Description
Book SynopsisThe Royal Society''s Science Book of the Year
[A]n exuberant romp through evolution, like a modern-day Willy Wonka of genetic space. Gee's grand tour enthusiastically details the narrative underlying life's erratic and often whimsical exploration of biological form and function. Adrian Woolfson, The Washington Post
In the tradition of Richard Dawkins, Bill Bryson, and Simon WinchesterAn entertaining and uniquely informed narration of Life''s life story.
In the beginning, Earth was an inhospitably alien placein constant chemical flux, covered with churning seas, crafting its landscape through incessant volcanic eruptions. Amid all this tumult and disaster, life began. The earliest living things were no more than membranes stretched across microscopic gaps in rocks, where boiling hot jets of mineral-rich water gushed out from cracks in the ocean floor.
Although these membranes were leaky, the environment within them
