What kind of world would we have if evolution had taken different paths? And why, instead, did things turned out this way?
In his outstanding short story "The Library of Babel", Jorge Luis Borges imagines a seemingly endless place where all the books of the world are collected; those already written and those existing only potentially. Just as a writer can imagine books that have never been written, a scientist in the laboratory can create enzymes that evolution has never created, which are extremely powerful and can do wonderful things.
In his outstanding short story "The Library of Babel", Jorge Luis Borges imagines a seemingly endless place where all the books of the world are collected; those already written and those existing only potentially. Just as a writer can imagine books that have never been written, a scientist in the laboratory can create enzymes that evolution has never created, which are extremely powerful and can do wonderful things.
Proteins, DNA, genomes are also some kind of books: they are sequences formed by codes and therefore, in some way, alphabets.
Here a literary idea becomes a scientific metaphor. Telmo Pievani teases our imagination, always assisted by scientific evidence, sharing with the reader hypotheses of historical crossroads, parallel universes, potential lives.
Biografia dell'autore
Telmo Pievani holds the chair of Philosophy of Biological Sciences at the Università degli Studi of Padua. He is the director of Pikaia, the Italian evolution portal, and collaborates with Corriere della Sera, Le Scienze and Micromega.
Rights Sold
English (Worldwide): MIT Press
