Customer Reviews

The Surprising Archaea: Discovering Another Domain of Life

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"Animal, vegetable or mineral?" It seems that question leaves out almost all living things. Biologically, the plants, animals---even yeast---are closer to one another than to any bacterium. The difference is that the former---the Eukarya---have cells with nuclei, while the Bacteria do not. Genetically, there is a third domain of life---the Archaea. A member of the Archaea is as different, genetically, from a member of either of the other domains as a bacterium is from you. The tree of life has THREE genetic branches. The remarkable discovery of the third domain of life had to await the development of modern methods of genetic analysis; the definitive paper (by Carl Woese and colleagues from the University of Illinois) appeared in 1977. Howland has written a lucid and highly entertaining overview of the biology of the Archaea, coveing everything from their ecology to the structure of archaeal cells. The level of sophistication expected of the reader is about the same as would be needed to enjoy a Scientific American article.

A great survey of the current state of knowledge about this
intriguing group of organisms. The writing is clear and
informative. Howland describes a few
classic examples of the group in detail and gives a good
picture of the entire kingdom and its place in evolutionary
history.

Throughout the book he does a wonderful job of explaining how
researchers arrived at their conclusions and how much
faith the reader should have in the theories he
puts forward.

As usual, life is much more bizarre and weird than you thought and this book shows you exactly why. I found the discussion on archaeal and bacterial metabolism particularly interesting. These little archaea are pretty damn sweet. Makes me wish I had taken microbiology in college instead of sleeping in all the time.

In his unusually thorough, non specialist, treatment of anaerobic
extremeophiles (non-oxygen using bacteria that live in weird places), the author answers some interesting questions, such as what kind of biologic adaptions does it take to live in places like boiling water or acid lakes? How do you collect samples of them? How do you culture creatures that die in the presense of oxygen? Is it possible that there's an entire biosphere far below ground?

Oddly, the one explanation he leaves out why the archea are generally only found today in hostile places.

Small but a nice book. Not many illustrations.
The author seems more a teacher than a researcher.
Archea are like bacteria but they are different.
Many archea are extremophiles living
in hot springs or other stressful environments.
From the name "archea" I assumed these critters were older than
the ones we are familiar with, but the tree of life in this book
shows the eucharia branch (us) at the same time or earlier than the archea.
Puzzling. Perhaps it isn't known so everything branches at the same time.
The book seems about 70% comprehensible to
non biological majors like earth scientists.