How Did Life End Up With Us?

The Secrets of Life: From Big Bang to Trump

SS O'Connor

• Publisher: Otium Press
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9781839786044
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Why does the gene behave like a hedge fund manager? Why are mutations like a gambling scam? Why does nothing ever become top dog in life and win forever?
Humans only arrived after 99.99% of the time there's been life on earth. So what was here before us? And how did these species, and the evolutionary process that created them, end up with the unpromising creatures that were our ancestors?
In this, the first book of The Secrets of Life quartet, SS O'Connor brings his outsider's, questioning eye to reveal the great forces that lie behind life: from the laws that arose with Big Bang, through to the 'decisions' that organisms make to determine their chances.
But how did everything come about? And what made some life forms succeed - while others would join the 99.9% of species that appeared, yet went on to become extinct? The story goes right back to our single-celled forebears - the only things that were on the planet for 80% of its existence, and then continues as it lays out the ways that successive transmissions built increasing complexity, and how the resulting species found their synergistic ways of coexisting.
In an easy-going, conversational style, O'Connor explains in lay-man's language how the gene is the great conductor of life's orchestra, how it helped millions of life forms to refine themselves - yet why it also sees failure, death and extinctions as opportunities rather than disasters.
Last, the book tells the story of the men who unpicked the mysteries, what they meant by fitness and 'the fittest', but why they continued to be baffled by organisms that broke the rules by helping each other. Why would some even choose to be sterile when producing the next generation was the overriding compulsion in life? And why would the answer to this question explain why altruism is the proof for the 'gene-based theory of evolution' - and why cooperation was to become the strongest force in life?

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The secrets of life? How can one claim anything so idiotically simplistic when there’s such a bewildering variety of organisms on earth? If they’re all so different, how can they share the same secrets?
• Chapter Two: The beginning? Why, what happened in the beginning? And why did it make us all march to the same drumbeat?
• Chapter Three: Life? What is it anyway? And how did it start? Isn’t it all a bit of a mystery?
• Chapter Four: DNA? We all know what that’s supposed to do… why should it be so interesting?
• Chapter Five: If DNA is so great at passing on genes, then where’s the replication? Why isn’t everything the same instead of being so obviously different?
• Chapter Six: Can the gene really be said to have a strategy for the future? And, if so, how does this affect its ‘vehicles’ - living things - which would include us?
• Chapter Seven: Prokaryotes were our ancestors. So, what happened for the two billion years when they were the only life forms on the planet? And since they still exist, what can we learn from them?
• Chapter Eight: How did life spend so long as single cells, and then somehow progress to end up with organisms like us? And why did certain changes seem to work, and others didn’t?
• Chapter Nine: The journey continues. After 90% of the Earth’s story, evolution and new life forms became supercharged… by the marvel of sex. But why and how did that happen?
• Chapter Ten: Phew. That’s quite a lot to take in... perhaps it’s time for a bit of a catch up? Maybe even to suggest what all this history adds up to?
• Chapter Eleven: If the gene is completely focused on keeping life going… why does it let things die?
• Chapter Twelve: So sex leads to death. And death helps clear out old generations to let mutations introduce diversity. This sounds like a clever plan, but how can the gene be sure that mutations are going to make things better, and not worse?
• Chapter Thirteen: How did people think evolution worked before Darwin and Wallace came along? If God wasn’t the only one making decisions, what else did they imagine was happening?
• Chapter Fourteen: Few would disagree that Charles Darwin was a visionary genius, but who was the other person - Alfred Russel Wallace? The two of them are supposed to have somehow worked together, but who came up with the right answer? And what was it?
• Chapter Fifteen: Could Lynn Margulis have been right in saying that natural selection alone wasn’t enough to explain evolution? But who was she and what did she mean? And if she and other people with similar views were correct, what are now regarded as some of the other major drivers of evolutionary change?
• Chapter Sixteen: Do organisms really make ‘decisions’ about how they’re going to behave? And, if so, what are the benefits of the different strategies they’ve arrived at?
• Chapter Seventeen: In a world of apparent competition - in which survival and reproduction are the only aims - can non-human life forms behave like us and actually help each other? And, if they can, then what’s making them do it?
• Chapter Eighteen: Altruism? Don’t be ridiculous - we all know that’s a uniquely human quality. Living things are programmed by their genes to survive and reproduce, so why would anything act in a way that wasn’t in its self-interests? Why would it ever sacrifice itself for others?
• Chapter Nineteen: Why would an organism deliberately choose to be altruistic - put its life in danger or reduce its fitness for others? If evolutionary success is all about being able to reproduce, why does the ‘selfish gene’ let it decide not to?
• Chapter Twenty: Is the human capacity for altruism just genetic selfishness? If so, does this mean that we’re the same as other organisms - or are we really different?
• Chapter Twenty One: Geneticists say humans are the only organisms on earth that can override the instructions of their genes, but what are we rebelling against?
• Acknowledgements
• Picture credits