The Vital Question Quotes

“One begins to wonder if all the most interesting problems in physics are now in biology.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life

“I shall argue that the distinction between a ‘living planet’ – one that is geologically active – and a living cell is only a matter of definition. There is no hard and fast dividing line. Geochemistry gives rise seamlessly to biochemistry. From this point of view, the fact that we can’t distinguish between geology and biology in these old rocks is fitting. Here is a living planet giving rise to life, and the two can’t be separated without splitting a continuum. Move”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?

“At the level of their biochemistry, the barrier between bacteria and complex cells barely exists.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life

“Your 40 trillion cells contain at least a quadrillion mitochondria, with a combined convoluted surface area of about 14,000 square metres; about four football fields.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?

“There’s no greater insult in science than to say that an argument is ‘not even wrong’, that it is invulnerable to disproof.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?

“In the end, respiration and burning are equivalent; the slight delay in the middle is what we know as life.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life

“Occam’s razor, the philosophical basis of all science: assume the simplest natural cause. That answer might turn out not to be correct, but we should not resort to more complex reasoning unless it is shown to be necessary.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?

“We have established on thermodynamic grounds that to make a cell from scratch requires a continuous flow of reactive carbon and chemical energy across rudimentary catalysts in a constrained through-flow system. Only hydrothermal vents provide the requisite conditions, and only a subset of vents – alkaline hydrothermal vents – match all the conditions needed. But alkaline vents come with both a serious problem and a beautiful answer to the problem. The serious problem is that these vents are rich in hydrogen gas, but hydrogen will not react with CO2 to form organics. The beautiful answer is that the physical structure of alkaline vents – natural proton gradients across thin semiconducting walls – will (theoretically) drive the formation of organics. And then concentrate them. To my mind, at least, all this makes a great deal of sense. Add to this the fact that all life on earth uses (still uses!) proton gradients across membranes to drive both carbon and energy metabolism, and I’m tempted to cry, with the physicist John Archibald Wheeler, ‘Oh, how could it have been otherwise! How could we all have been so blind for so long!’ Let”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?

“Well, biology is not only about genes and environment, but also cells and the constraints of their physical structure, which we shall see have little to do with either genes or environment directly. The predictions that arise from these disparate world views are strikingly different.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?

“Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em; little fleas have smaller fleas, and so ad infinitum.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life

“Sex is far more widespread than seems reasonable.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life

“One mitochondrion contains tens of thousands of copies of each respiratory complex. A single cell contains hundreds or thousands of mitochondria. Your 40 trillion cells contain at least a quadrillion mitochondria, with a combined convoluted surface area of about 14,000 square metres; about four football fields. Their job is to pump protons, and together they pump more than 1021 of them – nearly as many as there are stars in the known universe – every second.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life

“it’s no mystery that all cells here on earth should be chemiosmotic. I would expect that cells across the universe will be chemiosmotic too.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?

“Hermaphroditic species such as flatworms go to bizarre lengths to avoid being inseminated, fighting pitched battles with their penises, their semen burning gaping holes in the vanquished. This is lively natural history, but it is circular as an argument, as it takes for granted that there are greater biological costs to being female.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?

“NASA ‘working definition’ of life, for example: life is ‘a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution’.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?

“I will argue that energy has constrained the evolution of life on earth; that the same forces ought to apply elsewhere in the universe; and that a synthesis of energy and evolution could be the basis for a more predictive biology, helping us understand why life is the way it is, not only on earth, but wherever it might exist in the universe.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?

“So it seems to me there are two big unknowns at the very heart of biology today: why life evolved in the perplexing way it did, and why cells are powered in such a peculiar fashion. This”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?

“I think we can reasonably conclude that complex life will be rare in the universe – there is no innate tendency in natural selection to give rise to humans or any other form of complex life. It is far more likely to get stuck at the bacterial level of complexity. I can’t put a statistical probability on that. The existence of Parakaryon myojinensis might be encouraging for some – multiple origins of complexity on earth means that complex life might be more common elsewhere in the universe. Maybe. What I would argue with more certainty is that, for energetic reasons, the evolution of complex life requires an endosymbiosis between two prokaryotes, and that is a rare random event, disturbingly close to a freak accident, made all the more difficult by the ensuing intimate conflict between cells. After that, we are back to standard natural selection.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?

“Forty years ago, at the dawn of molecular biology, the French biologist Jacques Monod wrote his famous book Chance and Necessity, which argues bleakly that the origin of life on earth was a freak accident, and that we are alone in an empty universe. The final lines of his book are close to poetry, an amalgam of science and metaphysics: The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose. Since”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?

“Without a high flux of carbon and energy that is physically channelled over inorganic catalysts, there is no possibility of evolving cells. I would rate this as a necessity anywhere in the universe: given the requirement for carbon chemistry that we discussed in the last chapter, thermodynamics dictates a continuous flow of carbon and energy over natural catalysts. Discounting special pleading, that rules out almost all environments that have been touted as possible settings for the origin of life: warm ponds (sadly Darwin was wrong on that), primordial soup, microporous pumice stones, beaches, panspermia, you name it. But it does not rule out hydrothermal vents; on the contrary, it rules them in. Hydrothermal vents are exactly the kind of dissipative structures that we seek – continuous flow, far-from-equilibrium electrochemical reactors. Hydrothermal”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?

“All complex life shares an astonishing catalogue of elaborate traits, from sex to cell suicide to senescence, none of which is seen in a comparable form in bacteria.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life

“Burton has been crossing between two different populations of these copepods from opposite sides of the island, which were reproductively isolated for thousands of years, despite living only a few miles apart. Burton and his colleagues catalogue what's known as "hybrid breakdown" in matings between the two populations. Intriguingly, there is little effect in the first generation, the result of a single cross between the two populations: but if the female hybrid offspring are then mated with a male from the original paternal population, her own offspring are terribly sickly, in a "sorry state" to borrow from the title of one of Burton's papers.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life

“All this implies that the growth rate is the real force behind sexual development, at least in mammals. The genes are just holding the reins, and can easily be replaced over evolution - one gene that sets the growth rate is replaced by a different gene that sets the same growth rate.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life

“I will lay out a hypothesis – tell a coherent story – that connects energy and evolution.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life

“I hope to persuade you that energy is central to evolution, that we can only understand the properties of life if we bring energy into the equation.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life

“Peter Medawar described a hypothesis as an imaginative leap into the unknown. Once the leap is taken, a hypothesis becomes an attempt to tell a story that is understandable in human terms.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?

“The environment most realistically capable of giving rise to life, whether here or anywhere else in the universe, is alkaline hydrothermal vents. Such vents constrain cells to make use of natural proton gradients, and ultimately to generate their own.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?

“what happens if we take a cyanide pill: it jams up the final proton pump of the respiratory chain in our mitochondria. If the respiratory pumps are impeded in this way, protons can continue to flow in through the ATP synthase for a few seconds before the proton concentration equilibrates across the membrane, and net flow ceases. It is almost as hard to define death as life, but the irrevocable collapse of membrane potential comes pretty close. So”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?

“the greatest mutational health hazard in the population is fertile old men. Thankfully, uniparental inheritance means that men don’t pass on their mitochondria at all.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?

“Essentially all life uses redox chemistry to generate a gradient of protons across a membrane. Why on earth do we do that?”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?