These are all lifestyles that exist in bacteria anyway. ...Photosynthesis obviously. The only eukaryotic lifestyle that does not exist at all in bact… - Nick Lane
" "These are all lifestyles that exist in bacteria anyway. ...Photosynthesis obviously. The only eukaryotic lifestyle that does not exist at all in bacteria is ... the ability to engulf other cells, to grow around them. That's never been found yet in bacteria. It seems to require... a lot of energy, a large complicated system capable of changing shape and moving around. ...For whatever reasons it never evolved. I would say the reason was that you need mitochondria to get that large and complex in the first place.
About Nick Lane
(born 1967) is a British and writer. He is a professor in evolutionary at University College London. He has published five books to date which have won several awards.
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Additional quotes by Nick Lane
I deliberately avoid having... [a working definition of life]. What I quote... is... from Peter Mitchell... a pioneer... of... , that essentially all cells, with very very few exceptions, are powered by... proton gradients across the membrane. So on one side of the membrane surrounding the cell you've got the high concentration on the inside, a low proton concentration [on the outside]. Protons are... the positively charged nuclei of atoms, so... [y]ou're pumping them out and... putting a charge on the membrane... That's as universally conserved across life on earth as the itself, which implies, as a mechanism, it's very early... [I]t's not something anyone ever predicted. It's not something that... emerges from a chemical understanding of the biochemistry of cells.
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