Early Life

Rating:
Summary: Margulis at her best -- but a missed opportunity
Review: I wish this book were available as a normal paperback. I really like nearly everything about it. Understanding Margulis on the origin of Meiosis is so much easier with line drawings! If you are interested in Margulis's ideas about the serial endosymbiont theory and how the eukaryotic cell arose, it's hard to do better than "Early Life." The clarity of this book is wonderful. Why a "missed opportunity"? Despite the fact that this is a new edition with Michael F. Dolan, the science appears not to have been updated. For example, Margulis thought an "aggressive" bacterium such as Bdellovibrio might have invaded cells to form mitochondria. Genomic research has shown that mitochondria came from a Rickettsia species. In illustrations, Bdellovibrio is still shown and the Rickettsia connection is not mentioned. Does Margulis completely reject evidence from nucleic acid sequencing?

Evidently -- because the biggest "hole" in this book is a complete lack of recognition that the Archaea are something completely different from Bacteria. Margulis makes a friendly mention of Carl Woese in the introduction of the new edition, as if his research were the only stone in the massive structure that shows Archaea are a separate domain of life. It is not just the rRNA's that are different (as Woese showed) -- the membrane lipids are different, the Archaea have histones (like eukaryotes) and some have multiple chromosomes (like eukaryotes). Lumping them with other "prokaryotes" in spite of the current state of science is nothing less than a willful act of ignorance, and it's too bad that this book is damaged by her prejudices. I hope some day that a third edition will include modern scientific discoveries. And I hope that some day her "Five Kingdoms" will be updated to "Six." But somehow I doubt it will happen.

Rating:
Summary: Margulis at her best -- but a missed opportunity
Review: I wish this book were available as a normal paperback. I really like nearly everything about it. Understanding Margulis on the origin of Meiosis is so much easier with line drawings! If you are interested in Margulis's ideas about the serial endosymbiont theory and how the eukaryotic cell arose, it's hard to do better than "Early Life." The clarity of this book is wonderful. Why a "missed opportunity"? Despite the fact that this is a new edition with Michael F. Dolan, the science appears not to have been updated. For example, Margulis thought an "aggressive" bacterium such as Bdellovibrio might have invaded cells to form mitochondria. Genomic research has shown that mitochondria came from a Rickettsia species. In illustrations, Bdellovibrio is still shown and the Rickettsia connection is not mentioned. Does Margulis completely reject evidence from nucleic acid sequencing?

Evidently -- because the biggest "hole" in this book is a complete lack of recognition that the Archaea are something completely different from Bacteria. Margulis makes a friendly mention of Carl Woese in the introduction of the new edition, as if his research were the only stone in the massive structure that shows Archaea are a separate domain of life. It is not just the rRNA's that are different (as Woese showed) -- the membrane lipids are different, the Archaea have histones (like eukaryotes) and some have multiple chromosomes (like eukaryotes). Lumping them with other "prokaryotes" in spite of the current state of science is nothing less than a willful act of ignorance, and it's too bad that this book is damaged by her prejudices. I hope some day that a third edition will include modern scientific discoveries. And I hope that some day her "Five Kingdoms" will be updated to "Six." But somehow I doubt it will happen.

Rating:
Summary: assigned 1 chapter...devoured all
Review: Many years ago I was assigned one chapter in this book for a microbiology course. Instead I couldn't stop until I'd read it all. It was really good.

Rating:
Summary: I have to say, since I am Dorion Sagan
Review: that that last reviewer did not know what the bleep they were talking about. Yes, this is a very good book but, listen, my mum, Lynn was the one who put the idea of "seme" in Microcosmos! Where people (and Richard Dawkins was one!) get off "mind-reading" who writes which part of a co-authored book is beyond me. The writer was correct, however, that this is a very good book, perhaps the best, for a nuts-and-bolts overview of early life. Now for some fluff: Check out our new book Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species--if you like it, Frank (or whatever your name is) be sure to credit the good parts to me! Also check out Up From Dragons: The Evolution of Human Intelligence and Into the Cool: The Thermodynamics of Life (forthcoming) if you are curious...

Rating:
Summary: I have to say, since I am Dorion Sagan
Review: that that last reviewer did not know what the bleep they were talking about. Yes, this is a very good book but, listen, my mum, Lynn was the one who put the idea of "seme" in Microcosmos! Where people (and Richard Dawkins was one!) get off "mind-reading" who writes which part of a co-authored book is beyond me. The writer was correct, however, that this is a very good book, perhaps the best, for a nuts-and-bolts overview of early life. Now for some fluff: Check out our new book Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species--if you like it, Frank (or whatever your name is) be sure to credit the good parts to me! Also check out Up From Dragons: The Evolution of Human Intelligence and Into the Cool: The Thermodynamics of Life (forthcoming) if you are curious...

Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive book on early life
Review: This book on early life delves persuasively into the chemistry of ancestral prokaryotes. Although Carl Woese's three-kingdom classification system is presently scientifically fashionable, archea (archeobacteria) are morphologically identical to other bacteria, and so the wisdom of giving them their own kingdom, despite their RNA differences (and RNA changes over evolutionary time) is debatable.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book by Margoulis (as usual), but...
Review: This is a great book by Lynn Margoulis. She is still one of the greatest experts on her field (microbiology) and a great evolutionary theorist. Her ideas on symbiogenesis, once considered heretical are now accepted by the great majority of evolutionary theorists. This majority apparently now includes John Maynard Smith, the official keeper of the neo-Darwinist orthodoxy (while Richard Dawkins is neo-Darwinism's Bloviator Maximus).

Margoulis' views, while not always right are always worth reading about. Her books are about Life, rather than about semantics (like many of Dawkins books are). There is a lot to learn here, like in her previous book, "Symbiosis in Cell Evolution" (a classic, which is unfortunately out-of-print).

So what is the problem? Well, being an evolutionary heretic should not exempt somebody from learning about modern theories of phylogenetics! I mean, really, this insisting in lumping Bacteria and Archaea is a major annoyance.

It does not matter that the Bacteria and Archaea are more similar to each other than to Eukarya, still the evidence points to the fact that Archaea and Eukarya are more closely related to each other than to Bacteria, meaning that the last common ancestor of Archaea and Eukarya lived more recently than the last ancestor (of both) with Bacteria. Morphological similarity has nothing to do with it: the SSU rRNA evidence is reasonably strong, and Archaea and Eukarya share common characters, like histones.

It is true that Archaea and Bacteria share a very strong common character, i.e. the Prokaryotic status, but this has nothing to do with phylogeny. Why? Because the Prokaryotic status is a shared but ancestral character (technically a plesiomorphy), and is totally useless for determining the branching order between clades.

The presence of histones, on the other hand, is a shared derived character (apomorphy) and it can be used to determine the fact that Archaea and Eukarya do form a clade (Histonia?). The SSU rRNA data reinforces the reality of this clade.