Top 15 Nick Lane Quotes

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.

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.

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.

The is riddled with redundancy.

The double helix of DNA... is composed of two long chains [of 'letters'] that snake around each other... each strand providing an exact template for the other. ...[E]ach strand ...contains just four types of letter, with ...billions ...arranged down... the chain. ...3,000 million letters ...make up the human genome ...[T]he same — the same lines of code — can have different effects depending on the context.

[B]iochemical pathways that produce the basic building blocks of life are... conserved across practically all cells.

became the study of how... simple molecules were interconnected one into another. ...The [simple] molecules ...containing ...up to about twenty carbons, but most ...have fewer than ten.

[M]etabolic flux... Even a simple bacterial cell can undergo... a billion trnasformations per second... is... what being alive is.

Flux is a form of flow, but with one crucial difference. ...In biochemistry flux is the flow of things that are transformed along the way.

It is the movement that creates the form.

This book will explore how the flow of energy and matter structures the evolution of life and even genetic information.

Even the laws of thermodynamics... can be recast in terms of information — Shannon entropy, the laws of bits of information. But this view generates its own paradox at the origin of life. ...Place information at the heart of life, and there is a problem with the emergence of function ...the origin of biological information. There are problems... in understanding why we age and die... diseases... and how experiences can give rise to conscious mind. ...A far better question ...what processes animate cells and set them apart from inanimate matter?

For decades, biology has been dominated by information—the power of genes. ...[Y]et there is no difference in the information content of a living protozoon and one that died ...The difference between alive and dead lies in energy flow ...the ability of cells to continually regenerate themselves from simpler building blocks.

No, we're not alone [in the universe]. We share it with lots of friendly bacteria [and this includes bacteria on other planets].

I see myself as a biologist or a biochemist, but... in the context of as a broader subject, it forces me to wrestle with physics, with cosmology, with chemistry, with geology, with earth sciences or planetary sciences, and that's a thrill. ...I think it's what most people are drawn into science in the first place for, because science, in its biggest sense, is what inspires people, and by the time that you've got to the level of doing a PhD, it's narrowed down so much that a lot of people are almost forced to lose their imagination, and their creativity as a scientist... I think astrobiology is a subject that puts all that back in, in heaps.