We might as well toss out all of the dreadfully boring, high school biology textbooks students slog through every year and replace them with this incredibly dense but admirably compelling description of the evolution of life on Earth. Yes, for those of us who slept through biology, it's a 400 page, information-rich, data dump which may need to be read several times before all its concepts are fully grasped; but unlike with high school biology, this time, devotion will pay off with enlightenment. I've never read a book that did more to advance my understanding of the basics of science and, as readers of this blog can attest, I've read a couple books.
The genius of this book is its structure. Whereas my education in biology had no o organizing principle, no founding premise, to elevate information into knowledge. Students learn about hearts and eyes and muscles and tissue, but there isn't a narrative, a why. We're humans; for those of us who lack a mind predisposed to enjoying science, we need what we're learning to connect to something. We need it to fit into the larger picture of life. In starting out at the beginning of life on our planet, then deploying each subsequent chapter to describe an advancement made by that original life, all in the name of evolving, of growing, of propagating, the reader gains an invaluable glimpse of that larger tapestry. Bacteria was locked into the depths of our world, unable to break free, until it figured out a way to save up the energy to propagate. Once it managed that, it needed a code to carry instructions if it was going to ever be more than bacteria. And so DNA gave rise to more complex organisms which, of course, needed to be able to move around to survive. And so muscles were developed. Circulatory systems for better performance, brains for organization, eyes for precision in navigation, sex for reproduction... It's all so painfully logical!
I imagine that some will criticize Mr. Lane for streamlining the development of life on Earth. I'm sure, in reality, there were many more fits and starts, trials and errors, than those related here, but we work from what we know. And the truth is that we will probably never have a complete picture of life's development because too much of it has been permanently lost to the billions of years required to advance from bacteria to New York City. And so, though Mr. Lane's reconstruction of life's ascension is at risk of inductive reasoning, it simply makes too much sense to be less than authentic. Yes, it's heavy; yes, it sometimes feels as if there's too much here to fit inside a single skull and that, at some point, ones brain will give up and go on strike, but the joy that comes from glimpsing the big picture overwhelms the difficulty. This is a wonderful achievement. Creationists, beware. (5/5 Stars)
PS: My apologies to the biology teachers the world over. You do wonderful work. I blame the curriculum.
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