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Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Life sciences: general issues > Evolution
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Life's Edge - The Search for What It Means to Be Alive (Paperback)
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Life's Edge - The Search for What It Means to Be Alive (Paperback)
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List price R280
Loot Price R219
Discovery Miles 2 190
You Save R61 (22%)
Expected to ship within 5 - 10 working days
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'This book is not just about life, but about discovery itself. It
is about error and hubris, but also about wonder and the reach of
science. And it is bookended with the ultimate question: How do we
define the thing that defines us?' - Siddhartha Mukherjee, author
of The Gene We all assume we know what life is, but the more
scientists learn about the living world - from protocells to
brains, from zygotes to pandemic viruses - the harder they find it
to locate the edges of life, where it begins and ends. What exactly
does it mean to be alive? Is a virus alive? Is a foetus? Carl
Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is
life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer
it. Is the apple sitting on your kitchen counter alive, or is only
the apple tree it came from deserving of the word? If we can't
answer that question here on earth, how will we know when and if we
discover alien life on other worlds? The question hangs over some
of society's most charged conflicts - whether a fertilized egg is a
living person, for example, and when we ought to declare a person
legally dead. Life's Edge is an utterly fascinating investigation
by one of the most celebrated science writers of our time. Zimmer
journeys through the strange experiments that have attempted to
recreate life. Literally hundreds of definitions of what that
should look like now exist, but none has yet emerged as an obvious
winner. Lists of what living things have in common do not add up to
a theory of life. It's never clear why some items on the list are
essential and others not. Coronaviruses have altered the course of
history, and yet many scientists maintain they are not alive.
Chemists are creating droplets that can swarm, sense their
environment, and multiply - have they made life in the lab? Whether
he is handling pythons in Alabama or searching for hibernating bats
in the Adirondacks, Zimmer revels in astounding examples of life at
its most bizarre. He tries his own hand at evolving life in a test
tube with unnerving results. Charting the obsession with Dr
Frankenstein's monster and how Coleridge came to believe the whole
universe was alive, Zimmer leads us all the way into the labs and
minds of researchers working on engineering life from the ground
up.
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