Last month, I asked you how to handle the ever-growing pile of science books I receive (before I donate most of them to the library, of course). A plurality of you voted in favor of frequent thumbnail descriptions, rather than alternatives like the less frequent all-out review. That’s a relief, because that was my own preference. So let me pull off the top book from the pile,  Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution by Nick Lane.

The reason it’s on the top is that it happened to be very useful to me right now with an article I’m working on (more on that next month). Lane has selected a handful of key features of the