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I was sort of up to date on the subject, but Lane's book made it clear that my textbook was already at least a decade out of date even though it's copyright is 2013, at least on the question of the earliest cells.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...

The central question in biology today is how life originated. It's not only the biggest unanswered question in biology, but it's also central to our understanding of the place of life in the universe. We now know that planets are extremely common in the universe, and it's at least plausible, that a lot of them have or had Earth like conditions. If we understood how life originated on Earth, we would be much more able to understand the probability of it existing elsewhere. Conversely, if we found life elsewhere, it would almost certainly provide potent clues to how life originated on Earth. The past decades have seen considerable progress in understanding some possibilities for early life, but we are far from concrete answers. Natalie Wolchover, writing in Quanta , has some news on one approach, dissipation driven organization. The idea is that some physical systems evolve to maximize their dissipation of energy and entropy increase. The biophysicist Jeremy England ...