A review by holodoxa
The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures by Antonio Damasio

2.0

The Strange Order of Things is an ambitious and provocative mess of a work. At its center, the book posits that foundational thermodynamic processes instantiated homeostatic mechanisms in living things which in turn creates a subjective state that provokes the action of life. However, Damásio shows only a passing interest in developing the argument for his heterodox view of life's origins nor does he really address what the purported issues are with the orthodox theory of life (i.e. the RNA world hypothesis paired with the gene's eye view of evolution and endosymbiosis). There is a flippant dismissal that the energetics don't work in the orthodox theory, but this is inconsistent with the empirical work on this topic (e.g. RNA self-catalysis, RNA spontaneous polymerization with clay catalysts, etc). Ultimately, a lot of the scientific claims and philosophical musings (lot more of the latter) are rendered uninformative or contradictory or even misleading.

Despite the half-baked and somewhat sloppy nature of The Strange Order of Things, it was still periodically an interesting or engaging read. The third part of the book was sort of a grab-bag commentary on various contemporary phenomena or ideas. He's particularly critical of transhumanist and techno-utopian thought; some of his opining is interesting, but it appears he may be right for the wrong reasons on some issues.

All together, I don't strongly recommend as there are a lot of better books out there (apparently even by this same author according to the other Goodreads reviews I perused).