Ny Times Book Reviews Cockell the Equations of Life
Nonfiction
Why Nosotros Should Never Expect to Observe Sentient Ice Cubes
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THE EQUATIONS OF LIFE
How Physics Shapes Development
Past Charles Southward. Cockell
337 pp. Basic Books. $32.
A newcomer to the cantina in the pirate metropolis of Mos Eisley in a milky way far abroad would be confronted by a oversupply of intimidating thugs: Rodians, Devaronians, Ithorians, Morseerians, Lutrillians, Siniteens and other alien buccaneers swilling liquor and picking fights while a band of hairless Biths play some kind of cosmic jazz.
Just another night at the Star Wars bar.
Equally exotic as they announced, these beings share a comforting familiarity: They are bilaterally symmetrical with, for the most function, a pair of eyes staring from a caput connected by a cervix to a torso equipped with matching pairs of limbs. They move across the floor on legs, not wheels. They make sounds with mouths and register them with ears. In their basic torso programme they are footling different from the motley crew in the public room of the Spouter-Inn where Ishmael meets Queequeg, Melville'south illustrated man.
Scientists have long debated how closely extraterrestrial life would evolve to resemble that on earth. Stephen Jay Gould, in his book "Wonderful Life," took a contrarian view, arguing that with a slightly different gyre of the Darwinian dice, earth would accept been inhabited by creatures unimaginable.
Charles South. Cockell, an astrobiologist at the Academy of Edinburgh, is the anti-Gould. In his new book, "The Equations of Life: How Physics Shapes Evolution," he argues for a cosmos populated, if at all, past anthropocentric creatures like those George Lucas dreamed up for the "Star Wars" films.
No matter how different the conditions on distant worlds, all presumably accept the same laws of physics — from quantum mechanics to thermodynamics and the laws of gravity. And life, as Cockell puts it, is merely living thing, "material capable of reproducing and evolving."
If there is biological science elsewhere in the universe (and it has risen across the level of green slime) nosotros would notice it strikingly familiar, he proposes, not just in appearance but downwardly to the carbon-based machinery in its cells.
Cockell's volume lucidly addresses biology'southward great mystery: If we grant that life is an interplay of chance and necessity, in the words of the French biochemist Jacques Monod, so which has the upper hand?
Monod came downward on the side of chance, proposing that the cellular chemical science that seems then primal is merely "randomness caught on the fly," a grab bag of molecules that happened to exist around when the first cellular membranes spontaneously formed, trapping a drop of the primordial waters. Cells with the fittest concoctions crowded out the weaker, just then the recipe was locked in — a frozen accident carried along for the evolutionary ride.
But Cockell argues that even at this deep level, the possibilities of life were tightly confining. Rerun the record of evolution, and DNA, RNA, ATP, the Krebs cycle — the rigmarole of Biology 101 — would probably arise over again, here or in afar worlds. Single cells would then bring together together, seeking the advantages of metazoan life, until before you know it something like the earthly menagerie would come to be.
Never dogmatic, Cockell entertains opposing views. H. G. Wells, he reminds us, envisioned "silicon-aluminum men" dwelling in an atmosphere of gaseous sulfur on the shores of a liquid fe sea. Others have imagined Plutonians resembling intelligent water ice cubes.
Darwin wrote of "endless forms most beautiful" (dazzler being in the eye of the beholder) merely Cockell makes a strong example that evolution is narrowly channeled. The endlessness is only in the filigree, similar the spots on a moth or Queequeg's tattoos.
In exploring the space of possible life-forms, evolution is no freer, Cockell implies, than the builder of a bridge. Consider the mole, a burrowing fauna that is "an engineering solution to the compromises needed to effectively shift soil past maximizing the force applied over a small-scale distance," Cockell writes. "It is an organic manifestation of P=F/A."
Pressure equals force divided by area. No wonder moles evolved independently in Europe (where they are kin to shrews and weasels) and in Australia (where their cousins are kangaroos and koalas). The contingencies of random variation are overshadowed past the hard reality of making a living in an unforgiving world.
That in itself is non a startling idea. The pleasure of Cockell's volume comes from the detail with which he pursues it. In a chapter chosen "The Physics of the Ladybug," he carefully lays out some of the principles that dictate why such an insect almost had to exist.
It would not be so surprising to find one crawling along the leafage of a potted constitute in the Star Wars bar, oblivious to the surrounding racket.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/books/review/charles-s-cockell-equations-of-life.html
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