Matters of how life works and Logic of living at the Serengeti

Sean Carrol, an award-winning scientist, writer and educator, found how life works at vastly different scales and one of the most important revelations about the natural world is that everything is regulated, even there are rules the amount of every molecule in our bodies and rules that govern the numbers of every animal and plant in the wild, and their rules that regulate life at such different scales and logic of the human body that they are remarkably similar- there is a common underlying logic of life. He makes a compelling case that it is now time to use the Serengeti Rules to heal our ailing planet.

Caroll’s captivating and thoughtful book is fantastic and brings in a history of thought and research in the relevant areas of physiology, ecology.

Sean B Carroll, now a biology professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, uses his narrative skills to take us through time and space on a scientific journey, to explain the logic behind how our bodies or their cells know when to change the production of a particular substance in response to infection, or how removal of certain species from the African Savannah by poachers affects its ecological balance.

Carroll introduces, the book’s first hero is the soldier-scientist Walter Cannon, (1871-1945), serving with the US Army Medical corps during the First World War, he saw how fast an injury can trigger a biochemical cascade into shock. Cannon in fact introduced several anti-shock measures which saved the lives of many wounded soldiers on the battlefield of France. He drew up the first detailed picture of the way the body maintains a healthy bio-chemical balance known as homeostasis. The information on the living bodies and ecosystems are helping doctors to treat disease through correcting hormonal imbalances, and learning to repair wounded ecosystems by reintroducing key species, often top predators exterminated y hunting or environmental degradation.

He also introduces Robert Paine, the ecologist who promoted the idea of a keystone species, Jacques Monod, the biologist who began to unravel how genes are turned on and off and Tony Sinclair, the zoologist, who shed light on complex trophic relationships controlling animal numbers on the Serengeti. The amazing efforts have restored a wealth of wildlife to Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park.

The Serengeti Rules : the quest to discover how life works and why it matters by Sean B Carroll

Princeton University Press £16.95/ $24.95 280 pages.

eBook ISBN:9781400880263