Product Description
This book addresses the question of how life may have arisen on earth, in the spirit of an intriguing detective story. It relies on the methods of Sherlock Holmes, in particular his principle that one should use the most paradoxical features of a case to crack it. This approach to the essential biological problems is not merely light-hearted, but a fascinating scrutiny of some very fundamental questions. 'I know of no other book that succeeds as well as this one in maintaining the central question in focus throughout. It is a summary of the best evolutionary thinking as applied to the origins of life in which the important issues are addressed pertinently, economically and with a happy recourse to creative analogies.' Nature '... a splendid story - and a much more convincing one than the molecular biologists can offer as an alternative. Cairns-Smith has argued his case before in the technical scientific literature, here he sets it out in a way from which anyone - even those whose chemistry and biology stopped at sixteen - can learn.' New Statesman

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 11 reviews)

Highly recommended by Bruce Oksol (San Antonio)

5 Stars
March 07, 2009
I am impressed that this paperback is still commanding a price of $20 on Amazon. It just shows how remarkable this little book is. I still maintain that the best literature and the best scientific thought comes out of Britain. This is another example. With nothing more than reflecting on how life began and asking the right questions, separating the VITAL from the INSIGNIFICANT, Cairns has provided an interesting suggestion, and lays out the thesis so well, you can't help but follow along easily. My only complaint: once he reaches the end, I wish he had added a chapter or two to suggest what the next step was in evolution of the first organism. It's a short book; you can read it in two or three days at a very leisurely pace. I first read it some years ago, and re-read it occasionally, and always find something new.

Amusing and readable book about what the first replicators weren't, and might have been, like by David M. Chess (Mohegan Lake, NY USA)

4 Stars
March 02, 2006
I found this book while doing some research in the aftermath of an online discussion of just how unlikely the formation of the first replicators (the first things that could undergo evolution) was. In that discussion someone had remarked (after reading some creationist stuff) that it was just fantastically impossible for the first cell, or even the first nucleotide, to come together more or less by accident. I replied that of course no one serious thinks that the first replicator was a whole cell, or even a modern sort of nucleotide; it was presumably some very low-tech and inefficient thing, just barely able to reproduce itself imperfectly once in a blue moon. After I said that I realized that while it seemed perfectly obvious to me, and that all right-thinking people must agree, I didn't specifically recall any of the right-thinking people in question. So I went and did some research, and (among other things) I found this book. In "Seven Clues to the Origin of Life", A. G. Cairns-Smith, a molecular biologist and so on at the University of Glasgow, lays out in an amusing and chatty way (including numerous Sherlock Holmes quotations) his argument that yes the first replicator really couldn't have been any of the replicators that we have today, or even anything very much like them. And he presents his own theory as to what they in fact were: inorganic clay crystals of a certain type that seem to have (or seem capable of having) both the requisite ability to do a kind of very low-tech replication, and the potential to have eventually provided the platform on which our current much higher-tech replicators (DNA and all that) got their start. The writing is extremely clear and readable, aimed at a general non-technical audience, and the book is both fun and short (131 pages including glossary, index, etc). I'm not convinced by his argument that these particular clay crystals were the first replicators, but I'm very convinced that something at least vaguely like them could have been, and that therefore there's no really puzzling problem about how replication got started in the first place. Which is nice, because it's pretty clear that it did. *8) Highly recommended to one and all. And if you really like the subject, there's apparently a longer and weightier and more technical book, "Genetic Takeover", in which he treats the same subject in more detail (and perhaps without the Sherlock Homes).

True? False? Who knows? But definitely a great read! by world class wreckin cru (Dallas, TX)

5 Stars
August 03, 2003
First, I have to preface my review by saying that I haven't yet read other books about the origin of life, so I have nothing to compare this book to...anywayThis short book is absolutely fascinating. The thrust of the author's argument is this:Life as we know it is too complex to have originated in its present form. Nucleic acids and proteins and most organic molecules necessary for life are too complex to have originated in the primitive atmosphere even if the conditions were favorable. We need to find something that is capable of growing, replicating (not perfectly), and providing a substrate for the formation of molecules necessary for life as we know it today. What could possibly do that? Ah yes, crystals of clay! Clay is abundant. It grows and replicates but not perfectly thus allowing for irregularities to accumulate. These crystals with irregularities could then provide a surface that brought molecules together in close proximity so that they could interact and produce the organic molecules needed for life. Eventually, the secondary organisms that resulted from this process achieved a certain complexity that gave rise to life as we know it.Interesting argument. Is it true? Is it even plausible? I actually don't know the answer to either question, and I have a feeling that there are no definite answers.I found this book thought-provoking, and it presented an interesting solution to the mystery of the origin of life.

Witty, but self serving

3 Stars
July 13, 2003
The author's specific view on the origin of life on Earth from clay minerals explained in a "see how smart I am" fashion.For a broader overview in a similarly slim book, read Origins of Life from Freeman Dyson instead. For a much broader overview on three times as many pages read The Emergence of Life on Earth by Iris Fry.Do read the book if you want to get a short and entertaining first hand explanation of the Carins-Smith theory of the origin of life - which by the way seems to be half way between eccentric and mainstream: widely discussed without being generally accepted.

Concise, logical, lucid by Atheen M. Wilson (Mpls, MN United States)

5 Stars
February 03, 2003
A. Graham Cairns-Smith has created a small gem in his Seven Clues to the Origin of Life. The book, a discussion of the pre-biotic stage of the evolution of life, is concise, logical and lucid and explained in terms that would be comprehensible to anyone from the junior high student with a basic science education to beyond it. As Daniel C. Dennett writes in the journal Nature about another of the author's books, "Cairns-Smith is a brilliant explainer of difficult ideas, bringing to the task an imagination that is magnificently disciplined by detailed scientific understanding." I had heard of the concept of a crystal template for the creation of organic molecules while studying mineralogy for a geology degree in the 1980s, so Cairns-Smith's topic had already intrigued me. When I found reference to this book in the annotated bibliography of another I was reading, I decided to look it over too. I wasn't disappointed. Dr Cairns-Smith is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Chemistry Department at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. The main area of his research has been in simple non-nucleic acid genetic systems which might have been important in the earliest stages of the evolution of life, a topic on which he has collaborated with others and continued to publish in professional journals as recently as 1996. So he is eminently prepared to discuss the pre-biotic era of life. Although the book is old for a work of science (1985), it is nonetheless still very much a leading idea in the subject of the early stages of life. Furthermore, the author cleverly puts the topic into terms that most of his readers will understand, even borrowing concepts from architecture/building, the nature of ropes, and the history of technology to do so. Avoiding confusing professional jargon, he leads the reader through the material in a logical, step by step manner until his conclusion: that we may owe our existance to the character and evolution of clay materials. While one may not necessarily believe that this is actually how the process worked-or for religious reasons may disagree altogether-it is still a cogent work, one that illustrates how science comes up with its theories of how things got to be as they are.

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