Scan barcode
A review by kitceratops
Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive by Carl Zimmer
4.0
Carl Zimmer took quite the challenging subject here, which is basically, What is life? There were a lot of subsets of questions that were also looked at within that subject. What is consciousness, what makes us human, how did life start from non-living structures?
What I appreciate about this book is that it doesn't shy away from controversial subjects. For example, the subject of abortion, a hot button topic at any point. Why would this come up in a book about life? Zimmer does a great explanation of the topic, bringing in the history, science, and religious aspects of the controversy. What you can walk away from his presentation there are no easy answers but it is complicated. There are no easy solutions to this subject. We fight about this sort of thing because we can't have a clear definition of what something is.
There are no simple answers in science. That maybe we need to relearn how to look at the world, that we cannot just categorize into nice neat boxes. Carl Zimmer has delivered a great readable book that is more honest about how science works than many others I have recently read, and more people would be better off having this kind of understanding.
What I appreciate about this book is that it doesn't shy away from controversial subjects. For example, the subject of abortion, a hot button topic at any point. Why would this come up in a book about life? Zimmer does a great explanation of the topic, bringing in the history, science, and religious aspects of the controversy. What you can walk away from his presentation there are no easy answers but it is complicated. There are no easy solutions to this subject. We fight about this sort of thing because we can't have a clear definition of what something is.
There are no simple answers in science. That maybe we need to relearn how to look at the world, that we cannot just categorize into nice neat boxes. Carl Zimmer has delivered a great readable book that is more honest about how science works than many others I have recently read, and more people would be better off having this kind of understanding.