The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?

by Nick Lane

We can’t understand society if we know nothing of its history; nor can we understand the workings of the cell if we don’t know how it evolved.

It is a cold killer, with a calculated cunning honed over millions of generations. It can interfere with the sophisticated immune surveillance machinery of an organism, melting unobtrusively into the background like a double agent. It can recognise proteins on the cell surface, and lock on to them as if it were an insider, gaining entrance to the inner sanctum. It can home in unerringly on the nucleus, and incorporate itself into a host cell’s DNA. Sometimes it remains there in hiding for years, invisible to all around. On other occasions it takes over without delay, sabotaging the host cell’s biochemical machinery, making thousands upon thousands of copies of itself. It dresses up these copies in a camouflaged tunic of lipids and proteins, ships them to the surface, and bursts out to begin another round of guile and destruction. It can kill a human being cell by cell, person by person, in devastating epidemic, or dissolve entire oceanic blooms extending over hundreds of miles, overnight. Yet most biologists would not even classify it as alive. The virus itself doesn’t give a damn.