Vital Dust

Published 15 years ago, Christian De Duve's Vital Dust feels at times like it's at the cutting edge of latest research. Only brief moments display the age of this science book, which is a bit of a rare quality.

Duve traces the history of life and searches for meaning in all of it. Spanning from biochemistry (his field) to philosophy (not his field), Duve attemps to synthesize several fields of science and thought into an ultimate meaning of life.

He begins with a sweeping tale of the origins of life, beginning with theories on life arising from nonlife, moving to RNA and DNA origins, to unicellular life, to the diversity of multicellular organisms. Then, he discusses the nature of the human mind and the theories surrounding the existence and meaning of human consciousness. He then makes a stab at identifying the meaning of human life.

I read a lot of science non-fiction books and enjoy most of them. Very few, though, stick out from among the rest as "essentials" - books that I feel are essential reading for anyone interested in science. This book falls in that category, although with an asterisk. I have yet to read such a compelling narrative of the origins of life. Somehow Duve writes for both scientists and laymen alike. I must admit that there were moments where I felt lost, but the moments were brief and did not take away from my experience reading the book.

Duve's only fault occurs when he attempts to dabble in the field of philosophy. He  confesses several times that philosophy and psychology are fields where he has only passing knowledge about and dug deeper into in an attempt to further the scope of this book. His limits in these areas render the last 50 or so pages quite a bit weaker than the first 250.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in science. If you don't consider evolution to be even a remote possibility of the emergence of life, then you probably won't appreciate this book. That would be a shame, though, because this book is beautiful.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

(83/100)