Customer Reviews:

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0

Vital Dust - Mechanics and Metaphysics:

Christian De Duve is a great scientist. His contributions to biology and to humanity are legion. In this book, De Duve undertakes the daunting task of reconstructing the history of life on the planet Earth. It is a very good broad brush overview of the information that has been gathered and the knowledge that has been gained relative to the mechanics of life. His repeated appeals to the process of natural selection to fill the many gaps in the history he tries to establish, however, demonstrate a faith in... more info

Very informative:

I found this book to be quite informative and well written. The one small complaint I have about "Vital Dust" is its sparse use of diagrams and illustrations, hence the 4 star rating rather than 5. Otherwise, I found this book to be excellent. I am a research life scientist, so had little trouble with Dr de Duve's explanations, but feel the work would be more accessible to the general reader with more illustrations. This is such an interesting book, that I would hate for someone to be "put off" of it... more info

The story's in the details:

Ever since Charles Darwin postulated the beginnings of life in "some warm little pond" science has probed into origin mechanisms. As it became clearer that life is a molecular phenomenon, researchers have delved deeper into chemical processes to work out life's start. De Duve joins that quest with a detailed examination of these mechanisms and the environments in which they come about. In his explanation of life's origins, it becomes clear that the mechanisms leading to life are common. Earth, therefore, is... more info

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