The Spark Of Life: Darwin And The Primeval Soup [Hardcover]

Christopher Wills (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 4, 2000

Where did we come from? Though researchers have done much work on this question in recent years, the answer remains elusive. In The Spark of Life, Christopher Wills and Jeffrey Bada examine the enduring mysteries surrounding life's origin: Did life arise on earth or on some other planet? What did the earliest primitive organisms look like? Were they based on RNA, DNA, or on something we would hardly recognize today? Untangling a century of contentious debate, the authors explore current theories of "the source"-from Martian meteors to hydrothermal vents-and then present their own elegant and compelling scenario: Life arose not in the subterranean depths, as many believe, but on Earth's tumultuous surface, where a primitive form of natural selection spawned the first genetic material, perhaps in the form of a proto-virus. The book ends with a whirlwind tour of one of the most exciting scientific endeavors: the search for extraterrestrial life. Knowing exactly how life began on Earth will not only teach us more about ourselves, it will bring us much closer to finding life elsewhere.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Can you create life with just a taser and a bowl of soup? Most likely not, unless you give yourself a few hundred million years to experiment. Biologist Christopher Wills and marine chemist Jeffrey Bada show off the fruits of research looking for signs of life elsewhere and clues to the origin of terrestrial organisms in The Spark of Life. The writing is clear and every concept is explained well--Wills's reputation for translating scientific understanding into plain English is well-deserved, and Bada's insider status with NASA provides insight not found elsewhere. They examine the field of theories, from extraterrestrial origin to life spilling out of hydrothermal vents to deep-crust genesis, and find strengths and weaknesses in them all. Their own partisan stance has it that life began on the surface of our planet through Darwinian-like processes operating on primitive self-replicating chemicals. Though their arguments are fairly compelling, the jury is still out, and will probably remain out indefinitely; science often balks at providing explanations for unique events, preferring to stick to general principles. Still, we can see that the problem is valuable because the search for an answer turns up all sorts of unexpected scientific finds: RNA-catalyzed reactions, Martian environmental problems, and natural selection of nonliving chemicals all showed up amid these debates. While it won't settle the issues, we can be glad that The Spark of Life explains them so clearly and primes us for the research still to come. --Rob Lightner

From Booklist

Few scientific mysteries are as fascinating as the origin of life. Wills and Bada's book measures up to the subject's high interest. Both biologists, they ably relate the course of research since Stanley Miller and Harold Urey famously created amino acids in a test tube in 1953. The biochemistry of the primordial goo has since become better understood, as has the physical environment of the early earth. Wills and Bada's dramatic account of the forces at work during Earth's first billion years--huge tides due to the nearby moon, volcanism, a turbulent atmosphere, and an ocean of a composition that can only be postulated--makes the emergence of self-replicating molecules, let alone reproducing organisms, seem improbable indeed. Researchers attack the problem both from the bottom up, by trying to synthesize a system with self-replicating properties, and from the top down, by discerning how the biochemicals of the cell (ATP, RNA, proteins, etc.) function together. A tour of the exobiological potential of the solar system caps this lively presentation. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (April 4, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0738201960
• ISBN-13: 978-0738201962
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,496,841 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A triumph of popular science writing, September 9, 2000

By 

Frank Paris (Beaverton, OR USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Spark Of Life: Darwin And The Primeval Soup (Hardcover)

Where are all the reviews? Come on, people! This is a great book! It is the best popular book I've ever read on the biology of the origin of life. It starts out with a historical survey of the efforts to deal with this problem. When I first picked up the book, I thought this section was only in there to pad out the page count. But I was dead wrong. Not only is the writing style lively and entertaining (without being too cute), but the authors show how an understanding of the historical development of the effort helps to understand where the science of this problem is today. You know how they stay that God is in the details? Well, it is actually in the nitty-gritty details in this section of the book that makes this historical introduction valuable.

Anyone interested in the problem of the origin of life knows about Stanley Miller's experiments of sending electric sparks through a mixture of methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapor and how they produced an incredibly complex mixture of organic compounds, including many of the amino acids of life. But never have I read such a detailed description of the experiments. I usually gloss over descriptions of Miller's experiments, mainly as it turns out because the descriptions are boring without knowledge of the details. But the authors of this book show how extremely interesting the details of these experiments actually were and why they were so important, even though it turned out that Miller's assumptions of the composition of the primitive atmosphere were wrong. This level of detail sets the tone for the entire book, which really delves into the details. Non-specialists are bound to come away with a deeper understanding of the problems involved in understanding the origin of life, even if they've read the popular books by Christian De Duve, Thomas Gold, and John Maynard Smith.

After presenting the historical background, the authors first take a bottom up, then a top down approach to the problem. The bottom up approach examines various likely scenarios that have been developed of how a basic chemical soup could have given rise to metabolism and heredity. The top down approach looks at life as it is today and tries to work the problem backwards. This is an especially interesting section of the book and points out the importance of symbiosis and the probable rampant exchange of hereditary material in the very early history of life. The "tree" of life it turns out is not a well-organized tree at the bottom, but a complex network where diverse, unrelated organisms freely exchanged hereditary material. I found it very interesting that this notion was in this book already, since it was only a few months ago that an article on this theory appeared in Scientific American. This book is VERY up to date.

Before reading this book, I was persuaded that Gold's theories of the origin of life were very likely true, that it really formed deep within the mantle. But after reading this book, I am no longer convinced. Read the book, and you will see for yourself that it is much more likely that it would take a planet subject to widely varying tides and extreme climactic changes to provide the opportunities for the evolution of life. Conditions in the mantle are the exact opposite of all these exciting happenings on the surface. Similar reasoning leads the authors to speculate that the probability of life evolving on the moons of those Jupiter-sized planets surrounding nearby stars that have been discovered in recent years might be very high, since the climactic swings and tidal forces caused by the large gas parent planets would be extreme. Yes, the book ends up in a wonderful final chapter speculating on the probability of life evolving on other planets. At first I had the same thoughts I first had about the beginning of the book, that this last chapter was just fluff. But soon I was utterly riveted by their argument. A fascinating, entertaining, and extremely enlightening book.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent introductory text on abiogenesis, November 22, 2000

By 

Rick L Pierson - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Spark Of Life: Darwin And The Primeval Soup (Hardcover)

I read a lot of material on the origin of life. Having run across Jeffery Bada's writings in some books, as well as on his web page, in the peer-reviewed journal `Science', and in popular science journals such as `The Sciences', I regarded Bada as an honest scientist: one who presents an even-handed accounting of material and evidence. I have always found his fairness and willingness to express his skepticism to be quite refreshing, especially since the topic of the origin of life can have major philosophical and religious ramifications (many scientists present only the positive evidences, hide the conflicting evidences, and do their utmost to shove their materialistic philosophy down the reader's throats). Bada holds firmly to a purely-natural origin of life, but he does not allow his worldview to bias his work - he is true to scientific evidences foremost. I expected the same from him when I heard of his book. When I read "The Spark of Life", I was not disappointed. Bada - and apparently the lead author, Christopher Wills, as well - present the reader with an honest coverage of the details, along the lines of, "According to this theory, ..., but keep in mind that....". As another reviewer noted, the authors present the reader with both sides of the argument and allow the reader to come to his or her own conclusion: the authors do not insist on telling you what you must think. For their maintenance of integrity in what can be a rather volatile subject, I commend the authors and "award" them 5 stars.

But the praise does not end there. They provide an up-to-date, broad, introductory coverage of the OOL field. If you know nothing about it at all, you can sit down and read the book and understand almost every sentence, and when you have completed reading the book, you will be up to speed on almost all aspects. This is probably the best introductory book on the origin of life I have read to date. Again, worthy of 5 stars.

However, note that the book is at the introductory level. It is written in everyday language and does not delve into the confusing and overwhelming complexities of organic chemistry or molecular cell biology. Those who have already read "The Molecular Origins of Life: Assembling Pieces of the Puzzle" will not find anywhere near the level of detail in "The Spark of Life" as they did in "The Molecular Origins of Life": I would recommend this book to those readers only if they found the other book "over their heads", or too-narrowly focussed. But this does not detract from "The Spark of Life" at all. It was not aimed at the research scientist as the other book was.

Finally, I would like to briefly address an error the authors make. On page 109, they mistakenly mention cytosine instead of thymine. This would be a major blunder under normal circumstances, but it is absolutely trivial in the book. Why? Because the mistake is isolated: it affects only two sentences out of the entire book - no other sentence anywhere in the book is based on, or references, this oversight. While writing, an author's neurons apparently got crossed temporarily and wrote the wrong word: something the author obviously realized was wrong after the book went to press. This had to be an honest mistake - not a sign of ignorance. Again, it in no way detracts from the book's integrity.

31 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Getting the Chemistry right, November 29, 2000

By 

Frank Deis (Highland Park, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Spark Of Life: Darwin And The Primeval Soup (Hardcover)

I have noticed that some biologists have a kind of arrogance about chemistry. "I don't have to know the chemistry!" To a certain extent, it's true that in some branches of biology you can have a very productive career without ever really knowing the chemical details that underlie the biology you're working on. However, a poor grasp of chemistry can also lead you to fall on your face in an embarrassing way, and that's what happens at one point (at least!) in "Spark of Life."

Authors who get the chemistry right in writing about the origin of life can extend previous theories in interesting ways. Christian de Duve, the Nobel Prize winner who wrote "Vital Dust" does exactly that, presenting the idea that protein-based life preceded an RNA takeover. The current enthusiasm for an RNA world as the original form of life on Earth is mostly being promulgated by people who don't really understand how nucleotides behave. As I said before, this includes a lot of biologists. Robert Shapiro's books (he gets it right, too) explain clearly how totally unlikely it is to have rich concentrations of RNA nucleotides lying around in puddles waiting to combine into nascent RNA polymers. On the other hand, this is a very likely thing to happen in cells that are using ATP and other triphosphates for energy storage. There they are, it's easy to polymerize them.

Getting the chemistry right doesn't guarantee you'll get the theory right -- Michael Behe gets the chemistry right, as well. But getting the chemistry wrong can lead down the path of error. I think if Lynn Margulis really understood the difference between Diphytanyl ethers and fatty acid bilayers, she'd see that Archaea are wildly different from "regular" Eubacteria.

OK, so this is a review of "Spark of Life." What Wills and Bada did that made me lose all confidence in their knowledge of primordial soup is this. There are four "bases" used in RNA -- Uracil, =Cytosine=, Adenine, and Guanine. Any undergraduate taking Biochem or MolBio knows this. But Wills and Bada and their editors and readers apparently do not. Thus the statement on page 109:

"Another example is cytosine, an essential nucleobase of DNA. ... cytosine is unstable and decomposes quickly. It may not be a coincidence that RNA, which probably appeared before DNA, uses the more stable molecule uracil instead of cytosine."

Now, this isn't a typo, or a "word-o." There is nothing in the biochemistry of RNA that corresponds to the paragraph above. RNA uses both Uracil and Cytosine. Thymine is used in DNA rather than Uracil -- but the issue is not stability but information. Thymine has an extra methyl which allows it to be distinguished from the Uracil produced when Cytosine inevitably breaks down. So, I am supposed to learn about the primordial soup from people who can't remember what RNA is made of??

There are other irritations as well. The use of "Darwin" to personify selective processes is juvenile, precious, and off-putting. An example from page 112-3:

"organic molecules ... awaited the firm hand of Darwin, who would decide which of them would 'live' or 'die'."

I can't see who would enjoy this book. I read avidly about the origin of life but how can I believe Wills and Bada have any grip on this material given their chemical howler?? I am basically amazed at the positive reviews the book has received so far. I don't find it useful at all.