Just Finished Reading: The Vital Question – Why is Life the Way it is? By Nick Lane (FP: 2015)

It’s a good question, a fundamental question. Why is life exactly the way it is? Could it have been any different? Does our knowledge of life on Earth give us any clues about other life in the Universe are there indeed universal laws of life?

To attempt to answer these questions we need to go way, way, way back in time to the very earliest, and simplest, life forms – bacteria (or actually the ancestors of what we recognise as bacteria these days). After around 2 billion years where they dominated the world they gave rise to cells that we are all familiar with – with a nucleus, recognisable call walls, DNA and much else besides. How did this happen? By the fusing together of two distinct types of single cell creatures to produce the first true Eukaryotic cell. This apparent one-time event produced the raw material for evolution to produce everything from Amoeba to Blue whales and us over the next 2 ½ billion years. The driving force behind all this was energy. Early bacteria, in a largely oxygen free atmosphere at the time, had a limited pool of energy to call on. The new calls on the block had much more at their disposal utilising the productive capacity of what later became mitochondria. Being energy rich they could afford to grow larger, more complex with sub-sections of the cell undertaking individual pieces of work, they could grow faster, reproduce more often and in more interesting ways (introducing both the idea of sex and death to the Earth), carry more genes allowing evolution to have more grist to its mill which increased the overall ‘speed’ of the evolutionary process. Once off and running there was no stopping them. The rest is, a very long and convoluted, history.

It’s good to get back to some proper scientific reading. It’s been a while – and it showed as I struggled with some of the earlier parts of this very interesting work. Whilst being no stranger to Biology or Evolution itself I admit to being on much less confident ground with Chemistry. It’s not something I studied in school to any great length so some of the author’s arguments and detailed descriptions ended up being close to going over my head. Some parts I probably skimmed more than I should have, others I had to read several times to understand what he was getting at. But don't let that kind of thing put you off. Although College grade Chemistry and Biology would come in handy it’s not 100% necessary to get the meat of the argument onto your mental plate in a reasonably cooked condition. I was much happier when he discussed what was happening in cells at a quantum level (very important) so all that reading of Quantum Mechanics over the past few years came to my rescue here! But again don’t let that put you off. If you get the gist of his argument that will be enough to serve you well later on when he delves into cell function and how mistakes in cell replication point to what happens in normal heathy cells. The meat of the book (to keep using a very un-vegetarian analogy) is dedicated to that healthy cell, how it works, why it looks and operates the way it does – right across all complex life on Earth – and why it probably couldn’t be any other way.

Which brings up his views on life elsewhere. We both agree that life in the Universe will be common for the simple reason that its building blocks are everywhere in abundance and there has been more than sufficient time for it to emerge wherever conditions allow. We agreed to disagree on his second contention – that complex multicellular life is rare. Simple bacteria like creatures existed on Earth for 2 billion years before the Eukaryotic Revolution which took another 2 ½ billion years to produce intelligence. This was, the author maintains, a once in a life time event. It would be entirely possible, he maintains, for bacteria to dominate the planet right up to its extinction when our Sun finally burns out. This is the apparent fate of most life on most worlds (which would explain the lack of signals or spaceships. Bacteria has little use for either star drives or radio telescopes). I remain to be convinced of this. Maybe it’s just hope but I’d expect complexity to emerge eventually given time. The advantages are seemingly obvious.

This was, as I’ve said, a difficult read (at least for me!) but a worthwhile one. My brief and simple precis has done little justice to the detailed argument and analysis that unfolds throughout its 305 pages. If you ever wanted to understand why life is the way it is I’d have to say that there are probably many worse places than this. Recommended to anyone with an enquiring mind.