Synopses & Reviews
This fascinating work, co-authored by a Nobel Prize winning scientist, extends Darwin's ideas on natural selection back into evolutionary time and applies them to the molecular "fossil record" that preceded the origin of life. Using the techniques of molecular biology, the book demonstrates that life on Earth is the inevitable result of certain chance events that took place in the unique history of our planet. Furthermore, researchers can not only precisely formulate the laws governing the emergence of life, but also test them under controlled laboratory conditions. In fact, the authors show how it is perfectly possible to construct evolutionary accelerators that optimize the conditions for certain events and which can be used to demonstrate their theoretical conclusions in laboratory experiments. The book is organized into three sections. Each of the 10 chapters in the first section are introduced by quotations from Thomas Mann's classic novel The Magic Mountain, a work that is deeply concerned with the themes presented here in scientific form. In the second part, important biological ideas form the themes of 15 colorfully illustrated vignettes, which can be read separately or as elaborations on the first section. The final section summarizes key events in the history of molecular biology and includes an extensive glossary of technical terms. Written for a wide audience, and already highly successful in the original German edition, this book brings fresh insight to the search for evolutionary origins. General readers will find it clear and accessible, as will students and scientists in biochemistry, molecular biology, microbiology, and evolution.
Review
"Valuable as a succinct account of recent advances in research on the origins of life undertaken from the perspective of extreme reductionism." --Metascience
About the Author
Manfred Eigen won the Nobel Prize in 1967 for his research on very rapid chemical reactions. Director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen since 1964, his interests are now focused on a rigorous exploration of the origins of life.
Table of Contents
PART I. "What was Life?" - Theme and Variations
1. Life is Historical Reality
2. Can the Historical Origin of Life be Reconstructed?
3. Complexity as a Physical Problem
4. How does Information Arise?
5. Life is a Dynamic State of Matter Organized by Information
6. Is there a Principle of Order in Biological Systems?
7. Evolution Means the Optimization of Functional Efficiency
8. What are the Natural Prerequisites for the Origin of Life?
9. The Ladder of Organizational Levels
10. Unceasing Creation
PART II. Vignettes from Molecular Biology
1. Sequence Comparison (Statistical Geometry)
2. Sequence Comparison (Examples)
3. How Old are the First Life Forms?
4. Nucleic Acids as Information Stores: The Transition from Chemistry to Biology
5. Structural Forms of the Nucleic Acids
6. The Proteins: Molecular Purveyors of Cellular Function
7. Instruction: Copying, Reading, and Translation
8. The Genetic Code
9. Quasi-Species: The Cloning of Mutant Distributions
10. Quasi-Species: The Structure of Mutant Distributions
11. Experiments in Evolution
12. Sequence Space
13. Viral Infection
14. Hypercycles and Comparements
15. Recombinant DNA
PART III.
Resume: Darwin is Dead - Long Live Darwin!
Epilogue
Notes and Literature on the History of Molecular Biology