Quotes from Nick Lane

I will lay out a hypothesis – tell a coherent story – that connects energy and evolution.

was a world on which life emerged, 3,800 million years ago, perhaps animated by something of the restlessness of the planet itself.

there isn't a full consensus among experts. But strip away a few more skins from the onion of time and, by 3,400 million years ago

Bacteria dominated our planet for another 2,500 million years before the first truly complex organisms appeared in the fossil record.

Essentially all life uses redox chemistry to generate a gradient of protons across a membrane. Why on earth do we do that?

establishment. In 1966, the Dutch geologist M. G. Rutten could write, in a charmingly antiquated style that has passed forever from the scientific journals:

The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.

A night in the arms of Venus, it was said, led to a lifetime on Mercury.

One mitochondrion contains tens of thousands of copies of each respiratory complex. A single cell contains hundreds or thousands of mitochondria. Your 40 trillion cells contain at least a quadrillion mitochondria, with a combined convoluted surface area of about 14,000 square metres; about four football fields. Their job is to pump protons, and together they pump more than 1021 of them – nearly as many as there are stars in the known universe – every second.

The first true eyes appeared somewhat abruptly in the fossil record around 540 million

Onions, wheat and amoebae have more genes and more DNA than we do. Amphibians such as frogs and salamanders have genome sizes that range over two orders of magnitude, with some salamander genomes being 40 times larger than our own, and some frogs being less than a third of our size. If

A cell can also look static under a microscope, yet its state is the product of more than a billion metabolic reactions every second.11 You are composed of at least thirty trillion cells, so in the last second your tranquil demeanour was sustained by an incomprehensible one hundred billion trillion reactions (1023, or 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). I'm now in my mid-fifties, so my wrinkles and aches and pains are the product of about 1032 reactions to date, roughly a billion times

Geochemistry gives rise seamlessly to biochemistry.

So it seems to me there are two big unknowns at the very heart of biology today: why life evolved in the perplexing way it did, and why cells are powered in such a peculiar fashion. This

We know a great deal about the molecular mechanisms of evolution and about the history of life on our planet, but far less about which parts of this history are chance – trajectories that could have played out quite differently on other planets – and which bits are dictated by physical laws or constraints.

what happens if we take a cyanide pill: it jams up the final proton pump of the respiratory chain in our mitochondria. If the respiratory pumps are impeded in this way, protons can continue to flow in through the ATP synthase for a few seconds before the proton concentration equilibrates across the membrane, and net flow ceases. It is almost as hard to define death as life, but the irrevocable collapse of membrane potential comes pretty close. So

the igneo-aerial food." In other words, despite

Life is the interplay between structure and energy.

Mitochondria convert flux through the Krebs cycle into electrical membrane potential. The membrane is a capacitor: a thin insulating layer that separates two electrically charged aqueous phases, generating powerful electrical fields across the membrane. Changes

We now know that free-radical signals are central to cell physiology, so we can begin to see why antioxidants (which mop up free radicals) do as much harm as good.

For that matter, how do we switch from simple chemical affiliations to selection for proteins? And how do we get from RNA to DNA? As it happens, there are some striking answers, backed up by surprising findings in the last few years. Gratifyingly, the new findings square beautifully with the idea of life evolving in hydrothermal vents, the setting of Chapter 1.

It's not just lifespan that varies with free-radical leak, health span does

If free-radical leak is fast, degenerative diseases set in quickly; if it's slow, they're postponed or even abrogated altogether.

The environment most realistically capable of giving rise to life, whether here or anywhere else in the universe, is alkaline hydrothermal vents. Such vents constrain cells to make use of natural proton gradients, and ultimately to generate their own.