Books: Origins Of Complexity ; China Water History

These just arrived.

Extract:

I hope to persuade you that energy is central to evolution, that we can only understand the properties of life if we bring energy into the equation..... I want to show you that the origin of life was driven by energy flux, that proton gradients were central to the emergence of cells, and that their use constrained the structure of both bacteria and archaea. I want to demonstrate that these constraints dominated the later evolution of cells, keeping the bacteria and archaea forever simple in morphology, despite their biochemical virtuosity. I want to prove that a rare event, an endosymbiosis in which one bacterium got inside an archaeon, broke those constraints, enabling the evolution of vastly more complex cells. .....Finally, I want to convince you that thinking in these energetic terms allows us to predict aspects of our own biology, notably a deep evolutionary trade-off between fertility and fitness in youth, on the one hand, and ageing and disease on the other.

The last book I read on the evolution of complexity was Mark Ridley's The Cooperative Gene which described the many evolutionary inventions that suppress genomic conflict and make multicellular bodies workable. Nike Lane writes at a more fundamental level of the energy currency of the cell. Feeling very excited about this book. I am sure to learn a lot.

Extract:

But the ubiquitous and ambivalent relationship that the Chinese people have had with water has made it a powerful and versatile metaphor for philosophical thought and artistic expression, and its political connotations can be subverted and manipulated in subtle ways for the purposes and protest and dissent. These meanings of water are more than metaphorical. Because the lives of everyday folk has always depended on water, the river and canals mediate their relationship to the state. Water -too much of it,or too little - has incited the people to rise up and overthrow their governments and emperors. Burgeoning economic growth now places unprecedented pressure on the integrity and sometimes the very existence of China's waterways and lakes. Not only can China's leaders ill afford to ignore this potential brake on economic growth, but the environmental problems are leading to more political pluralism in a nominally one party state.

Sweeping... from the Qin Dynasty (200 B.C.) to the present..