Planet of Microbes and Reading the Rocks

The following are two failed book reviews. The first failed because I could not bear to subject myself any further to the book. The second failed when the author made a factual error that undermined her credibility too profoundly for me to continuing reading.

Ted Anton’s Planet of Microbes

 Photo by Eric Erbe, digital colorization by Christopher Pooley, both of USDA, ARS, EMU. 
Wikipedia, February 17, 2018.

Planet of Microbes begins with Stanley Miller’s 1952 origin-of-life experiment, in which Miller attempted to recreate the conditions of the early Earth in a glass device. It was Harold Urey that conceived of the experiment. While Urey was teaching at the University of Chicago, and while Miller was a student there, Urey described the idea for the experiment in a campus lecture attended by Miller. (13) In the experiment, water was heated, mixed with the gases that were thought to constitute Earth’s early atmosphere, and an electric charge was passed through the gases. Miller discovered that glycine formed under such conditions. Glycine is an amino acid, and amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. As Miller continued the experiment, he was able to produce additional biological molecules, demonstrating that at least some of the precursors to life form naturally under the conditions that prevailed on the early Earth. (11, 15-16)

The careers of both Miller and Urey intersected with the field of nuclear physics, though in quite different respects. Harold Urey discovered deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen, in 1931 and participated in the Manhattan Project. Miller studied under Edward Teller at the University of Chicago before Teller left to work on the hydrogen bomb. (14-15)

Anton discusses the work of Konstantin Merezhkovsky. Merezhkovsky proposed that many organelles of eukaryotic cells had originated as independent organisms. In particular, he proposed that chloroplasts originated as cyanobacteria. (18) He also studied lichens extensively. Lichens are a symbiotic composite organism of fungi and algae.

Unfortunately, Anton creates the impression that Merezhkovsky was unique in realizing the symbiotic nature of lichens. Indeed, based on Anton’s narrative, I assumed that Merezhkovsky was the first to identify this relationship. In fact, Simon Schwendener was the first to recognize that lichens are composite organisms, and he did so in 1868. (Ed Yong; Sapp, 4-5) While Anton does not explicitly claim that Merezhkovsky was the first to identify lichens as composite organisms, the manner in which he describes Merezhkovsky’s work with lichens creates this misimpression, and he could have easily avoided this by mentioning Simon Schwendener.

Ivan Wallin was another researcher who, like Merezhkovsky, was among the first to recognize that plant and animal cells contain organelles that once existed as independent organisms. Specifically, Wallin proposed that mitochondria originated as free-living bacteria. (20-21)

Lynn Margulis was influenced by the work of both Merezhkovsky and Ivan Wallin. (25) She argued in support of their claims that chloroplasts and mitochondria originated as independent bacteria. While this is the prevailing understanding of the origins of these structures today, Margulis’s 1967 paper “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells” was rejected by 16 journals before being accepted by a 17^th. It was in the 1980s that these claims began to be widely accepted, and this is because DNA technology made it possible to test them.

Anton also discusses James Lovelock. Lovelock made contributions to gas chromatography, the practice of identifying the constituents of a gas by analyzing the spectrum of light passing through it. (31) He also invented the electron capture detector, which he used to identify the spread of industrial pollutants such as chluorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere. (32) However, Lovelock is most famous for the Gaia Hypothesis, which holds that the Earth is a “living” system whose components interact in a homeostatic fashion to maintain conditions favorable to life.

I made it about 100 pages into Planet of Microbes, but this was an incredibly unpleasant experience. When I found myself dreading returning to the book, I decided to abandon it altogether. Here are some reasons why.

Anton’s presentation is disorientingly inchoate. While this may not be the case in regard to the overall structure of the book, it is the case with the individual passages. The feeling you get when reading Planet of Microbes is the feeling you get when you are having difficulty politely extricating yourself from a conversation with someone who talks to much. The seeming randomness of the presentation of Planet of Microbes doesn’t simply render it less coherent. It is a constant distraction. The reader is frequently wondering what one paragraph has to do with the last or what the beginning of a paragraph has to do with the end of it. Rather than contemplating the ideas discussed, the reader is frequently contemplating the manner in which it is being presented. It often feels that Anton has simply cut and paste sentences into a paragraph without adding the necessary transitions words. It also often feels as if he is just listing facts that he finds fascinating but which aren’t immediately relevant.

Anton also provides an enormous quantity of biographical trivia as well as quotations about personalities. We learn that Carl Woese had a Miles Davis poster, and a colleague is quoted as saying that Woese “worshipped the truth.” (56) We learn that Samantha Joye was a walk-on who made her college basketball team. (81) Who cares? The digressions are minor, but they are constant and a nuisance.

Finally, Planet of Microbes is a blizzard of typographical errors. Sometimes these errors are obvious, but sometimes they take the following form: “Most of the essential components required for enzyme action could be found in RNA….” Now consider the sentence that immediately follows it: “They also discovered that most of the essential components required for enzyme catalysis could also be found in RNA structures.” (46-47) These sentences say exactly the same thing in barely different words. I find such errors particularly frustrating, perhaps because the typical reader is likely to not recognize that they just read identical sentiments expressed in only slightly different words. While putting two periods at the end of many sentences is annoying, patching together paragraphs from your notes without proofreading for coherence and calling it a book feels a little more like cheating.

It is hard to imagine Planet of Microbes being of much value to anyone. Those interested in the science will find the biographical trivia and irrelevant quotations to be a nuisance. Those interested in the biographies of scientists are unlikely to take satisfaction in a scattershot of trivia about dozens of individuals.

Writing a book is an enormous and difficult undertaking, and so I’m conflicted about writing so critically about Planet of Microbes. But the truth is, I hated reading this book. What’s worse, I hated it despite being very interested in the subject matter. It’s awkward that Anton is such an awful writer. He is a professor of English.

Reading the Rocks

While Ted Anton’s Planet of Microbes takes typographical errors and poor organization to a new level, Brenda Maddox takes the grand prize for what may be the single worst factual error I have ever encountered in a piece of published writing. Reading the Rocks is the first book in which I have ever encountered a single error so egregious that I immediately stopped reading the book.

Life began on Earth as early as 3.8 billion years ago. It was unicellular. Around 600 to 500 million years ago, the first multicellular lifeforms appeared. These are the ancestors of plants, animals, and fungi. The seemingly abrupt appearance of countless fossils of multicellular lifeforms is referred to as the Cambrian Explosion.

Until the 1950s, the Cambrian Explosion was regarded as possibly marking the beginning of life on Earth. This is because single-celled lifeforms typically leave less discernible fossils than multicellular lifeforms. By the 1960s and 70s, the notion that life began 600 million years ago was no longer tenable because of the accumulated discoveries of pre-Cambrian microfossils. (Woese, 209)

It is incredible that an author composing a book on the history of science could publish the following sentence in 2017. Behold: “By far the longest part of the earth’s history is now understood to have been the time before any form of life began—an estimated 3.9 billion years. Only comparatively recently—an estimated 540 million years ago—did life emerge, first as single cells deep in the ocean, then as creatures with heads, tails and segmented bodies. This period is now referred to as the ‘Cambrian explosion’.” (15)

Clichés are clichés for good reason. The covers and titles of these books made me want to read them, and so I grabbed them off the New Books shelf at the library. The most important lessons that Planet of Microbes and Reading the Rocks taught me are that you can’t judge a book by its cover, and that I ought to be more selective about what I read.

Anton, Ted. Planet of Microbes: The Perils and Potential of Earth’s Essential Life Forms. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Maddox, Brenda. Reading the Rocks: How Victorian Geologists Discovered the Secret of Life. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.

Sapp, Jan. Evolution by Association: A History of Symbiosis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Woese, Carl. “The primary lines of descent and the universal ancestor.” In Evolution from Molecules to Man, edited by D. S. Bendall. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Yong, Ed. “How a Guy From a Montana Trailer Park Overturned 150 Years of Biology.” The Atlantic, July 21, 2016. Accessed February 10, 2018: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/07/how-a-guy-from-a-montana-trailer-park-upturned-150-years-of-biology/491702/.