Volume 10, Number 4 · February 29, 1968
That's Life
By C.H. Waddington
The Origins of Life
by J.D. Bernal
World, 345 pp., $12.50
I suppose that nowadays most people accept, as so obvious that it hardly requires a second thought, the final dethroning of man from the position of focus and summit of the universe, which he for so long, and so confidently, had given himself. We would hardly raise an eyebrow were we to find a new series of books on 'The World Natural History,' including among its early volumes a long and quite detailed study on the natural history of the Garden of Eden. Of course, this climate of thought is astonishingly recent. Until a very few decades ago the scientific view of life was completely dominated by the denial that living systems could spontaneously arise from non-living ones. Indeed it would have been claimed that Pasteur had experimentally disproved the possibility of spontaneous generation. He kept a nutritive broth in conditions in which no external living agents could get access to it, and he showed that nothing living appeared within it; hence he concluded that life could not arise spontaneously. Pasteur was of course looking for something obviously recognizable as alive, such as a bacterium or yeast. As the search for the origin of life has gone deeper, we have had to ask more penetrating questions about what is and what is not alive. I shall argue that these are some of the most important issues raised by the book under review.
Review, 3002 words
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