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 … - Nick Lane
" "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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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 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.
I think there's plenty of solutions to Fermi's paradox, that we don't need to add this as an extra one, but yes, this would be my favorite explanation for it, that there is no inevitability about complex life, that there's nothing in the laws of cosmology that say, "[Complex] Life will start." I think that there probably is something in the laws of cosmology lending itself towards bacteria, but the idea of more complex life... I certainly wouldn't see a Simon Conway Morris view, for example, that the origin of life is so complex that you require God to put everything in motion and then will take you all the way to humans.
[A]cquiring mitochondria gives you a headache that can go wrong very easily, but here's an interesting problem in a nutshell. You look at a plant cell under a microscope, or an animal cell, or a fungal cell, or an or something, and you'll recognize the same structure in all of them. They've all got a nucleus. They've all got the s as straight chromosomes. They've all got s. They've all got s. They've all got complexes. They all do as a division mechanism. They all do as two steps where you first double everything and then half it twice. They all go through the same rigmarole. They've all got mitochondria. They've all got the same system, endoplasmic reticulum, things like that. ...[Y]ou could list page after page after page in a text book and it would be exactly the same for a plant, or a fungal cell, or an animal cell. Now they have really different ways of life. If you were to simply think, "Well, there's some inevitability that bacteria will give rise to complex life." ...You would imagine that a photosynthetic bacteria, a would give rise directly to photosynthetic , eukaryotic algae, but they didn't. It was by the intermediary of acquisition of a . There was a common ancestor of eukaryotes that was nothing like a cyanobacterium and nothing... quite like an algae except without the chloroplasts. So... why is it that we all have the same machinery inside, but we have such different lifestyles? Why don't we see multiple origins of complex life where cyanobacteria give rise to photosynthetic trees? Why don't we see predatory bacteria?
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