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,… - Nick Lane
" "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.
English
Collect this quote
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.
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Additional quotes by Nick Lane
I do like this quote from Simon Conway Morris that if the aliens call then don't pick up the phone. I'm not sure I'd really like to meet any of them very much. Perhaps... meeting bacteria would be the least scary... [T]he chances of meeting aliens is so remote that I haven't really troubled myself very much about it. It would be nice to think that if we did, somehow they would be a superior intelligence... they would have solved a lot of the problems of aggression and whatever else that humans have, but I fear not. I fear that it would be the opposite, that... natural selection has a knack of producing nastiness in intelligence.
[Why a cell vs a gene or partial gene?] There's been plenty of work done on RNA replicators and they have a tendency to become smaller and simpler and effectively better able to make copies of themselves with whatever you provide them in the environment, and they end up with a thing called , which is basically the binding sequence of the which allows it to furiously replicate away. ...If you're providing in the environmwent an RNA polymerase and an infinite supply of s then... they become simpler and simpler, and faster and faster at copying. ...The trouble is there isn't ever going to be an environment that's providing that for you except in a cellular context... If you're selecting at the level of genetic replication, the replicators that are better able to make copies of themselves fast are those which are, in effect, the most selfish and the least likely to cooperate to try and convert the environment into .
Loading...