Book review: “Life Ascending”
Posted by Imran on 26/07/2009
Science can be innaccessible. It can be seen as a series of facts and theories about the world, results of experiments, and an attempt to distil the beauty of nature down into a series of numbers.
But in Life Ascending, Nick Lane reminds us that it doesn’t need to be that way. Life Ascending is a really quite brilliant book about evolution, which has two major things going for it. Firstly, evolution is in itself a story. Secondly, the author knows that science is only accidentally about numbers and facts and figures – it’s really the way that humans try to understand the world.
Lane makes his book a zippy sightseeing tour through ten of the greatest inventions in evolution, and as much a narrative of how the ideas themselves evolved (that includes the story of some of the people behind them) as anything else. It has to be said that there’s a good smattering of biochemistry in there, but if you have vague memories of ATP from GCSE science, it’s worth persisting with it – the payback’s good.
His first chapter, on how life first coalesced out of the primordial muck nearly 4 billion years ago, gives you a bit of existential vertigo. The step-by-step delve into how minerals and chemicals (when you add a bit of heat) might have become the very earliest living cells, almost by chance but almost inevitably, puts the arguments over the rest of evolution into perspective.
If he can persuade you that the very first jump – that big leap from chemistry to biology – was no epic shift at all, but a series of completely believable small steps somewhere in the limbo between life and death, then the other big questions in evolution don’t seem quite so intimidating.
But, of course, Lane gives you a brief intro to them. His chapter on photosynthesis explains how the planet’s then-dominant lifeform did its inadvertant best to kill off the rest of them with a poisonous gas – oxygen. He talks you through how animals first chanced upon the equipment they needed to move and see – already present in their own array of proteins, because their algae-like ancestors used them to photosynthesise and put their cells together.
There’s an intriguing chapter about the latest thinking on how the first complex cells – like the ones that we, plants and fungi have, containing a nucleus and various organelles – might actually have been a mashup of cells from the two other great lineages of life which predate us, the bacteria and the archaea. We don’t seem to have conclusively evolved from one or the other, and there’s evidence to show that we’re a weird hybrid of the two.
Lane takes in DNA, sex, and warm blood along the way, even having a go at explaining consciousness before ending – appropriately enough – with the evolution of death, and how we might work around it.
But all the way through – and emphasised in the epilogue – the author makes clear that the science he has covered is humanity’s best guess so far. Borrowing from Jacob Bronowski’s haunting treatise from Auschwitz, he reminds us that science is a very human form of knowledge; “We are always at the brink of the known… Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible”.
And thanks to one of humanity’s great inventions, the internet, here’s that short Bronowski clip. In a dirty pond he stands, literally, in the ashes of his ancestors, before pulling up a handful of mud. Science doesn’t destroy beauty and humanity – it’s misplaced certainty which does that.
