Quotes from Nick Lane

this chapter is different from the other chapters in this book, in that not only does science not (yet) know the answer, but at present we can barely conceive of how that answer might look in terms of the known laws of physics or biology or information.

A piece of bad news wrapped in a protein coat.

Mitochondrial genes act like a female surname, which enables us to trace our ancestry down the female line in the way some families try to trace their descent down the male line from William the Conqueror, or Noah, or Mohammed.

While a few men seek to justify their existence by assuming the burden of childcare, or material provisioning, the same is not true of many lower creatures, human or otherwise, where the males quite literally just fuck off.

As a rule of thumb, the hermaphrodite lifestyle works well if the prospects of finding a mate are slim, for example in low-density or immobile populations (explaining why many plants are hermaphrodites), while separate sexes develop in species with higher population densities or greater mobility.

multicellular life. All animals, all plants, all of them depend on

of oxygen, whether we think of it as 'good' or 'bad', is the formation of free radicals. As conventionally stated, the idea that breathing oxygen causes ageing is disarmingly simple. We produce free

Storing genes, vulnerable informational systems, in the immediate vicinity of the mitochondrial respiratory chains, which leak destructive free radicals, is equivalent to storing a valuable library in the wooden shack of a registered pyromaniac.

One begins to wonder if all the most interesting problems in physics are now in biology.

Nothing is more conservative than a bacterium.

Petty human squabbles over borders and oil and creed vanish in the knowledge that this living marble surrounded by infinite emptiness is our shared home, and more, a home we share with, and owe to, the most wonderful inventions of life.

Radical feminists and evolutionists agree that males are a serious cost to society.

At the level of their biochemistry, the barrier between bacteria and complex cells barely exists.

If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking and loving, you don't actually live longer, it just seems longer.'1

Without programmed cell death, the bonds that bind cells in complex multicellular organisms might never have evolved.

There's no greater insult in science than to say that an argument is 'not even wrong', that it is invulnerable to disproof.

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.

If all these considerations are correct, then the appearance of eyes really could have ignited the Cambrian explosion. And if that's the case, then the evolution of the eye must certainly number among the most dramatic and important events in the whole history of life on earth.

It seems that all eukaryotic cells either have, or once had (and then lost) mitochondria. In other words, possession of mitochondria is a sine qua non of the eukaryotic condition

To doubt that life evolved, even if some of the details described in this book may yet prove wrong, is to doubt the convergence of evidence, from molecules to men, from bacteria to planetary systems. It is to doubt the evidence of biology, and its concordance with physics and chemistry, geology and astronomy. It is to doubt the veracity of experiment and observation, to doubt the testing in reality. It is, in the end, to doubt reality.

The myosin in our own skeletal muscles is more closely related to the myosin driving the flight muscles of that irritating housefly buzzing around your head than it is to the myosin in the muscles of your own sphincters

Men are even worse: a hundred rounds of cell division are needed to make sperm, with each round linked inexorably to more mutations. Because sperm production goes on throughout life, round after round of cell division, the older the man, the worse it gets. As the geneticist James Crow put it, the greatest mutational health hazard in the population is fertile old men.

In the end, respiration and burning are equivalent; the slight delay in the middle is what we know as life.

All life on our planet is related, and the readout of letters in DNA shows exactly how. By comparing DNA sequences, we can compute statistically how closely related we are to anything, from monkeys to marsupials, to reptiles, amphibians, fish, insects, crustaceans, worms, plants, protozoa, bacteria–you name it.