Oxygen has had extraordinary effects on life. Three hundred million years ago, in Carboniferous times, dragonflies grew as big as seagulls, with wingspans of nearly a metre. Researchers claim they could have flown only if the air had contained more oxygen than today - probably as much as 35 per cent. Giant spiders, tree-ferns, marine rock formations and fossil charcoals all tell the same story. High oxygen levels may also explain the global firestorm that contributed to the demise of the dinosaurs after the asteroid impact. The strange and profound effects that oxygen has had on the evolution of life pose a riddle, which this book sets out to answer. Oxygen is a toxic gas. Divers breathing pure oxygen at depth suffer from convulsions and lung injury. Fruit flies raised at twice normal atmospheric levels of oxygen live half as long as their siblings. Reactive forms of oxygen, known as free radicals, are thought to cause ageing in people. Yet if atmospheric oxygen reached 35 per cent in the Carboniferous, why did it promote exuberant growth, instead of rapid ageing and death? Oxygen takes the reader on an enthralling journey, as gripping as a thriller, as it unravels the unexpected ways in which oxygen spurred the evolution of life and death. The book explains far more than the size of ancient insects: it shows how oxygen underpins the origin of biological complexity, the birth of photosynthesis, the sudden evolution of animals, the need for two sexes, the accelerated ageing of cloned animals like Dolly the sheep, and the surprisingly long lives of bats and birds. Drawing on this grand evolutionary canvas, Oxygen offers fresh perspectives on our own lives and deaths, explaining modern killer diseases, why we age, and what we can do about it. Advancing revelatory new ideas, following chains of evidence, the book ranges through many disciplines, from environmental sciences to molecular medicine. The result is a captivating vision of contemporary science and a humane synthesis of our place in nature. This remarkable book will redefine the way we think about the world.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Elixir of Life - and Death; 2. In the Beginning there was no Oxygen: The Origins and Importance of Oxygen; 3. Silence of the Aeons: Three Billion Years of Microbial Evolution; 4. Fuse to the Cambrian Explosion: Snowball Earth, Environmental Change and the First Animals; 5. The Bolsover Dragonfly: Oxygen and the Rise of the Giants; 6. Treachery in the Air: Oxygen Poisoning and X-Irradiation: A Mechanism in Common; 7. Green Planet: Radiation and the Beginnings of Photosynthesis; 8. Looking for LUCA: Last Ancestor in the Age Before Oxygen; 9. Portrait of a Paradox: Vitamin C and the Many Faces of an Antioxidant; 10. The Antioxidant Machine: A Hundred and One Ways of Living with Oxygen; 11. Sex and the Art of Bodily Maintenance: Trade-offs in the Evolution of Ageing; 12. Eat! Or You'll Live Forever: The Triangle of Food, Sex, and Longevity; 13. Gender Bender! The Rate of Living and the Need for Sexes; 14. Beyond Genes and Destiny: The Double Agent Theory of Ageing and Disease; 15. Life, Death and Oxygen: Lessons From Evolution on the Future of Ageing
Reviews
"A thought-provoking popularization of evolution and oxygen biochemistry."--New England Journal of Medicine
"Nothing less than a total rethink of how life evolved between about 3.5 billion and 543 million years ago, and how that relates to the diseases we suffer from today.... This is scientific writing at its best."--Financial Times
"A worthy effort with a clearly argued message, full of informative and entertaining details."--American Scientist
"Provocative and complexly argued."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"One of the most thought-provoking books I have ever read."--John Emsley
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Reviews
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Nick Lane is firmly in the "free radicals" camp, those who believe that it is the accumulation of damage by free radicals which cause aging, and age related diseases. Given all the complexities of aging, Lane doesn't feel there is currently sufficient evidence to prove this theory, and so looks to the evolutionary record for additional justification. At least that is his rationale for taking the reader on a fascinating journey - I think of myself as reasonably well read on evolutionary theory, and I learned a lot about evolution (first half of book) as well as about aging (2nd half of book).
"Oxygen" is a work of science not popular science, and there are new insights and theories as well as a synthesis of existing material. Lane has a disarmingly "simple" way of expressing himself, but proceeds linearly rather than "top down", so that the closest thing to a summary occurs at the end of the book, which I think is unfortunate. I suppose a much smarter reader would disagree, enjoying the arguments as they unfold, and even I have some sympathy for that point of view. Lane does remind the reader of various points as he goes along, and the book has a great index. I got bogged down a bit in some of the cellular biology: many readers will need to either skim some material or refer to cellular biology texts, e.g. the introductory chapters of the classic text by Bruce Alberts, et al.
A potpourri of some of the ideas in "Oxygen": without oxygen, the earth would have lost all its hydrogen, thereby all its water; the most primitive common ancestor of all the branches of life already had the ability to protect itself against oxidative stress (arising from ultra violet rays which generate free radicals), and to use oxygen based metabolism; on several occasions geology contributed to "sudden" increases in atmospheric oxygen, which then drove an explosion of new life forms; at first mitochondria benefited eukaryotes as an anti-oxidant mechanism, not source of power; sex protects against the accumulation of harmful mutations (OK, I knew that already); mitochondria come from only the egg, where they have been inactive, not from the sperm where they are active and therefore often degraded; genes migrated from the mitochondria to the nucleus because they were in less danger from free radicals there (my generalization, not Lane's); the APOE variation of genes linked to Alzheimer's are not harmful, they are protective, but are more likely to be made inoperable with age; Alzheimer's is a matter of nerve damage due to oxidative stress (which ties in with a current theory, not mentioned, that Alzheimer's is the result of a localized type II diabetes, since diabetes results in increased oxidative stress).
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