Whether you define life as living or not is really a matter of opinion... It's a continuum. You can draw a line wherever you want or healthier not to… - Nick Lane

So there's one example of free living ... with bacteria living inside it. It wasn't . It's got a cell wall and it's not a . So they can get inside, but we can say for sure it's rare. What does it do? In a nutshell it changes the topology of the cell. It allows you to internalize respiration and it's not just internalizing the membranes. It's internalizing a genetic control system with in our own case, which by standard selection is whittled down to a kind of minimal unit required to do the job, and that in effect allows the nuclear genome to expand up to anything it wants to be. So... it's a structural change. It's not something which you can find by genetic exploration of the evolutionary space. It's something [in] which you change the topology of a cell. And once you've got that, you've got bacteria living inside another bacterial cell. You've got a fight on your hands! They've got to get along with each another somehow. So the chances of it going wrong is quite high. So I would imagine if we know of one or two examples now, there must have been thousands, millions, billions of cases of this over earth history. The fact that... all this searching across the earth that we've done for life, we find bacteria, we find , we find these candidate phyla. We're not sure what they are, exactly, but they seem to be very simple and probably s, and we see Eukaryotic cells, all the cases that appear to be potentially evolutionary intermediates, something slightly different, have turned out to be highly derived... from more complex ancestors.

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.

That's a question about the meaning of life... Why are we here? What are we doing? What's important to us? Why should we struggle to do anything, and I think most of the answers to those questions lie within society itself. ...I don't see a greater meaning, that we've been put here as a species, that we're exceptional in any way. We're just another species. We're very much similar to pretty much everything else, and I think what we've done that's good has been the achievement of society as a whole... [A] lot of people within society... humans have a need for an origins myth, and that origins myth, if it happens to bear some semblance to reality, I think a lot of people are genuinely interested to know what can we say about the origins of the Universe, about the origins of the solar system, about the origins of life. ...[C]an we as ...puny-brained humans come to, through logic, through experiments, through thinking about it, through observations, come to an explanation for how life came to be. It's a grand question. It would be wonderful to know the answer. I think a lot of people would love to know that answer, and I personally would love to know that answer, even if my own views on the subject turn out to be completely wrong.