What Is Life?

Rating:
Summary: Dr. Margulis - You Go, Girl!
Review: "What Is Life?" is an illuminating & expansive reconstruction of the bacterial evolution of life on Earth. Combining rigorous science, mythology, history, poetry, stories, sketches, wit, captivating writing, & arresting photography, Margulis & Sagan examine Professor Margulis' theory of endosymbiosis.

Needless to say, Dr. Margulis has left me speechless. I cannot post here an adequate review of this book because I can't find the words to express what this book has done to my beliefs.

Others have done it much better. For the best review, read Piero Scaruffi's 1999 review titled "Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan: What is Life? (Simon & Schuster, 1995)." Scaruffi does Dr. Margulis justice. Like many other readers, on the other hand, he is unfair to Dorion Sagan as his mother's co-writer. Nothing conveys to the ordinary reader the wonder & vast scope of the world of science better than stimulating prose. With it, I am able to "get" very quickly otherwise confounding stuff. Thanks to Sagan, I am able to learn all over again long-forgotten facts like the structure & function of DNA & RNA. I like Sagan's off-hand style & acidic wit. His eccentricity makes his science books fun to read.

Dr. Lynn Margulis - Maverick Microbiologist Extraordinaire!

Dorion Sagan - You Rock!

Rating:
Summary: Beyond biology
Review: I was as enthralled as other reviewers with the amazing facts in this book. My favorite: bacteria don't age; they can die from accidental causes but "programmed death" started with eukaryotes. The authors show that death is necessary for organisms (like us) that practice meiotic cell division.

But this book is far more than a random collection of facts. Margulis and her collaborators do an amazing job of assembling an understandable model of life using parts carefully selected from a vast body of biological knowledge. While a one-sentence definition is still elusive, the reader builds up a picture of life's most pertinent characteristics, as exhibited by the truly astounding diversity of living things on this planet. By the time I finished, I was satisfied that the authors had answered the question.

You don't need to be a biologist to understand and enjoy this book. Its beauty is that the greatest scientific thinking on the most complex topics has been presented in common english, with necessary scientific terms explained as they are introduced. If you are intrigued by the question of life, I doubt there's a more complete, accurate, understandable, and enjoyable answer available than this book.

Rating:
Summary: The best of the best.
Review: I was totally engrossed with this book and for several weeks it became
an appendage. It is filled with awsome facts and enlightenments.
My only disappointment was that I am just an animal like all others on
this earth and nothing was said concerning what happens to me when
fungi take over. I mean "Me". Where do I go? Right now I beleive I just
plain die. It makes life a bit harder to face, to think all this is gone when
I die. Can anyone recommend a book that will help to give me an idea
as to what happens to my consciousness when I die??

Rating:
Summary: The best of the best.
Review: I was totally engrossed with this book and for several weeks it became
an appendage. It is filled with awsome facts and enlightenments.
My only disappointment was that I am just an animal like all others on
this earth and nothing was said concerning what happens to me when
fungi take over. I mean "Me". Where do I go? Right now I beleive I just
plain die. It makes life a bit harder to face, to think all this is gone when
I die. Can anyone recommend a book that will help to give me an idea
as to what happens to my consciousness when I die??

Rating:
Summary: A worthy exploration of a difficult question!
Review: Lynn Margulis, as with many popular science writers, tends to get in a little bit of trouble both with her professional peers and with the devotees of her professional peers. Academic disciplines are a bit akin to competing schools of secular theology, with much (if not most) of the difficulty arising from what the layman *thinks* the masters say. Margulis is decidedly *not*, for example, the flaming vitalist or Earth Mother worshipper that some have painted her as (due to her subscription to the "Gaia" hypothesis), and Richard Dawkins was much more modest in his conception of the "meme" than some of his successors (notably Susan Blackmore) have been. If one can get past such hangups the thoughts of great scientists are a good deal more subtle than we sometimes think, and Lynn Margulis is no exception.

She and her son Dorion Sagan both have a flair for lucid, non-technical writing, and the picture they paint--of life as a thermodynamically open system, responding as much to symbiosis and cooperation as it does to extinction and competition--is both intellectually interesting and aesthetically pleasing. Her neo-Darwinist cohorts might occasionally overstate the role of competition in natural selection as much as she can overstate the role of cooperation, but there seems no reason to deny that both factors play important (and complementary) roles in the natural world. Dr. Margulis' tour of the microbial and multicellular worlds is truly fascinating; I found myself learning more than I ever thought I would want to know about fungi, mushrooms, bacteria and protists, and remaining delightfully thirsty for more. Where she is making some hypothetical propositions, she usually clearly identifies these and doesn't pass them off as fact. However, she does include a certain paean to Gaia--the idea of biological life on earth functioning as a coevolutionary, self-regulating ecosystem/organism that helps maintain an earthly enviornment conducive to life as we know it--that some (like myself) might find compelling, while others will find it irrelevant. The jury's still out on Gaia, but she makes a persuasive case for why such a concept should be considered alongside the larger question of "what is life?" Overall, a worthy addition to the armchair scientist's bookshelf, alongside anything by Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, or Ernst Mayr.

Rating:
Summary: Savor science presented at its poetic best
Review: The hardcover edition of this book is a treasure in my extensive library. Clever writing and beautiful photographs bring out fascinating ideas. This is a book to be savored.

Rating:
Summary: This is a luscious book.
Review: The two reviews of "What Is Life" by Kirkus Reviews and Gerard Le Blond were disappointing in their negative tone. Having just read "What Is Life", I found myself wondering what these reviewers brought to the book they so casually dismissed. The author of the Kirkus review is a professional reviewer of books, probably with little appreciation of biology or evolution. His dismay that viruses were not included in the discussion is without merit. Viruses are parasites that cannot reproduce without a living host. They are marginal at best to the question at hand. An author writing on the nature of computers would not find it necessary to spend time on computer viruses. The further criticism that only two vertebrates were included among the pictures reflects the author's parochial viewpoint. This decision should be applauded so that more pictures of a wider variety of life could be included. The pen and ink renderings by Christie Lyons were exceptional. Anyone who wants to look at bushbabys and cheetahs can consult National Geographic or any children's animal encyclopedia.

The quote "knock up against each other and work things out." is used by the reviewer to knock down Margulis and Sagan's book. This line is taken from the last half of the first sentence in a five sentence summary of chapter six. These chapter summaries are intended to be playful and poetic, not dry and lifeless remarks. The implication that tough-minded biologists would laugh at this book is nonsense and should be completely dispelled by Niles Eldrege's forward.

The Gaia theory does permeate the book at many levels. The theory is controversial, but Margulis has not been one to shrink from biological controversies. Her symbiotic theories of the origins of mitochondria and chloroplasts were also controversial when she put them forward, however, she was right then and she may be right now. I would not find much fault with her support of the Gaia theory even if it is not elevated to textbook status. To take a specific example, the suggestion that coccolithophorid algal blooms generate dimethyl sulfide and this causes cloud cover to form and cool the planet has not been supported by satellite observations reported this year. Yet, the Gaia hypothesis is greater than this one example, and there is something to be said for backing an idea if you think it is worthy.

The final blow in the Kirkus review is that few readers would persevere through the whole text. This is hardly relevant to the quality of the book, but more to the quality of the reader. There are many books that are highly praised, yet are seldom read from cover to cover. One that comes to mind is Godel, Escher, Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid, winner of the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. How many of us have started that book, only to become stalled part way through?

As a biochemist with an interest in evolution, I found this book to be fascinating. The examples are fresh. I had never heard of the Rio Tinto in Spain, with its unusual fungi. I did know about the 37 acre fungal clone in Michigan, but I did not know about the quaking aspen forest with 47,000 trunks that is a single organism, probably the largest on earth. One does not have to read far into this book to realize the breadth and depth of knowledge relevant to life's history. Trichoplax, a living minimalist animal is presented as a glimpse of what the first animals might have been like. Thermoplasma acidophilum, an archeabacterium with histones (found almost exclusively in eukaryotes) suggests we need to consider the ancestors of these types of bacteria as precursors of modern eukaryotes.

One area that is particularly strong in this book is the early history of life. A 10 page timeline scrolls across the top of Chapter 3, giving one of the most detailed summaries of important events in life's progression. Margulis is of course the authority on symbiosis of cells to generate more complex life forms, and Chapter 5 on this subject is one of the best in the book. If you are looking for answers to some mystical or metaphysical notion about life, or if you want a quick definition, do not read this book! If you want to gain some insight about life from an expert in the field, then read What is Life. This is a luscious book.

David R. Nelson, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Dept. of Biochemistry University of Tennessee, Memphis

Rating:
Summary: So you thought you knew biology!
Review: This book is an eye opener and a mind expander. As a science book for the general reader, I give it four stars; this is because Lynn Margulis is a maverick within biology today, and not all that she says is generally accepted science, and because its basic organizational principle, the division of living organisms into five kingdoms, is somewhat out of date. (Since the book came out in 1995, genetic data has made kingdoms subservient to the three "domains" of archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes.) For those with a more extensive background in biology, give it five stars for its capacity to open up broad new perspectives and to offer illuminating new details.

Lynn Margulis does not serve up any final answer to her title's question. There are a couple of ongoing themes: that wherever there is life, there is what she calls "autopoiesis", the definition of a boundary between self and other, together with the absorption and expenditure of free energy to maintain the self. (A process, as she notes, which not only doesn't violate the second law of thermodynamics, but actually accelerates the rate at which overall entropy increases.) A second theme is, that life's self-organization goes on at progressively higher levels of integration: from cells to colonies and to symbiotic unions that make one complex cell out of several; from complex cells to multicellular animals, plants, and fungi; from multicellular beings to societies and ecosystems; from ecosystems to the biosphere. Margulis believes that biology impoverishes itself by insisting, as Steven Jay Gould does, that evolution has no "direction," simply because no master designer is imposing a direction on it from outside.

But ultimately, according to Margulis, life can't be defined because it keeps on defining itself, and coming up with new definitions. It is better to step back from our skewed view of primates and vertebrates as the most typical living beings, and look at the broad range of specific ways of being alive that evolution and symbiosis have produced so far. So her book is largely organized into chapters describing the history and nature of each of the five kingdoms, in chronological order: bacteria, protoctists (single celled organisms with nuclei), animals, fungi, and plants.

Did you know that it takes two eggs and three sperm to make a flowering plant? That the cell walls of fungi are made from the same material as lobster skin? That photosynthesis evolved independently several times among bacteria?

As stimulating as the book's parade of facts about the wild profusion of ways of being alive is its parade of speculations: that cilia and flagella are the remnants of spirochete bacteria which took up residence in other cells; that the first fertilization event was the result of a failed attempt at cannibalism; that species-jumping genes from fungi taught flowering plants how to make fruit. Another startling hypothesis surfaces every few pages. Some of these speculations are seriously defended, some are tossed out for what they're worth, but they're all fascinating.

I do wish the footnotes had been more extensive. It would be good, for example, to read up on Kwang Jeon's ameba experiments, in which those amebas that didn't die of a bacterial infection wound up incorporating the bacterial genes - and after a few years of lab reproduction, became unable to survive without them. That experiment is the most vivid support Margulis gives for her thesis that genetic material continues to be regularly exchanged across kingdom boundaries; but it's not among the items for which she chose to provide citations.

Rating:
Summary: What a Great Book
Review: This book is written with great intelligence and subtlety. I'm an engineer, and it has been about thirty years since my last biology class. I'm not even sure what compelled me to update my knowledge in this field. I suppose the title "What is Life?", got my attention, as I found this title to be somewhat audacious. Let's face it, "What is Life?", is the supreme question, and any author who ventures in this direction is walking a tight-rope of controversy.

I can honestly say I learned a lot from this book, as I've underlined just about every page. It has so many fascinating insights about the evolution of bacteria into living organisms. As the authors acknowledge, scientists today do not yet understand all the fundamental biological questions - but it sure seems they are headed in the right direction.

Quoting from p. 218, "The facts of life, the stories of evolution, have the power to unite all people". Although I doubt that we can ever "unite all people", I believe that this book will be appreciated by readers who are looking for modern and rational explanations to some existential questions, within the context of biology.