Nick Lane Quotes

I read some of those ideas years ago, , and thought it was thrilling. Over recent years I don't really see the need for a kind of genetic intermediary between an RNA level of genetic replication and some other form of replicator. ...[T]here's no suggestion that it's there in biology. There's no suggestion that I know from geology that is capable of giving rise to more complex systems, or to having an organic takeover. It seems to add in a layer of unnecessary complexity. So I much prefer to get straight into organic chemistry, and straight into as we know it.

So if you think of it from a protocell point of view, the selfish replicators which are the best at making copies of themselves are necessarily those that are best able to make the entire protocell replicate itself.

I'm not particularly... eucaryocentric, but I do think there is a problem to solve there. ...There is a difference in morphology ...

I do like this quote from Simon Conway Morris that if the aliens call then don't pick up the phone. I'm not sure I'd really like to meet any of them very much. Perhaps... meeting bacteria would be the least scary... [T]he chances of meeting aliens is so remote that I haven't really troubled myself very much about it. It would be nice to think that if we did, somehow they would be a superior intelligence... they would have solved a lot of the problems of aggression and whatever else that humans have, but I fear not. I fear that it would be the opposite, that... natural selection has a knack of producing nastiness in intelligence.

Life as we know it has both, and the people who say s first are in effect saying, "Well, there's plenty of s, there's plenty of RNA. The environment's providing it for free," without worrying themselves too much about what kind of an environment is going to provide all of that for free, and by definition, an environment which is effectively metabolically sophisticated enough to provide s is non-living and therefore not part of the question, so they're just pushing it aside. I would say that the whole metabolic side is needed to give rise to genetic information and nucleotides in an RNA world in the first place, that it would be a dirty RNA world contaminated with s and s, and s and things...

If we, meaning humans now... find life somewhere else, most people would be disappointed if it turned out only to be bacteria.

[Life is] a continuum. I think there are some phase transitions, probably, and the origin of... genetic information is probably one of them. ...[W]e are doing some modeling work to try and work out how evolvable... a geological system [can] be along the path to getting to cell-like things that... most people would understand as life. How far can you go down that line before you have genetic inheritance? ...[A] long way, but you get to a point where... it's no longer evolvable. ...[I]n our modeling, you can get to a point where you're capable of producing s capable of making copies of themselves with a degree of sophistication, but getting beyond that, to specializing to different niches and so on, I don't see the way, without genetic inheritance.

The inner logic of ... Much of it is imposed by thermodynamics; some is facilitated by catalysts. Some is refined by genes. And part stems from the vicissitudes of life itself, which forced evolution down improbable paths, while transforming our geologically restless globe from a sterile, anoxic planet into the living, high-octane world of today.

Viruses are quite sophisticated in the sense that they're forming virion particles and they're infecting other cells... s and things... selfish genes, I suppose in the broadest sense.

Now CO₂ itself... doesn't really want to pick up any electrons and become reduced to an organic molecule, but if it's in a relatively ic environment where there's s available, it picks up a negative charge. It doesn't want another negative charge. It's going to try and repel that, but if there's a proton around, it picks up the proton. Now it's neutralized the charges... pick up another electron, another proton. So it's much easier to accept electrons in an acidic environment. And this is the structure of these vents and it's the structure of cells, and it's how these earliest, most ancient cells we know about actually do fix CO₂. They use the proton channel in the , which effectively locally acidifies an environment and allows this reaction to proceed. So I think that's fundamental, simple... works well, and it's testable in the lab.

[T]here's a limit to just how far vents can take you... but... once you've gotten as far as , then you've freed yourself from a fairly small energy flow, a fairly tight and focused energy flow.

Now it's possible to have some kind of protocell with some form of metabolism without any genetic heredity. It's possible in principle. Is it alive?

What does life do then? ...it seems reasonable that the earliest forms of life were ic... [i.e.,] they grew from gases... found in normal geological environments through an energy flux which is equivalent to cells which we see today, which is to say, what all life does today. There's a very simple phrase from Mike Russell... "hydrogenate CO₂"... [i.e.,] add onto to make organic molecules. That is the structure of in cells, and different cells can get hydrogen from all kinds places. They can strip it out of water. They can get it from , but it also comes bubbling out of the ground as hydrogen gas, and that seems to be the simplest form of life imaginable as... life on earth. It's reacting hydrogen and CO₂, and they don't react easily. The way that cells make them react... is to effectively use an electrical charge on a ... [T]here are environments like deep sea s that provide... for free with an equivalent electrical charge across a barrier, and I think... that's the way to see the question.

I think there's plenty of solutions to Fermi's paradox, that we don't need to add this as an extra one, but yes, this would be my favorite explanation for it, that there is no inevitability about complex life, that there's nothing in the laws of cosmology that say, "[Complex] Life will start." I think that there probably is something in the laws of cosmology lending itself towards bacteria, but the idea of more complex life... I certainly wouldn't see a Simon Conway Morris view, for example, that the origin of life is so complex that you require God to put everything in motion and then will take you all the way to humans.

The possessors of... nuclei, the s, are the most important cells in the world. ...[A]ll plants and animals, all and fungi... essentially everything we can see with the naked eye, is composed of [them]...