The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language

By addebook • Jun 28th, 2008 • Category: Biology •

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The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language

The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language
By John Maynard Smith, Eors Szathmary

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Number Of Pages: 192
Publication Date: 2000-11-26
ISBN-10 / ASIN: 019286209X
ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780192862099
Binding: Paperback

When John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary published The Major Transitions in Evolution, it was seen as a major work in biology. Nature hailed it as a book of “grand and daunting sweep…A splendid and rewarding tour de force.” And New Scientist wrote that it captured “the essence of modern biology,” calling it “an extremely significant book which, as a bonus, is very readable.” Now, in The Origins of Life, Maynard Smith and Szathmary have completely rewritten Transitions to bring their ideas to a wider audience of general readers. Here is a brilliant, original picture of how life evolved on earth, focusing primarily on six major transitionsdramatic breakthroughs in the way that information was passed between generations. The authors offer illuminating explorations of the origin of life itself, the arrival of the first cells with nuclei, the first reproduction by sexual means, the appearance of multicellular plants and animals, the emergence of cooperative animal societies, and the birth of language.
The Origins of Life represents the thinking of two leading scientists on questions that engage us allhow life began and how it gradually evolved from tiny invisible cells into whales and trees and human beings.

Amazon.com:

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

Summary: Solid foundation for understanding evolution.
Rating: 5

Fantastic book. Compared to many other books on evolution and biology, I found this to be one of the easiest to understand. It is simply and well written and gives the reader a good idea of the evolution of life. It allows the reader to understand how life could have arose out of physical and chemical processes and shows clearly how many of the things we consider to have arisen out of the mind of a great deity actually have an elegant developmental history that cannot be disputed.

The book explains, convinvingly, how each transition is solidly built upon the foundations of the previous transitions (replicating molecules/ populations of molecules in protocells to RNA as gene and enzyme/specialization to DNA and protien enzyme to Primate societeis/Human societies with language). Despite a few things we yet do not understand fully (for example, how a complex backbone for RNA can possibly evolve, given the absence of enzymes) the reader will be able to see that the authors’ admissions of the absence of scraps of concrete evidence here and there (plausible theories and scenarios have been proposed) is a subject for furthur inquiry and experimentation, the 1% of evidence they do not have in the face of 99% of fact that has been proven through rigourous experimentation.

In response to a previous review about the book not giving an answer to how individual genes could have been activated to give cells the properties they have, the authors have proposed that individuals cells are likely to be influenced by their environment. In other words, cells know their place in a body and respond to their circumstances.

Summary: An expert account of the major steps in evolution
Rating: 5

This can be regarded as a more accessible version of The Major Transitions in Evolution, an earlier book by the same authors addressed to professional biologists. It is more accessible, and more readable, certainly, but it still demands some effort and attention on the part of the reader. As the authors candidly admit in their preface, they “fear it will not be an easy read”, because “it contains a lot of facts, and a lot of new ideas”. This is a fair assessment, but readers who do make the effort can expect to learn a considerable amount of modern biology from two of its most respected authorities.

Charles Darwin largely ducked the question of the origin of life, taking the realistic view that it was too difficult to handle at the time he was writing, and contented himself with accounting for how it could have evolved once it had started. John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, writing a century and a half later, could hardly avoid this problem, and their book starts at the very beginning by trying to define what it means to be alive and to explain how the first living organisms could have emerged from non-living inorganic matter. For them this was a matter of combining the chemistry of the production and use of energy with the chemistry of storing the information needed for producing a new organism identical with its parent.

Here they are confronted with a dilemma, the “error catastrophe”: if the first organisms were too small they could not have fulfilled all the chemical functions they needed; if they were too big they could have reproduced themselves accurately. For a long time the gap between too small and too big seemed unbridgeable, but a possible solution was found in the realization that the first enzymes were probably not proteins (as they nearly all are today) but nucleic acids, which could combine their good capacity for storing information with a rather feeble capacity for catalysing chemical reactions.

The remainder of the book presents the subsequent steps that were needed to proceed from these humble (but by no means simple) beginnings to the great complexity of the living world of today. How did the transition occur from a world in which nucleic acids did everything to one with the present-day division of labour between nucleic acids for information and proteins for catalysis? How did the first multicellular organisms arise from unicellular parents? How did animal societies evolve? How did language originate (apparently only in humans)?

Maynard Smith and Szathmáry have interesting and important things to say about all of these questions, and others, including, in the middle of the book, a masterly discussion of the difficult question of sexual reproduction: why did it arise, and, especially difficult, why is it maintained in the face of what appear to be obvious advantages of virgin birth, or parthenogenesis? It is not too difficult to think of small advantages in sexual reproduction, but that is not enough, because the advantage of parthenogenesis is very large , amounting to a factor of two in every generation, so one needs an even larger advantage of sexual reproduction to overcome it.

Summary: Non-specialist version of Major Transitions in Evolution
Rating: 5

As stated in the preface, this book presents to a general readership the same ideas as the authors’ 1995 book “The Major Transitions in Evolution.” I found it still challenging, but richly rewarding. The most interesting questions in evolution deal with the evolution of new levels of organization. The authors identify only eight such transitions starting from cooperating collections of replicating molecules up through multicellular organisms, colonies of ants and bees, and finally human societies with language. Anyone interested in the question of how cooperation evolved in human societies needs to also understand how cooperation evolved in the other seven transitions. This appears to be the definitive work on that subject that is accessible to a non-specialist.

Summary: Led by the nose…
Rating: 1

A rather convoluted attempt at answering the central question: What is life? But Smith and his co-author fail in other respects too. Among the subsidiary problems surrounding the question of life and its origins is a rather more specific question on how exactly cells with the same genetic information become different adult structures. In other words, animals, for example, are composed of many different cells - muscle cells, nerve cells etc - that are all identical, but in development they become different in shape, composition, and function. The answer (already well known) is that cells are not different because they have different genes, but because some genes are active while others are not. Maynard Smith pops the central question in developmental biology (page 18): how does three dimensional form arise during development; how does it come about that the right genes are active in the right places. He repeats this question on p18, p28,p100,and finally on page 115 once again, he repeats”…how is it that different genes are active in different cells…we will return to this question in a moment”. Now I get fed up, when is he going to answer this question! But wait, on page 117, yes, here it comes, he finally says, yes, one more time - “how is it that different genes are active in different cells…the answer finally on page 117 - WE DO NOT KNOW!! What a run around! At this point I turf this book aside, and decide to slate this author for jerking me around.

Summary: Information transmission from genes to memes
Rating: 5

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.

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