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A review by cameliarose
Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive by Carl Zimmer
5.0
In Life's Edge, Carl Zimmer sets out to explore the line that separates life and non-life, what means to be alive, and the impossible task of giving life a definition.
Many forms of lives or partial lives are examined. Apparently some scientists do not consider viruses as lives, even though when they infect animals, plants and bacterias, they are certainly alive. Under extreme conditions, animals can retreat into "half life", such as bats in hibernation and tardigrades in outer space. They are not dead since they can be revived, but when they exist without metabolism, they do not behave as alive.
Slime, a single-celled organism, is so fascinating that I am going to read more on it. They have no brains, but can solve puzzles, and leave “memories” in the outside world.
The author also examines the definition of life and death in human societies. He peels open the anti-abortionists’ argument that human life begins at conception by stating that fertilized eggs during the early stage of development are alive in the same way as cells in your body are alive, but they are not life yet, and such a view of when human life begins is scientifically untrue and logically flawed.
The history of how brain death became the standard definition of death is fascinating and a little scary.
Of course, the author has something to say about Darwin's theory of evolution and the discovery of DNA, and he focuses on how they affect our understanding of what life is. He then moves on to how life begins on the earth - volcano pond or deep ocean vent? Scientists have created organic molecules from scratch in labs by mimicking volcano ponds that could have existed 3 billion years ago.
The best part of the book is the definition of life, or our continuous effort to define life. Life is what people think they know but hardly able to give an exhaustive definition.
The NASA definition of life is “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution”, which was distilled by Trifonov in 2011 as "Life = Self-Reproduction with Variations". But the argument is far from settled. The last chapter, Four Blue Droplets, the author explains the assembly theory of life. He says, "a theory of life may end up looking a lot like the theory of superconductivity - it may explain life as a particular configuration of matter that gets a special quality from the physics of the universe. "
Many forms of lives or partial lives are examined. Apparently some scientists do not consider viruses as lives, even though when they infect animals, plants and bacterias, they are certainly alive. Under extreme conditions, animals can retreat into "half life", such as bats in hibernation and tardigrades in outer space. They are not dead since they can be revived, but when they exist without metabolism, they do not behave as alive.
Slime, a single-celled organism, is so fascinating that I am going to read more on it. They have no brains, but can solve puzzles, and leave “memories” in the outside world.
The author also examines the definition of life and death in human societies. He peels open the anti-abortionists’ argument that human life begins at conception by stating that fertilized eggs during the early stage of development are alive in the same way as cells in your body are alive, but they are not life yet, and such a view of when human life begins is scientifically untrue and logically flawed.
The history of how brain death became the standard definition of death is fascinating and a little scary.
Of course, the author has something to say about Darwin's theory of evolution and the discovery of DNA, and he focuses on how they affect our understanding of what life is. He then moves on to how life begins on the earth - volcano pond or deep ocean vent? Scientists have created organic molecules from scratch in labs by mimicking volcano ponds that could have existed 3 billion years ago.
The best part of the book is the definition of life, or our continuous effort to define life. Life is what people think they know but hardly able to give an exhaustive definition.
The NASA definition of life is “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution”, which was distilled by Trifonov in 2011 as "Life = Self-Reproduction with Variations". But the argument is far from settled. The last chapter, Four Blue Droplets, the author explains the assembly theory of life. He says, "a theory of life may end up looking a lot like the theory of superconductivity - it may explain life as a particular configuration of matter that gets a special quality from the physics of the universe. "