BOOK
Life Ascending, by Nick Lane
Profile, £9.99
4/5
IN A NUTSHELL
A series of eye-opening essays details the majesty and complexity of the 10 great inventions of evolution.
REVIEW
If one of your New Year resolutions is to bolster your brainpower, it would not be amiss to make your first action the purchase of this book.
For it holds two great steps towards that course. Firstly, it is pitched satisfyingly a notch higher than average popular science publications - which tend to be two notches below what's necessary to keep your mental faculties at a comfortable stretch.
This book will explain without patronising, with some big words but also without needless complication what you need to know - but you have to stay sharp to keep up. Which is a good thing.
Secondly, this book will guarantee to dislodge the last remnants of lobe-clinging cranium crud by dint of a neat non-biological process.
It will blow your bloody mind.
Accomplished science writer Nick Lane puts together a series of lucid and logical explanations of the sublime intricacies and mechanics of biological evolution that, surely, will inspire the awe of the most jaded January earth dweller.
We casually fling phrases like photosynthesis about - but the bio-chemical beauty of the process that oxygenated the planet (and could, if harnessed by man, end our climate crisis at a stroke) is beyond the realms of our meagre sense of wonderment.
The intelligent design fraternity may have lost the argument (don't tell them, they get agitated) but their base-level incredulity that the world can be so bafflingly splendid in its every aspect and in every scale is a sensation shared by evolutionists too.
Remember how disorientated you felt when you understood that time was relative? Einstein had to be kidding, right? Because if time is relative... wow, what the hell just happened?
Well, reading this series of explanations of DNA and sight and sex and death and photosynthesis and movement and the other "great inventions of evolution" offers the same blissful epiphanies on every page.
