The book "New History of the Origin of Life on Earth"
Hello! We decided to write a review of our new book:
The generally accepted history of the origin of life on Earth is obsolete. Two scientists, Peter Ward and Joseph Kirschwink, offer a book that contains all the findings of recent research. The authors show that many of our previous ideas about the history of the origin of life are wrong. First, the development of life was not a slow, gradual process: cataclysms contributed to the formation of life more than all the other forces combined. Secondly, carbon is the basis of life, but what other elements determined its evolution? Thirdly, since the time of Darwin we have been thinking in terms of the evolution of species. In fact, there has been an evolution of ecosystems — from underwater volcanoes to tropical forests — that have shaped the world as we know it. Based on his many years of experience in paleontology, biology, chemistry, astrobiology, Ward and Kirschvink tell the story of life on Earth, so fantastic that it is hard to imagine, and at the same time so familiar that one cannot pass by.
History in almost any form is perhaps the most disliked school subject. One of the most in-depth studies on this topic is in the book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (“My teacher lied to me: all the wrong textbook on American history” 1), and her main conclusion can be stated in a nutshell: useless thing! Leuven writes: “The story told in textbooks is predictable, any problem in them is either already solved, or is about to be solved ... The authors do not use examples of the present to explain the past, because the present is not a source of information for authors of history textbooks.”
')
The idea of ​​Leuven is quite clear. In the form in which American history is taught in high school, the past and the present are not related to each other, and it turns out that history has nothing to do with modernity, in no way affects it. Nevertheless, Leuven’s conclusion is not entirely correct, especially if we speak about the history of life on Earth, whose antiquity is recorded on stones, in molecules and DNA chains present in any of our cells. The benefit of studying this story is indisputable, as well as the fact that knowledge of the history of Life can save us from almost complete extinction.
In the early 1960s, the great American writer James Baldwin remarked: "People cannot escape from history, just as history cannot escape from people." He meant humanity, but these words will be equally true if the word “people” is replaced with “all life on Earth, in the past and present,” since each DNA chain in every cell of the human body is an ancient record of biological history made simple code and transmitted from generation to generation. It can be said that DNA is nothing but a story embodied in physical form. This form is slowly being created and developed over many epochs with the help of the most merciless of all creators, natural selection. DNA is a story that lives in us, while it dictates its own conditions to us. This is a model of our body, which decides that we will pass on to our children - gifts for good or for a time bomb. We really cannot escape from this peculiar bearer of history, which cannot escape from us anywhere.
The history of the development of life provides answers to many difficult, but such urgent questions that each of us asks: how did we, the people, manage to become a small, just-spreading branch on a huge tree of life? What struggle awaits our species in the future, what hardships leave their marks on our, human, branch of this old tree, which is four billion years old? The past helps us to understand what place we occupy among the more than twenty million living species, as well as the myriad of others that have already disappeared. The extinction of any species means the disappearance of the still unnamed species in the future probable evolutionary history.
On the pages of this book, we will go a long way to our future, going through the long-standing tests that our ancestors faced: fire, ice, lightning strikes, poisonous gas, fangs of predators, merciless competition, deadly doses of radiation , as well as war and conquest in the struggle for the development of every habitable corner of this planet. And each episode became a component of the entire amount of information in the existing DNA. Every crisis or war changed genomes by adding or splitting different genes. Each of us is a descendant of disaster survivors and time-hardened people.
There is one more, and even more weighty, reason to study the history of the origin of life, it was called by Norman Cousins: "History is a huge early warning system." This wise thought was expressed at the height of the Cold War. Later generations had little idea what it meant to grow in the 1950s and 1960s, when the weekly siren of the warning of the civilian population reminded us children that any faint sound of a jet plane could be the beginning of the end.
Wars endlessly charge an ominous tribute to humanity — physical, economic, emotional. The history of the development of life has many similarities with the history of human conflicts. The evolution of the means of attack in predators (stronger claws and fangs, sharp odors, even poisonous thorns and stings to catch and kill other species) initiates the development of elements of opposition to potential victims (more reliable protection of the body - armor, higher speed of movement, development of hide), and sometimes - and the emergence of protective weapons. All this can be called "biological arms race." Many significant events of evolution cannot be repeated, because evolution has too long periods of development, designed to fill the biosphere with competitive and well-adapted organisms. For example, it is hardly possible to repeat the Cambrian explosion, which resulted in the emergence of many basic forms of the animal world. But what can really happen is that they are opposed to life and diversity, such as extinction, or even mass extinction, as happened in the past due to catastrophic events.
With every molecule of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere, we ignore early warning signals that remind us that in the past, an increase in carbon dioxide in the air has already led to ten cases of mass extinction of species and that the situation is now similar. The causes of those extinctions were not asteroids, but the rapid saturation of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide as a result of volcanic activity and the greenhouse effect that accompanied it.
In this century, the situation is the same as in previous centuries, it was called the “greenhouse mass extinction” - by analogy with the cases of mass extinction that have already taken place in the history of the Earth4. Through the analysis of fossils, including using modern devices and tools, we understand that the danger of such extinction is real today. Despite this, many of our colleagues remain deaf or prefer not to hear the cries of the dying, not only from the past, but also from the future. The history of life has provided us with a system that warns us that we must reduce carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. However, human history shows that people are not likely to pay attention to warnings until climate change causes massive human casualties.
Scientific information about the distant past is one of the aspects that is most often ignored when discussing climate change. One of the most frequently (so often that it has already been slightly erased) of the quoted remarks about history belongs to George Santayana: "Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat its mistakes." Bearing in mind the well-known cases of mass extinction in history due to the rapid increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we should pay special attention to the word “doomed” in the statement of George Santayana.
No book can fully recreate the history of the development of life. We have to make a choice, and our choice was dictated by the word "new." The latest “full” one-volume version of this story came out in the mid-1990s — an amazing best-seller in life: The Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth. British paleontologist and writer Richard Forti. His work is delightful, and to this day it is pleasant to read, and in our case it is reread, and this is 20 years after the publication! But science is developing very fast, today we already know what was not known two decades ago. Even as many as two scientific fields, which were only born in the 1990s, are developing: astrobiology and geobiology. The development of technologies allowed to extract completely new samples from fossils and rocks, as well as to identify previously unknown taxa. Even the principles of scientific research have changed, and now the most significant discoveries are being made at the junction of the once self-sufficient and well-known sciences: geology, astronomy, paleontology, chemistry, genetics, physics, zoology and botany - each science is symbolically found in universities in its own building, has no only its own faculty, but also its own terminological apparatus and a set of methods allowing to receive new information.
In our presentation of the material, we proceeded from three principles that served as the basis for our new history of the origin of life. First, we believe that the history of life development is more dependent on catastrophic events than on the totality of all other forces, including the slow, gradual evolution that Charles Darwin first described it, and he, in turn, relied on the principles of the founders of actualism. Actualism, the main principle of geology for more than two centuries, was originally developed by James Hutton and Charles Lyell at the end of the XVIII century. This principle has been studied by many generations of young naturalists, including Darwin8. The discovery of the asteroid which destroyed the dinosaurs, which crashed into our planet 65 million years ago, was a turning point in the study of geology. Researchers' views shifted towards the approach that they called “neo-catastrophism”, partly reviving the ideas of catastrophism - the direction that existed before actualism.
We will show on the pages of this book that actualism - the way it explains the ancient world, the type and pace of evolution - is not relevant and by and large can be refuted. What is happening in modern times does not give an understanding of what happened in the distant past, especially since those events were more like cataclysms than the result of a gradual development of the situation. For example, what modern events would help explain phenomena such as the “Earth-Snow”, or the Oxygen Catastrophe, or the saturated gray Ocean Canfield, which arose over a billion years ago and contributed to the evolution of the first stage of animal development. The mass extinction of dinosaurs at the border of the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods (the so-called Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, or Cretaceous-tertiary extinction) also has no analogies in our day, and the type of ocean and atmosphere that created the possibilities for the origin of life on the planet does not exist today, as there is no saturation of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, which would not allow any ice island to appear on Earth. The present is not the key to understanding most of the events of the past. Thinking differently, we limit ourselves to the views and understanding of the nature of things.
Secondly, since we are a carbon form of life formed by chains of carbon compounds (carbon atoms combine to create proteins), then it is logical to assume that the molecules of three gases, oxygen, carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, had a special influence on life history. Perhaps, of all the elements, sulfur had the greatest influence on the development of nature and life on our planet.
Finally, since the history of the development of life is the history of living beings, then it is the evolution of ecosystems that is the most significant factor for the formation of sets of the modern picture of life. Coral reefs, rainforests, deep-water fauna faults and many others - each of these phenomena can be a special play with its actors, but with the same scenario from era to era. At the same time, we know that in the depths of time, fundamentally new ecosystems populated by new forms of living organisms arose by chance. The emergence of living beings, which, for example, can fly, or swim, or walk on two legs - all these are major changes in evolution that have changed the whole world, and each of them has helped to create new ecosystems.
More information about the book can be found on the publisher's website.
Table of contents
Excerpt
For readers of this blog 25% discount coupon - New Story
The generally accepted history of the origin of life on Earth is obsolete. Two scientists, Peter Ward and Joseph Kirschwink, offer a book that contains all the findings of recent research. The authors show that many of our previous ideas about the history of the origin of life are wrong. First, the development of life was not a slow, gradual process: cataclysms contributed to the formation of life more than all the other forces combined. Secondly, carbon is the basis of life, but what other elements determined its evolution? Thirdly, since the time of Darwin we have been thinking in terms of the evolution of species. In fact, there has been an evolution of ecosystems — from underwater volcanoes to tropical forests — that have shaped the world as we know it. Based on his many years of experience in paleontology, biology, chemistry, astrobiology, Ward and Kirschvink tell the story of life on Earth, so fantastic that it is hard to imagine, and at the same time so familiar that one cannot pass by.Foreword
History in almost any form is perhaps the most disliked school subject. One of the most in-depth studies on this topic is in the book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (“My teacher lied to me: all the wrong textbook on American history” 1), and her main conclusion can be stated in a nutshell: useless thing! Leuven writes: “The story told in textbooks is predictable, any problem in them is either already solved, or is about to be solved ... The authors do not use examples of the present to explain the past, because the present is not a source of information for authors of history textbooks.”
')
The idea of ​​Leuven is quite clear. In the form in which American history is taught in high school, the past and the present are not related to each other, and it turns out that history has nothing to do with modernity, in no way affects it. Nevertheless, Leuven’s conclusion is not entirely correct, especially if we speak about the history of life on Earth, whose antiquity is recorded on stones, in molecules and DNA chains present in any of our cells. The benefit of studying this story is indisputable, as well as the fact that knowledge of the history of Life can save us from almost complete extinction.
In the early 1960s, the great American writer James Baldwin remarked: "People cannot escape from history, just as history cannot escape from people." He meant humanity, but these words will be equally true if the word “people” is replaced with “all life on Earth, in the past and present,” since each DNA chain in every cell of the human body is an ancient record of biological history made simple code and transmitted from generation to generation. It can be said that DNA is nothing but a story embodied in physical form. This form is slowly being created and developed over many epochs with the help of the most merciless of all creators, natural selection. DNA is a story that lives in us, while it dictates its own conditions to us. This is a model of our body, which decides that we will pass on to our children - gifts for good or for a time bomb. We really cannot escape from this peculiar bearer of history, which cannot escape from us anywhere.
The history of the development of life provides answers to many difficult, but such urgent questions that each of us asks: how did we, the people, manage to become a small, just-spreading branch on a huge tree of life? What struggle awaits our species in the future, what hardships leave their marks on our, human, branch of this old tree, which is four billion years old? The past helps us to understand what place we occupy among the more than twenty million living species, as well as the myriad of others that have already disappeared. The extinction of any species means the disappearance of the still unnamed species in the future probable evolutionary history.
On the pages of this book, we will go a long way to our future, going through the long-standing tests that our ancestors faced: fire, ice, lightning strikes, poisonous gas, fangs of predators, merciless competition, deadly doses of radiation , as well as war and conquest in the struggle for the development of every habitable corner of this planet. And each episode became a component of the entire amount of information in the existing DNA. Every crisis or war changed genomes by adding or splitting different genes. Each of us is a descendant of disaster survivors and time-hardened people.
There is one more, and even more weighty, reason to study the history of the origin of life, it was called by Norman Cousins: "History is a huge early warning system." This wise thought was expressed at the height of the Cold War. Later generations had little idea what it meant to grow in the 1950s and 1960s, when the weekly siren of the warning of the civilian population reminded us children that any faint sound of a jet plane could be the beginning of the end.
Wars endlessly charge an ominous tribute to humanity — physical, economic, emotional. The history of the development of life has many similarities with the history of human conflicts. The evolution of the means of attack in predators (stronger claws and fangs, sharp odors, even poisonous thorns and stings to catch and kill other species) initiates the development of elements of opposition to potential victims (more reliable protection of the body - armor, higher speed of movement, development of hide), and sometimes - and the emergence of protective weapons. All this can be called "biological arms race." Many significant events of evolution cannot be repeated, because evolution has too long periods of development, designed to fill the biosphere with competitive and well-adapted organisms. For example, it is hardly possible to repeat the Cambrian explosion, which resulted in the emergence of many basic forms of the animal world. But what can really happen is that they are opposed to life and diversity, such as extinction, or even mass extinction, as happened in the past due to catastrophic events.
With every molecule of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere, we ignore early warning signals that remind us that in the past, an increase in carbon dioxide in the air has already led to ten cases of mass extinction of species and that the situation is now similar. The causes of those extinctions were not asteroids, but the rapid saturation of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide as a result of volcanic activity and the greenhouse effect that accompanied it.
In this century, the situation is the same as in previous centuries, it was called the “greenhouse mass extinction” - by analogy with the cases of mass extinction that have already taken place in the history of the Earth4. Through the analysis of fossils, including using modern devices and tools, we understand that the danger of such extinction is real today. Despite this, many of our colleagues remain deaf or prefer not to hear the cries of the dying, not only from the past, but also from the future. The history of life has provided us with a system that warns us that we must reduce carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. However, human history shows that people are not likely to pay attention to warnings until climate change causes massive human casualties.
Scientific information about the distant past is one of the aspects that is most often ignored when discussing climate change. One of the most frequently (so often that it has already been slightly erased) of the quoted remarks about history belongs to George Santayana: "Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat its mistakes." Bearing in mind the well-known cases of mass extinction in history due to the rapid increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we should pay special attention to the word “doomed” in the statement of George Santayana.
What is so new about this “New History of the Origin of Life”?
No book can fully recreate the history of the development of life. We have to make a choice, and our choice was dictated by the word "new." The latest “full” one-volume version of this story came out in the mid-1990s — an amazing best-seller in life: The Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth. British paleontologist and writer Richard Forti. His work is delightful, and to this day it is pleasant to read, and in our case it is reread, and this is 20 years after the publication! But science is developing very fast, today we already know what was not known two decades ago. Even as many as two scientific fields, which were only born in the 1990s, are developing: astrobiology and geobiology. The development of technologies allowed to extract completely new samples from fossils and rocks, as well as to identify previously unknown taxa. Even the principles of scientific research have changed, and now the most significant discoveries are being made at the junction of the once self-sufficient and well-known sciences: geology, astronomy, paleontology, chemistry, genetics, physics, zoology and botany - each science is symbolically found in universities in its own building, has no only its own faculty, but also its own terminological apparatus and a set of methods allowing to receive new information.
In our presentation of the material, we proceeded from three principles that served as the basis for our new history of the origin of life. First, we believe that the history of life development is more dependent on catastrophic events than on the totality of all other forces, including the slow, gradual evolution that Charles Darwin first described it, and he, in turn, relied on the principles of the founders of actualism. Actualism, the main principle of geology for more than two centuries, was originally developed by James Hutton and Charles Lyell at the end of the XVIII century. This principle has been studied by many generations of young naturalists, including Darwin8. The discovery of the asteroid which destroyed the dinosaurs, which crashed into our planet 65 million years ago, was a turning point in the study of geology. Researchers' views shifted towards the approach that they called “neo-catastrophism”, partly reviving the ideas of catastrophism - the direction that existed before actualism.
We will show on the pages of this book that actualism - the way it explains the ancient world, the type and pace of evolution - is not relevant and by and large can be refuted. What is happening in modern times does not give an understanding of what happened in the distant past, especially since those events were more like cataclysms than the result of a gradual development of the situation. For example, what modern events would help explain phenomena such as the “Earth-Snow”, or the Oxygen Catastrophe, or the saturated gray Ocean Canfield, which arose over a billion years ago and contributed to the evolution of the first stage of animal development. The mass extinction of dinosaurs at the border of the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods (the so-called Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, or Cretaceous-tertiary extinction) also has no analogies in our day, and the type of ocean and atmosphere that created the possibilities for the origin of life on the planet does not exist today, as there is no saturation of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, which would not allow any ice island to appear on Earth. The present is not the key to understanding most of the events of the past. Thinking differently, we limit ourselves to the views and understanding of the nature of things.
Secondly, since we are a carbon form of life formed by chains of carbon compounds (carbon atoms combine to create proteins), then it is logical to assume that the molecules of three gases, oxygen, carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, had a special influence on life history. Perhaps, of all the elements, sulfur had the greatest influence on the development of nature and life on our planet.
Finally, since the history of the development of life is the history of living beings, then it is the evolution of ecosystems that is the most significant factor for the formation of sets of the modern picture of life. Coral reefs, rainforests, deep-water fauna faults and many others - each of these phenomena can be a special play with its actors, but with the same scenario from era to era. At the same time, we know that in the depths of time, fundamentally new ecosystems populated by new forms of living organisms arose by chance. The emergence of living beings, which, for example, can fly, or swim, or walk on two legs - all these are major changes in evolution that have changed the whole world, and each of them has helped to create new ecosystems.
More information about the book can be found on the publisher's website.
Table of contents
Excerpt
For readers of this blog 25% discount coupon - New Story
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/395201/
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