American Scientist

Life's Origin: The Beginnings of Biological Evolution. Edited by J. William Schopf. vi + 208 pp. University of California Press, 2002. Cloth, $60; paper, $30.

The nature of the origin and evolution of life is a topic that has engaged us since ancient times. In distant woods tribal shamans would gather around the fire and tell stories of events shrouded in the mists of time. There were amazing tales of life's formation: how the heavens ripped wide open, the waters formed, the ingredients for life were mixed, and bizarre creatures emerged from the muck. The stories generally agreed, but occasionally debates would erupt among the shamans over the chronicle of creation.

In Life's Origin: The Beginnings of Biological Evolution, editor J. William Schopf has assembled a council of shamans to tell the scientific versions of the story: John Oró, Alan W. Schwartz and Sherwood Chang, Stanley L. Miller and Antonio Lazcano, James P. Ferris, Leslie E. Orgel, and Schopf himself are the contributors. Many of them have led, and all have been honored by, the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life; all have made monumental contributions to the field.

Each of the book's six chapters holds the reader's attention. The material, which is presented on the level of an advanced undergraduate, should pique the interest of novices with a science background; advanced practitioners may be reminded of forgotten aspects of the subject. I for one appreciated the historical interludes—discussions of the contributions of such luminaries as Immanuel Kant, Jöns Jacob Berzelius and Walther Löb, as well as Charles Darwin, Adolph Strecker and A. I. Oparin. The chapter by Oró, "Historical Understanding," naturally has a high concentration of history. Oró also reminisces illuminatingly about his own interest in the topic. Each author devotes at least some (occasionally considerable) space to putting the material discussed into historical context.

Because each chapter is written in a different style, the text has an uneven feel—a problem quite common in books with multiple contributors. The effect of this is minimized somewhat by the chapters' overlapping subject matter. Some, but I think insufficient, effort has been made to weave the six contributions into a cohesive whole.

Naturally, each of the authors focuses on his own work. They all acknowledge rival theories, but some do a better job than others of explaining the advantages of opposing views. This is fine, but it limits the book's usefulness. In "From Big Bang to Primordial Planet," by Schwartz and Chang, we read that "Experimental evidence is emerging in support of the view that organic compounds can be formed under conditions prevalent in hydrothermal systems." But in "Formation of the Building Blocks of Life," by Miller and Lazcano, we learn that "it is difficult to accept that organic compounds were synthesized at 350°C in submarine vents. Rather, we have abundant data indicating that such conditions favor decomposition of many compounds in time spans ranging from seconds to hours." Each position is legitimate, but because there is no chapter that synthesizes differing interpretations of evidence or explains why they occur, novices may find such conflicting statements confusing.

Perhaps no synthesis of that sort was possible, as some of the disagreements are intractable. Motivated readers can seek out the works cited in the references to each chapter in order to come to a conclusion or at least understand the complexities that create the conflicts. There are also some curious omissions (for example, no one cites the work of David W. Deamer or M. Reza Ghadiri), but this is perhaps unavoidable when such a large and complicated topic is covered in so few pages.

A very nice glossary is included. When the terms defined there first appear in the text, they are in boldface type. The index, unfortunately, is woefully incomplete. For example, the word "proteinoid" is defined in the glossary, but there is no way to find it in the text—even if you already know enough about the topic (such as that proteinoids are made from the thermal polymerizations of amino acids and that Sidney Fox believed they were the solution to the problem of the origin of life) to look under other subject headings in the index.

Life's Origin provides brief, cogent discussions of mainstream as well as alternative theories about the origin and early evolution of life. The book's greatest asset is that it assembles such a marvelous group of authors, and its greatest deficit is the poor index.—Jason P. Dworkin, Astrochemistry Branch, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center