Life's Edge:The Search for What it Means to be Alive by Carl Zimmer, Book 43 of 2022

 

The book for this semester at the Evolution Round Table at Franklin and Marshall College is Life's Edge: The Search for What it Means to be Alive by Carl Zimmer.

Zimmer has been writing about science since the 1990s for the New York Times, Discovery, and National Geographic. He is the author of several books, Life's Edge is the latest.  

Every chapter of the book brings up another question about what it means to be alive, what is life, and what is not life.  

We are intro­duced to a mena­gerie that perches in the gray area bet­ween alive and not-alive: creatures like tardi­grades and nema­todes that can re­emerge from crypto­biosis with the touch of water. 

Zimmer describes pythons whose basal meta­bolic rates can grind almost to a halt, slime molds that display a brain­less kind of mem­ory and problem-solving abil­ity, and a girl named Jahi McMath, who was dec­lared brain-dead yet had a beat­ing heart and con­tinued to grow before dy­ing (again) five years later. 

COVID makes an ap­pear­ance. A book on the def­ini­tion of liv­ing would not be com­plete with­out a look at viruses. Zimmer intro­duces to var­ious def­ini­tions of life, coming from many sources from sci­entists to phil­osoph­ers. From them he derives five special hall­marks of life: meta­bolism, infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing, homeo­stasis, re­pro­duc­tion, and evol­ution. 

The sheer diver­sity with­in these traits is clear in his beautiful writing, as is the elu­sive­ and com­plex nature of life. As Zimmer says, biol­ogy is a "sci­ence in which the most impor­tant object [life] has no defin­ition." 

Wonders abound through the book. Zimmer's description human reproduction and when life begins shows the kind of complexity that makes absolute beliefs on where life begins look hopelessly ludicrous. 

If you are interested in biology, read the book. It's fantastic. 

First 42 Books of 2022:

The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy

C.S.Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by James Como

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis

Le veritable histoire des petits cochons by Erik Belgard

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen