Customer Reviews

Singularities: Landmarks on the Pathways of Life

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A fascinating account of what is known or conjectured about the first steps in the origin of life, by the master on the subject. He goes right back to the stages before RNA and Darwinian evolution took over, to look at the necessary prerequisites from chemistry. Warning: the author is pulling no punches; the reader needs the capacity to tackle some serious biochemistry.

This is an excellent, challenging book. Please do not be put off by the suggestion of one reviewer that it is somehow sympathetic to the nonsensical "intelligent design" and "creation 'science'" religions. It is nothing of the sort. This is a good science book for the secular-minded. See the good review in Nature, August 2006.

The Kindle download is in the Topaz (awz1) format and contains very fuzzy text. Download the sample first and make sure you can live with the text font quality. Older books are often converted in the awz1 or Topaz format. This allows for fast conversion at the expense of font quality. I think Amazon owes its Kindle readers a decent crisp font in a $30 book. In particular, look at the larger italicized letters. You will notice that the letters still look ratty at larger font sizes.

The purpose of this excellent book is to highlight singularities in the origin of life (p.viii), and evaluate available evidence against the possible causes of chance, deterministic chemistry in a suitable environment, and intelligent design. It requires undergraduate level biochemistry to read it, but I have never come across another book on the subject that gives such precision and clarity to the main issues.

It is not spelt out, so readers need to be aware that a singularity is a unique event that only happened once and is thus indistinguishable from a miracle (because science can only experimentally verify repeatable phenomena). Because `The history of life is marked by a large number of such singularities' (p.viii) then the default explanation must be intelligent design because he provides no other non-natural cause in his list of seven causes in the `General Introduction'. If any natural cause was available then these problems would not be singularities.

The natural causes that he appeals to are unconvincing and/or logically invalid--that is why the problems remain singularities. For example, he attributes nothing to chance and everything to chemistry and the environment (p.238). However he has to invoke all the properties of life to get the chemistry out of the 'dirty gemisch' of the natural environment and into an organized and functional form, so by using life to explain life his argument is circular and invalid--that is why the problems remain singularities.

In regard to the environment, he avoids being specific in most cases, so the only environmental causes we end up with are many references to the chaotic dirty gemisch, and the `starvation, acidification and excessive heat' (p.167) that finally got pre-life over the line to life. Dirty chemistry, starvation, acidification and excessive heat are easily reproduced in the laboratory and none of them produce life!

As a creationist, I can say that de Duve's excellent book will be on my recommended reading list for many years to come. No one else has ever been so clear in describing (i) the singularities underpinning life, (ii) the total poverty of naturalistic explanations, and (iii) such willful disregard for the logical explanation of the evidence.