Nick Lane Quotes

We've had some success and quite a lot of failure too. ...[T]he problem we're having... is reproducing the successes we have had. The big problem... for anyone working on this is that hydrogen gas is not soluble in water at atmospheric pressure. What we really need to do to make this work is to ramp up the pressure in the system to 300 bars and then we need a continuous flow. For this to work you need a across a barrier. Then it should work. We don't know, and we haven't got the funding to build a high pressure reactor. We're collaborating with a group in Utrecht to do that. ...If we can do that experiment and then it fails, then my confidence that this would be a suitable possible origin of life would take a serious knock.

The is riddled with redundancy.

[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.

[Yellowstone] are not alkaline thermal vents... There are vents... of this serpentinized hosted systems with alkaline fluids rich in gas. ...A place called The Cedars in northern California ...Ken Nealson is the guy. ...He's done a lot of work up in The Cedars.

It's interesting... that life as a rule does not use UV radiation as an energy source, and the kind of chemistry that's being done using it doesn't resemble biochemistry as I know it... [T]he kind of environment that I'm talking about is deep sea s, and the question is, "Well, does it have to be deep sea? Could it... be same systems on land?" and they exist on land. They perfectly could. So it's perfectly feasible.

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

[I]t's interesting to me that the bacteriophages, the viruses that you find in bacteria, are not remotely similar to the ones that you find infecting archaea, which again are not remotely similar to eukaryotic viruses. ...They're different in their appearance. They're different in their mechanisms in which they force their... I mean the bacteriophages are these classic lunar module landing things... They are stunning things to look at. ...Some es look like bottle balls or postage stamps, strange shapes... They don't have any genes in common. They don't have mechanisms of entry into cells in common. They appear to be independently derived.

The s were acquired by a eukaryotic cell that was already a fully fledged eukaryotic cell.

I would define complexity, not really as genetic complexity because if you take it purely as genetic complexity, E. coli... a single cell may have 4,000 genes but the metagenome, the pool of genes in E. coli around the place may be on the order to 30,000 or more... [T]hat's the level of complexity equivalent to the human genome, or even more complex than the human genome, but it's organized and structured in a different way. ...You might say that it's structured in a similar way to an ... but I think an ant colony has taken that level of Eusocial behavior a long way beyond anything you would see in E. coli. So I would define it as morphologically complex, meaning cells are larger and have a lot of stuff in them.

I've had long and sometimes difficult discussions, especially about the singularity of the origin of Eukaryotes... A lot of people don't like that. ...[I]t's not really about what does it say about the probability of life elsewhere, although it has things to say to that. It's really about life on earth, and a lot of people are very uncomfortable with the idea of improbability... I've had quite difficult discussions with some students about that, but rarely... about life elsewhere in the Universe.

[T]he mechanism by which mitochondria generate energy, by pumping protons across a membrane (), is found in all forms of life... It's a bazarre way... This idea, however... won Peter Mitchell a Nobel Prize...

Whether you define life as living or not is really a matter of opinion... It's a continuum. You can draw a line wherever you want or healthier not to draw a line at all... I think there has to be some form of an environment capable of giving rise to some form of , which is capable of giving rise to nucleotides. ...They would put me in the metabolism first camp, but I dislike the tag... because I think it's simply about... the line across a continuum...

If the Krebs cycle is ordained by thermodynamics, then it should take place spontaneously in some suitably propitious envirnonment, even in the absence of s.

I said you [bacteria] are not morphologically complex, you are biochemically awesome.

[On the controversy between and .] [T]he classic case of convergence would be the eye and the human eye, or ian eyes. ...The common ancestor they had had a light sensitive spot, they did have some regulatory genes in common... for example, but that had to effectively independently recruit all the rest of the genes required to make a camera type eye, and that direction of evolutionary travel was in parallel. It was convergent. We even see in some s... a camera-type eye in single-celled critters where there's a retina made from s. There's a made from mitochondria. There's a there. They don't have a brain. I don't know how they use this thing but... plainly it's a camera-type eye. ...It's a of some sort. ...I would see that as a completely independent origin of a camera-type eye, albeit without a brain. I would see the octopus' and mammalian eye as being convergence in the Simon Conway Morris sense... There are certain ways that you can make an eye, that work, and all the steps along the way have to be favored, and... perhaps there are seven or eight... fundamentally different types of eye that we see on earth, and most of them have arisen more than once, always from a common ancestor, generally, that had as a light sensitive pigment. So you're then into an interesting terrain or... How common are the right types of light sensitive pigment? They're chemically not so straight forward.