Ackerman, Jennifer G. Chance in the House of Fate. Houghton
Mifflin Company, 2001.
The book is about the discovery of remarkable resemblances in our genes that
unite every living thing in the tree of life.
Austad, Steven N. Why We Age: What Science Is Discovering about the Body's Journey through Life. John Wiley & Sons, 1999.
Baldi, Pierre. The Shattered Self: The End of Natural Evolution.
MIT Press, 2001.
A professor of computer science and biological chemistry observes that "our
notions of self, life and death, intelligence, and sexuality" are primitive
and contends that a world dominated by computer and biotechnologies shatters
this model, making us uneasy with scientific advances. While Robert Wright and
E. O. Wilson focused on evolutionary theory as it demonstrates the emergence
of self, Baldi goes further to show how the self evolves after natural evolution
has ended.
Brack, Andre. ed. The Molecular Origins of Life: Assembling Pieces of the Puzzle. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Chaisson, Eric J., Lola Judith Chaisson. Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Chela-Flores, Julian et al. eds. Chemical Evolution: Self-Organization of the Macromolecules of Life. A Deepak Pub, 1995.
Cone, Joseph. Fire Under the Sea: The Discovery of Hot Springs on the Ocean Floor and the Origin of Life. William Morrow & Co, 1991.
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998.
Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. New York: Penguin Books, 1958.
Dawkins, Richard, Daniel Dennett. The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene. Oxford University Press, 1999.
Day, William. Genesis on Planet Earth: The Search for Life's Beginning. 2nd ed. Yale University Press, 1984.
De Duve, Christian R. Vital Dust: Life as a Cosmic Imperative. Perseus Books, 1995.
Dennett, Daniel C. Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1995.
Depew, David J., Bruce H. Weber. Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and
the Geneology of Natural Selection. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.
Surveys the different schools of thought within evolutionary theory regarding
the relation between thermodynamics, self-organization and the evolutionary
synthesis.
Diamond, Jared. The Third Chimpanzee. New York, NY: Harper, 1992.
Ellis, Richard. Aquagenesis: The Origin and Evolution of Life in the Sea. Penguin, 2001.
Gladyshev, G. P. Thermodynamic
Theory of the Evolution of Living Beings. Nova Science Publishers, 1997.
A prominent physical chemist offers a thermodynamic model of ontogenesis,
philogenesis, and biological evolution in general. As part of his general overview,
he explains the nature of evolution, the origin of life and the role of divine
initiation, new conformities, and other factors.
Fry, Iris. The Emergence of Life on Earth: A Historical and Scientific Overview. Rutgers University Press, 2000.
Gould, Stephen J. Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985.
Gould, Stephen Jay. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and
the Nature of History. W. W. Norton & Company, 1990.
The author presents his opinions on the upheaval in fundamental theories of
evolutionary development due to the challenges by scientists at Cambridge University
in the 1970s concerning the accepted classifications of the Cambrian creatures
preserved in the Burgess Shale—a major fossil find discovered in British Columbia
in 1909.
Gould, Stephen J. Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History. W. W. Norton & Co., 1992.
Greenberg, J. Mayo, C. X. Mendoza-Gomez. eds. Chemistry of Life's Origins. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993.
Hoch, James A., Richard Losick, Abraham L. Sonenshein. eds. Bacillus Subtilis and Its Closest Relatives: From Genes to Cells. ASM Press, 2001.
Hookway, Christopher. Minds, Machines and Evolution: Philosophical Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19984.
Keller, Evelyn Fox, L. L. Winship. The Century of the Gene. Harvard University Press, 2000.
Lahav, Noam. Biogenesis: Theories of Life's Origin. Oxford University Press, 1999
Loewenstein, Werner R. The Touchstone of Life: Molecular Information, Cell Communication, and the Foundations of Life. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Lewin, Benjamin. Genes VII. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Maddox, John Royden. What Remain to Be Discovered: Mapping the Secrets of the Universe, the Origins of Life, and the Future of the Human Race. Simon & Schuster, 1999.
Margulis, Lynn, Dorion Sagan, What Is Life? University
of California Press, 2000.
Prominent biologists explore what it means to be alive. Going beyond both mechanistic
and vitalistic concepts of life, this book argues that the question "What
is life?" is a linguistic trap. To the authors, life is a material process,
surfing over matter like a wave; it is more like a verb than a noun. It is "a
controlled artistic chaos, a set of chemical reactions so staggeringly complex
that more than four billion years ago it began a sojourn that now, in human
form, composes love letters and uses silicon-chip computers to calculate the
temperature of matter at the birth of the universe."
Medina, John J. The Clock of Ages: Why We Age—How We Age—Winding Back the Clock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Morowitz, Harold J. Beginnings of Cellular Life: Metabolism Recapitulates Biogenesis. Yale University Press, 1992.
Pennington, S., M. J. Dunn. Proteomics: From Protein Sequence to Function. Springer-Verlag New York, 1999.
Ponnamperuma, Cyril, N. F. Raulin, Julian Chela-Flores. Chemical Evolution: Physics of the Origin and Evolution of Life. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996.
Ridley, Matt. Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in
23 Chapters. HarperTrade, 2000.
One of the most accessible books available on the topic of the human genome.
Taking each of the 23 chromosomes in turn, the author recounts the history of
our species and its ancestors from the dawn of life. He explains "genes
that we share with bacteria, genes that distinguish us from chimpanzees, genes
that can condemn us to cruel diseases, genes that may influence our intelligence,
genes that enable us to use grammatical language, genes that guide the development
of our bodies and our brains, genes that allow us to remember, genes that exhibit
the strange alchemy of nature and nurture, genes that parasitise us for their
own selfish ends, genes that battle with one another and genes that record the
history of human migrations."
Rosen, Robert. Essays on Life Itself. Columbia University Press, 1999.
Rosen, Robert. Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life. Columbia University Press, 1991.
Salthe, Stanley N. Development and Evolution: Complexity and Change in Biology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.
Schwartz, Jeffrey H. Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species. New York: John Wiley, 1999.
Smith, John Maynard, Eors Szathmary. The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Sole, Richard, Brian Goodwin. Signs of Life: How Complexity Pervades Biology. New York: BasicBooks, 2000.
Provides a long list of examples on how mathematical structures influence the genesis and morphology of living systems.
Wicken, Jeffreys S. Evolution, Thermodynamics, and Information: Extending the Darwinian Program. Oxford University Press, 1987.
Zweiger, Gary. Transducing the Genome: Information, Anarchy,
and Revolution in the Biomedical Sciences. McGraw-Hill, 2001.
A scientist who worked at Stanford University, Genentech, and Incyte explains
the significance of the Human Genome Project and the paradigm shift that it
has created in the life sciences.