Every Living Thing by Rob Dunn Book review - Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life From Nanobacteria to New Monkeys

Rob Dun takes us along in his shirt pocket on an adventure to discover Life, and the process of its discovery. Dunn is an ants specialist who began collecting newspaper articles about new species, new lineages, and even bigger discoveries, and got touched by the collection of brilliant, obsessive, stubborn, and in some cases half-mad scientists who were behind these discoveries. “Here I tell the stories of the biologists whose discoveries have shaped what we know about the dimensions of the living world”. The greatness of Dunn’s writing is that he does not merely tell facts and history, but enters into the characters and lives of those men and women who made the natural history. The character of Linnaeus, for example, doesn’t only carry the greatness of his purpose…

Interestingly, the history of biology is filled with rejection. New ideas, like those of Socrates or Galileo, do not please peers and appear more often ridiculed than welcome. “Science requires skepticism, yet discovery requires a temporary relaxation of this skepticism.”

The history of our own description of the world around us started in our hunter-gatherer time, when our ancestors knew some species around them for being edible or dangerous. Each community had their language and names. Linnaeus, who lived and died before the birth of Darwin, set out to harmonize this messy state of facts and to name all the species in the world with a universal name. He grouped plants by sexual characters, to make sense of complexity, as the human mind is bound to do.

Swammerdam, before Linnaeus, changed entomology in the 17th century. At this time, all the insides of insects was considered to be indistinct mush. By scrutiny he uncovered a world – he found worms inside of snails, and smaller worms inside the worms. “The body of a beast deserves as great admiration as the human body” Swammerdam rightly wrote. But the momentum of his progress was lost when he met Antoinette Bourignon, a devout that convinced him that his research was only about ego and was taking him away from the joy of knowing God.

Another Revolution came from a man who didn’t seem destined for scientific glory and fame. Antonie von Leeuwenhoek was a simple man, with little education, who worked a variety of jobs in 17th century Delft. But one night at 40 years-old, upon reading the illustrated Micrographia, he became intrigued by the little crawlers. As a result of his curiosity, he built his own microscopes, many times more potent than any other instrument at the time nor that would be created for the next hundred years.

With his homemade lenses, Leewenhoek became the first man to ever see microorganisms, in April 1676. He described tiny animals from a rainwater drop swimming around - a thousand times smaller than any creature visible with the naked eye. Leeuwenhoek had crossed a boundary and found a whole new realm of life, which we now know is the predominant realm on our planet. In days, he had actually discovered two new Kingdoms: besides plants and animals would now be bacteria and protists. The Royal Society was skeptical when reading Leeuwenhoek’s descriptions and only started to believe when an emissary was sent out and saw, on Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes, the animalcules. Leeuwenhoek’s obsession for the microscopic life never faded and he spent the rest of his long life endlessly fascinated by microscopic mysteries. Yet, for all the years he spent behind his lenses, the unknown seemed to him always as large as it had always been.

In the 20th century, the entomologist Terry Erwin gave a new perspective of the richness of life, by studying the tropical forest. He discovered that evolution was obsessed with beetles. “We talk about the age of dinosaurs and the age of mammals, but from an evolutionary perspective, since the first colonization of land all ages were of insects and smaller organisms. Dinosaurs came and went, but the beetles divided, one species becoming two, and conquered”. Erwin, by extrapolating counts he made on trees in the tropical forest, estimated that there might be 30 million tropical arthropods in the world. Dan Janzen, his follower as a prophet of tropical life, created the Guanacaste Conservation Area and took the mission to name all living things in that patch of forest. The extent of life again changed dimensions, as there were more moth species in Guanacaste Reserve (over 10 000) than Linnaeus thought there were species in the world. And the moths are not even very diverse when compared to beetles!

Another tropical entomologist, Carl Rottenmeyer, realized that species layer one onto the next. “Upon each flea is a smaller flea”. Each layer is smaller than the one below it until, at the boundary at which our vision or technology reaches its limit, we can see no more – but there would certainly be more to see! In addition to this difficulty, as we are busy cataloging, the species move about surviving and speciating. The prospect of naming all species will probably always appear out of reach as a fluid reality can’t be definitively grasped.

Beyond the task of naming and describing the living world around us, the mission of biology has also been to understand the relationships between the species and identify their origins. Lynn Margulis marked her time in an unprecedented way when she started, as a student, to wonder about the origin of the organites in cells. Margulis found DNA in chloroplast and moved towards a theory that would explain not just the DNA in these plant organites but the fundamental relationship among the 4 kingdoms of life: the theory of endosymbiosis.

?“Any living being larger than a bacterium is a superorganism”, meaning a collective that evolved through the bodily fusion of 2 or more earlier cells, she said. For centuries, male biologists had emphasized the role of struggle and competition in evolution. Lynn Margulis offered a different view: the history of life’s most important events was a series of symbiotic mergers. She was proposing that our bodies were made of multiple bodies, that something as deep as our identity was divided along ancient lines. She met lifelong challenge and criticism for her ideas. Indeed, it appears far harder to conceive that we are not at the center of our biological world than it is to believe that we are not at the center of the universe. But she knew she was right and she fought for the truth without ever giving up. She demonstrated that, as Dunn puts it: “we are every bit as beholden to our mitochondria as they are to us. Each of our parts has split identities. Our words and ideas come not from the eukaryotic self but from the combined self.”

Scrutiny of the cells got to the next level with Carl Woese, who set out in search of the unequivocal truth about evolution. He invented the method of rRNA analysis to compare organisms based on the distance between their rRNA sequence. His peers did not understand Woeses’s drive to these laborious analyses and considered the questions of the microbial life evolutionary tree as unanswerable. When Wolfe collected specimen of strange bacteria and asked Woese to look at the similarity with other bacteria for their classification, Woese had the revelation he had been waiting for. These microorganisms looked like bacteria, but they were completely different from a metabolic and genetic point of view. Through rRNA comparison, they had just discovered together a whole new kingdom of life: Archae. The paradigm of life changed with Woese, as his tree of life positioned man, animals and plants as minor players on the edge of a world of microorganisms. “Since Leeuwenhoek, there were the microscopic things and the big things. The big things were the main story and the microbes were the back story. Woese was trying to turn the backstory into the plot.”

The story of our perception of life has also been marked by our refusal to consider the existence of life where we could not see it. We first thought that the deep sea was dead. When we found life thriving there, we still thought that the seafloor was dead. Step by step, we found microorganisms including under the seafloor, under the crust of the Earth. Actually, calculations based on drills led to the estimate that as much as half of the weight of life on Earth could be in its subsurface. In deep levels, without light or oxygen, microbes use exclusively the energy produced by the radioactive decay of rocks. If such microbes were able to imagine the conditions at the surface, they would probably judge them too inhospitable to welcome life – with extreme temperatures, low pressure, deadly UV exposure…

Such discoveries are rich in teachings : they tell us that there is still a whole world to discover on Earth, and that our search for life on other planets could also consider conditions we used to consider as inhospitable. And if microbes can’t be found on the surface, then maybe they will be in the planet’s underground.

These are just a few of the stories told by Dunn, that have punctuated and modified our vision of the living world. If you have enjoyed Darwin’s and E. O. Wilson’s books, I trust you will love this tale on our position among the living beings on this planet. Dunn’s writing is as easy to read as a novel, full of awe and enthusiasm and is to be especially recommended to young people who think of taking up a career in biology, because his excitement is contagious and the amount of yet-to-be-discovered, yet-to-be-named, is more than we can imagine. Many of the big questions about life remain unanswered: When, where, and how many times did life evolve on Earth ? Has it evolved elsewhere ? Is there a limit to how big or small species can ? On what conditions they can live in ? Can you contribute to this research ?