Nick Lane has some pretty wild ideas about the evolution of life.He thinks early life was continuous with the spontaneous chemistry of undersea hydrothermal vents.Nick’s story may be wrong, but I find it remarkable that with just that starting point, you can explain so much about why life is the way that it is — the things you’re supposed to just take as givens in biology class:* Why are there two sexes? Why sex at all?* Why are bacteria so simple despite being around for 4 billion years? Why is there so much shared structure between all eukaryotic cells despite the enormous morphological variety between animals, plants, fungi, and protists?* Why did the endosymbiosis event that led to eukaryotes happen only once, and in the particular way that it did?* Why is all life powered by proton gradients? Why does all life on Earth share not only the Krebs Cycle, but even the intermediate molecules like Acetyl-CoA?His theory implies that early life is almost chemically inevitable (potentially blooming on hundreds of millions of planets in the Milky Way alone), and that the real bottleneck is the complex eukaryotic cell.Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.Sponsors* Gemini in Sheets lets you turn messy text into structured data. We used it to classify all our episodes by type and topic, no manual tagging required. If you’re a Google Workspace user, you can get started today at docs.google.com/spreadsheets/* Labelbox has a massive network of domain experts (called Alignerrs) who help train AI models in a way that ensures they understand the world deeply, not superficially. These Alignerrs are true experts — one even tutored me in chemistry as I prepped for this episode. Learn more at labelbox.com/dwarkesh* Lighthouse helps frontier technology companies like Cursor and Physical Intelligence navigate the U.S. immigration system and hire top talent from around the world. Lighthouse handles everything, maximizing the probability of visa approval while minimizing the work you have to do. Learn more at lighthousehq.com/employersTo sponsor a future episode, visit dwarkesh.com/advertise.Timestamps(00:00:00) – The singularity that unlocked complex life(00:08:26) – Early life continuous with Earth's geochemistry(00:23:36) – Eukaryotes are the great filter for intelligent life(00:42:16) – Mitochondria are the reason we have sex(01:08:12) – Are bioelectric fields linked to consciousness? Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
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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
having me here. This is fun. I love talking about this kind of thing. 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, 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 those kind of machinery cell membranes and things. There's just basically a lot of kit in these cells. And the weirdness is, if you look inside a plant cell or a fungal cell, it looks exactly the same under an electron microscope as one of our cells. But they have a completely different lifestyle.
So why would they have all the same kit if they evolved to be a single-celled alga living in an ocean doing photosynthesis? It's still got the same kit that our cells have. So we know that because they share all of these things, they arose once. in the whole history of life on Earth, there could have been multiple origins, but there's no evidence for that.
If there was, it disappeared without trace. So we've got this kind of singularity, which happened about 2 billion years ago, about 2 billion years into the history of life on Earth. Then this thing happens once that gives rise to all complex life on Earth. And the one thing which I guess you could conclude from that is bacteria and archaea
In terms of their genetic repertoire, they're actually, 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.
They had four billion years to have a go at that, and they never came up with a trick, which says it's not in the genes. It's not about information. There's something else which is controlling it. And that's something I think is the acquisition of these power packs in our cells called mitochondria. Yeah.
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.
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