The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language

This is an ambitious work in that in less than 200 pages it attempts to dissemble the mysteries of the birth of life and language (two versions I guess of the same thing).

Along the way it touches on critical topics like what is life? how did it first come to be? how did multicellular life arise? whence intelligence? and of course whence language?

My personal take is that while I've been more than happy to give this book a five star rating it's more in homage to the ambition of its writers than the strength of their accomplishment.

Therefore for a better treatment of these issues I would recommend the following books:

1) The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. A de riguer read for fans of this topic which itself conflates the life and language mysteries I think in a much more probing way.

2) The Fifth Miracle by University of Adelaide's Paul Davies. This book itself traces the origins of life part of the equation but does so in a more comprehensive and comprehendible fashion.

3) Language and species by linguist Darrick Bickerton. Linguist Bickerton broke Chomsky's rule against linguists discussing the origins of language issue and produced a highly readable and provactive book.

However none of this takes away from reading this book as well. John Maynard Smith is highly respected in this field and is always well worth reading even here where his efforts are less helpful than other writers.

Fantastic book. Compared to many other books on evolution and biology, I found this to be one of the easiest to understand. It is simply and well written and gives the reader a good idea of the evolution of life. It allows the reader to understand how life could have arose out of physical and chemical processes and shows clearly how many of the things we consider to have arisen out of the mind of a great deity actually have an elegant developmental history that cannot be disputed.

The book explains, convinvingly, how each transition is solidly built upon the foundations of the previous transitions (replicating molecules/ populations of molecules in protocells to RNA as gene and enzyme/specialization to DNA and protien enzyme to Primate societeis/Human societies with language). Despite a few things we yet do not understand fully (for example, how a complex backbone for RNA can possibly evolve, given the absence of enzymes) the reader will be able to see that the authors' admissions of the absence of scraps of concrete evidence here and there (plausible theories and scenarios have been proposed) is a subject for furthur inquiry and experimentation, the 1% of evidence they do not have in the face of 99% of fact that has been proven through rigourous experimentation.

In response to a previous review about the book not giving an answer to how individual genes could have been activated to give cells the properties they have, the authors have proposed that individuals cells are likely to be influenced by their environment. In other words, cells know their place in a body and respond to their circumstances.

This can be regarded as a more accessible version of The Major Transitions in Evolution, an earlier book by the same authors addressed to professional biologists. It is more accessible, and more readable, certainly, but it still demands some effort and attention on the part of the reader. As the authors candidly admit in their preface, they "fear it will not be an easy read", because "it contains a lot of facts, and a lot of new ideas". This is a fair assessment, but readers who do make the effort can expect to learn a considerable amount of modern biology from two of its most respected authorities.

Charles Darwin largely ducked the question of the origin of life, taking the realistic view that it was too difficult to handle at the time he was writing, and contented himself with accounting for how it could have evolved once it had started. John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, writing a century and a half later, could hardly avoid this problem, and their book starts at the very beginning by trying to define what it means to be alive and to explain how the first living organisms could have emerged from non-living inorganic matter. For them this was a matter of combining the chemistry of the production and use of energy with the chemistry of storing the information needed for producing a new organism identical with its parent.


Here they are confronted with a dilemma, the "error catastrophe": if the first organisms were too small they could not have fulfilled all the chemical functions they needed; if they were too big they could have reproduced themselves accurately. For a long time the gap between too small and too big seemed unbridgeable, but a possible solution was found in the realization that the first enzymes were probably not proteins (as they nearly all are today) but nucleic acids, which could combine their good capacity for storing information with a rather feeble capacity for catalysing chemical reactions.

The remainder of the book presents the subsequent steps that were needed to proceed from these humble (but by no means simple) beginnings to the great complexity of the living world of today. How did the transition occur from a world in which nucleic acids did everything to one with the present-day division of labour between nucleic acids for information and proteins for catalysis? How did the first multicellular organisms arise from unicellular parents? How did animal societies evolve? How did language originate (apparently only in humans)?

Maynard Smith and Szathmáry have interesting and important things to say about all of these questions, and others, including, in the middle of the book, a masterly discussion of the difficult question of sexual reproduction: why did it arise, and, especially difficult, why is it maintained in the face of what appear to be obvious advantages of virgin birth, or parthenogenesis? It is not too difficult to think of small advantages in sexual reproduction, but that is not enough, because the advantage of parthenogenesis is very large , amounting to a factor of two in every generation, so one needs an even larger advantage of sexual reproduction to overcome it.

As stated in the preface, this book presents to a general readership the same ideas as the authors' 1995 book "The Major Transitions in Evolution." I found it still challenging, but richly rewarding. The most interesting questions in evolution deal with the evolution of new levels of organization. The authors identify only eight such transitions starting from cooperating collections of replicating molecules up through multicellular organisms, colonies of ants and bees, and finally human societies with language. Anyone interested in the question of how cooperation evolved in human societies needs to also understand how cooperation evolved in the other seven transitions. This appears to be the definitive work on that subject that is accessible to a non-specialist.

A rather convoluted attempt at answering the central question: What is life? But Smith and his co-author fail in other respects too. Among the subsidiary problems surrounding the question of life and its origins is a rather more specific question on how exactly cells with the same genetic information become different adult structures. In other words, animals, for example, are composed of many different cells - muscle cells, nerve cells etc - that are all identical, but in development they become different in shape, composition, and function. The answer (already well known) is that cells are not different because they have different genes, but because some genes are active while others are not. Maynard Smith pops the central question in developmental biology (page 18): how does three dimensional form arise during development; how does it come about that the right genes are active in the right places. He repeats this question on p18, p28,p100,and finally on page 115 once again, he repeats"...how is it that different genes are active in different cells...we will return to this question in a moment". Now I get fed up, when is he going to answer this question! But wait, on page 117, yes, here it comes, he finally says, yes, one more time - "how is it that different genes are active in different cells...the answer finally on page 117 - WE DO NOT KNOW!! What a run around! At this point I turf this book aside, and decide to slate this author for jerking me around.