Life Ascending

Title: Life Ascending – The Ten Greatest Inventions of Evolution

Author: Nick Lane

Publisher: Profile Books 2010 (First published: 2009)

ISBN: 9781861978189

Pages: 344

This book showcases a chemist’s eye view of evolution, thereby affording another perspective to the charming story of life. In a survey of the history of life on earth, the author comes out with ten events, or rather inventions in his parlance, that thoroughly changed the course of life and diverted it into the highway leading to complex organisms like mammals and men. Development of the complex cell, sight, power of movement and sex constitute a few of the characteristics identified by the author. With his judicious selection of parameters, Nick Lane has presented a well balanced picture of the state of things. Being a scholar of biochemistry who has authored many books and articles on the subject, Lane excels in portraying what he knows best in flowery detail. He was awarded the Biochemical Society Award in 2015 for his achievements and the book itself has bagged many honours.

Picking out ten identifying features from a bewildering array of organisms with infinitely variable features is a herculean task, that can’t be undertaken without a solid structure for the investigation and proper methods of analysis. The author identifies four criteria for selecting the phenomena that is included in the text. The first one is quite obvious – it should be revolutionary in function, taking place on a global scale so as to affect the growth of life as a whole. Another benchmark is that the phenomenon must still be existing. There is indeed no point in singing the praise of a creature that was extinct long ago because it lacked the ability to adapt to changing environment. Evolution by natural selection alone is taken to be the third factor in which cultural selection is ruled out as it came rather late in the history of life on this planet. In a discussion rooted on the basics of emergence of life, anything other than natural selection need not be considered. The final parameter selected by Nick Lane is that the evolutionary development should be iconic. This term is rather vague, even though it is justified in the text. An iconic transformation is bound to be revolutionary too, and vice versa. So, what is the difference between it and the first one? Whatever may be Lane’s arguments to the contrary, readers get an impression that the fourth point is a redundant one.

Secrets behind the origin of life are presented from a chemist’s point of view. One important aspect visible here is the scrapping of Darwin’s famous idea of the ‘primordial soup’, the warm puddle that was thought to be the cradle of life. Darwinists posit that life originated in those primordial pools of warm water in which amino acids and proteins abounded. Lane brings up the idea of under-sea hydrothermal vents as the nursery of life on earth. These vents are the locations of the outpouring of hot metals and minerals from the mantle to sea floor. A few such structures have been studied in detail and the prodigious amount of energy and complex organic molecules detected around the periphery of these vents makes the idea highly plausible. But readers should keep one thing firmly in their minds. Darwin’s suggestion of the warm pool does not constitute an integral part of the theory of evolution, which is silent on the question of the origin of life. What Darwin proposed was a probable mechanism for the interpolation of his theory to the origins of life itself. Changing the warm pool with the hot vent does not in any way affect the applicability of Darwinian evolution, because once life was afoot (in the figurative way, of course), the further course of action proceeded along the evolutionary pathways. There is no confusion here, but the author could have specifically explained this.

The book attempts an overkill on the issue of how eukaryotic cells (having a nucleus inside the cell as opposed to bacteria which don’t possess one) evolved from their more primitive bacterial ancestors. Bacterial body structure is very conservative, we don’t see much change in them even at present since they are supremely adapted to the environment to which they belong. But eukaryotes change rapidly. They were the harbingers of higher life forms. All mammals belong to this family. So, the problem addressed by Lane is the origin of the eukaryotic cell. Evolution by natural selection is the obvious option, but the speed of mutation attested by microbiology is too slow, in fact, so slow that the entire tenure of the earth is not sufficient to cover the development of a nucleus inside the cell. The alternative is a fanciful postulate going by the name of ‘fateful encounter theory’. In a nutshell, when two dissimilar cells come near by chance, one cell gobbles up the other, turning it into its nucleus in the long term. The event is purported to be so fortuitous that it might have occurred only once! Such a remote probability for the origin of all higher forms of life doesn’t augur well for Darwinian evolution. If it had to seek help from a very, very improbable event, how is it going to be functionally different from creation? But on two other occasions, such gobbling up is taken for granted without much nitpicking as in the case of photosynthesizing cells that incorporated cyanobacteria to do their trick with light and ordinary cells accommodating mitochondria for fulfilling their energy demands, even though mitochondria are deemed to be independent bacteria prior to acquiring tenancy inside the cells. Are they too deemed to be fateful encounters? The book doesn’t provide an answer to this vital question.

A thought provoking discussion on the meaning of consciousness and its physical significance is provided. Speculations on ending the exclusion of physical forces and particles in describing mind’s action are intriguing. It may be that a new form of quantum interactions not yet identified is behind the working of the mind. This is definitely a bit forcing the issue, as the appeal to undetected quantum fluctuations to explain a point is the hallmark of charlatanism. Another inspiring description is about aging and death. Even though a bit counter intuitive, Lane identifies death as one of the ten inventions made by evolution in its progress at creating complex life forms. If the author is to be believed, a great deal of research is going on to uncover the secrets of aging and death. Early researchers had identified

free radicals and antioxidants as the players in this great game, but later research is more ambivalent on the issue. Leak of free radicals from the cells’ mitochondria is the hot cake now, and a gene has been identified among the Japanese which slows down this process. The healthy consequence is longer and healthier lives for those fortunate enough to have this mutation in their genome. However, the effect of this gene is revealed only much later after sexual maturity and hence there is no selective advantage for them. The author expects widespread improvement in man’s healthy lifespan in around two decades as a result of the study going on in the field. A healthy optimism, indeed!

As the author is a renowned biochemist, the presentation is geared more towards the mechanism of chemical reactions in focus. Emotions, for him, are not exactly the ineffable experience we feel, but the result of a group of molecules combining with others, in the brain. The relevance of the book is attested to by the up to date information available in it. While most of the books in the genre fall short of the year 1980, Lane has included content right after the year 2000 as well. This is the advantage of being a front runner in the field, which the author is. His infatuation with hydrothermal vents in the early part of the book appears to be verging on the intimidating. The physical layout of the book is not very appealing to the reader, with its very small text that is a burden to read. Also, it assumes a good deal of prior understanding of biological concepts to fully appreciate the content. Statements like ‘a vast number of unicellular protists are facultatively sexual’ (p.132) frankly flew way above my head. The book is gifted with a good index and a nice set of illustrations and photographs.

The book is recommended for the serious reader.

Rating: 2 Star