Nick Lane

And under most conditions that these people have looked at, they're Santa Fe.

the answer is, well, you do better if you're not part of the symbiosis.

Only under certain conditions will you do better.

So predictably, the end point is it doesn't work.

Here's a vivid way of seeing it.

We know what bacteria and archaea look like.

People have been studying these things and finding new examples.

And there's a group discovered 10 years ago called the Asgard Archaea.

And they're relatively eukaryotic-like, which is to say they've got proteins in there and genes that are pretty similar to eukaryotic ones.

And they're interesting cells.

They've got long processes, and possibly they can move vesicles around inside them.

So they're doing a few eukaryotic things.

But if you look at their internal structure, it's not very complex.

It's nothing like a eukaryotic cell.

And if you look at their genome size, it's basically a standard prokaryotic genome size.

You're talking 4,000, 5,000 genes.

So these are not eukaryotic by any stretch of the imagination.

And then you look at a eukaryotic cell, and I said this at the beginning, you look at a plant cell or an animal cell or a fungal cell or an alga or amoeba under a microscope, and they've all got the same stuff.

And it's kind of weird.

Why would a single-celled alga living in the ocean have all the same kit that one of my kidney cells has?