Microlands by J Craig Venter & David Ewing Duncan, review

But Venter’s project has uncovered so much diversity in aquatic microbial worlds, the standard taxonomy of kingdom, phylum and species breaks down in an effort to capture its richness. At the microbial scale, every tiny thing reveals itself to be a special and unique snowflake. Viruses, for instance, tailor the bacteria they use as host cells by importing and exporting their own genes into them, like petrolheads souping up their cars. 

We already knew that microbial evolution takes place on a scale of hours. Now, it turns out the mech­anisms of that evolution are so ­various and plastic, we can barely formalise them. Conventional “laws of biology” may go some way towards explaining creatures as big as ourselves, but at the scale of bacteria and viruses, archaea and protozoa, wild innovation holds sway. 

The field is simply overwhelmed by the quantity of data that Venter’s project has generated. Discovering whether microbes follow fundamental ecological “laws” at a plan­et­ary scale will likely require mas­s­ive, mono­lithic cross-environment ­surveys – and, presumably, many further vacations-cum-expeditions for provocative tycoons who love to sail.   

Here’s the capping irony, and Duncan does it proud – that Venter, the arch-entrepreneur of cutting-edge genetic science, is returning biology to its roots as a descriptive science. We are just going to have to go out and observe what is there – and, says Venter, “that’s probably where biology will be for the next century at least”.

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Microlands is published by Robinson at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books. Simon Ings’s latest book is ­Engineers of Human Souls: Four Writers Who Changed Twentieth-Century Minds.