Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origin

For book club this month we chose a book titled Genesis: The scientific Quest for Life's Origin by Dr. Robert Hazen

The topic of the book is a discussion of the current theories of how life may have emerged from the non-living chemical rich primordial earth. The word for this transitional event is autogenesis.

I've read a lot about evolution, but I was really interested to learn more about the beginning of life, specifically its creation. What does it even mean to be alive? It's easy to clarify in terms of humans, and mammals, but when you get down to smaller, simpler things, the answer becomes fuzzy. How did the first life form on earth organize itself? And how do scientists even begin to answer that question a few billion years later?

These were all questions I had going into this book, and I have to say that for the most part my curiosity concerning them has been satisfied. That's not to say the book had complete and definitive answers to my questions, but rather that it addressed them, and gave the best possible answer (as it is understood by scientists today), or answers if there were more than one possibility. It was both an overview and a history of the subject, and for the most part an easy read. The only difficulty was when the author explained certain chemical reactions, and used names like isoprene and phenathrene etc. But they were necessary to document in that they supply the "proof" to the claims the scientists are making concerning the origins of life and ultimately ourselves.

I wrote in the previous blog about emergent systems. Well, this seems to be the prevailing theory on how life on Earth came about. Through an unique combination of chemicals and the right influx of energy, life was able to emerge. I find that utterly fascinating. It was also really interesting to me how large a role geologists are playing attempting to answers to the origin of life questions. By examining rocks and the chemical signatures entombed within them they are helping biologists and chemist find clues to how life evolved. If I ever go for my PhD, I think this is where I'd focus.

The book begins by exploring a few of the many ways that life can be defined. From philosophical, religious, and scientific views come all kinds of answers. But the one that was used as a “working definition” by the author came from Dr. Gerald Joyce a member of a NASA exobiology panel. He said; “Life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution”.  And that works for me. It’s not very romantic sounding, but it gets the job done.

The book also recounts the history of some of the earliest origin-of-life experiments, back in the 1950’s. Among them the most famous Urey-Miller experiments where an early Earth atmosphere was simulated using ammonia, methane and hydrogen. When they sparked the mixture (as a proxy for lightning strikes) they were able to produce many amino acids, which are the building blocks of life! Those experiments, while inaccurate (the composition of the early atmosphere has been refined in recent years) created a lot of interest and basically began modern hunt for the origin of life.

The book also discusses the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe, spending a lot of time to examine the evidences for and against life on Mars through the inspection of the famous Allen Hill’s meteorite, or ALH84001.

The book discusses the methods of teasing out information from rocks millions of years old, and explains in pretty extensive detail the current experiments that are being conducted and what they hope to tell us about the origin of organic life.

There were really interesting chapters on chemosynthetic life (i.e. life that gets its energy from chemical reactions rather than the sun) and discusses microbes living miles beneath the Earth’s crust in in tiny pockets of otherwise dense rock.

There was a chapter about the possible mechanisms that evolved RNA (the precursor to DNA) that led to more complex life.

There was a discussion about how clay particles might have been the template for DNA, and how minerals could have substituted for membranes before primitive cells knew how to make their own!

There was so much unique information that I feel bad not covering it all in this review, but to go into any more depth would require a lot more explaining on my part, and I think in that case you’d probably be best off just reading the book yourself.

Anyway, in closing, I give this book four out of 5 stars. It was well written, easy to read (for the most part), extremely interesting, and I think it covered the subject thoroughly and in depth enough to be educational without being too technical. It also provided a history of how we got to where we are now, and a window into the future research on this mind boggling subject.

ATTENTION: If you are super lazy or don't like reading, but want to learn more about this I found a talk on the book given by the author on YouTube! You can check it out HERE.

Emergence

Termite mound: Example of an emergence system.
(borrowed from getintravel.com)

The book I read for book club this month touched on something called emergence. And because it's so interesting to me I thought instead of trying to incorporate it into my book review I'd write a separate blog about.
Emergence has come up briefly in a couple other books I've read recently, and I'm pretty fascinated by it at the moment.(Like I was with strange attractors a couple years ago;) But what is it? To borrow the definition from Wikipedia emergence is:
"...the way complex systems and patters arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple reactions."
What this means is that in many systems patterns will begin to emerge that could not be predicted beforehand by looking at any single component of the whole system. Saying it another way, emergence is the production of a pattern or a complex systems by many individual components that could never create anything on their own. Moreover, the system cannot work unless all of the components are in place. It's slightly more complicated than just that, since to create emergent properties a specific amount of energy must be added to the system, but I'll try to explain that below. This is a really cool thing, so I'm going to take a minute to give a couple examples.
Sand ripples: If you look at the components that form sand ripples in the bottom of a lake or ocean you have: Water, wave action (i.e. your energy source), and sand grains. If you  look closely at a sand grain, or a molecule of water, it is unlikely that you could predict how they could ever organize themselves into coherent rows of ripples. But they do. The thing is, they only do it when the right amount of energy (i.e. waves) are present. Too little energy and they will not form. Too much (think big crashing storm waves) and the ripples will be destroyed. But just the right amount, and suddenly sand grains can organize themselves into ripple patterns. Cool right?
Termite nests: This works for hives as well. The components to these systems are earth and millions of individual insects. The energy to the system is how much work each individual can do. Now if you took a single termite and inspected it closely you'd never guess that it could build a mound twenty feet tall. It doesn't even know how to "build"! And you'd be right, a single termite can't build a mound. Even several hundred couldn't, but a few million can, and do. A bunch of individually simple termites can build gigantic mounds taller than a giraffe!
The human brain: Same thing. Your components are individual neurons, and of course the energy comes from the food you eat. If you look at a single neuron you can see how it basically works, but it can't create complex thought...or even simple thought for that matter. All it can do is send and receive chemical signals. You can't make a "sort of brain" with a few hundred neurons. You need a whole skull full of them, all connected together, to be able to think, and learn and know. A brain is not a neuron, a brain is an intricately connected assemblage of many neurons that when acting together produce thoughts and regulate body functions.
So why is this important and interesting to me? This subject of emergence is critical for the transition from non-living to living. The primary reason being that it explains how the evolution of life was able to occur and not conflict with the second law of thermodynamics (i.e.entropy of a system never decreases). To be clear, technically nothing gets around the second law, so ultimately everything does increase in entropy. But small isolated systems like termite mounds, or shallow shore lines, or human brains, can under the right circumstances, for a time, produce amazing and complex things. Using only specific quantities of energy, and relatively simple parts amazing patterns and functions quite literally emerge! I think that is so cool.
Anyway, I'm probably not explaining this super well, but it's my hope that if you find this subject interesting, you will look it up and do some reading on your own! I am sure there are authors out there who have done a much better job than me. On is Dr. Robert Hazen who wrote the book Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origin that I read for book club this month.

The Shallows

This month for book club we read The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains, by Nicholas Carr.
From a pure readability factor it was pretty good. Not too heavy, thorough enough, but not too technical. And it was a quick read.
From my personal perspective in terms of content I went back and forth with being a little bored (because I already knew the stuff) to fairly interested. I wasn't so into his whole history of the Internet, or books for that matter, and I thought he repeated himself a bit too much (and stated obvious things that anyone reading this book would already know like what Facebook is...duh.)
But some of the brain imaging experiments, special studies, anecdotes from other writers, and his personal reflections on his experiences were intriguing to me. For example studies show "...that in the long run a medium's content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act." That goes for the Web as well as T.V, radio, and cell phones as well. You could even throw in GPS units, since it appears that spatial awareness is on a decline.
A few other highlights include:
It was interesting when the author (quoting another author) said "Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts- the faster the better." It really hit home for me, because that is exactly what I've been feeling lately. My mind is always running at full speed, looking for something to do.
I thought his commentary on the relationship between authors and readers was really interesting too. He says that back in the olden days when people read books there was an unspoken agreement between writers and those that read their work, namely that the author could write in a manner of full expression and be able to count on the patience and attentiveness of the reader. But now in the "faster is better" world of technology the readers attention is waning, writer must approach writing from an entirely new standpoint. They have to be quick, and exciting. It's less about what the writer wants to say (in terms of Internet reading) and more about what the readers are willing to read.
I found his discussion on the physical reshaping of the brain due to our modern technology, and the prolonged consequences to be really insightful. Reading on the web, with all it's distractions, makes it hard to focus. So our brains are becoming more able to multi-task. What we loose in the process is deep focused understanding. The author likens the modern memory to a Rolodex (for those of you who don't know what this is...go look it up!). We don't actually retain much information, but we are really good and remembering ways to find things out. And we are able to do it faster and faster all the time.
He also referenced another book I just happen to be reading at this very moment, that and that was cool.

This topic is really interesting to me on a personal level because I have lately noticed a shift in my mind, particularly a "loudness", (a scattered feeling like my attention is being pulled in many directions at once, all the time)  that I believe is the result of too much time surfing the net, and playing around with my phone etc. I'm not saying I don't love email and shopping on Amazon, but I think it would do me a bit of good to cut back. I find that I am often sacrificing the physical present for some distraction in cyberspace, and it bothers me. It's like when you get together with friends to go to dinner and then you all sit at the restaurant texting and "checking in" on Facebook....only I'm doing that to myself. For example I'll be trying to read a book, and then it suddenly occurs to me that I might want to marinade a tri-tip for dinner tomorrow, and so off I go clicking around on the Web looking for a marinade recipe. Then I decided to check the weather, then I get an email, then a couple texts, then I get a notice from Facebook so I sign in, and post a few comments of my own...You get it. Next thing you know I read for 15 minutes and was online for 45. The only time I really feel focused is when I am running or at kickboxing.
And as a side note the fact that information and technology is so portable is also changing us. I don't necessarily like that I am accessible to everyone all the time through several different mediums no matter where I am. On the rare occasions when I am focused and my mind is quiet, it is often disturbed by the ding on my phone that I have received a new email, or a text alert, and I get sucked in. Again, I am glad I have my cell phone for emergencies, but I just don't like the distraction of getting emails and texts when I am on the road.
I don't mean to sound antisocial, and I certainly do appreciate it when folks think about me, I'm just saying that it alters my focus and sometimes makes it hard to really be somewhere, doing something. Maybe the proactive thing to do is stop whining about it and just limit my internet use, and turn off my cell phone when I don't want to be disturbed.
Some people really thrive on technology and all of the amazing things it allows us to do. I am amazed by all my friends that manage it so well. But I don't. I appreciate it, but I don't "love" it.
I prefer a little more quiet.

Overall this was a good book, but I'd probably go with 3.5 starts out of 5.