What is Life?: How Chemistry Becomes Biology (Oxford Landmark Science) 1st Edition

by Addy Pross (Author)

66 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0199641017

ISBN-10: 0199641013

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Seventy years ago, Erwin Schrodinger posed a profound question: 'What is life, and how did it emerge from non-life?' This problem has puzzled biologists and physical scientists ever since.

Living things are hugely complex and have unique properties, such as self-maintenance and apparently purposeful behaviour which we do not see in inert matter. So how does chemistry give rise to biology? What could have led the first replicating molecules up such a path? Now, developments in the emerging field of 'systems chemistry' are unlocking the problem. Addy Pross shows how the different kind of stability that operates among replicating molecules results in a tendency for chemical systems to become more complex and acquire the properties of life. Strikingly, he demonstrates that Darwinian evolution is the biological expression of a deeper, well-defined chemical concept: the whole story from replicating molecules to complex life is one continuous process governed by an underlying physical principle. The gulf between biology and the physical sciences is finally becoming bridged.

What is Life?: How Chemistry Becomes Biology (Oxford Landmark Science)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"I would recommend this book for readers who would like a clear introduction to the fundamental chemical concepts that must have been part of the story of the origin of life." --Reports of the National Center for Science Education

"Pross does an excellent job of succinctly conveying the difficulty in crafting an unambiguous general definition of life and provides a road map to much of the work on the origin of life done by chemists in the past 50 years. The book is worth the read for these discussions alone." --Chemical Heritage

About the Author

Addy Pross received a Ph.D in Organic Chemistry from Sydney University in 1970. He is currently a Professor of Chemistry at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, and a recognized authority in the area of chemical reactivity to which he contributed with the highly cited and acclaimed Pross-Shaik model of chemical reactivity. He has held visiting positions in many universities word-wide, including the University of Lund, Stanford University, Rutgers University, University of California at Irvine, University of Padova, the Australian National University Canberra, and Sydney University. He has served on the editorial board of chemical and biological journals and a variety of academic management boards. In recent years he has directed his attention to the biological arena where he has applied his expertise in chemical reactivity to the Origin of Life problem and the broader question of the problematic chemistry-biology interface.

Series: Oxford Landmark Science
Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press; 1 edition (November 1, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0199641013
ISBN-13: 978-0199641017
Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 0.7 x 5.7 inches
Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 66 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #173,053 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #69 in Books > Science & Math > Biological Sciences > Biology > Molecular Biology
- #78 in Books > Engineering & Transportation > Engineering > Bioengineering > Biochemistry
- #193 in Books > Textbooks > Science & Mathematics > Chemistry

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Wes Knowles

This is a very good book. Life he defines as having purpose I ...

November 15, 2016

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

This is a very good book. Life he defines as having purpose I agree. Evolution is a fact as much as a such things in the past can possibly be proven. Similarly, we evolved from the same primitive life forms that all life on this planet arose from. However, his proof that purpose is an emergent property falls very short. The origins of life are still a huge mystery. Like the origins of the universe which also seems to have a purpose, the origins of life may lie outside of sciences' capabilities. It is good, even imperative that we try to search and research for the answers to these questions regardless that we may not be able to find them. Addy Pross' book is another step in the right direction.

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Paul Gilchrist

Systems chemistry is part of the story.

February 15, 2016

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Review for Amazon
Pross A, (2012) What is Life? How Chemistry becomes Biology. Oxford University Press
.....................
This book fills an important gap in the quest to explain how life could have emerged from precursor processes and it forms an important addition to the growing concept of "universal Darwinism". The author identifies systems chemistry as the field of study that leads to his approach. He looks for intermediate stages that are precursors of "life" and proceeds to spell out the likely role of autocatalytic chemistry occurring at a deep oceanic vent as the source of RNA from which life could have arisen. His description of this process leads on to identifying dynamic kinetic stability (DKS) as the particular variety of stability for these stages. DKS is not usually observed in regular chemistry but occurs in the persistence of entities capable of self-reproduction.
He invokes the Second Law of Thermodynamics to explain why "chemical reactions proceed such that less stable materials are transformed into more stable materials". Preservation of stability is seen as essential to the survival of systems. Any cyclic system and its complex successors must be subject to the occurrence of variants (error) that may be self-corrected or may become incorporated in the system where they may have negative, neutral or positive effects. Negative effects prevent survival. Neutral effects can be incorporated harmlessly in the system. Positive effects may offer a benefit in adapting to the environment in which the system operates.
Somewhere along the chain of events there should be a system which allowed the emergence of a facility to multiply from a precursor state that could only recycle itself without producing copies of itself.
I await his next book that should look toward other precursor systems to connect the cyclic self-organising physical systems operating under Newton's Laws of Motion with the self-replicating systems associated with DKS and thus further, towards life.

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Mike D.

The Marvel of the Smallest Life

August 17, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Thoughtful and strangely moving description of how replicating molecules follow the same patterns as the evolution of higher life forms. A marvelous joining of chemistry and biology at the molecular level ...and it doesn't even need a "weird" quantum physics trick..

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Shay Bella

Read This

December 5, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Mr. Pross lays out an intriguing and rational argument regarding the origin of life while raising questions (albeit not necessarily new) concerning just where an organism ends.

I originally picked this up as an Audible book, but found I that there were some sections I wanted to jump to, so I picked up the Kindle version for the WhisperSync mostly for the ability to add in annotations and make it easier to review the sections that I needed more time to wrap my head around.

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John Read

Top quality synthesis!

March 29, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Superb synthesis! More than an exposition, this breaks new ground. Pross details a continuous sequence from physics through systems biology, with no hiatus. Nothing left out. Nobel prize quality investigation. This work provided some missing pieces for my own cosmological writings.

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The Professor

Dynamic Kinetic Stability

January 22, 2014

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

This was a brief read, but I enjoyed it. It offers a new perspective on how life could have emerged from inanimate matter by examining the system dynamics of self-replicating molecules. Long story short, the author proposes that natural selection would have operated on early self-replicating molecules in the form of dynamic kinetic selection.

You do not need a detailed knowledge of chemistry to enjoy this, but a competent knowledge of it, as well as competence in basic biology, will enable full comprehension of the book.

The only flaw with this book is that it does not go into as much detail as I'd like. I hope that the author publishes a more academic level text in time.

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