Search -
Sparks of Life : Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Generation
Sparks of Life Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Generation Author:James E. Strick "Must all life come from preexisting life? Do all cells, including those of the tiniest wall-less bacteria, arise only from division of parental cells that they resemble? Isn't the central idea of evolution that all life 'is descended with modification' from previous, ancestral life? If so, then how could the earliest life originate ... more »without living predecessors? … These questions abounded in intellectual, medical, and naturalist circles in the decades just after Lyell's geological and Darwin's biological books became widely known. They are the focus of James Strick's Sparks of Life. Thankfully for the reader, Strick approaches them as a historian but one having scientific acumen and, especially, knowledge of modern microbiology and its antecedents." —Lynn Margulis, Science "You might think after On the Origin of Species that … obviously, if evolution was true, sometime in the distant past [there must have been] the natural creation of life from non-life … and you can certainly argue (as Darwin did himself) that once life got up and running, it would itself destroy the circumstances under which one might expect life ever again to come from non-life. However, as James Strick shows in his excellently written and beautifully informed study … the origin of life question was not about to go away that easily … Strick has a good tale to tell and—trained both as a historian and as a scientist—he tells it well." —Michael Ruse, Endeavour« less