Science   Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story A.G. Cairns-Smith               Darwin, in the final paragraph of his iconic book 'On the Origin of Species' composed a few lines of ethereal beauty. In a book that is not, otherwise acclaimed for its lyrical quality and sublime prose, these words never fail to move me profoundly even after I h...

Science   The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution Richard Dawkins                   Richard Dawkins is perhaps the most articulate and fierce proponent of the theory of Evolution today. He has authored many books on various facets of evolution, but had not collected and discussed the extant evidence for evolution in one place. In this book he has done this. He has mounted a terrific, unassailable and mammoth counterattack on the opponents of Evolution, the so-called believers in the theory of Intelligent Design, the Creationists. He calls them ‘history-deniers’, the 40-percenters. He explains citing believable allegories how deniers of evolution deny history. And the name, 40-percenters, because forty percent Americans deny that humans evolved from animals and believe that we were created by God in last 10,000 years. He presents incontrovertible evidence, one after another, in a...

Science/Biology/Biography   The Forgetting- Understanding Alzheimer’s: A Biography of a Disease David Shenk   Being alive is to continuously experience the world as it impinges on our senses. These experiences leave an imprint on our minds in the form of memories. From these memories we weave a universe that we carry within us till we die. Memory is central to our existence. It tells us who we are and how we are progressing in time. There cannot be meaningful thought in its absence. Neither can there be sustained emotions. If a person is deprived of memory, he ceases to be a human in the most fundamental sense. He loses the sense of self and of the world which surrounds him.   Our brain is snugly enclosed in a bony vault. It does not experience the world directly. Our senses feed it information in form of neural activity. This activates various synaptic transmissions among billions of neurons in brain. It is through these electro-chemical signals that brain ...

*** 1/2 /*****                                                                                                                Science The Blind Watchmaker Richard Dawkins Life in its various forms represents the most sophisticated and the most elegant creation in universe. Intricacy of anatomy and physiology of each and every part of the body of an organism is mind boggling. Most organic creatures have evolved incredibly intri...

Memoir/Science Double Helix- A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA James D. Watson Discovery of the structure of DNA molecule has been hailed as one of the foremost scientific feat of twentieth century. DNA is the molecule of life. Thus, when Francis Crick ‘winged in to the Eagle (a bar at Cambridge) to tell everyone within hearing distance that we had found the secret of life’, he was in fact mouthing the plain truth, though making Watson ‘slightly queasy’. This short book is an account of events which led to this ingenious and monumental discovery, written by one of the lead players in this quest, James D. Watson. Watson was then merely twenty-four years old. He has written these memoirs as he then saw the world, the events, and personalities involved, i.e., through the eyes of a young scientist who is in a hurry to make his mark in the world of science and earn a Noble Prize. Narration is exceedingly frank and unpretentious. There is no allus...

Science The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins We have found the secret of life- blurted Francis Crick in a bar soon after he and Watson first discovered that they had correctly deciphered the structure of DNA. That Genes are the storehouse of all information which is required to produce and then nurture the body that contains them, be it a single celled bacterium, a hundred feet oak tree or the most complex machine, the human being with a mind that contemplates on its own origin, is a fact known to most. And from this it seems logical to infer that genes fulfil a vital function of the body lodging them. In his first book The Selfish Gene , Richard Dawkins sets out to dispel this erroneous belief. Genes are not for bodies, but bodies are for Genes. This is the central theme of the book. The Selfish Gene theory of nature is Richard Dawkins’ theory of Genecentric world. He argues that Darwinian evolution does not work at the level of species or groups of living beings, but at the ...

**1/2/*****                                                                                                                                                      Science Dr Tatiana’s Sex Advice To All Creation-The Definitive Guide To The Evolutionary Biol...