Nick Lane (1) (1967–)

I’m not going to tell you that this is a hard book, one that requires effort and repays it many times over. Because I don’t want to scare you off. The book is that good.

Why do I recommend this book so highly? Nick Lane is among the world’s leading evolutionary biochemists, and certainly one of biology’s most articulate spokesmen. He never speaks down to the reader, but asks that you open yourself to core principles that are challenging.

If you took biology once upon a time, this is a show more book that might excite you. It is full of answers to previous unknowns, completions of sentences that once had no endings. Of course each answer raises its new questions, but this book is what happens when you turn your head for a few decades while smart people keep right on pointing their ever-sharper tools at the most basic questions.

Lane briefly but meticulously takes the reader through the history of life on Earth. The important events ended around two billion years ago. He explains the current thinking on the relation of the earliest cells to later cells, and offers up a theory that has supplanted Stanley Miller’s 1953 “primordial soup” theory of the origin of life that you may recall from school. The clarion call that rings out is this: the beautiful, symmetrical, functional, graspable double helical structure of DNA tells us about the conservation and replication of information in life. This is vital and necessary. But its vivid intuitive truth may have blinded us to another component of life that is perhaps even more basic and necessary – the energy that powers the cell. Lane argues forcefully that the molecular machinery behind this task ought to be as emblematic of life as the structure of DNA itself has become.

The kicker is that the abiotic chemical processes that were at work on the early Earth drove the start of life, and there is every reason to expect that the same processes are at work on the quadrillion other planets that have the necessary ingredients. What was essential to creating this world of miraculous diversity? A humble menu of rock, water, and carbon dioxide.

Someone should be screaming this from the rooftops! show less

I found myself thinking about one of the chapters in this book, years after I had finished the book. But alas, I could remember the basics about muscle fibres but not the name of the book so when I went searching for it in my collection I had difficulties. However, I just re-discovered it and find it still as arresting as i found it the first time around. I'm really impressed with Nick Lane. He's a biochemist with a solid background in research and the current book won him many awards show more ...including the royal Academy award for Science books in 2010. (Is it already that old?) He uses 10 inventions of evolution to elucidate life as we know it. They are.
1. the origin of life ....a reasonable overview and he seems to come down on the side of white (alkaline) smokers on undersea vents as the likely place where life originated. (I'm not so sure and note that he seems to entirely ignore the work of Cairns-Smith and a possible role for clay minerals as templates).
2. DNA.....which is mainly about routes for the possible evolution of RNA in the alkaline smokers and transformation into DNA. Quite fascinating. Lots to learn here.
3. Photosynthesis....Lane has written a whole book about oxygen so no surprise here that the photosynthesis story is about the role of electrons dropping to low energy levels (releasing energy) and being kicked back up to higher levels by more energy.....releasing oxygen in the process. (I must get his book on oxygen).
4. The complex cell...another masterful description of the biology of the cell ..but with only passing acknowledgement to Lyn Marguli's ideas about chloroplasts and mitochondria being organisms that were absorbed into the cell in a symbiotic relationship.
5. Sex...some interesting statistical stuff here but he makes the point that all eucaryotes: all plants, animals, algae, fungi, protists have sex but not bacteria...and huge numbers of genes were transferred to the cell by the absorption of mitochondria.
6. Movement..it's this chapter that stayed so long with me. The big change that came after the great Permian extinction was motility and motile organisms.....and movement requires muscles...converting chemical energy into mechanical force. Because of their great interest to me, I'll attach some more detailed notes on these chemical/protein mechanisms towards the end of this review.
7. Sight and the evolution of the eye....a beautifully written chapter ...full of interesting insights...like the trilobites use of mineral calcite lenses and in 2001 a living brittlestar was found with calcite lenses on its arms.
8. Hot blood...well I found out there that large animals generate more internal heat and large alligators are technically cold blooded but generate enough heat to be borderline hot-blooded
9. Consciousness...makes the point that the brain has obviously evolved ...so this would imply that "mind" has also evolved ....undermining Pope John Paul's message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences that evolution was ok but the mind of man was above all of that (or words to that effect).
10. Death...some interesting observations on extending life spans. Makes the point that most diseases come with old age....postpone the biological old age and you postpone the diseases (and death).
And, as promised above, here are some nuggets that I've extracted from the chapter on movement that I found so fascinating.
"One meticulous study by the geneticists Satoshi Ōta and Naruya Saitou, at the National Institute of Genetics, Mishima, (I’ve walked by it many times....a lovely setting with views of Mt Fuji) Japan, showed that a selection of proteins in the skeletal muscles of mammals are so similar to those in the striated flight muscles of insects that both must have evolved from a common ancestor of vertebrates and invertebrates, living some 600 million years ago.

Jellyfish, it seems, also have striated muscles that are minutely comparable with our own. So both smooth muscle and striated muscle contract using a similar system of actin and myosin, but each system apparently evolved independently from a common ancestor that possessed both cell types - a common ancestor numbering among the earliest of animals, from a time when jellyfish were the acme of creation.

we now know, for example, that the gene sequences of yeast and human actin are 95 per cent identical.' And from this perspective, the evolution of muscle looks very different. The same filaments that power your muscles power the microscopic world of all complex cells. The only real difference lies in their organisation.
A set theme, the motor interactions between myosin and actin, for instance, is varied with the endless imagination of natural selection, to arrive at a breathtaking array of form and function.......
All the traffic of the cell is borne by protein motors that work in a broadly similar manner. First is myosin, which cranks up and down the actin filaments, just as it does in muscle. But here the variations begin. In muscle, the myosin heads spend nine tenths of their time detached from the actin filaments;

How did this great parade of motor proteins come to be? There is nothing that compares with it in the world of bacteria. Nor are actin and myosin the only motoring double-act in eukaryotic cells. A second family of motor proteins, called the kinesins, operates in much the same way as the myosins, in a hand-over-hand manner up and down the sky-wires of the cytoskeleton. In the case of the kinesins, though, the sky-wires in question are not the thin actin wires, but higher-bore tubes, known as microtubules, which are assembled from subunits of another protein called tubulin.

At the detailed level of their gene sequences, the two main types of motor protein, the myosins and the kinesins, have virtually nothing in common......Here and there are points of similarity, but for a long time this was taken to be either chance or a case of convergent evolution. Indeed the kinesins and myosins looked to be a classic case of convergent evolution, where two unrelated types of protein became specialised for a similar task, and so developed similarities in structure, just as the wings of bats and birds evolved independently to converge on similar solutions to the common challenge of flight.

On the basis of crystallography, then, we know that the myosins and kinesins did indeed share a common ancestor, despite having so little in common in gene sequence. Their three-dimensional shapes show many points of folding and structure in common, right down to critical amino acids being preserved in space with the same orientation. This is an astonishing feat of selection: the same patterns, the same shapes, the same spaces, all are preserved on an atomic level for billions of years.....

The shape of all eukaryotic cells, from long and spindly neurons to flat endothelial cells, is maintained by the fibres of the cytoskeleton; and it turns out that much the same is true of bacteria.
For generations, biologists ascribed many bacterial shapes (rods, spirals, crescents, and so on) to the rigid cell wall bounding the cell, so it came as a surprise in the mid-199s to discover that bacteria have a cytoskeleton too. This is composed of thin fibres that look a lot like actin and tubulin...... As with motor proteins, there is little genetic resemblance between the bacterial and eukaryotic proteins.......yet.. The bacterial and eukaryotic protein structures are virtually superimposable, with the same shapes, the same spaces, and a few of the same critical amino acids in the same places. Plainly the eukaryotic cell skeleton evolved from a similar skeleton in bacteria.

In short, the cytoskeleton is motile in its own right. How did such a thing come to be?
Both actin and tubulin filaments are composed of protein subunits that assemble themselves into long chains, or polymers. This ability to polymerise is not unusual; plastics,..... Something similar [spontaneous polymerisation] must have happened in the case of the cytoskeleton proper, long ago. The units of actin and tubulin fibres are derived from ordinary proteins, with other functions about the cell. A few trifling changes in their structure, as happens with the variant haemoglobin, enabled them to assemble spontaneously into filaments. Unlike sickle-cell anaemia, however, this change must have had an immediate benefit.

And so the majesty of motility, from its most elementary beginnings, to the many-splendored power of skeletal muscle, depends on the workings of a handful of proteins, and their endlessly varied forms........ Some intriguing puzzles, when answered, may shine a brighter light. In bacteria, for example, the chromosomes are drawn apart using actin filaments, whereas the tightening that divides cells during replication is achieved with tubulin microtubules. The reverse is true of eukaryotic cells. Here, the scaffold of the spindle, which separates the chromosomes during cell division, is composed of microtubules, while the contracting corset that divides the cell is made of actin. When we know how and why this role reversal took place, we'll certainly have a better understanding of the detailed history of life on earth..... The ancestor of all living eukaryotes was motile. Presumably motility brought with it big advantages"
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All in all, it fulfils some of the promotion quotes on the rear cover, like "If Charles Darwin sprang from his grave, I would give him this fine book to bring him up to speed" and "A science book that doesn't cheat: the structure is logical, the writing is witty, and the hard questions are answered"....I would agree with that. Five stars from me. show less

Though Lane is more of a scientist than Bill Bryson this book reminded me in many ways of Bryson's wonderful 'A short history of nearly everything'. Lane is an interesting writer and this book tells the oxymoronic tale of Oxygen as both healer and killer, saint and sinner, good guy and villain. There is a distinctly science feel to the text and Lane does not shy away from detailed analysis/presentation of data and theoretical conjecture but the tone is almost always decidedly in awe of show more life's majesty and at times playful (hence my comparison with Bryson). Oxygen tells a good yarn and it's one that will make you go, at times, 'Wow, who'd have guessed?' show less

This is a fascinating account of ten crucial developments of evolution, from the perspective of a biochemist, beginning with the origin of life and ending with death. It is information dense but chatty, nicely organized with a succinct 25 or so pages per chapter. I can't really do justice in a review. A decent summary would occupy pages, and I'd need to reread and research to be sure I got it right. Don't let this deter you. My background is possibly at the level of biology 101, awhile ago, show more and the explanations were perfectly coherent. It is not necessary to grasp and remember every biochemical detail; it is enough to realize that micro biochemical reactions and changes underlie macro features of organisms. Each of the ten developments, including some that would appear to be oddly out of place, such as consciousness, is traced back to molecules that appeared early in evolution. Alas, one criticism, my frequent complaint: Oh why why why don't books include more diagrams?

Because the origin of life is, well, completely cool, and because the first chapter is about disequilibrium at the interface between hydrothermal vents and the ocean, a Wikipedia link, with diagrams: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_vent.

An excerpt:
"Thermodynamics is one of those words best avoided in a book with any pretense to be popular, but it's more engaging if seen for what it is: the science of 'desire'. The existence of atoms and molecules is dominated by 'attractions', 'repulsions', 'wants' and 'discharges', to the point that it becomes virtually impossible to write about chemisty without giving in to some sort of randy anthopomorphism. Molecules 'want' to lose or gain electrons; attract opposite charges; repulse similar charges; or cohabit with molecules of similar character. A chemical reaction happens spontaneously if all the molecular partners desire to participate; or they can be pressed to react unwillingly through greater force. And of course some molecules want to react but find it hard to overcome their innate shyness. A little flirtation might prompt a massive release of lust, a discharge of pure energy. But perhaps I should stop there. My point is that thermodynamics makes the world go round."

(read 27 Nov 2011) show less