Life Ascending

Lane picks the ten greatest inventions of evolution, greatest measured by consequence, by how they changed the planet, and gives each a chapter that runs from the living machinery down to the contested question of its origin. The list itself is the argument: the origin of life, DNA, photosynthesis, the complex cell, sex, movement, sight, hot blood, consciousness, death.

The method makes the book. Each invention is treated as a detective story still partly open, and Lane, a working biochemist, walks the reader into the actual evidence: the deep sea alkaline vents whose chemistry he argues incubated the first metabolism; the accident by which one cell swallowed another and, once in four billion years, produced the mitochondria bearing complex cell everything visible descends from; why sex pays its notorious twofold cost; the protein motors that turned life mobile; the opsin molecules whose duplications built the eye, dissolving the old argument from design with the actual parts list; the metabolic gamble of warm blood; and death itself as an invention, programmed and negotiable, with the chapter's dark hint that ageing is the price of the mitochondrial bargain struck chapters earlier.

It is denser than most popular biology, molecule by molecule when it needs to be, and repays the effort with the rarest thing in the genre: arguments, staked and defended, rather than a tour.

Around three hundred and forty pages.

Best for readers who want evolution's biggest steps explained from the chemistry up, by a scientist unafraid to say which theories he is betting on.