Singularities: Landmarks on the Pathways of Life
By addebook • Jun 24th, 2008 • Category: Biology •
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Singularities: Landmarks on the Pathways of Life
Singularities: Landmarks on the Pathways of Life
By Christian de Duve
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Number Of Pages: 274
Publication Date: 2005-10-24
ISBN-10 / ASIN: 052184195X
ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780521841955
Binding: Hardcover
Erwin Schrödinger’s What is Life? published 60 years ago, influenced much of the development of molecular biology. In this new book Christian De Duve, Nobel Laureate and pioneer of modern cell biology, presents a contemporary response to this classic, providing a sophisticated consideration of the key steps or bottlenecks that constrain the origins and evolution of life. De Duve surveys the entire history of life, including insights into the conditions that may have led to its emergence. He uses as landmarks the many remarkable singularities along the way, such as the single ancestry of all living beings, the universal genetic code, and the monophyletic origin of eukaryotes. The book offers a brief guided tour of biochemistry and phylogeny, from the basic molecular building blocks to the origin of humans. Each successive singularity is introduced in a sequence paralleling the hypothetical development of features and conditions on the primitive earth, explaining how and why each transition to greater complexity occurred.
Summary: Never fear, it’s not a “Creationist/ID” text
Rating: 4
This is an excellent, challenging book. Please do not be put off by the suggestion of one reviewer that it is somehow sympathetic to the nonsensical “intelligent design” and “creation ’science’” religions. It is nothing of the sort. This is a good science book for the secular-minded. See the good review in Nature, August 2006.
Summary: Unprecedented clarity on the origin of life
Rating: 5
The purpose of this excellent book is to highlight singularities in the origin of life (p.viii), and evaluate available evidence against the possible causes of chance, deterministic chemistry in a suitable environment, and intelligent design. It requires undergraduate level biochemistry to read it, but I have never come across another book on the subject that gives such precision and clarity to the main issues.
It is not spelt out, so readers need to be aware that a singularity is a unique event that only happened once and is thus indistinguishable from a miracle (because science can only experimentally verify repeatable phenomena). Because `The history of life is marked by a large number of such singularities’ (p.viii) then the default explanation must be intelligent design because he provides no other non-natural cause in his list of seven causes in the `General Introduction’. If any natural cause was available then these problems would not be singularities.
The natural causes that he appeals to are unconvincing and/or logically invalid–that is why the problems remain singularities. For example, he attributes nothing to chance and everything to chemistry and the environment (p.238). However he has to invoke all the properties of life to get the chemistry out of the ‘dirty gemisch’ of the natural environment and into an organized and functional form, so by using life to explain life his argument is circular and invalid–that is why the problems remain singularities.
In regard to the environment, he avoids being specific in most cases, so the only environmental causes we end up with are many references to the chaotic dirty gemisch, and the `starvation, acidification and excessive heat’ (p.167) that finally got pre-life over the line to life. Dirty chemistry, starvation, acidification and excessive heat are easily reproduced in the laboratory and none of them produce life!
As a creationist, I can say that de Duve’s excellent book will be on my recommended reading list for many years to come. No one else has ever been so clear in describing (i) the singularities underpinning life, (ii) the total poverty of naturalistic explanations, and (iii) such willful disregard for the logical explanation of the evidence.
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