Replaced e-book of duplicate title 'Mushroom'

Living things are truly strange objects. They stand squarely within the material world, but at the same time flaunt capacities that far exceed those of inanimate matter. Life is in some sense a singular phenomenon: astonishingly, all creatures from bacteria to elephants, redwoods and humans belong to a single enormous family. What life is, how living things work, how they mesh with the realm of physics and chemistry, and how they came to be as we find them—these are the questions that define the science of biology. A rational sense of the world requires finding in it a place for life. Many of the answers are known, but as knowledge expands relentlessly it becomes ever harder to grasp the phenomenon of life whole. This book aims to make the phenomenon of life intelligible to serious readers who are not professional biologists by giving them a sense of the biological landscape: presenting the principles as currently understood and the major issues that remain unresolved, as simply and concisely as may be. What emerges is a biology that is internally consistent and buttressed by a wealth of factual knowledge, but also inescapably historical and complex. The hallmark of life is organization, order that has purpose; and that sets biology apart from the physical sciences. Despite a century of spectacular progress the phenomenon of life remains tantalizingly beyond our grasp, bracketed by two stubborn mysteries: the origin of life at one end, the nature of mind at the other.