Dwarkesh (host)

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 the

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 at the end.

Yeah.

I mean, it's so fascinating.

So just to recapitulate for my own understanding and the audience's,

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, which drives work and specifically it favors the fixation of carbon dioxide and to drive the reaction with hydrogen gas to make organics.

And then you've got along this membrane, you've got catalysts, which are basically early enzymes.

So you've got enzymes, you've got the cell, you've got the proton gradient.