CapitalistImperialistPig

After taking a few whacks at some of the older theories for the original biogenesis, Nick Lane presents his best guess at a candidate. After pointing out some crucial flaws in the primordial soup and black smoker theories, he picks Mike Russell's alkaline vent theory. What you need, he says, is a flow through reaction chamber with appropriate chemistry and catalysts that concentrates crucial reaction products and flushes wastes. Alkaline hydrothermal vents provide exactly the conditions required for the origin of life: a high flux of carbon and energy that is physically channelled over inorganic catalysts, and constrained in a way that permits the accumulation of high concentrations of organics. The hydrothermal fluids are rich in dissolved hydrogen, with lesser quantities of other reduced gases including methane, ammonia and sulphide. Lost City and other known alkaline vents are microporous – there is no central chimney, but the rock itself is like a mineralised sponge, with th...

Lee turned me on to Nick Lane's book The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life . I'm only about a tenth of the way through it, but as is my want, I can't help commenting. It's a terrific book. I took a senior level course in Evolution only a semester ago, so I thought I was sort of up to date on the subject, but Lane's book made it clear that my textbook was already at least a decade out of date even though it's copyright is 2013, at least on the question of the earliest cells. Naturally I haven't gotten to the core of Lane's argument yet, but several points are obvious: he believes that the key event in the rise of complex cells (the eukaryotes) which constitute humans, plants, fungi, and several very diverse groups of unicellular creatures was the incorporation of the bacterial endosymbionts which became mitochondria into our ancestral archaebacterial cells. Moreover, this occurred only once (or, at any rate, only des...