The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Eors Szathmary (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Life is a long, strange trip, and in The Origins of Life, John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry blast you through its three-and-a-half-billion-year history at breathtaking pace.

Life, we learn, is information, transmitted in ever more intricate ways across the generations. Self-replicating chemicals walled themselves into cells, organized themselves into regimented communities of chromosomes, swapped notes with other populations to become sexual, cloned themselves to form multicellular colonies called organisms, got together with other colonies to form societies, and, eventually, in the case of one particular ape, developed the ability to put this whole story down on paper.

For those evolutionists brought up on the theory of "red queens" and "self genes," Origins provides a complementary crash course in the practical nuts-and-bolts biology behind the headlines. The authors describe the technical problems involved in the transition from one stage to another, and explain the ingenious and often fortuitous steps that natural selection took to overcome them. For example, the rigid walls of the first cells gave way to more flexible membranes that could engulf food particles and incorporate "little organs" such as mitochondria. A "cytoskeleton" of filaments and tubules was needed to maintain the cell's integrity, and--presto!--this structure was the perfect motorway for intracellular traffic, ideal for shearing the cell apart during cloning, and provided the earliest means of locomotion, such as the tail of sperm.

With this attention to detail, the book requires careful reading--but it's worth it. Maynard Smith and Szathmáry's book makes you realize just how lucky you are to be alive. --Oliver Curry, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly

How did life on Earth go from individual molecules in hot carbon soup to viral spirals, to cells, to sex cells, to us? Smith and Szathmary's The Major Transitions in Evolution (1995), addressed to other evolutionary biologists, responded to this question by reviewing Darwinism through the lens of information theory. The authors' new work brings nonexpert readers an "account of the evolution of complexity," of changes in the ways "genetic information... is stored, transmitted and translated." Smith and Szathmary (professors, respectively, at the University of Sussex, England, and the Collegium Budapest, Hungary) apply their model to periods in the history of life, from the era of the first self-replicating molecules to the advent of chromosomes and thence to cells and cell walls, sexual differentiation and mating, symbiosis between species, animal societies and symbolic speech. Directing their interest in information transfer to biological processes and epochs, they cover topics ranging from the definition of life (why do we not call fire "alive"?) to the basis of tribal warfare. Moving speedily from epoch to epoch, fueled by a few important concepts (such as the division of labor) and explaining all the genetics they use, Smith and Szathmary show "just how difficult it has been to evolve complex organisms whose genes co-operate rather than compete." A chapter on sex offers several theories of how it arose; a later chapter examines the origins of our built-in ways of understanding and generating grammatical sentences in our native languages. Compact, dense, formidable yet accessible, this book exposes readers to the cutting edge in theoretical evolutionary biology.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press; illustrated edition edition (May 13, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0198504934
• ISBN-13: 978-0198504931
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,014,044 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Information transmission from genes to memes, December 23, 2000

By	Stephen A. Haines (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language (Paperback)

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.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good, but a bit skimpy on details, December 23, 1999

By	Rick Pierson (Dothan, AL) - See all my reviews

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.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Origins of Life, March 26, 2000

By	Atheen M. Wilson "Atheen" (Mpls, MN United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.