What is it about?
A book review of Life’s Engines, by Paul Falkowski. He examines the origin and workings of life’s essential processes: photosynthesis and respiration. It is an oxidation-reduction reaction during which electrons are exchanged with transfer of energy—occurring in a teeming microbial “electron marketplace” in our oceans.
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Why is it important?
This “electron marketplace” is what made life on Earth possible over 2.4 billion years ago. If disturbed it could make Earth uninhabitable again. Microbes don’t have ‘brains’ or plans: they exchange DNA freely to survive the moment. But en masse, the changes could become uncontrollable, altering Earth’s atmosphere once more.
Perspectives
Falkowski's book deserves more attention from the research community. Technology—to satisfy the moment— too often ignores biology. For example, the current interest in synthetic microbes is shorted-sighted and dangerous: once unleashed, they cannot be retrieved. A further threat is artificial intelligence: technology’s fervor to make a brain to replace the human one. Without a respiring body and its 3-billion-year wisdom encoded in its DNA, AI is not about life, it’s about death (of humans). ** Use this link to read the book review online: https://www.leonardo.info/reviews_archive/feb2016/falkowski-wong.php
Cecilia Wong
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Life’s Engines: How Microbes Made Earth HabitableLife’s Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitableby Paul G. Falkowski. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, U.S.A., 2015. 224 pp., illus. ISBN: 978-0-691-15537-1., Leonardo, August 2016, The MIT Press,
DOI: 10.1162/leon_r_01307.
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