Origins of Life [Hardcover]

Freeman Dyson (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0521309492 | ISBN-13: 978-0521309493 | Publication Date: February 28, 1986

This general book starts by surveying theories and experiments concerned with the origin of life; it then gives a sketch of new ideas and experiments by which the gaps in our understanding may be filled. The principal new idea is that a search for chemical models of primitive life which are highly tolerant of errors may result in the recognition of structures which do not involve exact replication of molecules. It is suggested that genes originated later, as parasites infecting an earlier non-replicating fauna. As the word origins in the title implies, the author suggests that we should look carefully at the notion that life began twice, once with cells and later with genes. The book is based on the Tarner lectures, given with the support of Trinity College, Cambridge, to a mixed university audience of educated but not expert listeners. It is therefore written for such a non-specialist reader.

Editorial Reviews

From Scientific American

The plural of the title is purposeful: Dyson advances the hypothesis that life had a double origin. "Either life began only once, with the functions of replication and metabolism already present in rudimentary form and linked together from the beginning, or life began twice, with two separate kinds of creatures, one kind capable of metabolism without exact replication and the other kind capable of replication without metabolism." He sees reasons to favor the second possibility, with metabolizing creatures appearing first. Dyson is a renowned theoretical physicist (professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.) who offers an "apology for a physicist venturing into biology" by citing physicist Erwin Schrödinger's maxim that "some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them, and at the risk of making fools of themselves." In this new edition of a book first published in 1985, Dyson builds his argument with characteristic skill and clarity. He views his hypothesis as "useful only insofar as it may suggest new experiments." --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Review

"An interesting book, clearly written and well argued, it can certainly be recommended..." Amazon.com

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (February 28, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521309492
• ISBN-13: 978-0521309493
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,053,529 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars theories on the origins of life via 1985, March 30, 1998

By 

Dave D. (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Origins of Life (Hardcover)

First published in 1985, Origins of Life by Freeman Dyson, is a great introduction into the most accepted theories on the origins of life. It was almost universally assumed that the first organisms sustained themselves, in a very hostile world 3 eons ago, by replicating themselves. A brief introduction into the three main theories of replication, a precise chemical process a molecule uses to make an exact copy of itself, is laid out in the first two chapters. Dyson then presents his own theory as to the possibility that the first organisms didn't replicate, but sustained themselves via metabolism, in the form of simple enzymes. He theorized that replicating organisms used the pre-existing enzymes as hosts later on. In chapter three, he presents a "simple" mathematical model as a basis for biologists to create their own experiments to, if nothing else, prove him wrong (Dyson is a theoretical physicist and this work attempts to bring together thinking from different scientific fields). The last chapter was the best, bringing philosophy into play. For example, he debates the notion that replication of human behavior is not a very exact process, but very fault tolerant instead. In fact, he surmises the first replicating organisms were probably sloppy at the job. If that notion excites you, buy this book! Mr. Dyson attempts to make this book readable for the layman, but does not define what monomers or nucleotides are. This book is not for everyone. A rudimentary understanding of biology would help, but I made it with only a dictionary. I didn't even attempt to follow the math in chapter three, and the author was apologizing for its simplicity!

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Short Book That Says a Lot, February 28, 2001

By 

James R. Mccall (Libertyville, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Origins of Life (Canto) (Paperback)

In 91 pages of text Freeman Dyson says some surprising and wonderful things, and turns around some conventional notions about the place of replicating molecules such as DNA and RNA in early life. His view is that they came later - perhaps much later - after metabolism was established in cells that reproduced sloppily and approximately, but had robust-enough homeostatic mixes that a split was usually successful. This view was approximately that of a Russian named Oparin 75 years ago, but the dazzle of the genome has turned almost everyone to thinking that precise replicators had priority in the development of life over haphazard metabolizers.

Dyson does not depend on hand-waving and vague argument to draw these conclusions. He reviews what is known and the main extant theories of life's origin, then introduces his own, using a "toy model" that abstracts the chemistry and draws conclusions about steady-state solutions that might work. As befits a great theoretician, it is an elegant and powerful bit of theorizing, but does not wander from the constraints of the chemistry -- as far as he knows. But Dyson is clear that the point of his model is to stimulate experiment, and that organic chemists will be the ones to judge the usefulness and viability of his assumptions.

Unless you are a physicist, you won't follow some of his work in solving for the model, but you can trust the math and the physics when it comes from Freeman Dyson. Just glance at the equations and graphs, but follow the words in his model chapter and get a real feel for the kind of system that proto-life might have been.

He makes a good case for the essence of life being complexity, and that the conceptual purity and rigor of the gene has distracted us from the "tangled bank" that life at all levels, from bacterial cell to ecosystem to economy, seems to exemplify. Error tolerance -- being able to carry on in the midst of junk and in spite of "mistakes" -- seems to be more characteristic of life than exactness. That's a pleasing notion in an uptight age.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good questions are real thought-provokers, November 13, 2005

By 

Mehetabelle "mehetabelle" (Silicon Valley United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Origins of Life (Canto) (Paperback)

We're used to books that give answers. We want to be spoon fed, and often whine when the answers are not sugar coated as well.

The books about the origins of life that I've read (De Duve's "Vital Dust," Margulis' "Early Life," Gribbon's several books, Crick's pan-spermia, the anthropic principle...) follow the usual pattern. They start at different stages of the origins of life, but they all:
- expound a theory as if it were universally agreed to be true then
- explain how the process progressed whether from stardust or extra-terrestrial sources, oceanic amino acids or bacteria-like organisms.

Well, Freeman Dyson does it differently. He starts with good questions. Questions, when formulated well, help us to think and arrive at better answers. He asks about the first living cells:
- Did replication come first or
- Did metabolism come first?
- Did those two processes happen simultaneously?
- Did they happen independently or were they correlated or causative...?
- Which process might be 'better' or 'worse' if it happened first?

He reviews the well-known research (natural selection, statistical methods...) and how well they may be able to answer these questions. Then he tells us his preference and why. Why? Because it helps us to think further.

Then he says that being a physicist (and a mathmatician who, at age 17, devised the pattern for cluster bombing that would create a self-accelerating firestorm. His theory was tested on Dresden and proven to be very effective), he does not know about biology and with that disclaimer, built a 'toy model' to help us think through ways to arrive at conclusions.

The third part of this book goes into the 'fidelity of replication (or error rates), and an analysis of the smallest number of self-organizing molecules that still 'work.' This seeming tangent is of special interest to me because it furthers my quest to learn how we acquired mitochondria and how they work now, with so few DNA of their own. And also what might be the evolutionary future of extremely simple organisms that are formed into colonies such as some sea jellies?

This book made me think so hard that I don't actually remember its conclusions. It's a short book so only took a few evenings to read, even including the periods I had to put it down to let my mind digress down a path that was triggered by the book, but I might be thinking about it and studying the questions that it raised for a very long time.