The Stairway to Life
An Origin-of-Life Reality Check
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Narrated by:
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Fred Hoff
About this listen
Spontaneous generation of living organisms - life arising without progenitor or seed - was a common belief in the time of Aristotle. Over the next 2,000 years, support for spontaneous generation slowly retreated to its final stronghold: spontaneous formation of the first living organism.
From recently acquired insights into the complexity of the simplest organisms, Tan and Stadler specify requirements for spontaneous formation of life and evaluate the prospects for natural processes to satisfy these requirements. The Stairway to Life is a thought-provoking inquiry that breaches the final stronghold of spontaneous generation.
©2020 Rob Stadler (P)2021 Rob StadlerListeners also enjoyed...
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Paul Falkowski looks "under the hood" of microbes to find the engines of life, the actual working parts that do the biochemical heavy lifting for every living organism on Earth. With insight and humor, he explains how these miniature engines are built - and how they have been appropriated by and assembled like Lego sets within every creature that walks, swims, or flies. Falkowski shows how evolution works to maintain this core machinery of life, and how we and other animals are veritable conglomerations of microbes.
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Best Science Book Ever Written. Period.
- By serine on 07-28-15
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A Crack in Creation
- Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution
- By: Jennifer A. Doudna, Samuel H. Sternberg
- Narrated by: Erin Bennett
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Not since the atomic bomb has a technology so alarmed its inventors that they warned the world about its use. Not, that is, until the spring of 2015, when biologist Jennifer Doudna called for a worldwide moratorium on the use of the new gene-editing tool CRISPR - a revolutionary new technology that she helped create - to make heritable changes in human embryos.
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In to the abyss we ascend, a scary future
- By Philomath on 06-17-17
By: Jennifer A. Doudna, and others
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13 Things That Don't Make Sense
- The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time
- By: Michael Brooks
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 8 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Science starts to get interesting when things don't make sense. Science's best-kept secret is that there are experimental results and reliable data that the most brilliant scientists can neither explain nor dismiss. If history is any precedent, we should look to today's inexplicable results to forecast the future of science. Michael Brooks heads to the scientific frontier to meet 13 modern-day anomalies and discover tomorrow's breakthroughs.
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10 interesting chapters-read epiloge first
- By Stephen on 06-10-09
By: Michael Brooks
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Know This
- Today's Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments
- By: John Brockman
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman, Dan John Miller
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Scientific developments radically alter our understanding of the world. Whether it's technology, climate change, health research, or the latest revelations of neuroscience, physics, or psychology, science has, as Edge editor John Brockman says, "become a big story, if not the big story". In that spirit this new addition to Edge.org's fascinating series asks a powerful and provocative question: What do you consider the most interesting and important recent scientific news?
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Pete and Repeat and Re-repeat
- By Daniel L on 02-25-18
By: John Brockman
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Life Unfolding
- How the Human Body Creates Itself
- By: Jamie A. Davies
- Narrated by: Napoleon Ryan
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Where did I come from? Why do I have two arms but just one head? How is my left leg the same size as my right one? Why are the fingerprints of identical twins not identical? How did my brain learn to learn? Why must I die? Questions like these remain biology's deepest and most ancient challenges. They force us to confront a fundamental biological problem: How can something as large and complex as a human body organize itself from the simplicity of a fertilized egg?
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Fascinating Biology ; Distracting Narration
- By Tim on 03-01-15
By: Jamie A. Davies
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Science and the Akashic Field
- An Integral Theory of Everything
- By: Ervin Laszlo
- Narrated by: Tom Pile
- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Mystics and sages have long maintained that there exists an interconnecting cosmic field at the roots of reality that conserves and conveys information, a field known as the Akashic record. Recent discoveries in vacuum physics show that this Akashic field is real and has its equivalent in science's zero-point field that underlies space itself. This field consists of a subtle sea of fluctuating energies from which all things arise: atoms and galaxies, stars and planets, living beings, and even consciousness.
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A must-read about ultimate nature of reality
- By Alexandra Hopkins on 04-15-18
By: Ervin Laszlo
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Origins
- The Scientific Story of Creation
- By: Jim Baggott
- Narrated by: Neil Scott-Barbour
- Length: 16 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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What is the nature of the material world? How does it work? What is the universe and how was it formed? What is life? Where do we come from and how did we evolve? How and why do we think? What does it mean to be human? How do we know? There are many different versions of our creation story. This book tells the version according to modern science. It is a unique account, starting at the Big Bang and travelling right up to the emergence of humans as conscious intelligent beings, 13.8 billion years later.
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Interesting book, but WOW, the narrator ...
- By UH on 01-10-17
By: Jim Baggott
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Why Darwin Matters
- The Case for Evolution and Against Intelligent Design
- By: Michael Shermer
- Narrated by: uncredited
- Length: 4 hrs and 22 mins
- Abridged
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Columnist and publisher Michael Shermer, once an evangelical Christian and a creationist, argues that Intelligent Design proponents invoke a combination of ad science, political antipathy, and flawed theology in their new brand of creationism. He refutes their pseudoscientific arguments and then demonstrates why conservatives and people of faith can and should embrace evolution. Why Darwin Matters is an incisive examination of what is at stake in the debate over evolution.
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TOTAL MISREPRENTATION: WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE?
- By Theo Tsourdalakis on 09-04-11
By: Michael Shermer
What listeners say about The Stairway to Life
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- KJMonte
- 11-08-23
Amazing
I love the scientific integrity and devotion to revealing the building blocks of life. It was refreshing to hear the ground truth of what would truly be needed for abiogenesis to happen, if it were to happen naturalistically.
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- JD
- 03-01-22
Excellent Book!
I plan to listen to this book again and I may even buy the paper copy. I would like to walk back through each chapter and educate myself on the science as I go. Admittedly, much of the information was new to me and I did not understand everything. Still, the scientific evidence presented is insurmountable. I knew enough to get that point from the book. It is a shame that smart people have completely closed their eyes to the absolute impossibility of abiogenesis. There is no harm in admitting that we did not spring from a cosmic mud puddle. We are smarter than that… might it be that we owe our origin to an intelligent designer? Even the rebound atheist, Antony Flew was willing to admit that.
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- Mr. Orange
- 01-20-22
I had no idea how much was going on in one cell
I found the book very interesting, worth the time I spent listening. I would recommend.
One of the last chapters sounds like it needs some editing though. I hope more people will take a listen. The universe is insanely complex and so is life.
And this will help you appreciate it a little more.
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- Adane Yonder
- 09-12-22
true science
science vs. fiction masquerade as science. highly recommended.
the authors list 12 indispensable steps the non-life world has to ascend to become life. they demonstrate intelligent help is needed every step of the way.
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- Amazon Customer
- 12-18-21
Phenomenal. poignant. essential.
as a follower of the creation evolution saga for decades i have read a ton of the staples and many tangents- this one belongs at the top of essentials. . its refreshingly technical, but unlike secular pop science garbage , its not technical because it uses unfamiliar technical language deliberately intended to obscure understandingl- most titles shy away from the barrier of jargon separating students of biology and chemistry from the average joe -and with good reason, most need it diluted with pedestrian terms to take in (which this book delivers in spades using apt and strikingly accurate analogies) but anyone who digs a little deeper has seen the awesome complexity of living molecular systems making paleys watch pale in comparison. the snapshots Tan has delivered are examples of the paradoxically unevolvable scenarios that make abiogenesis appear in its true light- another irrational fairy tale of the cult of scientism.
anyone can pick this up and come out the other side with massive gains, it could be more work for some than others.. but the concepts and the crash course of essential understanding for each concept is all here, well articulated and neatly organized.
if you're an admirer of the wonders of creation,
you. need. this. book.
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- b. mccann
- 09-08-22
Tough to follow
I’ve read quite a few books on the origins of life, and this is by far the least easy to follow
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- Emily
- 01-10-22
thoroughly researched & presented. Biased agenda
Offers a nice synthesis of the major historical advances towards our understanding of how life began. But this book is heavily biased towards creationism. While the ability to recapitulate abiogenesis in the lab has proven to be a complex and complicated journey, the immediate jump to creationism is lazy and one dimensional. Perhaps there are other unexplored phenomena to discover, and prebiotic conditions that haven't been conceptualized...yet. The story of our scientific advancements in this arena, while important to critique and understand the limitations of the studies, would be better told with a neutral tone to further pique curiosity, rather than turn people away from the scientific method.
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