Origins of Life
The plural of the title is purposeful: Dyson advances the hypothesis that life had a double origin. "Either life began only once, with the functions of replication and metabolism already present in rudimentary form and linked together from the beginning, or life began twice, with two separate kinds of creatures, one kind capable of metabolism without exact replication and the other kind capable of replication without metabolism."  He sees reasons to favor the second possibility, with metabolizing creatures appearing first. Dyson is a renowned theoretical physicist (professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.)  who offers an "apology for a physicist venturing into biology" by citing physicist Erwin Schrödinger's maxim that "some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them, and at the risk of making fools of themselves." In this new edition of a book first published in 1985, Dyson builds his argument with characteristic skill and clarity. He views his hypothesis as "useful only insofar as it may suggest new experiments."