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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 … - Nick Lane
" "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 CO<sub>2</sub>"... [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 CO<sub>2</sub>, 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.
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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.
What I would say with some degree of certainty from the example of life on earth, is that if you simply have a population of bacteria... the chances of it giving rise to the kind of morphological complexity... we see in eukariotic cells, and we do not see in bacteria, is remote... because bacteria and archaea, if you look at the amount of , they dwarf the genetic variation that we see in Eukaryotes. They have explored genetic sequence space to orders of magnitude greater that Eukaryotes did, and despite exploring all of that space, they haven't come up with morphological complexity. ...[T]hey did through an endosymbiosis. ...It's rare between prokaryotes, rare to the point that we know of one example of free-living bacteria with bacterial cells living inside it. We know of two other examples where, there's a for example, which has inside its own cells... some gamma protein bacteria, with beta protein bacteria living inside them. It's a little bit of a strange system and it's hard to know, again, can you generalize from this, because it's all inside a Russian doll?
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s are the crowning glory of life. ...[T]he rich variety of life is almost entirely attributable to the... variety of proteins. ...Perhaps the most important group are the s ...biological catalysts that speed up the rate of biochemical reactions ...with an astonishing degree of selectivity for ...raw materials.
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