First life: discovering the connections between stars, planets, and evolution on earth

Description

Cover; Title Page; Copyright Page; Table of Contents; Acknowledgments; Introduction; Chapter 1: A Fireball Over Australia; Chapter 2: Where Did Life Begin?; Chapter 3: When Did Life Begin?; Chapter 4: Carbon and the Building Blocks of Life; Chapter 5: The Handedness of Life; Chapter 6: Energy and Life's Origins; Chapter 7: Self-Assembly and Emergence; Chapter 8: How To Build a Cell; Chapter 9: Achieving Complexity; Chapter 10: Multiple Strands of Life; Chapter 11: Catalysts: Life in the Fast Lane; Chapter 12: Copying Life's Blueprints; Chapter 13: How Evolution Begins;This pathbreaking book explores how life can begin, taking us from cosmic clouds of stardust, to volcanoes on Earth, to the modern chemistry laboratory. Seeking to understand life's connection to the stars, David Deamer introduces astrobiology, a new scientific discipline that studies the origin and evolution of life on Earth and relates it to the birth and death of stars, planet formation, interfaces between minerals, water, and atmosphere, and the physics and chemistry of carbon compounds. Deamer argues that life began as systems of molecules that assembled into membrane-bound packages. Thes. Cover Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1: A Fireball Over Australia Chapter 2: Where Did Life Begin? Chapter 3: When Did Life Begin? Chapter 4: Carbon and the Building Blocks of Life Chapter 5: The Handedness of Life Chapter 6: Energy and Life's Origins Chapter 7: Self-Assembly and Emergence Chapter 8: How To Build a Cell Chapter 9: Achieving Complexity Chapter 10: Multiple Strands of Life Chapter 11: Catalysts: Life in the Fast Lane Chapter 12: Copying Life's Blueprints Chapter 13: How Evolution Begins Chapter 14: A Grand Simulation of Prebiotic EarthChapter 15: Prospects for Synthetic Life Epilogue Sources and Notes Index