The is riddled with redundancy. - Nick Lane

It would be a little disappointing if we didn't even find bacteria in our own solar system. I would be rather surprised to find what I would describe as large, morphologically complex life. ...It only arose once on earth. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's improbable... but it does raise some interesting questions about why, and... I think we can apply principles to it, and those principles effectively are why do bacteria and , as assistive groups to the bacteria... They're biochemically very complex. They're genetically very complex. They're kind of structured in a different way where they have large, complex metagenomes, but... I doubt very much that we'll ever find anything of the [morphological] level of complexity of a flea, composed of bacterial cells.

For decades, biology has been dominated by information—the power of genes. ...[Y]et there is no difference in the information content of a living protozoon and one that died ...The difference between alive and dead lies in energy flow ...the ability of cells to continually regenerate themselves from simpler building blocks.

The information encoded in DNA spells out the molecular structure of s. This, said Crick, is the 'central dogma' of all biology: genes code for proteins.