The Cobra Event

I am reading Richard Preston's The Cobra Event, or I should rather say "was reading", because I have no intention of finishing the book. Ignoring the demonising of Iraq (this book was written much before the American invasion, so whatever one reads about Iraq's WMD capabilities must be seen for what it really is), I didn't really like the style of the prose, with it's a) over-reliance on the knowledge of esoteric matter to carry the plot and b) the soapboxing. Here is an instance of the second kind:

It was Charles Darwin who first understood that evolution is caused by natural selection, and that natural selection is death. He also understood that vast amounts of death (vast amounts of natural selection) are required to effect a small permanent change in the shape or behavior of an organism. Without huge amounts of death, organisms do not change over time. Without death, life would never have become more complex than the simplest self-copying molecules. The arms of a starfish could not have happened without countless repetitions of death. Death is the mother of structure. It took four billion years of death -- a third of the age of the universe -- for death to invent the human mind. Given another four billion years of death, or perhaps a hundred billion years of death, who can say that death will not create a mind so effective and subtle that it will reverse the fate of the universe and become God? The smell in the Manhattan morgue is not the smell of death; it is the smell of life changing its form. It is evidence that life is indestructible.

Replace death with life, i.e. that natural selection is the rewarding of fitness with life, and the above paragraph's basic premise is still valid, but the sentence about the Manhattan morgue doesn't have a leg to stand on, showing that the mini-lecture about natural selection is pretty much extraneous.