My review of Nick Lane's book: "The Vital Question:Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life"
The Hard Questions about the Origin of life Finally Answered
In this excellent work, Nick Lane, renown British Biologist and popular science author, has identified what he calls "the vital unsolved questions in the field of biology," and has gone one step beyond mere speculation to positing plausible heuristic theories about how these mysteries may be solved.
The most intriguing of these, in my view, is Lane's speculative questions about how, after 500 millions years of the earth's existence, life somehow got up and running?
On parallel with that question is Lane's suggestion that life may have emerged only once on this planet.
And yet even more intriguing, he asked why no intermediaries appeared between simple and complex life?
That question remains one that even this treatise did not attempt to tackle with a ten-foot pole: One day we had simple nucleus-less prokaryotes in the form of bacteria and archaea; the next day we had complex eukaryotes with nuclei, that would go on to include mitochondria, cell division, RNA and metabolism.
Thus, out of nowhere sprang all the eukaryotics " plants and animals with which we are all now familiar.
Biologist, Lynn Margulis, going against the prevailing scientific winds, showed that prokaryotes evolved into eukaryotes via cooperation rather than via the long mistaken standard orthodoxy of competitive struggles.
Her research emphasized that mitochondria in animals, and chloroplasts in plants, are the result of endosymbiosis between bacteria and archaea, not due to some imagined evolutionary primordial competition.
Lane, noting that all cells, whether eukaryotic or prokaryotic, have one thing in common: they both burn food through respiration " used this fact to speculate that maybe he could find geochemical processes that mimicked this biological energy production method.
In doing so, he came up with an hypothesis about how the connection between geochemical energy production and cellular energy production, may have come about; namely, all living cells power themselves through a process of pumping protons across a membrane creating a reservoir of electrical imbalance.
The gradient of the back-flow of these protons is used by cells to produce physical work, just as water flowing through a dam turns a turbine.
This process proved to be the clue Lane needed to find existing geochemical processes that mimicked biological energy production.
Taking three of the most abundant elements in the universe: rocks, water, and carbon dioxide, Lane formulated his own chemical ideas for the emergence of biological chemistry from geological chemistry.
As a result, the case he makes here is for the emergence of life via alkaline hydrothermal vents in the deep seabeds, which are produced by a chemical reaction between solid rock and water, is tantalizingly convincing.
The way Lane put it is as follows: "alkaline hydrothermal vents provide exactly the conditions required for the origin of life: a high flux of carbon and energy that is physically channeled over inorganic catalysts, and constrained in a way that permits the accumulation of high concentrations of organics."
In this somewhat dense formulation, we learn how life precursor products conceivably could have been produced from hydrogen and carbon dioxide in these deep seabed vents.
I was in the sixth grade, when in 1952, Miller and Urey famously used electrochemical shocks to a primordial soup to generate life. Sadly it did not generate life, but did produce a number of precursor building blocks of life. Among them were amines, peptides, amino acids and a few other things that I no longer remember.
These "life in the soup" experiments continued well into the 1970s, but no test tube life ever emerged.
Lane proposes an alternative mechanism here: formation of primitive lifeforms in alkaline hydrothermal vents.
In summary, of the nearly 40 trillion cells in our eukaryotic bodies, each one has a nucleus and mitochondria fused together into one cell through symbiotic cooperation with its predecessors the prokaryotes and archaeas.
This now is all but a consensus formulation, the standard model of biology that accepts the fact that all complex cells evolved from this symbiosis by deriving energy from a reduction/oxygen reaction.
In mitochondria, electrons jump from one ferro-sulphuric cluster to another. And as already noted, all life on earth depends on proton gradients across membranes that drive carbon and energy metabolism.
Having only recently completed Dr Richard Pico's incredible book "Consciousness in Four Dimensions," this book backfills a great deal of the biochemistry that Pico only loosely approximated.
Together they make me think I might finally understand how life may have come about. Five stars
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