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I wouldn't expect populations of bacteria to give rise, without endosymbiosis, to complex morphology and the kind of intelligence that we have, elsew… - Nick Lane
" "I wouldn't expect populations of bacteria to give rise, without endosymbiosis, to complex morphology and the kind of intelligence that we have, elsewhere. I think that it would require (I'm going out on a limb here)... an endosymbiosis for the reasons I've been saying, and... that endosymbiosis is a) rare and b) likely to go wrong. So I can't put a number on how improbable it is. It's just that I would say that it's a factor that a lot of people would rather not think about. If you have an agenda where you'd like to find complex life out there, the SETI people for example... probably don't want to hear this kind of stuff. It says that it's less likely... it's not an inevitable outcome of physics.
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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
Whether or not it would be possible to drive the kind of protein machinery that you see in modern cells, like an ... that makes the energy currency of life... If it were just sitting there in a in a vent, can work out whether the natural... ion gradients in these vents would be... powerful enough to drive this machine to work. ...[Y]ou need to know what are the substrates, what are... the materials that it needs to operate? Where are they coming from? What's the concentration of them? You realize that you have no answer to any of those, and then what's the product? Well, it disappears off somewhere else, as well. So how can selection act if you've got stuff coming in from some unknown place and the product leaving to some unknown place? It made me realize that cellularization is important as a way of keeping the inside in and in keeping the outside out, and so I now have problems with the idea of seeing the entire vent as a kind of a living system.
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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.
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