Book Review: Microcosm

post from Daily Kos on 18 May 2008 09:46:45 AM. © Daily Kos

Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life
Author: Carl Zimmer
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Available: Order Here

In newspapers or science programs, one occasionally hears mention of an evolutionary ‘ladder,’ naturally with humans perched on the exalted top rung. Not to take anything away from our species, we are indeed uniquely endowed by physiology in numerous ways. But until I read Carl Zimmer’s Microcosm, I didn’t fully appreciate that that picture isn’t just over simplified, it’s just plain wrong.

The anatomically modern human species has been around a few thousand generations. Our class, the mammals, has been evolving for many millions more leaving behind an impressive of living form and function. Imagine what our bodies, organs, and cells might be physically capable of, if the long sharp scalpel of natural selection had been operating on our kind for uncounted trillions of generations. There are such miraculous creatures.

One in particular has developed the capacity to completely remake their entire metabolism from the molecular bottom up or retrofit their gross anatomy from the top down. If humans were capable of equivalent transformations, we would be able to sprint across a continent subsisting only on a diet of rancid meat, stand on the ocean’s shore, sprout a tail and gills in the space of a few hours, and swim across the Atlantic feeding only on toxic red algae. Yet even that doesn’t do their sophistication justice, for they have evolved to evolve with clever system built into and onto clever systems. They are among the greatest human allies; they can be our worst enemy. More recently, these marvelous creatures have become a biological Rosetta Stone translating nature’s most tightly held secrets of life, and they’ve been domesticated to serve man.

Carl Zimmer tells all those tales and many more quite masterfully in Microcosm.