She Has Her Mother’s Laugh

Title: She Has Her Mother’s Laugh – The Powers, Perversions and Potential of Heredity
Author: Carl Zimmer
Publisher: Picador, 2018 (First)
ISBN: 9781509818549
Pages: 656

Heredity is a powerful tool with which life sustains and propagates itself on earth. Even though its effects were clear to every society, the methods by which it is transferred across generations came to light only in the twentieth century. With the discovery of genes and unwinding the mysteries of DNA, mankind basked in the tremendous potential the knowledge offered to enhance the wellbeing of people – and, by corollary, causing unforeseen consequences if the technology was not responsibly handled. Genes are the blessing and the curse that our ancestors bestowed on us. However, science identified many other factors that are equally crucial to the development of humans as genes. This book covers all these channels in excellent detail and provides a comprehensive view of genetic research. The single most important idea it gives off is that inheritance is a broad concept which propagates through DNA (what is usually called nature), environment (nurture), epigenetic (transfer of some acquired traits) and by teaching the young (culture). Even though these are quite diverse, a little consideration would show that the benefits it conveys to a living being are broadly of the same nature. Carl Zimmer is an American popular science writer, blogger, columnist, and journalist who specializes in the topics of evolution, parasites and heredity. He has authored many books.

The book provides a good overview of the study of heredity beginning from Charles V, the Habsburg emperor, to plant and animal breeding in subsequent centuries. Generations of interbreeding in the royal line resulted in specific genetic features such as a deformed jaw (later called the Habsburg Jaw) among the princes. Their overall health was very fragile too. Things got moving when Darwin appeared on the scene. ‘Origin of Species’ was one of the most influential books ever written. Darwin could not explain the biology behind why individuals varied and how traits are copied to the next generation. He believed that a trait acquired in life could be passed down to future generations. We read about Gregor Mendel and the birth of the concept of genes. Hugo de Vries discovered in the year Darwin died that every cell contained invisible particles that are responsible for passing traits from one generation to the next. He called them pangenes which was later shortened to genes.

When it was established that traits could be transferred to another generation, racism suggested the possibility that the white race was at the pinnacle of human evolution. Even among the whites, the Nordic stock was deemed to be superior. Whites suffering from genetic diseases ranked further lower in the hierarchy with blacks and coloured people going down to the bottom rung. A new branch of study called eugenics thought of ways to cleanse and thereby better the human stock. By the dawn of the twentieth century in the US, eugenicists wanted to improve the human stock by selective breeding and preventing people with genetic disabilities from having children. Across the ocean in Germany, it was copied by Nazis into a devilish strategy. It first targeted people with disorders (usually poor intellectual capacity) to be sterilized. Hitler established a set of racial hygiene laws. In the first year after establishing hereditary health courts, Germany sterilized 64,000 people and by 1944, the tally went up to 400,000 including the mentally ill, the deaf, gypsies and Jews. In 1939, Nazis started killing off people with hereditary disabilities. It is estimated that they eliminated 200,000 lives. In the US, the craze for eugenics sailed in the inverse ratio as its progress in Germany. American objectors of eugenics repudiated it as bad science and bad policy. The Eugenics Record Office was shut down in 1939. Eugenics is down for the moment, but it may spring back to life if a powerful backer comes to its rescue. How many of you did think of Donald Trump while reading these lines?

Zimmer gets into the question of whether a characteristic is heritable in the true sense of the term, that is, whether an organism will definitely suffer the consequences if a specific gene is present or missing in its genome. The gist of the discussion is that the linkage is too complicated to decide beyond doubt. Colour of eyes is a heritable trait. Citing the example of a genetic disease called PKU, the author argues that it showed a way to attack the idea that our intelligence is fixed by the genes. This is an unfortunate example for the argument however. The brains of these people get stunted and they end up with very low intelligence like a toddler. This is because the gene prevents the dissociation of the amino acid phenylalanine obtained from food which eventually reaches the brain and damages the nerve cells. If no treatment is made, it will lead to devastating intellectual disability. But if the infant is given a diet low in that chemical, the symptoms disappear. What this example proves is that genes are extremely important but in some cases, some alleviating measures can be found. This does not support the author’s logic that genes are not that critical. Then he takes up the case of height as a heritable trait. Here, the dependence on genes is as high as 86 per cent, but it is strongly linked to nutrition also. After each generation, the world is getting taller, not just in the developed countries. South Korean women grew eight inches taller in average height in a century, while Iranian men got taller by six and a half inches. The book then concludes that intelligence depends on several physical factors and genes that no direct relationship can be drawn. Studies held in Scotland suggest that lower intelligence test scores raised people’s risk of death. It’s possible that people who score higher may be better able to understand information their doctors give them. Genes still account for only a small percentage of the variation in people’s test scores. As with height, it has not been able to definitely prove which genes cause the effect to occur.

Race or racial purity is a concept which is associated with the genome of people constituting a society. Zimmer makes an extraordinary effort to conclude that race is not supported by DNA. He observes that the concept of race is not a feature of the natural world beyond our social experience. But this looks uncannily similar to the wokeish canard that gender is a social construct rather than biological. Hence, take it with a pinch of salt! Up until the middle ages, writers never used the word in the present meaning. Racial laws were common in the US as recently as half a century ago. The Racial Integrity Act passed in 1924 barred interracial marriages. It defined the white people as those whose blood is entirely white (of course, not in colour) having no known, demonstrable or ascertainable admixture of the blood of another race. This law would stand till 1967 when a couple’s wedding was annulled on its basis. They appealed to the Supreme Court which struck down the law. The author argues that if races were biologically significant, most of the genetic diversity should exist between races rather than between individuals of the same race. In the 1950s, Richard Lewontin made a study of a wide range of human populations which found that genetic differences between races was only 6.3 per cent, whereas the diversity within populations was 85.4 per cent. Even with this data, it somehow feels that something important and which can tip the scales has not been told. Since the subject is contentious, it is understandable that authors would prefer to bet on the side of the politically correct option. There is a brief analysis on contagious cancer, which was a scientific secret hiding in plain sight for two centuries. Eight cases were identified so far and they would not be the last. In the case of humans, the documented cases show a single leap (from one person to another and not more). It may be that our immune systems are so strong that cancers never get the chance to evolve into parasites that can leap from host to host.

The birth of a living being is something which is looked at with awe and wonder even by committed rationalists. This book furnishes a good discussion on how cell division takes place when a foetus is developed, clearly articulating the intricacies of the process and the pure amazement at one cell replicating to hundreds of types of totally different cells in different parts of the body. There is a startling narrative on human chimeras where the genome and proteins contain traces of another person, usually a twin, whose genetic particles get mixed up in utero. If two embryos of the same sex are involved, it’s much easier for them to go unnoticed. In the other cases, the blood of the person may carry cells of a different blood type. A case is listed where a person possessed male and female sexual organs. In the case of animals, an example is described where it carried the genetic imprint of two fathers. Obviously, this possibility is not examined for human cases. We also read about unusual instances of a mother’s DNA not matching her children. This happens when the mother was a tetragametic chimera (where one embryo develops into a person combining that of a should-have-been-twin). It is now known that foetuses can pass cells to mothers and vice versa, whose effects can last for several years after birth. Women who had given birth to boys carried cells with Y chromosomes. This book pushes the envelope of genetic research to the end of the 2010s. It looks like a whiff of Lamarckism is returning to science under the lofty title of ‘transgenerational epigenetic inheritance’.

The author unveils a chapter in the life of the famous writer Pearl S. Buck who is the author of the masterpiece The Good Earth. It was one of the four books with which I started my reading career. In fact, I’m not sure how many times I have read this superb novel. It was news to me that Buck started writing fiction just to save enough money to settle her mentally stunted daughter in a good institution. The child was suffering from PKU. There is a good discussion on gene therapies on somatic and germ lines such as CRISPR and mitochondrial, fully exposing the ethical and scientific concerns associated with them. The apprehension that this may lead to a new kind of eugenics is also very strong. In vitro gametogenesis offers the dizzying possibility of transforming on ordinary skin cell into a sperm or egg from which a baby can take shape. The author displays an unnecessary wokeish bias in the last chapter in accusing the whites of inheriting wealth way more than the blacks and suggests that this may be legally stopped. In a second case, he suggests that instead of using for disease eradication, CRISPR should be employed for saving endangered species, but he does not consider who would fund such research. This is also a wrong appreciation of the priorities.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Beasts Before Us

Title: Beasts Before Us – The Untold Story of Mammal Origins and Evolution

Author: Elsa Panciroli

Publisher: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2023 (First)

ISBN: 9781472983985

Pages: 320

 

We are really awed by our planet’s collision with an asteroid at the end of Cretaceous period 65 million years ago when dinosaurs became extinct. The demise of this predator group prepared the ground for mammals to explore and conquer all possible niches on earth. As a result, mammals grew in size, became more and more diurnal and won the competition for scarce resources. Eventually, a bipedal ape which developed a large brain size took over the world and assumed nature’s role in making several species go extinct. This has been the accepted lore regarding the development of mammals – and by corollary, of humans too. This book presents a different view, one in which it is conclusively shown that mammals existed and to a certain extent were spread over the face of the earth much earlier than thought. What it paints is the picture of a see-saw. Mammals proliferated in the Permian but were seriously put back by the mass extinction at the end of the era. Reptiles, which include dinosaurs, took prominence in the Triassic period which followed it. Then came the asteroid at the end of Cretaceous and mammals again held sway which still continues. This interesting story is told by Elsa Panciroli, who is a Scottish paleontologist who studies the evolution and ecology of extinct animals. She is an experienced science communicator and has written for mass-media houses.

 

The author discusses on the so called ‘success’ of a species in biological parlance. In fact, this is not to be confused with the dominance of a species on others. The term ‘success’ generally means only that it could propagate itself over time in an uninterrupted lineage. In that sense, all species living today are successful up to now. Moreover, while there are only 5,500 species of mammals, there are 18,000 species of bird and 35,000 of fish. That’s just vertebrates. There are over one and a half million species of beetles. So, who is the most successful? This should be kept in mind while making tall claims such as this was the ‘age of mammals’. The only thing is that mammals include the largest vertebrates and we are disproportionately focused on size. However, they originated much earlier than the current consensus. Paleontology suggests that they arose 350 million years ago in the supercontinent of Pangaea. Around 300 million years ago, mammals parted ways with reptiles. Mammals did not evolve from reptiles; they only shared a common ancestor. The belief that mammals followed reptiles in dominance of the world became prevalent as most of the early fossil evidence found in Europe came from secondary rocks and belonged to reptiles. After a catastrophe, they were wiped out and mammals appeared in the tertiary age. The first fossil of a mammal ever found was the jaw of an opossum-like animal discovered in 1820 in secondary rocks. With more evidence coming from all over the world, the scientific world has now conceded that mammals existed and flourished much earlier than the age of reptiles.

 

The author narrates personal experiences of prospecting for fossils in her native Scotland, Russia and South Africa. Mongolian expeditions of the pioneer paleontologist Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska are given in some detail as she had obtained the largest collection of Cretaceous mammals. The fossils demonstrated that the age spanning 250 million years before the collapse of dinosaurs which was the first age of mammals was ignored by scholars for a long time. Early mammals like pelycosaurs looked like reptiles. We continue to see descriptions like mammal-like reptiles to describe them. From among the ranks of the pelycosaurs, a new group emerged which developed the key traits we associate with modern mammals including warmer blood and higher energy lifestyles. They also established – for the first time – an ecosystem which we still recognize today as based on large numbers of herbivores fed upon by a smaller cohort of carnivores. These cyanodonts are the ancestors of mammals which looked more like compact dogs with increasingly enlarged and complex jaw muscles. This change is linked to chewing with more complex teeth. At the same time in the Late Permian, 252 million years ago, reptiles and other tetrapods were also proliferating. Some of them had also evolved into giants. They would get their lebensraum when mammals were most hardly hit by the end-Permian extinction event.

 

The Permian extinction was a great cataclysm in the life of biota on our planet. Around 250 million years ago, volcanic activity peaked in the region which is now in Russia which threw up volcanic ash and greenhouse gases in huge quantities as to alter the global climate for millions of years. Three quarters of life were wiped out and the next age – the Triassic – began with a slate wiped clean. Reptiles and dinosaurs gained prominence and grew to large body sizes. But the mammals were not always at the receiving end however. We have found evidence of carnivorous mammals of this era that ate baby dinosaurs for food. In late-Triassic, little mammals the size of a mouse spread across the globe. These little creatures are thought to be the ancestors of us all. Warm-bloodedness helped early mammals to become nocturnal and escape the unwelcome attention of larger predators. The coldness of night is no barrier to an animal carrying its own heating system. Most of the mammals (except humans, of course) have only mediocre ability to distinguish vivid colours and their eyes are more attuned to see shapes in the dark. It is surmised that humans and primates re-acquired the ability to see colours through a mutation in the genes, but their ability is still a far cry from the glorious visual world of birds. Because they adapted as nocturnal animals, the sense of smell and sound greatly developed in mammals.

 

Whether intended or not, this book not only fails to discredit Lamarck’s use and disuse theory as the reason for causing genetic changes in organisms, but on at least two occasions, it lends a gentle support to it. In a footnote on page 31, the author claims that ‘the characteristics that were used would be passed on, and those that weren’t would atrophy which isn’t all that far off the mark’. This is indeed far off the mark. Lamarck’s theory stayed afloat in the pre-genetics era when the mechanism of inheriting a parent’s characteristic by the offspring was unknown. I’m sure the author is well aware of this and obliquely suggests natural selection as the mechanism that helped propagate features advantageous to survive in a particular habitat, but some readers may get confused here and think that Lamarck’s idea must have something in it. Another argument on the same line is the adaptation of herbivores to digest plant matter by incorporating helper bacteria colonies in their guts. Panciroli argues that microorganisms may have initially been ingested by early tetrapods when they ate some decomposing plant matter. Eventually, some of the plant-processing bacteria survived in the gut and a symbiotic relationship developed. This too is a broad statement enough to perplex a reader on how this new feature persisted in a new generation of the animal. This book introduces flowering of plants as a novel mechanism of species propagation developed around 120 million years ago that helped in mammal evolution. Earlier, pollination was limited through wind and water. Another interesting feature is the remark on ancient human bones. Analysis of the bones between the Neolithic and bronze ages (which is just yesterday by paleontological timescales covered elsewhere in the book) shows that the intense manual labour of early farming lifestyles made the average woman develop upper body strength comparable to a renowned modern athlete. Life was really hard back then..!

 

It is asserted that we are seeing a radical transformation in the study of paleontology and that is part of the reason for writing this book. Use of statistical methods to analyse big data and the routine CT scanning of fossils have opened up entirely new fields of research. In fact, Panciroli is very forceful – even to the brink of obsession – in boasting about the use of modern technology and mathematical tools used by her and her colleagues around the globe. This may be an attempt to enhance the stature of paleontology in the minds of young readers and to attract them to its study. It’d be a good exercise for the readers to look up the mentioned animals on Google as the included photographs and illustrations are totally unappealing. A real turnoff is the author’s punctilious political correctness that often leaps off the pages to sting you in the eye. She frequently flays white European bias towards discrimination of local knowledge regarding finding fossils. She credits nameless native inhabitants, than the person who described it to the world. This is mere showiness. She accuses the big names in her specialty of research of having harboured racist views on ethnicity and a misogynist perspective of history. As a successful woman typically considers herself a feminist by right, the author stresses on the contribution of earlier women in elevating paleontology to a widely respectable avenue of study. She accuses male bias in history and science and goes as far as claiming the same bias in museum specimens since we often see the peculiar features of the male displayed in such institutions! At the same time, she points out amusingly that the term ‘mammals’ applied to a wide group of animals, is not gender-neutral.

 

The book is recommended.

 

Rating: 3 Star

The Song of the Cell

Title: The Song of the Cell – An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

Author: Siddhartha Mukherjee

Publisher: Penguin Random House, 2022 (First)

ISBN: 9780670092727

Pages: 473

 

Efforts to understand the fundamental building blocks that make up the complex whole of living organisms was an exercise eagerly taken up by intellectuals in all civilizations of the world. Many intelligent guesses were put forward which could not be evaluated until the physical infrastructure for observing what is happening at the smallest levels could be developed. The invention of telescopes revolutionized astronomy and its counterpart – microscopes – opened up an unknown world before the incredulous researchers. For the first time, they began to discern an underlying uniformity in the composition of various organs within an organism and even across organisms. Following many leads found by experimenters, it was established that cells form the building blocks of life. This book is a chronicle of the discovery that all organisms, including humans, are composed of the basic units called cells and how these cooperative and organized accumulations enable aggregate traits like immunity, sentience, reproduction and cognition. It is also the story of what happens due to dysfunction leading to death and the transformative medicines that are being developed. Siddhartha Mukherjee's other books – the masterpiece ‘The Emperor of All Maladies’ and ‘The Gene’ – were reviewed earlier here.

 

Mukherjee begins by a brief survey of the ancient theories that tried to explain how life functioned. One such was vitalism which postulated a vital force that was present in all living beings as essential for birth of life. Another related idea was preformation. This speculated that microscopic shapes of adult animals reside in sperms. After fertilization with an egg, this is then expanded in size like a balloon surface does. However, cell theory demolished both these by the 1850s. Mankind woke up to a new idea which proved that cells are the basic building blocks of life. All our organs are made of cells that share many similarities like a membrane wall, metabolism, waste processing, nucleus and portals for entry and exit of chemicals. The instructions for creating new cells and for synthesizing proteins are contained in the DNA stored inside the nucleus. Even though the same genome is encoded in each cell, only parts of it are enabled in each organ. The physiology of an organism is the result of chemical reactions happening inside the cells. Likewise, the pathology of an organism is the outcome of another set of reactions which do not contribute to the well-being of the cell and the organism. This cellular targeting is the cause of why medicines succeed in curing the individual. Every potent antibiotic recognizes some molecular component of human cells that is different from a bacterial cell. Penicillin killed the bacterial enzymes that synthesized its cell wall, resulting in bacteria with ‘bullet holes’ in their cell membranes. This helped only because the human cell wall was different from a bacteria’s. But cancer cells share most of the features of normal cells and that’s why destroying them is so difficult and normal tissue is also affected as collateral damage in chemotherapy.

 

Technology has been able to probe deep into outer space and watch the formation and death of star systems in distant galaxies where light itself takes several years to reach. Considering the depth of information – at least, many viable hypotheses – on astronomy, it is astonishing as well as slightly embarrassing that we know very little about cells, on which our body and very life is totally dependent. The author gives a summary of how they originated. The origin of eukaryotic cells – those with a nucleus, like all animal cells – took place around two billion years ago. This is said to be ‘a strange, inexplicable turn for evolution’ (p.71) and also ‘an evolutionary mystery’. It has left only the scarcest of fingerprints of its ancestry or lineage. This is thought to be a black hole at the heart of biology. The growth of cells, by a process called cell division, is also a complex and mysterious operation. It includes a least understood phase called G2, where the division temporarily halts and checks for major errors in DNA duplication that may lead to catastrophic mutations. In such a case, it aborts the process but allows small mutations; otherwise there won’t be any mechanism available for evolution to operate. ‘Black hole’, ‘mysterious’, ‘least understood’, ‘inexplicable’ are all terms that make the opponents of evolution exuberant with joy. But wait, the working of the cell is so complex that they are not even wrong! A serious and fruitful study on cells developed only by mid-twentieth century and the field is still open for revolutionary discoveries.

 

As we read more and more of this book’s contents, we get more and more astonished at the ingenious inner working of the cell. Such is the organization and direction going on at the microscopic level! Frankly speaking, if somebody is led to think that this entire set up must be the creation of a superior intelligence of creator, they can’t be blamed outright. But as you delve deeper, chinks begin to appear and what is most evident is behind the veil is imperfection at every stage of the cellular process. Otherwise, we won’t die, won’t age or even get sick. Perhaps, we may not even be born! The process of blood clotting after a wound illustrates this in detail. Clotting is orchestrated by a special protein called von Willebrand factor (vWf) which circulates in blood as well as located under the cells that line blood vessels. Injury to the vessel caused by the wound exposes the vWf protein. This prompts the other vWf to gather around the injury. A cascade of changes is then launched which leads to the synthesis of another protein called fibrin. This forms a mesh on which the platelets are trapped which forms the clot and stops blood flowing out. So much is perfect design, but the incompetence manifests itself later. As a person ages, cholesterol-rich plaques are formed inside the blood vessels which hang on to the walls of arteries and stick to heart’s valves. When such a plaque accidentally ruptures or breaks, it is unfortunately sensed as a wound. The cascade to heal wounds is then activated. Platelets rush to the site to heal the wound and results in blockade and heart attack. This leads to the conclusion that if life is thought to be the handiwork of a creator, he is certainly intelligent, but not perfect. And this violates the first principle of religion about omnipotence.

 

This book examines each functional subunit of the human body and explains how it functions at the cellular level. The heart, brain, kidney, liver, blood, spleen, pancreas and neurons are handled in sufficient detail. I’m afraid some of it may be a little too thick for readers uninitiated into serious biology like me. However, these chapters are treasure chests of a lot of information and learning. Most developments in cell biology are surprisingly modern. The physiology of T-cells, an essential part of immunity, was identified only half a century ago. The thymus gland which produced it was till then thought to be a vestigial detritus of evolution with no useful function. How the immune system distinguishes between the body’s own cells and foreign invaders is a miraculous process. Mukherjee emphasizes this as it is highly relevant in cancer treatment which is his specialization. The present state of cancer therapy is handicapped by the immune system’s inability to distinguish cancer cells as something hostile to the body’s well-being.

 

The subtitle of the book mentions ‘new human’ whose potentialities are at once exciting and a bit terrifying. This involves genetic manipulation to alter the destiny of humans before birth or when afflicted with disease. Early experiments are now on to search for specific disease-causing genes at the embryo stage and alter them to benign versions before implanting the embryo into the uterus. Needless to say, this is still in its infancy and there’s lot of scope for regulatory supervision. In some cases of cancer in grown up persons, modifying the genome of specific immune cells or therapeutic agents to zero in on the cancer cells and sparing healthy cells is technically feasible. Another aspect of the new-human paradigm is the full scale development of stem cells which is a special kind of cell which can be used to create any type of cell. Normally, a skin cell produces another skin cell and a muscle cell creates a muscle cell. However, a stem cell can be programmed to create any of these. The book records a recent experiment in which a normal cell could be converted to a stem cell. This will greatly assist in developing organs outside the body that can then be used to replace defective ones inside. Mukherjee also stresses on the dynamic equilibrium which pervades at the level of cells which is called homeostasis. Cells die continuously and new ones take their place. Death is a relative balance between forces of decay and rejuvenation. If you tip the balance in one direction, you fall off the edge. Or in other words, the moment you stop growing, you start dying.

 

The book is divided into many parts dealing with fundamental aspects of cells like origin, reproduction, anatomy and metabolism and then goes on to explain each in some detail. Lot of footnotes is included which the author urges us to read carefully. Mukherjee, himself of Indian ethnicity, freely uses Indian philosophical, metaphysical and even mythological symbols to illustrate abstract concepts happening at the level of cells. This is a welcome innovation in books of this genre. This book introduces many advanced ideas which must be well understood by the readers in order to follow the argument intelligently. It must be confessed that this is a bit tedious and there are some pages on which it feels like a text book than a volume of popular science. Still, it must not be missed in one’s reading career. It is also suffused throughout with sublime wonder at the intrinsic functioning of the cell which the readers readily share. However, the illustrations are not at all attractive as many of them are reproduced from the original papers which were intended for a scholarly audience. This should be simplified and made arresting with good graphics in future editions. The author and publisher must seriously consider this suggestion.

 

The book is highly recommended.

 

Rating: 4 Star

Explaining Life through Evolution

Title: Explaining Life through Evolution

Author: Prosanta Chakrabarty

Publisher: Penguin Random House, 2022 (First)

ISBN: 9780670095100

Pages: 232     

 

We are said to be living in a post-truth era where truth is not deemed something absolute. People accept anything as truth which they wish it to be. Social media makes a celebrity’s truth the same for all his followers. However, these are philosophical concepts open to interpretation at many levels and ways. I don’t know how scientific concepts which are always true can be reconciled with the concept of post-truth I mentioned above. Touching an electrically live object causes a painful experience is a proposition that is true whether you believe that there is such a thing as electricity or not. But facts in natural sciences cannot be expressed in such outright terms even though a large number of researchers have studied the phenomena and are convinced of its merit. Evolution is one such fact of the development of life on this planet. Since it runs counter to the fundamental postulate of Abrahamic religions on the creation of life, there is widespread opposition to it. We have seen similar resistance in the past when the Church opposed Galileo’s heliocentric theory and know what has come out of it eventually. Till that time, evolution will continue to be resisted by believers who propose comic alternatives such as Creation or Intelligent Design. This book is intended to explain the topic of evolution ‘to anyone with an open mind to learning’. It is also meant to be a tool to aid those who themselves want to explain the topic to others. Prosanta Chakrabarty is an evolutionary biologist at Louisiana State University where he is a professor and curator. He was born in Canada and brought up in the USA.

 

Creationists often ridicule evolution as ‘just’ a theory of the development of life. The author accepts that but adds the clarification that a theory in science is an overarching term that has stood the test of time. A theory is often interchangeably used with ‘law’. But in everyday parlance, ‘theory’ is something questionable that remains to be proven. It is this misconception which serves as a perfect opportunity for religion to teach creation and intelligent design in US schools as ‘alternatives’. Chakrabarty then explains Darwin’s ideas on what happened on earth. There is a single origin of life here. That was a huge leap forward in thinking. Natural selection is the causative mechanism to explain the diversity of all life. This idea was far ahead of its time when Darwin first introduced it. Most scientists then was of the opinion that different human races originated in distinct ways and places in the long past.

 

The book glances upon the period when Darwin’s “Origin of Species’ first appeared. Though Darwin had postulated that species groups mutate over time, he had no idea of how it actually came about. Unknown to Darwin, the ideas of genetics were just taking shape in the garden of Gregor Mendel and anything like DNA was not even dreamed of. That is the beauty and power of Darwin’s theory. Later discoveries corroborated its hypotheses and strengthened it on the face of severe criticism on the spiritual front. The zeitgeist of the time was that offspring were a mix of their parents, which is called blending inheritance. If this was true, variation would be lost in each generation due to the indiscriminate mixing. Mendel’s experiments proved this wrong and established that genetic traits are carried to future generations in discrete form rather than continuous. But Mendel did not know how variation was maintained in the gene pool. Mistakes in copying billions of DNA pairs cause mutations and change in traits. The author also explains how different groups in a species who are separated by geographical barriers change into different species in a process called speciation. Here, isolation and time is the key formula. The gene pool of separated groups will diverge through non-adaptive forces (neutral mutations, genetic drift) and adaptive forces (natural selection) due to the different environments these populations find themselves in.

 

A notable feature in religious revelations of the origin of life is that Man is the perfect creation of God. The Semitic religions claim that Man was created in God’s image. This book punches holes in this argument by highlighting evolutionary accretions in the human body that denigrates God’s talent as a craftsman, not to say of the blunders He has committed in ‘designing’ the human body. Several examples are given, of which the kneecap is one which is a troublesome set of tendons and ligaments where a ball-and-joint like the shoulder would have been a better design. The blood pressure in human body is more than other animals as we took to bipedalism later in the series and a higher pressure is required to pump against the force of gravity. But, only one coronary artery is there to supply blood to heart’s muscles to do the job. Several animals have more. Fish hearts are more foolproof that don’t get easily clogged with fat. As a land animal, we have the advantage of getting more oxygen directly from air than from water, but gas exchange is more difficult through lungs than with gills. Moreover, we use the same tubing for breathing as well as feeding with the attendant risk of choking.

 

The author has not been successful in achieving his objective of making evolution easily understandable to lay readers. But he has made it a guidebook of Wokeism by unnecessary tirades against supposed social injustices that are irrelevant in a book on evolution. In an instance of extremely perverted sensitivity, Chakrabarty advocates that humans don’t need genders. This is not due to any scientific or survival imperative, but due to some individuals in the LGBTQ community show deviant behaviour from their assigned genders. He then picks bones at the scientific community which usually represents a white man on the node to represent all humanity in the tree of life. He argues that representation matters and seeing the same subgroup represented as the ideal human is damaging. He doesn’t mention what it damages – probably wokeism, extreme liberalism or leftism? What in fact is the harm done if a person drawing the tree of life put the image of a person who looks familiar (or similar) to him? If evolution was discovered by African scholars, a black man would have appeared there and the world would have accepted that too. The author brings in Donald Trump into this book by quoting one of his speeches confusing viruses and their supposed vulnerability to antibiotics. Even Narendra Modi is there at the receiving end of the author’s barbs because he and his party are accused to be promoting ‘eugenic-themed pseudo-science’. He then calls Henry Ford ‘Hitler’s Hero’. He even manages to include Hindutva and Dalit-Brahmin hierarchy in this book. This is good political propaganda but a poor scientific treatise. He is more kind to the creationists than the political right.

 

The book is a total disappointment as it is ill-focused on all important topics and dwells too long on side-issues. Each chapter is practically independent of each other and hence the entire ensemble lacks coherence. Here you see the individual VIBGYOR colours but not the composite white light. Concepts are explained by illustrations that are complex, intimidating, not self-evident and probably created by a person who finds evolution confusing to himself. Each of them includes a half-page caption to make it appear intelligible. The book incorporates an irrelevant comic strip on Darwin’s life that is totally redundant with nothing new or interesting. Some illustrations printed in monochrome with detailed captions are repeated as colour plates with the exact same captions. Altogether, this is a miserably failed attempt to explain the subject in a meaningful way. Obviously, the author has wasted much time in this effort and the readers are advised not to repeat the same folly.

 

The book is not recommended.

Rating: 1 Star