Well, this was the first book on Biological scientific issues that I've read. I am a scientist, more precisely a physicist, and now I am felling a strong desire to study more other kinds of sciences. Especially biology. Philosophy, psychology and sociology I've been already reading and studding for some time now. Possible even for a decade. But biology, apart from what I've learned in school, this is really the beginning of a new era in my readings. Why I've decided for that? I don't really know to be honest. It's a kind of a lack of something in a puzzle of the wholeness of life that I just could not fill only with psychological and philosophical insights. I don't know. Even when I try to think about society as whole, when I try to really understand it, when I think about Marxism and how I really see the society dynamics, I always have the feeling that although I am learning and conceiving part of the story, there is definitely something lacking. I don't really know in what sense I truly mean this lacking of something, I don't even think that biology and chemistry are in itself this lacking, but I feel now that they are definitely at least a piece of something that might help me to proper formulate and understand this lack, and who knows, by doing it, dissolving it?
So Ok, here it goes. I got a couple of books into sort of similar subjects (or not so much), how life emerged from chemistry, anthropology of extinction, how the brain functions, the principles of change that shaped life and so on. This one, by Addy Pross treats basically the question, how non-living chemical elements could evolve and become alive? How life could emerge from not-living things? And to be fair I was really skeptical about the whole thing before starting to read the book. Ok, I won't get into a lot of details about the book, because I am not very familiar with the whole background from where the discussion is made, but just a couple of comments here. The author is a scientist, with a lot of academic work on this subject, and by reading the book you really get the impression that he does know a lot about what he is saying. But in what sense? In the book he is not simply trying to prove a point but he does make a very broad and even easy to follow review of the current scientific debate about this life issue. Even for people who are not scientists, the book does explain very well the whole background knowledge that is needed to understand the debate. It gets a bit boring sometimes because of the amount of preparation about the subject he does, however that makes everything he is talking about very clear. There is a lot of references about many of the discussions he shows in the book. Well, what I am trying to say is that the book is very well written, very clear and you can see that the author is very honesty and never pretends to know or to have found something that he really didn't. That is what I mean by the author being a good scientist that knows what he is saying.
Ok, so his attempt here in the book is basically to try to find a kind of general law of evolution, in a similar way from what Darwinism is, but with the only difference that he wants to find it a bit earlier, by looking it directly into chemical reactions and how the laws of simple chemical systems have already an early shape of what we consider general laws of life, such as Darwinism for example that deals with evolution of species. He tries basically to find insights into how we can formulate from simple chemical terms a sort of "evolution of species" law (but not really species here, it should be something more like chemical evolution or whatever) that would have allowed simple chemical reactions to lead to the formation of more complex and self-replicating systems. And to that he does show a lot of references from scientific papers with results that does demonstrate all chemical mechanisms that he talks about when he tries to conceive this sort of general "law of chemical evolution".
Well, he definitely do not show exactly the moment when chemical no-living entities become "alive". Simply because we simply do not know that yet. But he is very clear and honesty about it all the time, showing precisely the current debate in academia that is ongoing on the subject. However, when he tries to conceive this general law of chemical systems that would allow molecules or whatever, to self-replicate, enhancing their complexity (that could potentially leads toward creation of living systems) he is very convincing. Well, I don't know much to be honesty about the whole thing to actually make a criticism of his toughs. But he is definitely convincing (At least to me he was). And the book to be fair did gave me some new tools to put in my head when I do think about society, human beings, and so on. It is just the beginning, things are not very clear yet. But anyway, that's the way I will go now. Will try to get some more biology stuff to read about and comment here in the next few months or years. So let's see. That's all for now.
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