Week 1- Why I Choose Life Ascending Logan Yang

The things that drew me to Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution was that one of the chapters if titled death and that another was titled consciousness. I have turned it over in my head a few times and I never viewed death as a product of evolution but then I realized that a large portion of what we have studied is based off the fact that generations come and go and this obviously means that they have to die. But the fact that death is a constant factor that allows evolution to occur would suggest to me that evolution is the product of death and not the other way around. I am interested to see how Nick Lane contextualizes death as a product instead of a driving force.

Consciousness also caught me off guard because evolution has created fantastic life forms that fill in different niches across the globe but only a handful have consciousness and if we talk in sheer numbers they are greatly outnumbered. Humans may the dominant mammal species with a population over six billion, but insects and bacteria dominate the numbers game. So how does such a specialized trait constitute one of the great inventions of evolution? Are we talking about evolution from an anthropocentric view? Does the sense of self mark some threshold that I personally am unaware of? Regardless of how impressive it is as an adaptation I am curious to see how it ties in with broad inventions such as death, the origin of life, the complex cell, and movement.
The rest of the topics should prove to be interesting but they did not draw my attention like the last two did, but nonetheless I am looking forward to reading how hot blood can stand as an achievement outside of a mammalian/anthropocentric view as bacteria, plants, and cold blooded animals have developed traits just as impressive in their own light. 

That said reading through the introduction I get the vibes that Lane did write the book with the general public in mind and that this book does have an human centered almost guided direction as he states that he will examine "our own deaths and prospects for immortality", which makes my hackles raise as it sounds like evolution is a journey of ascension despite his insistence that it is driven with no goal in mind. So I look forward to reading this book and hope that the chapters will included reasons as to why outside of humanity these inventions are hallmarks of evolution.