Review of SO SIMPLE A BEGINNING
A deep dive in biophysics that I’m still noodling on
Life is fantastically complex, built by the elegant process of evolution. The more you learn about how life works and what really allows us and every other living thing to be, the more you realize why some people stop trying to understand all together and just point to some mystical being as the creator of all this beauty. I mean, look at the image above – a blind evolutionary process built…that?
After a few weeks of binging memoirs, I jumped back into some (very) hard science to read So Simple a Beginning: How Four Physical Principles Shape Our Living World by Raghuveer Parthasarathy. It’s hands down the most beautiful book I’ve ever read (shout out to Princeton University Press for producing such a fantastic product, and to my friend Xavier Bonilla for the kind gift!)
So Simple a Beginning explains how four basic principles – self-assembly, regulatory circuits, predictable randomness, and scaling – are at the core foundation of life. Parthasarathy does a wonderful job explaining wildly complex biophysical phenomena, from how DNA functions, how organisms scale, and how we’re beginning to manipulate life.
It really feels like I read about five other books on my bookshelf that somehow made it into one cohesive mid-size book. The intersection of biology and physics might be the most underappreciated cross-over in the sciences (seriously, why are more people not talking about this?)
Even more impressive than the content, honestly, are the illustrations. They are so fantastically unique – completely different than any other science book I’ve ever read. They are beautiful, minimal and, somehow, require no captions, referencing, or explanations. They are woven seamlessly into the written content. All science books should have images like these. Especially with such complex phenomena being explained, they are also extraordinarily practical.
This book was also humbling. I realized how much more there is to know about biological function. How much deeper life is beyond the genetics and social sciences that are part of my daily professional life. I think I could read this entire book over again and learn at least 100 more things. There’s no way I comprehended even half of what was in here.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book – it’s a wonderful holistic book product. That said, I could see this book being quite difficult for someone with no science education background. Parthasarathy is a truly great writer, but this book really requires a higher baseline of knowledge than a more average popular science book that you might find at your local bookstore.
Published: February 2022
Format: Hardcover
If you think this sounds interesting, bookmark these other great reads:
The Dance of Life: The New Science of How a Single Cell Becomes a Human Being by Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz & Roger Highfield (2020)
Symphony In C: Carbon and The Evolution of (Almost) Everything by Robert Hazen (2018)
Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies by Geoffrey West (2017)
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Life is the action of the universe creating memories.