We're used to books that give answers. We want to be spoon fed, and often whine when the answers are not sugar coated as well.



The books about the origins of life that I've read (De Duve's "Vital Dust," Margulis' "Early Life," Gribbon's several books, Crick's pan-spermia, the anthropic principle...) follow the usual pattern. They start at different stages of the origins of life, but they all:

- expound a theory as if it were universally agreed to be true then

- explain how the process progressed whether from stardust or extra-terrestrial sources, oceanic amino acids or bacteria-like organisms.



Well, Freeman Dyson does it differently. He starts with good questions. Questions, when formulated well, help us to think and arrive at better answers. He asks about the first living cells:

- Did replication come first or

- Did metabolism come first?

- Did those two processes happen simultaneously?

- Did they happen independently or were they correlated or causative...?

- Which process might be 'better' or 'worse' if it happened first?



He reviews the well-known research (natural selection, statistical methods...) and how well they may be able to answer these questions. Then he tells us his preference and why. Why? Because it helps us to think further.



Then he says that being a physicist (and a mathmatician who, at age 17, devised the pattern for cluster bombing that would create a self-accelerating firestorm. His theory was tested on Dresden and proven to be very effective), he does not know about biology and with that disclaimer, built a 'toy model' to help us think through ways to arrive at conclusions.



The third part of this book goes into the 'fidelity of replication (or error rates), and an analysis of the smallest number of self-organizing molecules that still 'work.' This seeming tangent is of special interest to me because it furthers my quest to learn how we acquired mitochondria and how they work now, with so few DNA of their own. And also what might be the evolutionary future of extremely simple organisms that are formed into colonies such as some sea jellies?



This book made me think so hard that I don't actually remember its conclusions. It's a short book so only took a few evenings to read, even including the periods I had to put it down to let my mind digress down a path that was triggered by the book, but I might be thinking about it and studying the questions that it raised for a very long time.