30 quotes
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)
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)
I read some of those ideas years ago, Graham Cairns-Smith, and thought it was thrilling. Over recent years I don't really see the need for a kind of genetic intermediary between an RNA level of genetic replication and some other form of replicator.
Nick Lane (2021)
It would be a little disappointing if we didn't even find bacteria in our own solar system. I would be rather surprised to find what I would describe as large, morphologically complex life. ...It only arose once on earth.
Nick Lane (2021)