Books like What is life? by Lynn Margulis

Richard Dawkins’ classic, The Selfish Gene reexamines evolution from the perspective of genes as primary agents, arguing that organisms serve as vehicles for gene replication.

Erwin Schrödinger’s 1944 book "What Is Life?" poses the question of how living organisms can be explained by physics and chemistry, introducing the concept of an aperiodic crystal that later inspired the discovery of DNA.

"An all-inclusive catalogue of the world's living diversity, Five Kingdoms defines and describes the major divisions, or phyla, of nature's five great kingdoms - bacteria, protoctists, animals, fungi, and plants - using a modern classification scheme that is consistent with both the fossil record and molecular data. Generously illustrated and remarkably easy to follow, it not only allows readers to sample the full range of life forms inhabiting our planet but to familiarize themselves with the taxonomic theories by which all organisms' origins and distinctive characteristics are traced and classified."--BOOK JACKET.

"Ellis's detailed drawings bring animals to life that have not been seen for 400 million years, some that rival science fiction monsters for sheer weirdness. Early crocodiles and turtles were three times larger than they are today: and there was once a manatee that was 30 feet long and had no bones below the elbow. There were the trilobites, jointed animals with complex eyes that dominated the seas for 200 million years and then completely disappeared: sharks with teeth on their backs: and others, 50 feet long, with teeth the size of your hand.". "Fifty million years ago, some land-dwelling mammals reentered the water and began the process of modification that turned them into whales. It was the most astonishing transformation in mammalian history. In Aquagenesis, you will track these changes and meet the paleontologists who have found the links between the terrestrial mammals and the first semiaquatic whales - creatures that probably looked like hyenas, huge shrews, or fat otters. Today the only animal on earth that regularly walk in an upright, two-legged stance are penguins and people. It is possible that our size, shape, stride, intelligence, and hair (or lack thereof) can also be explained by the provocative theory of the aquatic ape."--BOOK JACKET.

Although Charles Darwin's theory of evolution laid the foundations of modern biology, it did not tell the whole story. Most remarkably, ``The Origin of Species said very little about, of all things, the origins of species. Darwin and his modern successors have shown very convincingly how inherited variations are naturally selected, but they leave unanswered how variant organisms come to be in the first place. In Symbiotic Planet, renowned scientist Lynn Margulis shows that symbiosis, which simply means members of different species living in physical contact with each other, is crucial to the origins of evolutionary novelty. Ranging from bacteria, the smallest kinds of life, to the largest -- the living Earth itself -- Margulis explains the symbiotic origins of many of evolution's most important innovations. The very cells we're made of started as symbiotic unions of different kinds of bacteria. Sex -- and its inevitable corollary, death -- arose when failed attempts at cannibalism resulted in seasonally repeated mergers of some of our tiniest ancestors. Dry land became forested only after symbioses of algae and fungi evolved into plants. Since all living things are bathed by the same waters and atmosphere, all the inhabitants of Earth belong to a symbiotic union. Gaia, the finely tuned largest ecosystem of the Earth's surface, is just symbiosis as seen from space. Along the way, Margulis describes her initiation into the world of science and the early steps in the present revolution in evolutionary biology; the importance of species classification for how we think about the living world; and the way "academic apartheid" can block scientific advancement. Written with enthusiasm and authority, this is a book that could change the way you view our living Earth.

What is Life? explores how chemistry alone can give rise to the complex, self-maintaining properties of living systems, arguing that Darwinian evolution emerges from a fundamental chemical principle that links replicating molecules to complex life.