| View Larger Image | Singularities: Landmarks on the Pathways of Life | Hardcoverby Christian de Duve (Author)
| List Price: | $57.00 | | Price: | $38.47 | | You Save: | $18.53 (33%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Hardcover | | Publisher: | Cambridge University Press | | Page Count: | 274 Pages | | Publication Date: | October 24, 2005 | | Sales Rank: | 199,310th |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
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. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 5.0 based on 4 reviews)
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Preview Kindle sample before buying! by Lyn Robie (US)  5 Stars
November 11, 2009
The Kindle download is in the Topaz format which includes very ratty looking embedded fonts. Download the sample first and make sure you can live with the text quality. Amazon is moving away from the .awz format that uses the Kindle's internal fonts to the .awz1 (or Topaz) format which includes the fonts in the download. The problem with this is that the downloaded fonts are often of very inferior quality. I think Amazon owes its Kindle readers a decent crisp font for a $30 book. In particular look at the larger italicized letters. You will notice that the letters still look ratty at larger font sizes.
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the first stirrings of life by R. A. Bull (NZ) 5 Stars
February 06, 2007
A fascinating account of what is known or conjectured about the first steps in the origin of life, by the master on the subject. He goes right back to the stages before RNA and Darwinian evolution took over, to look at the necessary prerequisites from chemistry. Warning: the author is pulling no punches; the reader needs the capacity to tackle some serious biochemistry.
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Never fear, it's not a "Creationist/ID" text by James B. Heaton III (Chicago, Illinois USA)  4 Stars
December 30, 2006
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.
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Unprecedented clarity on the origin of life by Alexander Williams (Perth, Western Australia) 5 Stars
November 06, 2006
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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SIMILAR PRODUCTS |
| Life Evolving: Molecules, Mind, and Meaning
by Christian de Duve (Author)
In just a half century, humanity has made an astounding leap in its understanding of life. Now, one of the giants of biological science, Christian de Duve, discusses what we've learned in this half century, ranging from the tiniest cells to the future of our species and of life itself. With wide-ranging erudition, De Duve takes us on a dazzling tour of the biological world, beginning with the invisible workings of the cell, the area in which he won his Nobel Prize. He describes how the first...
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| Beginnings of Cellular Life: Metabolism Recapitulates Biogenesis
by Professor Harold J. Morowitz (Author)
"This book is an extraordinary integration of a lifetime of thought on the subject by an exceptional scholar. Morowitz logically, consistently, and persuasively moves to define arguments that will influence thought in a fundamental realm of biology." -Donald M. Engelman, Yale University. "Morowitz develops a model of the origin of life in which cells originate first, proteins follow, and genes evolve last. This model contradicts conventional wisdom but has the distinct advantage of being...
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| Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins
by Robert Hazen (Author)
Life on Earth arose nearly 4 billion years ago, bursting forth from air, water, and rock. Though the process obeyed all the rules of chemistry and physics, the details of that original event pose as deep a mystery as any facing science. By what process did life actually begin? How did non-living chemicals become alive? Where, when, and how did life emerge on the blasted, barren face of our primitive planet? Author Robert Hazen is one of the world’s foremost scientists seeking...
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| The Emergence of Life: From Chemical Origins to Synthetic Biology
by Pier Luigi Luisi (Author)
The origin of life from inanimate matter has been the focus of much research for decades, both experimentally and philosophically. Luisi takes the reader through the consecutive stages from prebiotic chemistry to synthetic biology, uniquely combining both approaches. This book presents a systematic course discussing the successive stages of self-organisation, emergence, self-replication, autopoiesis, synthetic compartments and construction of cellular models, in order to demonstrate the...
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| Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution
by Nick Lane (Author)
A renowned biochemist draws on cutting-edge scientific findings to construct the mosaic of life’s astounding history. How did life invent itself? Where did DNA come from? How did consciousness develop? Powerful new research methods are providing vivid insights into the makeup of life. Comparing gene sequences, examining atomic structures of proteins, and looking into the geochemistry of rocks have helped explain evolution in more detail than ever before. Nick Lane expertly ...
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