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Is the emergence of life on Earth the result
of a single chance event or a combination of lucky accidents,
or is it the inevitable outcome of biochemical forces woven
into the fabric of the universe? And if inevitable, what
are these forces, and how do they account not only for the
origin of life but also for its evolution toward increasing
complexity? Carefully forming analogies that present the
mysteries of life in terms as familiar as a deck of cards
or the letters of the alphabet Christian de Duve, the Nobel
Prize-winning biochemist, introduces readers to the most
recent scientific theories about our ancient origins. This
is a groundbreaking history of life on Earth, a history
that only someone of Duve's stature and erudition could
have written.
The author guides us on a wondrous journey
through the past four billion years, from the formation
of the first biomolecules to the complexities of the human
mind, from microscopic chains of amino acids and nucleotides
to cataclysmic events in distant galaxies, arriving at the
compelling conclusion that the universe is strewn with "vital
dust" capable of spawning life anywhere under the right
conditions. Life and mind are not accidents; they are natural
manifestations of matter.
At the heart of Vital Dust is the
concept of seven increasingly complex "ages" of
life on Earth. With each age, de Duve shows the key event
that led to the next. He argues that simple, deterministic
chemical reactions put life on track but that other mechanisms
led inexorably to greater complexity and biodiversity: the
development of a lock-and-key system that serves as the
universal device of biological recognition at the molecular
level; the emergence of a common ancestor of all organisms,
from amoebas to humans; the great oxygen holocaust; the
conversion of some bacteria into complex cells; and the
successive improvements in reproductive strategies that
made possible the spectacular diversity of life on Earth.
Provocative and powerfully argued, Vital
Dust is one of the most important science books to come
along in some time.
Christian De Duve, who shared the 1974
Nobel Prize for biology or medicine with Albert Claude and
George Palade for their discoveries concerning the structural
and functional organization of the cell, is Professor Emeritus
at the Medical Faculty of the University of Louvain, Belgium,
founder and past president of the International Institute
of Cellular and Molecular Pathology in Belgium, and Andrew
W. Mellon Professor Emeritus at the Rockefeller University
in New York, He is the author of A Guided Tour of the
Living Cell and Blueprint for a Cell.
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