45 quotes
I wouldn't hesitate to call it [parasitism] a definition of life... [L]ife as a rule is parasitic on its environment, and the level of parasitism depends on the sophistication of the environment.
Nick Lane (2021)
If we, meaning humans now... find life somewhere else, most people would be disappointed if it turned out only to be bacteria.
Nick Lane (2021)
Yes I do think that... [viruses] are alive, not for the obvious reasons.
Nick Lane (2021)
No, we're not alone [in the universe]. We share it with lots of friendly bacteria [and this includes bacteria on other planets].
Nick Lane (2021)
Now, if we get to complex life and we get beyond organic life forms into artificial intelligence, post-biological, then anything goes and maybe that's what we should be looking for.
Nick Lane (2021)
Now it's possible to have some kind of protocell with some form of metabolism without any genetic heredity. It's possible in principle. Is it alive?
Nick Lane (2021)
The information encoded in DNA spells out the molecular structure of proteins. This, said Crick, is the 'central dogma' of all biology: genes code for proteins.
Power, Sex, Suicide (2005)
The driving force of metabolism is thermodynamics. ...[I]n this context ...the chemical need to react (to dissipate energy) in the same way that water needs to flow downhill.
Transformer (2022)
It does seem to me, from our experience of life on earth that photosynthesis allows you to... step up, by probably orders of magnitude in just how much life can take over a planet.
Nick Lane (2021)
The only way that you can really get a selfish replicator to be unselfish is to put it in a bag with a bunch of other selfish replicators, and then they're more or less obliged to cooperate.
Nick Lane (2021)
One stromatolite is pretty much the same as another stromatolite, to my eye. That probably gets the stromatolite biologists in a fury, I suspect...
Nick Lane (2021)
This membrane, so vanishingly thin, looms large... for bacteria use it for generating their energy.
Power, Sex, Suicide (2005)
Flux is a form of flow, but with one crucial difference. ...In biochemistry flux is the flow of things that are transformed along the way.
Transformer (2022)
According to mitochondrial gene analysis, Neanderthal man didn't interbreed with Homo Sapiens...
Power, Sex, Suicide (2005)
I'm not particularly... eucaryocentric, but I do think there is a problem to solve there. ...There is a difference in morphology ...
Nick Lane (2021)
Does it make sense that life is cellular? Would you expect to find life being cellular elsewhere? I suspect that for organic life... it would be cellular.
Nick Lane (2021)
If you're selecting at the level of genetic replication, the replicators that are better able to make copies of themselves fast are those which are, in effect, the most selfish and the least likely to cooperate to try and convert the environment into metabolism.
Nick Lane (2021)
There are people at UCL, Ian Crawford, who's doing a great deal for astrobiology, but it's not something which is happening through my department. It's happening through Planetary sciences. It's not happening in biological sciences...
Nick Lane (2021)
So... why is it that we all have the same machinery inside, but we have such different lifestyles? Why don't we see multiple origins of complex life where cyanobacteria give rise to photosynthetic trees?
Nick Lane (2021)
Viruses are quite sophisticated in the sense that they're forming virion particles and they're infecting other cells... transposable elements and things... selfish genes, I suppose in the broadest sense.
Nick Lane (2021)