Limited Time Offer
Premium members can get their quote collection automatically imported into their Quotewise collections.
" "I've had long and sometimes difficult discussions, especially about the singularity of the origin of Eukaryotes... A lot of people don't like that. ...[I]t's not really about what does it say about the probability of life elsewhere, although it has things to say to that. It's really about life on earth, and a lot of people are very uncomfortable with the idea of improbability... I've had quite difficult discussions with some students about that, but rarely... about life elsewhere in the Universe.
(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.
Premium members can get their quote collection automatically imported into their Quotewise collections.
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
I've been asked on various occasions, "Why don't we, as an origins of life community, get together, think what a killer experiment is, and then go and build a or something, where we go and do the experiment?" And the answer to that is... [W]e can't agree with each other about what experiment would you do? ...[I]t is intrinsically a lot more complex, precisely because it's a continuum. We don't know. We don't agree about what environment, we don't agree about what kind of chemistry or biochemistry. We can't join these things up, and so it seems to me a much healthier environment is to be deliberately multiple about it. Not to say, "Ok, this particular world view is going to dominate." I think we have to have multiple views until we know more.
[I]t's interesting to me that the bacteriophages, the viruses that you find in bacteria, are not remotely similar to the ones that you find infecting archaea, which again are not remotely similar to eukaryotic viruses. ...They're different in their appearance. They're different in their mechanisms in which they force their... I mean the bacteriophages are these classic lunar module landing things... They are stunning things to look at. ...Some es look like bottle balls or postage stamps, strange shapes... They don't have any genes in common. They don't have mechanisms of entry into cells in common. They appear to be independently derived.