cells are likely to be influenced by their environment. In other words, cells know their place in a body and respond to their circumstances.

This can be regarded as a more accessible version of The Major Transitions in Evolution, an earlier book by the same authors addressed to professional biologists. It is more accessible, and more readable, certainly, but it still demands some effort and attention on the part of the reader. As the authors candidly admit in their preface, they "fear it will not be an easy read", because "it contains a lot of facts, and a lot of new ideas". This is a fair assessment, but readers who do make the effort can expect to learn a considerable amount of modern biology from two of its most respected authorities.

Charles Darwin largely ducked the question of the origin of life, taking the realistic view that it was too difficult to handle at the time he was writing, and contented himself with accounting for how it could have evolved once it had started. John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, writing a century and a half later, could hardly avoid this problem, and their book starts at the very beginning by trying to define what it means to be alive and to explain how the first living organisms could have emerged from non-living inorganic matter. For them this was a matter of combining the chemistry of the production and use of energy with the chemistry of storing the information needed for producing a new organism identical with its parent.

Here they are confronted with a dilemma, the "error catastrophe": if the first organisms were too small they could not have fulfilled all the chemical functions they needed; if they were too big they could have reproduced themselves accurately. For a long time the gap between too small and too big seemed unbridgeable, but a possible solution was found in the realization that the first enzymes were probably not proteins (as they nearly all are today) but nucleic acids, which could combine their good capacity for storing information with a rather feeble capacity for catalysing chemical reactions.

The remainder of the book presents the subsequent steps that were needed to proceed from these humble (but by no means simple) beginnings to the great complexity of the living world of today. How did the transition occur from a world in which nucleic acids did everything to one with the present-day division of labour between nucleic acids for information and proteins for catalysis? How did the first multicellular organisms arise from unicellular parents? How did animal societies evolve? How did language originate (apparently only in humans)?

Maynard Smith and Szathmáry have interesting and important things to say about all of these questions, and others, including, in the middle of the book, a masterly discussion of the difficult question of sexual reproduction: why did it arise, and, especially difficult, why is it maintained in the face of what appear to be obvious advantages of virgin birth, or parthenogenesis? It is not too difficult to think of small advantages in sexual reproduction, but that is not enough, because the advantage of parthenogenesis is very large , amounting to a factor of two in every generation, so one needs an even larger advantage of sexual reproduction to overcome it.

This short, stunning book is at least two books in one. It tells the latest version of the story of how life arose and evolved. And it explicates the authors' model of evolution as composed of "major transitions" of which they discern and dissect eight. These transitions, of which an example is the transition from RNA as double duty gene and enzyme to the specialized use of DNA and protein, make an intriguing model around which to explicate various mechanisms of life. "Origins" in the title, however, is confusing; it is less about the beginnings of life than life's history of originating new structures. It moves quickly through the latest findings supplemented by plausibility arguments.

This shows how the mechanisms of evolution work from the first creation of self replicating compounds all the way to the complex, thinking, animal that we call humans. Where there are "missing links" this book shows by either example or by plausible process how these changes probably took place. After reading this it makes one wonder why we do not see how the universe compells the existence of life just as much as it is obiviously hostile to it; that the birth of life is just as inevitable as the resulting death.

I would agree with the previous reviewer that this book (for the non-specialist) is concentrated -- it covers a lot of territory in little time. I enjoyed the book tremendously and think that it is a great introduction to the problems, and the mechanics, of the origins of life. I would highly recommend it!

This isn't an easy book, and it helps to have some biology under your belt. But it is beautfully written, and utterly fascinating. You should read this book.