The only way that you can really get a selfish replicator to be unselfish is to put it in a bag with a bunch of other selfish replicators, and then t… - Nick Lane

A single discovery tomorrow could disprove everything I'm saying now. That's quite thrilling. ...We have been looking for several hundred years since Leeuwenhoek and we've not found anything really shocking that falls out of the system.

[T]he '' contends that ageing and many of... [its associated] diseases... are caused by... free radicals leaking from mitochondria during normal . ...As they burn up food using oxygen, the free-radical sparks escape to damage adjacent structures ...Many cruel inherited conditions... are linked with mutations caused by free radicals attacking mitochondrial genes.

What is [life] it? Would we even recognize it. What I imagine we would find would be cell-like things. Not a million miles away from bacteria, using , probably in water, not because it's the only way of organizing. It's just that carbon is very good at that kind of chemistry. It's very common in the universe. Water is ubiquitous. We know, from the principles of life on earth, that all this stuff works and we know that it's thermodynamically favored. ...[J]ust statistically, I would expect, maybe 900 times out of a thousand that life would be organized in a similar way to life here. That's not to say it can't be different. It's just probably... going to be similar.