Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution

I am very interested in learning all we know about evolution especially after all the DNA sequencing that has occurred that can help us understand it better. I am very glad I came across Nick Lane as an author on the topic. He can bring complex thoughts together in a very readable form. I loved how he wrote about the 10 great inventions of evolution and brought in the current knowledge (as of 2009) to make a fascinating read. I highly recommend this book.

I picked up my first book by Nick Lane, Power, Sex and Suicide, because I thought someone had mis-shelved a book on politics in the biology section. I was fascinated and challenged by the details, amazed at some of the discoveries over the last few years, and determined to check out some of the references. I immediately asked my local library to get Life Ascending for me. You may not agree with his choice of the 10 most important steps/events, but Nick Lane always does a fantastic job of describing, detailing, explaining, and educating in a style that is still highly readable. He doesn't assume his readers are dummies, but still provides an excellent explanation for sections of material you may not be familiar with, and plenty of references to fill in any gaps in your knowledge. I've asked my high school librarian to order a copy of this book - our science and biology classes start dealing with evolution in year 10, and go into details of DNA replication, and mechanisms for evolution, in years 12 and 13. This book is easily understandable by our seniors because of the good explanations, and would extend and update their knowledge since high school curricula and texts rarely manage to keep so up to date as this work.

XXXXX "This book is about the greatest inventions of evolution [where invention does NOT imply a deliberate inventor], how each one transformed the living world, and how we humans have learned to read this past...It is a celebration of life's marvellous inventiveness...It is...the long story of how we came to be here--the milestones along the epic journey from the origin of life to our own lives and deaths. It is a book grand in scope. We shall span the lengths and breadths of life, from its very origins in deep-sea vents to human consciousness, from tiny bacteria to giant dinosaurs. We shall span the sciences, from geology and chemistry to neuroimaging, from quantum physics to planetary science. And we shall span the range of human achievement... My list of [ten] inventions is subjective...and could have been different; but I did apply four criteria [that the author outlines] which I think restrict the choice [of inventions] considerably to a few seminal events in life's history...Beyond these...formal criteria, each invention had to catch my own imagination." The above comes from the introduction of this extraordinarily interesting book by biochemist and author Nick Lane. He is a biochemist at University College, London, England. This book is a treasure trove of past, recent, and new scientific knowledge. And the writing is superb. A book like this could have been dry and boring. But the writing is so good that this never occurs. For example, here is a writing sample from the chapter on sex: "If sex is an occupational folly, an existential absurdity, then not having sex is even worse, for it leads in most cases to extinction, non-existential absurdity. And so there must be advantages to sex, advantages that overwhelm the foolhardiness of doing so. The advantages are surprisingly hard to gauge and made the evolution of sex the 'queen' of evolutionary problems through much of the twentieth century. It may be that, without sex, large complex forms of life are simply not possible at all: we would all disintegrate in a matter of generations, doomed to decay like the degenerate Y chromosome. Either way, sex makes the difference between a silent and introspective planet, full of dour self- replicating things...and the explosion of pleasure and glory all around us. A world without sex is a world without the songs of men and women or birds or frogs, without the flamboyant colours of flowers, without gladiatorial contests, poetry, love, or rapture. A world without much interest." A criticism of this book that I have read is that certain inventions of evolution cannot be adequately explained and therefore should not have been included in this book. I disagree. Take the invention of consciousness for example. True we don't have all the answers. But what we do know makes for interesting reading. Thanks to Lane's writing, these chapters don't only make for interesting reading but stimulating reading as well. Finally, this book co

"Life Ascending" is one of the best biology books written for a wide audience that I have ever read. At one level it is a breezy and easy read, filled with clever illustrations that make the underlying, heavy-duty chemistry seem simple. A bit deeper down, it is real science. The process by which careful science must be persued, and the resulting twists and turns of the evidence are so clearly described, that the reader can at least begin to appreciate the exacting endeavours of the very talented people involved in this modern biological detective story. And modern it is! The references to the primary literature are almost all from this decade, including some of the most recent and striking findings that are as "hot off the press" as one ever finds in a general account. These references appear to be very well chosen, in itself, not an easy thing to do. The heart of his approach to "popularizing" science can be seen by reading some of that primary literature, and then reading Lane's non-technical, but precise interpretation. He is a master at distilling detailed, complex and difficult chemical processes into prose that reveals their essence. Years ago, a natural products chemist pointed out to me the wealth of chemical compounds in a tea leaf (hundreds), the processes necessary to characterize them, and the complex comparisons his laboratory was then engaged in to determine why one tea tastes better than another. Reading Lane explain the same thing would likely be akin to drinking a steaming cup of the winning brew.

It is one of the shibboleths of evolution that the blind forces which change genes and change creatures have no aim or direction. Our hands and the wings of bats may be wonderfully engineered biological machines, and may arise from the same basic limb design, but it is wrong to think that evolutionary forces set out to build up progressively so that hands and wings could emerge with their current efficient designs. It is hard, however, to get away from the idea of life forms progressing or ascending; we do, of course, speak of "lower life forms" without thinking of how astonishingly complex even an amoeba is. Nick Lane, a biochemist, knows that we are not evolutionarily "climbing the ladder of life", and especially knows that it is a parochial view that puts humans at the uppermost reaches of the biological tree. Nonetheless, his most recent book is called _Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution_ (Norton). These ten inventions are steps, if not steps up, in the complexity of life. The subtitle of his book also bears examination, and he knows it. In his introduction, he writes, "Evolution has no foresight, and does not plan for the future. There is no inventor, no intelligent design. Nonetheless, natural selection subjects all traits to the most exacting tests, and the best designs win out." Each of the chapters here looks at one of the ten winners within those tests. Lane admits he has made a subjective "Ten Best List", but he did have criteria. Each invention had to revolutionize the world, be of surpassing importance now, be due to evolution by natural selection rather than due to cultural forces, and had to be iconic in some way. What is significant in his book is that, as befits a biochemist, he has not concentrated on, say, hand and wing morphology, but on the molecules within cells that make the whole biological and evolutionary process go. To start off, necessarily, Lane considers the origin of life. Darwin had no way of knowing about the current best candidate for primordial life, the fissures within the basalt of the ocean floor. The vents bubble a supply of hydrogen which could react with the carbon dioxide in the water to form organic molecules, and a cross section of the vents shows a labyrinth of compartments that could have concentrated the organic molecules to become precursors of RNA, the primordial relative of DNA. After examining the origins of DNA, Lane tackles photosynthesis, the process by which sunlight powers reactions to strip electrons from water and install them into carbon dioxide, producing oxygen and energy-rich sugars. The chloroplast, the organelle in which photosynthesis takes place, evolved only one time, and from that start, now every green plant and alga has them. Why do we have sex? You may form your own ribald answer to the question, but it has been a real puzzle to biologists. After all, if a successful creature could just clone itself asexually, the success could not but

Twenty-five years ago when I was learning creationism rather than biology in the Christian college I graduated from, we had a fairly good excuse. No doubt scientists knew the evidence well enough and found it overwhelmingly supported the fact and theory of evolution. But for non-biology students and typical laypersons, the evidence was never presented in an accessible or cogent enough way to persuade us, and so we defaulted to the easy-to-grasp, if simplistic, notion that "God did it." Period, quotation marks, end of story. The excuse is gone, and each new book in this field seems to top the previous entries in some key aspect. "Life Ascending" takes a biochemical approach to the fascinating "inventions" of evolution, from the beginning of life to photosynthesis, sex...even death. Other writers have dipped into this important topic, notably Sean Carroll, but I am not aware of another popularly written book that focuses so extensively on this one aspect of evolutionary theory. And for my money, it's the most compelling evidence that exists. The chapters on the origins of life and metabolism (Krebs cycle) are worth the price of the book alone. Will the hypotheses advanced convince a hard-core Intelligent Design promoter? Not likely. The speculation required still eclipses the evidence provided, but a very plausible-sounding pathway is put forth, and it's fascinating to think about. What's more, key elements of each hypothesis are TESTABLE, setting them well apart from the comparitively content-free notion of Intelligent Design. The capper is how lucid the prose is, and how entertaining. Even when the topics get technical and potentially dry, great care is taken to turn phrases, add color, and supply interesting metaphors and examples to pull the reader through. I can hardly recommend this book more highly.