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The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere
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Review
"... the most significant book on the origin of life hitherto written." Walter Fontana, Harvard Medical School"This is a truly unusual work of scholarship, which offers both novel perspectives on a huge range of disciplines and a model of scientific synthesis. This is a remarkable, and remarkably impressive, book." Cosma Shalizi, Carnegie Mellon University"... an exceptionally important, highly original, unique scientific contribution ..." Elbert Branscomb, University of Illinois'The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth reads more like a well-executed textbook, one that covers much of what you need to know to jump in and start researching the origins of life. ... For physicists wishing to dive headfirst into the origin-of-life field, this book is a great place to start ... the book is not merely a compendium of existing knowledge; it offers genuinely new perspectives. [The authors] turn scientists' conventional origin stories on their heads. Rather than focus strictly on the chemical origin of life, they regard life as a planetary process ... they introduce the idea of life as a 'fourth geosphere' that complements the other three: the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere. In so doing, they make the problem of the origin of life one that may be tractable for physicists, and they lay out a possible framework for how to do it.' Sara I. Walker, Physics Today
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Book Description
Uniting the conceptual foundations of the physical sciences and biology, this groundbreaking multidisciplinary book explores the origin of life as a planetary process. For researchers, professionals entering the field or specialists looking for a coherent overview, this text brings together geochemistry, biochemistry, microbiology and physics, and includes an extensive bibliography.
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Product details
Hardcover: 691 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (June 6, 2016)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1107121884
ISBN-13: 978-1107121881
Product Dimensions:
7.2 x 1.4 x 10 inches
Shipping Weight: 3.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.6 out of 5 stars
11 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#77,934 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The two authors accomplished a great task of bringing together several pieces of scattered information throughout the domains of specialized science that evolved independently, so to say, and which within their respective domains can somehow contribute to the study of the origin of life. Even those that are apparently unrelated to this kind of study, in a first moment. But a synthesis uniting this body of knowledge was missing, until now. And by tying up these areas the authors provide a solid guideline that will likely conduct research within this particular field and will possibly bring insight to other fields of science as well in the years to come.This is not a popular science book, and the authors certainly didn't mean it to be. Their point is made following evidence and grounded on solid and rigorous theoretical principles. But it is a book that should be read by anyone working in the field, and those deeply curious about the subject. It is certainly worth the effort.
In this stunning, magisterial, and surprisingly wide-ranging book, Eric Smith and Harold Morowitz approach the origin of life from first principles and bring together knowledge from astrophysics, geochemistry, biochemistry, information theory and statistical mechanics to show how all the hints and constraints we know so far about life’s start and the universal patterns of life we’ve found compel us to adopt a new framework to understand life: life is a complex series of non-equilibrium phase transitions driven by a persistent geochemical redox potential.First, Smith and Morowitz argue that the ecosystem is the correct level to view the phenomenon of life and how it integrates with the rest of the planet’s geochemistry. It is only there that one can see the closed, robust nature of life. In every ecosystem from hydrothermal vents to rainforests, the ecosystem as a whole takes in inorganic inputs and free energy and builds biomass using a conserved core set of metabolic reactions. These core reactions give us many hints to the context of where and how life began suggesting the primary role of hydrothermal vents and of autocatalytic chemical networks.Next, Smith and Morowitz examine the physical conditions that were present before life began and ask the question: what stress was present in the non-living world that could have compelled the phenomenon of life into existence? Any non-equilibrium process (of which life is the most complex example) requires energy and a barrier to keep that energy from dissipating away too quickly. Smith and Morowitz take the physicist’s view and list many possible energy sources present on or around the early Earth and the barriers that could have maintained them. For example, they point out that the sun uses gravitational potential energy to drive nuclear fusion and the barrier to dissipation is the low probability of having a fusion collision which is set by the weak force!They then review the geophysical and geochemical processes that take place in the mantle, the crust and the atmosphere and describe the redox states of minerals in the mantle and how the atmosphere on the surface is held at a more oxidized state by hydrogen escape. (This chapter is the most in-depth and best introduction to the field of geochemistry that I’ve ever read.) The reduced state of the mantle and the oxidized state of the atmosphere turns the Earth into a giant redox battery (which has precisely the right energy difference to run the organic reactions of life) with the barrier being the crust itself and hydrothermal vents acting to concentrate this diffuse redox energy to specific points on Earth.Smith and Morowitz then present the core metabolic reactions that are universal to all life. This set of reactions creates a closed feedback loop and the whole loop (and most of the steps) are energetically favorable in a reduced hydrothermal vent environment. The core processes of life want to happen spontaneously at vents! Patterns and structure in core metabolism also reveal many more hints as to the key steps life needed to pass through on its journey to “lift itself off the rocksâ€. The evidence is fascinating and compelling, but there’s too much to adequately summarize here.Throughout the book, Smith and Morowitz argue that the most important question is not how were the organic precursors to life synthesized, but instead how was the selectivity of chemical reactions robustly maintained? There are many proposed reaction pathways to produce the building blocks of life, but the problem is that these pathways make many more products than the ones life uses and these unwanted products would starve the early reactions of life from getting enough input material. Bringing the questions of selectivity and robustness to center stage immediately suggests that one could use the tools of information theory and phase transitions to make progress.Information theory studies the storage and communication of information and deals with things like error-correcting codes that help you preserve information if you’re sending it through a noisy channel. Studying phases of matter has yielded a mathematical framework to understand how qualitatively different macroscale behavior (like ice or water) can result from the same fundamental building blocks and interactions (H2O molecules and electromagnetic interactions). Error correction in message transmission and the maintenance of some system in a particular phase require that only certain configurations of message or system can be selected. Furthermore, we know that the stability of a phase and the efficacy of message transmission mean that such selectivity can be robust.The authors then give an introduction to the broad and successful field of phase transitions and describe how ideas from information theory fit into understanding what a phase really is. This introduction leads to the math necessary to understand dynamic phase transitions in out of equilibrium chemical networks (which is close to what we’d want to understand life!) and includes a fantastic introduction to the modern viewpoint of how the universe formed as a cascade of phase transitions starting with the quark-gluon plasma right after the Big Bang to nucleons to neutral atoms to chemistry to eventually, after every symmetry has been frozen, superconductivity.Finally, Smith and Morowitz bring all these ideas together and describe how they conceptualize “the nature of the living stateâ€. Central are the ideas of robustness and modularity. They recount a parable about two watchmakers who are trying to build complex watches and are both interrupted every few minutes. One builds the watch in a very complex way so that it only works if all the pieces are in place and falls apart if the watchmaker leaves halfway through. The other watchmaker builds his watch out of self-contained modules which are each stable on their own. His progress remains when he is interrupted. The second watchmaker is able to finish his watch much faster than the first. We can see that modularity gives us a way of preserving a complex system against perturbations and of building more complex structures without the whole system becoming unmanageable or unstable. The modularity of life is evident everywhere one looks and is returned to again and again throughout the book.Modularity links with another idea that Smith and Morowitz emphasize: why can physics theories work at all if we don’t know the underlying building blocks of the world? The answer actually comes from the study of phases and is closely related to modularity. Matter in a certain phase can be described by an “effective theory†within that phase that allows us to ignore laws of the universe that act outside the regime of that phase. For example, the laws of chemistry don’t really apply when the world is too hot and atoms are ionized into plasma. The cascade of freezing transitions that matter undergoes itself represents a type of modularity and robustness. One phase lets us have molecules, we can then use molecules as the building blocks for minerals, which can then be used as the building blocks for more complex structures. Although much work remains, Smith and Morowitz see similar ideas present in how life self-organized into such a hierarchical and modular form (although in life’s case, it remained fully out-of-equilibrium unlike the phase transitions for matter mentioned above).Overall, this was one of the most profound and thought-provoking books I’ve ever read. It provides a solid foundation for those who are sufficiently motivated to reach the forefront of the current discussions on the origin of life. It also provides tools and ideas that have shaped how I understand the world more generally. I learned so much from this book! As a warning, the book assumes comfort with several branches of science (geology, chemistry and physics) and is rather dense at parts, but the book is laid out in a modular enough way that one should be able to find those parts of the book they are most interested in. It’s not light reading, but the insights in this book are totally worth the effort for those interested in the origin of life!
I wish it had had a good editor. I got a lot out of it but was frustrated by the redundancy [preface says: chapters 1-4 are about life as we know it; chapter 5 is about their proposal for life's origins, and then later the preface says the same thing again - that was the most striking example] and the rapid descent into math in sections such as the one on entropy; the book's description says the book is 'accessible'...I was also bothered by sections that seemed to say there was such a small number of simple molecules involved in something or other, but the molecules were never listed. Co-factors, for example - there aren't many of them. Couldn't they have simply listed them Somewhere in the book??I worked mostly with the kindle edition, whose figures were too small and which was full of 'figures' in the text, e.g. 'CO2' that translated to a blank space when saved.
This is an excellent scientific text, offering a comprehensive review of empirical results and analysis with an introduction to large-deviations theory (LDT), and some suggestion to how it might apply to origin of life. Yet these two aspects of the book don't seem married so well, and the presentation of LDT can be very arcane. Clearly the authors assume the reader has been exposed to statistical mechanics and is comfortable with advanced mathematics. This is alright if you feel comfortable, but for other readers not exposed to such topics (likely from a biological background) this section (chapter 7) should unfortunately be skipped or skimmed over. It is such a compelling perspective though, and a mathematical framework which can be beneficial to biological science, that it misses the point in being so arcane: this should be an interdisciplinary text, succeeding elsewhere in this regard. Chapters 3-6 are impressive in their content and presentation, introducing the reader to geophysics and chemistry, the structure of metabolism, patterns in energy cycles and the genetic code, and a succinct presentation on a possible chronology of events in abiogenesis. Chapter 7 is impressive in content, but disappointing in presentation. Chapters 1-2 and 8 give necessary binding to the text, the last chapter offering some intriguing insights, more so if one gets through Chapter 7. Finally, the book offers an impressive bibliography. It is worth getting for Chapters 3-6 - they are clearly presented and provide an excellent framework to understand patterns in cellular biology and it's possible histories. Chapter 7 is great if comprehendable, and this is the main flaw of the book.
The best, most eloquent book I've read in 30 years -- better even than classics like Guns Germs and Steel. Brilliantly thought out and expressed in a clear, accessible, informative style. A special delight are the side-bars in chapter 7, which introduce a multitude of pertinent topics from adjacent disciplines that I've always wanted to learn more about, a valuable quantitative interlude. Magnificent bibliography.
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