Nick Lane

You can't kind of evolve into something more complex.

To some extent, you can, but basically you're always going to get the same.

In the same environment, we'll always give you the same thing.

Soon as you start introducing random bits of RNA into this, then you've got what you'd call evolvability, which is to say you can begin to resist the environment.

You can begin to do things which are not just dictated by the environment.

You can evolve and change and leave events in the end and do other things.

So as soon as you've got genes, you've got the potential to do almost anything.

If you've got naked bits of RNA, what tends to happen is they're selected for their replication speed.

They just go on making copies of themselves.

They don't become more complex.

They don't start encoding metabolism.

They just go on copying themselves and it's a dead end.

if you're trapping them inside growing protocells, then effectively they're sharing the same fate.

And if some of them are capable of making that protocell grow faster, then they will get more copies of themselves because they're inside this protocell.

The protocell is growing faster.

It makes a copy of itself and it's still associated.

So you've got actually selection as we know it in cells today, where the replicator are the genes, but the system which is being reproduced is the cell.

I'm going to unpack that a little bit.

So what have mitochondria got to do with sex?

So what they have to do with sex is effectively the female sex.