From the Bookshelf of Science and Inquiry…

What is Life?: How Chemistry Becomes Biology

Addy Pross

Start date: January 1, 2015

Finish date: January 31, 2015

Discussion: Book Club 2015

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Book Club 2015

* December 2015 - Violinist's Thumb
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last updated Jan 11, 2016 06:55AM

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Nov 21, 2014 Steve Van Slyke rated it liked it

Shelves: science, evolution, genetics, kindle

This is one of those instances where I should probably qualify my remarks by mentioning that I am not a scientist and my formal education in biology and chemistry is limited to my studies in high school.

About one fourth of the way into this book I came close to abandoning it because the author seemed to be belaboring his points and I couldn't see clearly where he was headed. But I stuck with it and am glad to have done so because, even though I am not convinced he is correct, he does manage to p This is one of those instances where I should probably qualify my remarks by mentioning that I am not a scientist and my formal education in biology and chemistry is limited to my studies in high school.

About one fourth of the way into this book I came close to abandoning it because the author seemed to be belaboring his points and I couldn't see clearly where he was headed. But I stuck with it and am glad to have done so because, even though I am not convinced he is correct, he does manage to present a plausible, general theory of how life began on earth, or for that matter how it begins anywhere in the universe.

Pross marks out his territory by dividing the search for life's origin into two camps with different approaches. There is the historical approach, which attempts to determine the how, the actual events that may have transpired on prebiotic Earth 4 billion years ago, such as the famous Miller-Urey experiments. Pross dismisses these as needle-in-haystack efforts that have little chance of stumbling upon the correct answer given that very little is known about prebiotic conditions which could have varied widely in time and place.

In contrast, the ahistorical approach, which Pross favors, attempts to answer the general question of why life would evolve from inanimate matter. From that point forward he begins to lay out his answer to the question. In doing so he covers familiar ground, for example the ongoing debate as to which came first metabolism or replication and the question of why chirality or 'handedness' exists in life's basic molecules.

I won't spoil it for you by giving his answer here, but I will say that for me there was no great 'Aha!' moment. I appreciated the case that he built but in the end it did not seem to shed any great new light on the problem. He himself said that Darwin almost came up with the same answer 130 years ago.

Although Pross dismisses the historical approach and its various camps—the ventists, the pondists, the RNA World, the Clay World, the Lipid World, etc., I found the assessment of the these efforts much more interesting as they were laid out in Robert Hazen's book Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins.
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Dec 03, 2014 Tomislav rated it really liked it

Shelves: science

I read this because it was book of the month on Goodreads.com's Science and Inquiry group, for January 2015. I had some concerns in the prologue and first chapter, because the author was emphasizing the seemingly unnatural nature of life, going so far as to refer to "nature's design." Design suggesting to me a designer. Then discussing teleonomy, the apparent purposefulness of life. Then referring to evolution as Darwinism, citing and critiquing original words by Charles Darwin. All in all, the ...more

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Jan 27, 2015 Charlene rated it it was ok

Shelves: biology, physics, chaos-complexity-emergence, general-science, evolution

I love that Pross tried to take up Schrödinger's "What is Life" challenge, and I also really like that he attempted to extend our definition of life. Both of those things are necessary if we want to update our theory of evolution. I don't necessarily think he found the answer, but he made some interesting arguments and asked important questions. ...more

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