Life Ascending - Week 5: Final Thoughts

Life Ascending was a great choice of book. When I initially picked it I was intrigued about what it could possibly talk about and how it could possibly summarize the "greatest" inventions with just ten.  After reading it, I can say, it certainly convinced me and had me very caught into the book. The reason this happened was because of how the book was written and how Lane presented each new 'invention'; he explained and elaborated on each intention from a unique point-of-view - meaning he used interesting metaphor and always showed the 'invention' in both wildlife and humans. Had he just explained each 'invention', the book would have been boring, but thankfully he didn't.

For this last blog post, I want to focus on the last chapter of the book: Death. The reason I am doing this is well, its the last chapter of the book and the last post, so it feels appropriate. But, also because I found this chapter to be really interesting. When I firsts started reading this chapter I didn't know how death could be a beneficial invention; I could only think of the amount of pain that death causes both humans and animals. However, Lane convinced me otherwise, not that it doesn't cause pain because it does, but that it is incredibly beneficial. The quote that sold me on that ideas was this:

"Only death makes multicellular life possible. And, of course, without death there could be no evolution; without differential survival, natural selection comes to nothing"

I feel the quote is pretty self-explanatory. Death allows evolution to happen by survival of the fittest - the beneficial evolutions thrive, while the deleterious ones die. If deleterious evolutions did not die then there would be no moving forward with life. Just like with natural selection, if there was no death then everyone would have the same fitness and we could not more forward to more fit individuals. To me this is in fact one of the GREATEST evolution, ignoring that fact that death in every other ways sucks. I would have never thought of death this way and am so grateful to be able to this of it this way, there is more than just a negative meaning to the definition of death now.

Just like with the topic of death, after this book I so happy I can now explain all these evolution and have more the say about them, other that the basic common knowledge.