Nick Lane Quotes

[M]ost of what I teach and interact with the students is more about life on earth and the principles governing evolution, and from my own point of view, the biochemical side, which is not normally part of the evolutionary biology... [I]t's relatively rare for me to discuss life elsewhere in the Universe with them.

The driving force of is thermodynamics. ...[I]n this context ...the chemical need to react (to dissipate energy) in the same way that water needs to flow downhill.

[A]fter a decade of careful , it looks as if all known eukaryotic cells either have or once had... mitochondria.

To me it [we] means life as a whole, so I would include bacteria in we. ...Life on earth is a whole, yes I think so. We share the . We share the same cell structures. I feel quite a strong fellow feeling with bacteria.

The is riddled with redundancy.

Mitochondria are a badly kept secret. ...There are usually hudreds or thousands of them in a single cell, where they use oxygen to burn up food. ...[O]ne billion ...would fit comfortably on a grain of sand.

We also have a power to destroy the earth, and... it's probably unique. ...Destroy ourselves, destroy a large part of life in earth, not the bacteria... If we take ourselves out, we'll give it five million years and it will be indistinguishable, apart from ourselves.

Does anyone care if there's an awful waste of space? It's a form of wishful thinking... We would love for the Universe to be full. ...Personally, I grew up on the Hichiker's Guide to the Universe, those kind of crazy science fiction yarns, or Star Wars or whatever it may be. The idea that the Universe is full of other intelligent beings, all kind of finding a way of getting along or having a war, but having some heroism thrown in, but... it's all human vision of ourselves thrown onto a cosmic scale. Do I believe any of it? No... Is there anything that I think, from my understanding as a biologist, that would tend to lead to that? No... Does it matter if it's a tremendous waste of space? Well, that's to say "What's the point of the Big Bang?" I don't know. The idea that the Universe may be completely empty apart from matter and energy? It would seem to be, perhaps, the default hypothesis. The fact that we find life is surprising. It would be nice if there were laws of the Universe that tended to give rise to life. Maybe there are at the level of bacteria. I don't see it at the level of large, morphologically complex beings... I think it's emotive. It's pleasing, but I doubt it's true.

<nowiki>[</nowiki>Martin Rees] may be right. If we were to go back 5 million years, as intelligent apes, and ask ourselves "What is postbiological life?" I think the answer is it's not a concept that would possibly mean anything. So we've had... 4 billion years of life on earth, and it's come up with an enormous wealth and variation, but it's all organic and... the chances of it coming up with humans? I can't put a number on that. ...I don't think there's an inevitability that life, once it's started will give rise to a human-like intelligence or beyond that. I think there's nothing inevitable about it, and if we just go back a few million years on earth, there was nothing inevitable about it. So I, personally would still look for organic life, but... I'm not sure that would be the easiest thing to find. It may be that it's easier to find, yes, nano aliens or something.

The only way that you can really get a selfish replicator to be unselfish is to put it in a bag with a bunch of other selfish replicators, and then they're more or less obliged to cooperate.

Different species have transferred different genes to the nucleus, but all species with mitochondria have... retained... the same core contingent of mitochondrial genes.

[W]e are biochemically quite simple in comparison bacteria. Simpler than bacteria. In terms of our metabolic biochemistry we are really limited. ...[W]e have ...across the entire domain of s, about the same degree of metabolic sophistication as a single bacterial cell.

That's a question about the meaning of life... Why are we here? What are we doing? What's important to us? Why should we struggle to do anything, and I think most of the answers to those questions lie within society itself. ...I don't see a greater meaning, that we've been put here as a species, that we're exceptional in any way. We're just another species. We're very much similar to pretty much everything else, and I think what we've done that's good has been the achievement of society as a whole... [A] lot of people within society... humans have a need for an origins myth, and that origins myth, if it happens to bear some semblance to reality, I think a lot of people are genuinely interested to know what can we say about the origins of the Universe, about the origins of the solar system, about the origins of life. ...[C]an we as ...puny-brained humans come to, through logic, through experiments, through thinking about it, through observations, come to an explanation for how life came to be. It's a grand question. It would be wonderful to know the answer. I think a lot of people would love to know that answer, and I personally would love to know that answer, even if my own views on the subject turn out to be completely wrong.

There are people at UCL, Ian Crawford, who's doing a great deal for , but it's not something which is happening through my department. It's happening through s. It's not happening in biological sciences...

I think we share consciousness right across... not just even the animal world. I would see it going down even to the level of cells, some kind of flickering of consciousness. So I don't feel alone on earth, but I do think that there is something different about humans.