First Life
eBook - PDF

First Life

Discovering the Connections between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began

  1. 288 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

First Life

Discovering the Connections between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began

About this book

This pathbreaking book explores how life can begin, taking us from cosmic clouds of stardust, to volcanoes on Earth, to the modern chemistry laboratory. Seeking to understand life's connection to the stars, David Deamer introduces astrobiology, a new scientific discipline that studies the origin and evolution of life on Earth and relates it to the birth and death of stars, planet formation, interfaces between minerals, water, and atmosphere, and the physics and chemistry of carbon compounds. Deamer argues that life began as systems of molecules that assembled into membrane-bound packages. These in turn provided an essential compartment in which more complex molecules assumed new functions required for the origin of life and the beginning of evolution. Deamer takes us from the vivid and unpromising chaos of the Earth four billion years ago up to the present and his own laboratory, where he contemplates the prospects for generating synthetic life. Engaging and accessible, First Life describes the scientific story of astrobiology while presenting a fascinating hypothesis to explain the origin of life.

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Yes, you can access First Life by David Deamer in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Biological Sciences & Evolution. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Table of Contents
  5. Acknowledgments
  6. Introduction
  7. Chapter 1: A Fireball Over Australia
  8. Chapter 2: Where Did Life Begin?
  9. Chapter 3: When Did Life Begin?
  10. Chapter 4: Carbon and the Building Blocks of Life
  11. Chapter 5: The Handedness of Life
  12. Chapter 6: Energy and Life’s Origins
  13. Chapter 7: Self-Assembly and Emergence
  14. Chapter 8: How To Build a Cell
  15. Chapter 9: Achieving Complexity
  16. Chapter 10: Multiple Strands of Life
  17. Chapter 11: Catalysts: Life in the Fast Lane
  18. Chapter 12: Copying Life’s Blueprints
  19. Chapter 13: How Evolution Begins
  20. Chapter 14: A Grand Simulation of Prebiotic Earth
  21. Chapter 15: Prospects for Synthetic Life
  22. Epilogue
  23. Sources and Notes
  24. Index