"Today I’m chatting with Nick Lane, who is an evolutionary biochemist at University College London. He has many books and papers which help us reconceptualize life’s 4 billion years in terms of energy ..."

"We have a nucleus where all the DNA is, where all the genes are, and then all this machinery, cell membranes and things. There’s a lot of kit in these cells. The weirdness is, if you look inside a pla..."

"There’s something else which is controlling it. That something is the acquisition of these power packs in our cells called mitochondria. Now let’s go to the origins of life. You have this really compe..."

"The charge is about 150 to 200 millivolts, but the membrane is five nanometers in thickness, so that’s five millionths of a millimeter. If you shrank yourself down to the size of a molecule and stood ..."

"who, around the early 2000s, were publishing some amazing papers together. They were saying that in this deep-sea hydrothermal vent, rather than it being like a black smoker with a chimney with smoke ..."

"They take the H2 out of water and throw away the oxygen, and that collects in the atmosphere. But what bacteria very often do is that they have got hydrogen bubbling out of a hydrothermal vent. They j..."

"You’ve gone from thinking about a puzzle about why eukaryotes are special to thinking about planetary systems and thinking about the origin of life. What are the forces that are going to give rise to ..."

"with hydrogen gas to make organics. Then you’ve got, along this membrane, catalysts, which are basically early enzymes. You’ve got enzymes, you’ve got the cell, you’ve got the proton gradient. The sto..."

"Then if you make fatty acids, they will spontaneously, because of the hydrophilic nature of their different sides, they will spontaneously form a membrane. As I say, Krebs cycle intermediates are shor..."

"entirely spontaneous chemical reactions. That’s just a very interesting way to think about the evolution of life. A cell is effectively reduced inside, which is to say it’s got electrons inside. Outsi..."

"The thing I want to understand is what part of life the way it works now is contingent, and which would you expect to be shared even if you found life on another planet? It sounds like you’re saying t..."

"There’s evidence for them on Mars from the early days of Mars when there were oceans on Mars. There’s evidence now on moons, the icy moons, Enceladus and Europa. This is going on in our own solar syst..."

"Not necessarily Earth-like, but wet and rocky. If you just had to pull a number out of nowhere and just say, "This fraction has nucleotides," what fraction would you say? I would say a substantial fra..."

"to early life, that’s easy. Going from early life to changing the entire composition of the Earth through early prokaryotes is easy. If those two things are easy and then you’ve got 10 billion planets..."

"Now, the further from CO2 fixation towards genetics you get, the less similarity there’s going to be. This is not my inclination, but if I were a God-fearing person, I would hear this and I’d be like,..."

"I’m curious about your interpretation. I agree with you. I find it almost a little disturbing. I have to say that I’m not a religious person either, but I don’t object to religion. I’m not a militant ..."

"It would have to be the case that out of billions of potential planets that could give rise to eukaryotes, only on Earth does this chance occurrence happen. I wouldn’t argue that. Only on Earth? No, I..."

"It’s hard to know exactly what all the bottlenecks are here. But there has been some modeling work done to see if you get an endosymbiont, are you going to grow faster if you don’t have the endosymbio..."

"But eukaryotes giving rise to intelligent life, which is about to go explore the cosmos, is as far as we can tell, happening only in one place in our light cone. So why is that? You could say, "Well, ..."

"You’re restricting the amount of fighting. The thing I was getting at is, the eukaryote is solving for a large genome. It’s allowing the cell to get much bigger. Why are we so confident that this is t..."

"of those genomes are colossal. What we have with endosymbiosis, we still have extreme polyploidy, but we’ve whittled away all the genes that you don’t need. A symbiosis is based on effectively complem..."

"They’re everywhere. You’re going to have these same serpentinizing things. You’re going to have CO2. You’re going to have a similar biochemistry. You’re going to give rise to bacterial cells that have..."

"But if you simply say you’re limited by your imagination, you’re wrong because you can’t think of it. Well, that’s not science anymore. Now we’re talking about just imagination and hand-waving, but it..."

"But are we about to go to a couple of moons and see if we can find some organics there and so forth? That may take us a while but yeah, we already know that there are organics. On Enceladus, for examp..."

"understand how replicators arise in this world. If you’ve got these independent pores and they’re each individually accumulating their own organics through the spontaneous processes, initially at leas..."

"At what point do we get to the gene’s-eye point of view, where the gene is the coherent unit of replication? The sooner the better. Which is to say, if you’ve got this deterministic chemistry, which i..."

"So you’ve got selection as we know it in cells today, where the replicators are the genes, but the system which is being reproduced is the cell. Your sort of mitochondria-first viewpoint that helps ex..."

"There’s a very small genome, but there are multiple copies of it. The question is, how do you keep that clean? How do you prevent that from degrading and degenerating over time? Because let’s say you’..."

"The ones that got all the mutants, they get hit. The ones that got all the clean copies, they do all right. The parent had got both the mutations and the clean copies. But how do you distinguish betwe..."

"So why two? Well, there’s the fundamental difference that one is passing on the mitochondria and the other is not. Beyond that, if you’ve got multiple mating types, you still have one that passes on t..."

"Let’s talk about the Y chromosome, which is also not recombined. Just the same way that female egg cells try to minimize the amount of duplications in order to preserve the quality of the mitochondria..."

"It’s quite interesting because you were saying that the same thing happened to the mitochondrial DNA, which is a tiny genome, and has shrunk over time, starting from the original bacteria that was eng..."

"Why are they only using one gene? There’s two ways of seeing this. You’ve got a bacterial-sized genome, it’s pretty small. You’re going to replicate faster if you keep that genome small. It’s kind of ..."

"Bacteria never had the need to do that. As I was reading your book, just to ease my own ignorance, I was trying to come up with an analogy. Please let me know in which ways it’s naive. Also thanks for..."

"The analogy here might be sexual recombination that’s organized along the relevant gene. You see this allele, you see that allele. Evolution here is a maintainer which is then driving one of them to f..."

"There are costs and benefits to doing it. Maybe to close this off,  what is the experiment or method of interrogation, which would give us the most amount of information about the this story? There ar..."

"see it and act on it in some way. In other words, there’s something physical about it that can be selected for. I don’t think there’s anything controversial about that statement. But if it’s physical ..."

"Probably most people’s answer to that would be metabolic regulation of one sort or another. But that’s not really the driver. The driver in the end is the thermodynamic drivers. How many electrons do ..."

"That would be dull if it were true, but it would be useful to know if it were true. Much more exciting would be, do mitochondria generate the kind of fields that I was talking about in bacteria that a..."

"It’s been great to vicariously get a sense of that feeling from reading your books. Thank you. For the audience, this conversation has been most coupled with Nick’s book, The Vital Question. I would r..."