The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is? By Nick Lane. Profile; 360 pages; £25.
“THERE is a black hole at the heart of biology.” Grandiose openings like this are often a warning sign in popular science books, a signal that the author is trying to gussy up a collection of unremarkable observations. Not in this case. Nick Lane, a biochemist at University College London, knows whereof he speaks. His latest book is a persuasive, demanding attempt to answer some of the most fundamental questions in biology.
Science offers a broad overview of how life works, but many intriguing details remain unclear. Mr Lane tackles some of them, including the origins of life, the connections between sex and death and what, if anything, Earth can tell us about the possibility of life elsewhere.
The book’s overarching argument is that life is a natural, chemical process, and therefore faces constraints imposed by the iron laws of physics or chemistry. Despite its spectacular surface diversity, those constraints restrict its chemical underpinnings, and that affects how life develops. Such considerations, says Mr Lane, can shed light on some of biology’s most profound questions.
The most accessible of those is how life got started in the first place. Most people learn some version of the “primordial soup” theory, which posits that...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1Gz8Y9H
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