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Title: Oxygen: The Molecule That Made the World by Nick Lane ISBN: 0-19-850803-4 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: April, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Great book
Comment: Fascinating book. The author really knows his stuff and puts together a very persuasive story of how evolution was affected by Oxygen. Although some technical info through me at times, practically every page had some interesting tidbit. I found it hard to put down.
Rating: 5
Summary: A lot of information about a lot of different topics!
Comment: Nick Lane's book, Oxygen The Molecule that made the World, is a surprising volume. It mixes organic and inorganic chemistry with evolutionary studies, paleontology, research medicine, and even a little engineering to explain how the world got to be as it is. The first half of the book is dedicated to what our early atmosphere was like and how it changed as a result of biological activity. It also discusses how the evolving atmosphere, particularly the presence of oxygen, affected the complexity of early life and the sudden flourish of biological diversity after the Precambrian. The last half of the volume deals with the recent research on free radicals and their effect on health and on the phenomena of aging and of immortality.
Doctor Lane's own background is in biochemistry, and his research focus has been on oxygen free radicals and metabolic function in organ transplants. Not surprisingly he went into some detail about the free radical cascade that affects cellular metabolism and DNA integrity. I found this somewhat difficult to understand as I have only a very rudimentary grounding in organic chemistry. Still I have to admit that I know somewhat more about the process than I did before reading this book.
Probably because I know significantly more about geology and paleontology, I enjoyed more fully the author's synthesis and analysis of what we know of the geological and biological development of our atmosphere and our planet. Some of this material was familiar to me from other sources: Certainly that O2 can actually be a "poison" I know from managing patients with ARDS (adult respiratory distress syndrome) on mechanical ventilators with 100% O2; that the earth went through a series of green house earth/snowball earth phases early in its history I had learned from Ward and Brownlee's book Rare Earth; that life had begun almost as early as it was able and much earlier than had been previously believed, I was aware of from works by Gould, Schopf, and others; and that the mitochondria may once have been free-living, aerobic organisms that formed a symbiotic relationship with anaerobic organisms was known to me from my past exposure to microbiology in a nursing class.
New to me however, was the concept that gigantism may have been a means of limiting the negative effects of a periodic increase in oxygen in the environment, as Dr. Lane suggests in his chapter on The Bolsover Dragonfly. Although I had read an article that suggested that the immense sizes achieved by some of the dinosaur species might have been due to a higher percent of O2 at the time, I had also understood that it was because oxygen was a "good" thing, an opportunity of sorts. Lane points out that the negative effects of oxygen on tissues and DNA through the free radical cascade might have been ameliorated by an increased size. An animal--or one presumes also a plant--that increased its size might have been able to distribute negative effects over a greater body mass. One wonders if the rise of the mammalian mega fauna of the ice ages and their sudden almost catastrophic disappearance might not also have been due to some temporary fluxuation in the oxygen level of their atmosphere. (In which case the early Native Americans could be once and for all exonerated of having liquidated them, since their demise would have been dictated by a return to a baseline oxygen level!) If this were the case, one might also question what type of changes might be expected among our own kind as a result of such an increase and decrease of atmospheric oxygen.
I found the doctor's ideas on the trade off between sexual reproduction and immortality a unique approach to the topic of aging. Some of this information--the studies of animal reproduction rates, predation, and age at death, for instance--was known to me. Dr. Lane's discussion brought it together in a much more complete way.
Certainly the concept of sexual reproduction being one of life's mechanisms of perpetuating the fragile, complex organic molecules (DNA) in an oxidative environment was interesting. I had read Ridley's proposal that sexual reproduction evolved as a means of resisting bacterial infection, but Lane's suggests why it began as early as the DNA swapping behavior among early single eukaryotic cells. That the massive increase in biological diversity was an indirect product of the release of oxygen into the atmosphere, is truly an amazing thought. In the event as Lane makes claim in his subtitle, oxygen was truly "The Molecule that made the World."
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Title: Life on a Young Planet : The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth by Andrew H. Knoll ISBN: 0691009783 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 17 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time by Michael Benton, Michael J. Benton ISBN: 050005116X Publisher: Thames & Hudson Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Hydrogen: The Essential Element by John S. Rigden ISBN: 0674007387 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: May, 2002 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
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Title: In the Blink of an Eye by Andrew Parker ISBN: 0738206075 Publisher: Perseus Publishing Pub. Date: 15 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Snowball Earth : The Story of the Great Global Catastrophe That Spawned Life as We Know It by Gabrielle Walker ISBN: 0609609734 Publisher: Crown Pub. Date: 18 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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