Nick Lane – Life as we know it is chemically inevitable

Today, I'm chatting with Nick Lane, who is an evolutionary biochemist at University College London. And he has many books and papers which help us reconceptualize life's four billion years in terms of energy flow and helps explain everything from how life came to be in the first place to the origin of eukaryotes to many contingencies we see today in how life works. So, Nick, maybe a good place to start would be why are eukaryotes so significant in your worldview of why life is the way it is?

Well, first, thanks for having me here. This is this is fun. I love talking about this kind of thing. So so eukaryotes what's a eukaryote? It's basically the cells that make us up, but also make up plants and make up things like amoeba or fungi, algae. So basically, everything that's large and complex that you can see is composed of this one cell type called the eukaryotic cell. And we have a nucleus where all the DNA is, where all the genes are, and then all all those kind of machinery, cell membranes, and things. So it's just basically a lot of kit in in in these cells. And the weirdness is

Mhmm.

And the the one thing which I I I guess you could conclude from that is bacteria and archaea, in terms of their genetic repertoire, they're actually they've they've got a lot more genes, a lot more versatility than eukaryotes do. It's just that a single bacterial cell has much less in it, but there's so many different types of bacterial cell that, overall, they've kind of explored genetic sequence space. Right. They had four billion years to have a go at that, and they never came up with a trick. They said it's not in the genes. It's not about information. There's something else which is which

Now let's go to the origins of life. And you have this really compelling story where you imagine that the first life forms were continuous with earth's geochemistry? And if you can recapitulate the story a little bit, and I wanna ask

a question. I mean, I'll tell you how I got there first. Because I I started out working on mitochondria. Mhmm. And that took me into the evolution of eukaryotes. And eukaryotes acquire these endosymbionts that that that become mitochondria, and they change the potential of evolution. It doesn't change everything immediately, but it changes where the endpoints can be. Yeah. And it allows the evolution of these large complex cells and eventually multicellular organisms and us. So what a modern mitochondria are actually doing well, what they're actually doing is is respiration. They're generatin

Yeah. I mean, it's it's so fascinating. So just to recapitulate for my own understanding in the audiences, let's just break down what we have here. So you have the analog of a cell in these pores, you have something which concentrates the buildup of these organics so that they don't just all diffuse in some big primordial soup. And so this is why you think like some primordial lake is not where this happened. It had to be concentrated in some entity. Then you've got a chemiosmotic gradient, a proton gradient, drives work. And specifically it favors the fixation of carbon dioxide and to drive t

That's basically it. Yeah. So so so so what do you get if you react hydrogen and c o two? What you get are what are called Krebs cycle intermediates. So carboxylic acids, small molecules made only of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen with this organic acid group at the end, which can be two, three, four, five carbon units in the chain. And this is your basic building blocks. You you add on ammonia to this, and you you get an amino acid. You add more hydrogen on, and