- Dyson, Freeman J. Origins of Life.
2nd. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999. ISBN 0-521-62668-4.
- The years which followed Freeman
Dyson's 1985 Tarner lectures, published in the first edition of Origins
of Life that year, saw tremendous progress in molecular
biology, including the determination of the complete nucleotide
sequences of organisms ranging from E. coli to
H. sapiens, and a variety of evidence indicating the
importance of Archaea and the deep, hot biosphere to theories
of the origin of life. In this extensively revised second edition,
Dyson incorporates subsequent work relevant to his double-origin
(metabolism first, replication later) hypothesis. It's perhaps
indicative of how difficult the problem of the origin of life is
that none of the multitude of experiments done in the almost 20 years
since Dyson's original lectures has substantially confirmed or denied
his theory nor answered any of the explicit questions he posed as
challenges to experimenters.
March 2004 