The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language

By John Maynard Smith

Book Overview

When John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary published The Major Transitions in Evolution, it was seen as a major work in biology. Nature hailed it as a book of "grand and daunting sweep.... A splendid and rewarding tour de force." And New Scientist wrote that it captured "the essence of modern biology," calling it "an extremely significant book which, as a bonus, is very readable."
Now, in The Origins of Life, Maynard Smith and Szathmary have completely rewritten Transitions to bring their ideas to a wider audience of general readers. Here is a brilliant, state-of-the-art account of how life evolved on earth, focusing primarily on six major transitions--dramatic breakthroughs in the way that information was passed between generations. The authors offer illuminating explorations of the origin of life itself, the arrival of the first cells with nuclei, the first reproduction by sexual means, the appearance of multicellular plants and animals, the emergence of cooperation and of animal societies, and the birth of language.
The Origins of Life represents the thinking of two leading scientists on questions that engage us all--how life began and how it gradually evolved from tiny invisible cells into whales and trees and human beings.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0198504934
• ISBN13: 9780198504931
• Release Date: May 1999
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 190 Pages
• Weight: 1.03 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

An expert account of the major steps in evolution

This can be regarded as a more accessible version of The Major Transitions in Evolution, an earlier book by the same authors addressed to professional biologists. It is more accessible, and more readable, certainly, but it still demands some effort and attention on the part of the reader. As the authors candidly admit in their preface, they "fear it will not be an easy read", because "it contains a lot of facts, and a lot of new ideas". This is a fair assessment, but readers who do make the effort can expect to learn a considerable amount of modern biology from two of its most respected authorities. Charles Darwin largely ducked the question of the origin of life, taking the realistic view that it was too difficult to handle at the time he was writing, and contented himself with accounting for how it could have evolved once it had started. John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, writing a century and a half later, could hardly avoid this problem, and their book starts at the very beginning by trying to define what it means to be alive and to explain how the first living organisms could have emerged from non-living inorganic matter. For them this was a matter of combining the chemistry of the production and use of energy with the chemistry of storing the information needed for producing a new organism identical with its parent. Here they are confronted with a dilemma, the "error catastrophe": if the first organisms were too small they could not have fulfilled all the chemical functions they needed; if they were too big they could have reproduced themselves accurately. For a long time the gap between too small and too big seemed unbridgeable, but a possible solution was found in the realization that the first enzymes were probably not proteins (as they nearly all are today) but nucleic acids, which could combine their good capacity for storing information with a rather feeble capacity for catalysing chemical reactions. The remainder of the book presents the subsequent steps that were needed to proceed from these humble (but by no means simple) beginnings to the great complexity of the living world of today. How did the transition occur from a world in which nucleic acids did everything to one with the present-day division of labour between nucleic acids for information and proteins for catalysis? How did the first multicellular organisms arise from unicellular parents? How did animal societies evolve? How did language originate (apparently only in humans)? Maynard Smith and Szathmáry have interesting and important things to say about all of these questions, and others, including, in the middle of the book, a masterly discussion of the difficult question of sexual reproduction: why did it arise, and, especially difficult, why is it maintained in the face of what appear to be obvious advantages of virgin birth, or parthenogenesis? It is not too difficult to think of small advantages in sexual reproduction, but that is not enough, because the adva

Non-specialist version of Major Transitions in Evolution

As stated in the preface, this book presents to a general readership the same ideas as the authors' 1995 book "The Major Transitions in Evolution." I found it still challenging, but richly rewarding. The most interesting questions in evolution deal with the evolution of new levels of organization. The authors identify only eight such transitions starting from cooperating collections of replicating molecules up through multicellular organisms, colonies of ants and bees, and finally human societies with language. Anyone interested in the question of how cooperation evolved in human societies needs to also understand how cooperation evolved in the other seven transitions. This appears to be the definitive work on that subject that is accessible to a non-specialist.

Information transmission from genes to memes

Readers cruising through the wealth of books on evolution that have appeared in recent years will see one name [after Darwin] appearing almost universally. Either found in the text or the Bibliography, the name of John Maynard Smith stands ubiquitous. There's a good reason for such respect - Maynard Smith is both a capable scientist and strong presenter of science. This book, brief as it is, stands out as a prime example of his skilled writing hand. His collaborator, Eors Szathmary an Hungarian chemist, has clearly provided a wealth of resource information on many aspects of how life's mechanisms determined the path of evolution of early life. This is their second association, and it's a splendid result of the merger of two disciplines.This work, like their previous book, puts to rest the idea that evolution by natural selection is a 'group' or species phenomenon. Evolution works at individual levels. An animal, cell or even a gene - how it operates, survives and replicates. For all these elements to function successfully and pass their behaviours on to succeeding generations, a wealth of mechanisms must occur without serious hitch. Maynard Smith and Szathmary take us through these biological steps with unsurpassed clarity. Yet with all this wealth of detail, the reader finds nothing obscure or confusing in their descriptions.This book starts with descriptions of attempts to understand how life started. Now that it is understand that life's history is but a bit less than the existence of our planet, the beginnings of life must be a chemical phenomenon. Maynard Smith and Szathmary show how these reactions occurred and how they originated the steps leading to the complex life forms sharing the globe with us today. If their text wasn't clear enough [and it definitely is that] the accompanying line drawings spell out graphically how chemistry drove, and is driving, life's forces. Those seeking a wealth of information on various species will be disappointed. What this pair superbly depict are the mechanisms uniform over all life.Discussions of evolution cannot avoid addressing that creature who considers all life to have been created to ultimately produce it - the human being. The pair depart from their basic concept here by addressing human society. And rightly so. The ability of humans to modify their environment utilize powers that overcome the chemical basis by which we live. This ability rests on the use of language to convey ideas. No other animal possesses this capacity and the authors conclude this work with some ideas about the future course of human evolution and the role language will play in it. The major factor will be Dawkins' idea of the meme. They see memes as a Lamarckian element in human culture, guiding the path of our ongoing development. Clearly, a required companion volume to this book is Susan Blackmore's THE MEME MACHINE.This is a superb summation of evolution's workings and

Transitions model is fascinating

This short, stunning book is at least two books in one. It tells the latest version of the story of how life arose and evolved. And it explicates the authors' model of evolution as composed of "major transitions" of which they discern and dissect eight. These transitions, of which an example is the transition from RNA as double duty gene and enzyme to the specialized use of DNA and protein, make an intriguing model around which to explicate various mechanisms of life. "Origins" in the title, however, is confusing; it is less about the beginnings of life than life's history of originating new structures. It moves quickly through the latest findings supplemented by plausibility arguments.

Best sumation of evolution I have ever seen

This shows how the mechanisms of evolution work from the first creation of self replicating compounds all the way to the complex, thinking, animal that we call humans. Where there are "missing links" this book shows by either example or by plausible process how these changes probably took place. After reading this it makes one wonder why we do not see how the universe compells the existence of life just as much as it is obiviously hostile to it; that the birth of life is just as inevitable as the resulting death.