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title: "What is Life?: How Chemistry Becomes Biology (Oxford Landmark Science)"
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# What is Life?: How Chemistry Becomes Biology (Oxford Landmark Science)

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desertcart.com: What is Life?: How Chemistry Becomes Biology (Oxford Landmark Science): 9780198784791: Pross, Addy: Books

Review: Semantics worth $10 Nothing Profound - If you can find this for around 10 bucks US, the up to date semantic translations between physics, bio and chem are worth a quick read. The author obviously has a lot of experience translating catalysis, dynamic systems, molecular memory and ideas like information storage, frequent in bio, absent in chem, so as a bridge, it's a great little read. Everything else falls apart right around the nucleus of it's value: semantics. The author claims that we can "simply" apply Darwinian evolution to "purpose" in chemical catalysis to understand life. He then allows that Darwin left out all the paths and connections, which is no big deal due to Paleontology. What he misses (in an important Dettmer-Goldblatt The Logical Thinking Process: A Systems Approach to Complex Problem Solving sense) is that you CAN'T do that with molecular paths-- the devil, and the causes are IN the detail and paths. His missing arrows, ellipses and boxes ARE crucial to life's dynamics, and without them his theory BECOMES semantics, not science. Example: Life isn't design, it is purposive searching for replicative methods using entropy busting kinetic chemical directives to defeat thermodynamic equilibrium forces. He, and his buddy Hawking, miss the fact that search and directives are information and design terms. He calls Intelligent Design types "peddlers" -- then peddles his own semantic version of design! Pross says with all kinds of reverence that dynamic systems will revolutionize chemistry. Please-- this idea is 12 years old and we're far beyond popular press awe now, and into the tough math of softly constrained nonlinear dynamics vs. hard constraint dynamics with inequalities. This level includes triple integrals, matrix calculus and abundant partial derivatives and tensors. Nothing of substance in this book in that regard. There are hundreds of books written on the ODE/ equality - fuzzy constraint side of dynamics by the way, but only ONE covering inequalities and hard constraints that are becoming more and more important in DNA: David Stewart ( A Dynamics With Inequalities: Impacts and Hard Constraints (Applied Mathematics) . Finally, the author gives the wonderful punchline that, yes, humans really ARE just pond scum, ala his idiot buddy Hawking, but, guess what, because we are NETWORKED, we might be something a little more, and... sit down... why can't we all just get along? (Seriously, that's the ending/ punchline of the book!). Well, yes, reductionism means all arrows point down, but the bend over backward semantics to avoid design just gets silly. You don't HAVE to see reductionism as reverse engineering-- a Divine, Loving Creator giving us each instant to explore His skillfull designs, but at least acknowledge the projective importance of the human observer in creating the mulidimensional code-reality running beneath life! We're going to stop shooting school kids when we see that humans are vast, Godlike beings, not networked pond scum, and if his "hope for the future" is that, even as pond scum, we are bigger because there are a LOT of us... PLEASE! Individuals are NOT important in this bleak view... granted... we're selfish gene machines... and we get "this world" when that's all we think of individual human importance. Fortunately, science acknowledged, we still have spirit telling us each soul is vast and precious, not a collection of autocatalysts seeking enough energy to mate, then die, our purpose achieved. An annoying note: this guy continually adds "Nobel prize winner" to almost all of his citations throughout the book. Tone down the Nobel dispenser, dude! The real geniuses today are the 10,000 nameless Chinese and Indian mathematicians working IN dynamic systems. Get a clue. His European prejudice is almost as childish as my American prejudice, what can we do?
Review: Excellent intro to Contemporary Work on Origins of Life - Addy Pross describes the new Systems Chemisry's findings and related theorizing about ife's arising from inanimate matter. Her prose is readble without condescending too much. As an arrmchair science buff, I found "What Is Life?" pitched at the right level -- enough meat in the discussion of replicative chemical systems and dynamic kinetic stability to be interesting, not so dense as to lose me. As a historian, I would have liked to see Pross tell us more about some of the mid-20th century efforts to get at the origins of life, but that's a detail. A strong book.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #592,397 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #38 in Molecular Biology (Books) #59 in Biochemistry (Books) #151 in General Chemistry |
| Customer Reviews | 4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars (546) |
| Dimensions  | 7.6 x 0.6 x 5 inches |
| Edition  | Reprint |
| ISBN-10  | 0198784791 |
| ISBN-13  | 978-0198784791 |
| Item Weight  | 15.2 ounces |
| Language  | English |
| Part of series  | Oxford Landmark Science |
| Print length  | 224 pages |
| Publication date  | July 1, 2016 |
| Publisher  | Oxford University Press |

## Images

![What is Life?: How Chemistry Becomes Biology (Oxford Landmark Science) - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/518zdPwh87L.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Semantics worth $10 Nothing Profound
*by P***Z on January 26, 2013*

If you can find this for around 10 bucks US, the up to date semantic translations between physics, bio and chem are worth a quick read. The author obviously has a lot of experience translating catalysis, dynamic systems, molecular memory and ideas like information storage, frequent in bio, absent in chem, so as a bridge, it's a great little read. Everything else falls apart right around the nucleus of it's value: semantics. The author claims that we can "simply" apply Darwinian evolution to "purpose" in chemical catalysis to understand life. He then allows that Darwin left out all the paths and connections, which is no big deal due to Paleontology. What he misses (in an important Dettmer-Goldblatt The Logical Thinking Process: A Systems Approach to Complex Problem Solving sense) is that you CAN'T do that with molecular paths-- the devil, and the causes are IN the detail and paths. His missing arrows, ellipses and boxes ARE crucial to life's dynamics, and without them his theory BECOMES semantics, not science. Example: Life isn't design, it is purposive searching for replicative methods using entropy busting kinetic chemical directives to defeat thermodynamic equilibrium forces. He, and his buddy Hawking, miss the fact that search and directives are information and design terms. He calls Intelligent Design types "peddlers" -- then peddles his own semantic version of design! Pross says with all kinds of reverence that dynamic systems will revolutionize chemistry. Please-- this idea is 12 years old and we're far beyond popular press awe now, and into the tough math of softly constrained nonlinear dynamics vs. hard constraint dynamics with inequalities. This level includes triple integrals, matrix calculus and abundant partial derivatives and tensors. Nothing of substance in this book in that regard. There are hundreds of books written on the ODE/ equality - fuzzy constraint side of dynamics by the way, but only ONE covering inequalities and hard constraints that are becoming more and more important in DNA: David Stewart ( A Dynamics With Inequalities: Impacts and Hard Constraints (Applied Mathematics) . Finally, the author gives the wonderful punchline that, yes, humans really ARE just pond scum, ala his idiot buddy Hawking, but, guess what, because we are NETWORKED, we might be something a little more, and... sit down... why can't we all just get along? (Seriously, that's the ending/ punchline of the book!). Well, yes, reductionism means all arrows point down, but the bend over backward semantics to avoid design just gets silly. You don't HAVE to see reductionism as reverse engineering-- a Divine, Loving Creator giving us each instant to explore His skillfull designs, but at least acknowledge the projective importance of the human observer in creating the mulidimensional code-reality running beneath life! We're going to stop shooting school kids when we see that humans are vast, Godlike beings, not networked pond scum, and if his "hope for the future" is that, even as pond scum, we are bigger because there are a LOT of us... PLEASE! Individuals are NOT important in this bleak view... granted... we're selfish gene machines... and we get "this world" when that's all we think of individual human importance. Fortunately, science acknowledged, we still have spirit telling us each soul is vast and precious, not a collection of autocatalysts seeking enough energy to mate, then die, our purpose achieved. An annoying note: this guy continually adds "Nobel prize winner" to almost all of his citations throughout the book. Tone down the Nobel dispenser, dude! The real geniuses today are the 10,000 nameless Chinese and Indian mathematicians working IN dynamic systems. Get a clue. His European prejudice is almost as childish as my American prejudice, what can we do?

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Excellent intro to Contemporary Work on Origins of Life
*by T***N on August 14, 2013*

Addy Pross describes the new Systems Chemisry's findings and related theorizing about ife's arising from inanimate matter. Her prose is readble without condescending too much. As an arrmchair science buff, I found "What Is Life?" pitched at the right level -- enough meat in the discussion of replicative chemical systems and dynamic kinetic stability to be interesting, not so dense as to lose me. As a historian, I would have liked to see Pross tell us more about some of the mid-20th century efforts to get at the origins of life, but that's a detail. A strong book.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ What IS Life?
*by G***S on January 11, 2017*

In "Campbell's Biology" (Reece et al., 2014) this question appears on page one. "At the most fundamental level, we may ask: What is life? Even a child realizes that a dog or plant is alive, while a rock or a car is not [maybe not your car but mine on the other hand...]. Yet the phenomenon we call life defies a simple, one-sentence definition. We recognize life by what living things do." Campbell's lists the attributes of life as order, energy processing, evolutionary adaptation, response to the environment, regulation, and reproduction. At a significantly more advanced academic level in "Molecular Biology" (Clark et al., 2013), this same question is posed at the beginning of chapter one. On page three it is stated that the basic ingredients needed to sustain life include genetic information [this book is essentially about cells], a mechanism for energy generation, machinery for making more living matter, a characteristic outward physical form, an identity or self, the ability to reproduce, and adaptation. The header of the next paragraph states boldly that "Living Creatures Are Made of Cells". However well intended, they are both wrong, or better, myopic in their vision and scope. Life exists all around us. Literally everything is alive. Galaxies are ordered collections of stars, they process energy, they evolve, they certainly respond to the presence of other galaxies through gravitational force, they self-regulate their behavior by means of internal forces, and they reproduce other galactic forms in the process of colliding with other galaxies. What is life? is not the most insightful question to answer if our objective is a better understanding of the universe in which we live. Why is there life? is a much better origin from which to proceed. As described in the first couple of paragraphs above we tend to see life though an anthropomorphic lens, which has a much too narrow field of view. We tend to look at the end result of some 13 billion or more years of universal evolution and call that "life". So in order to make sense of that description of life we must somehow explain how life evolved from non-life. A valiant attempt has been made by Addy Pross in his book titled - you guessed it - "What is Life?: How Chemistry Becomes Biology". Pross to his credit eschews the two-stage process of getting from non-life to life. He maintains that it has always been a continuous process, and he is certainly on the right track: up until he waves his hands at a most crucial point in the argument. "It now seems increasingly likely that several billion years ago some replicating system [of chemicals] of unknown identity, but of low complexity, set off along the long and winding road toward high complexity." After that injunction he is good to go, and makes some excellent arguments that deal mostly with how more complex chemical molecules formed - those that combined to produce what we now like to call living organisms. He also makes a strong case for life as an emergent property of a system - i.e. a population of individuals - rather than as a characteristic of any one individual in that population. He does this in spite of his disparaging the concept of "emergent properties" early on in the book. Addy comes so close, but fails to realize that if he stepped back a bit further it is clear - at least to me - that the propensity for life is built into atomic structure. Pross will respond by saying that is what he intended to portray - but he doesn't say it explicitly. Shortly after the beginning of our universe we simply had hydrogen atoms. Why in heaven's name [pun intended] did we get the rest of the periodic table? Because hydrogen atoms, due to their valence properties, are social creatures, and enjoy cohabitating with one another. Add gravity, the cupid of attraction, and hydrogen atoms find one another and immediately bond because they are by nature capable of bonding. Add enough hydrogen atoms packed together by gravity and the heat of fusion produces stars wherein other atoms of higher atomic number are created, all because of their bonding properties at both the atomic and subatomic level. Life began with the bonding of hydrogen atoms. Pross is correct in stating that life is a property of populations and not of individuals. All that has been required for the continual triumph of life over the suppressive Second Law is available energy, information about the nature of the surrounding environment supplied by a few fundamental forces, some very obliging universal constants, and billions of years of getting to know one another well enough to build complex family relationships. Coda: It is not given for us to know what can happen in thousands of millions of years when our lifetimes are measured in but a few. Suffice to say that we can see evolution with our own eyes as we watch in wonder at the endogenous molecular changes wrought by our attempts to extinguish the lives of unwanted cells, microbes and viruses.

## Frequently Bought Together

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