The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life

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 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 show more 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

(Rating: 4.0 / 5.0, even)

The twenty to thirty percent of this book that I actually understood was excellent. The Vital Question is a thoughtful, persuasive treatise, full of fascinating proposals like, say, a conjecture that the vibrant plumage of male birds demonstrates mitochondrial health to female birds (as most pigments are synthesized in the mitochondria). Nick Lane outlines an emerging theory about the origins of the eukaryotic cell, leading us through a history of the field's ideas (cellular biology’s "oxphos wars" were a highlight), uprooting some established doctrines while defending and expanding on others. Unfortunately, even if I'm not the book’s intended audience, the amount of time I spent thumbing back and forth show more between the book and its glossary in an attempt to parse any given sentence is a clue that the writing could have been clearer – my willingness to do so, however, speaks to the ultimate success of this book. Undoubtedly, I'll read more Nick Lane, but I'll likely do so with a calorie-dense jar of peanut butter handy to sustain my own vitality. show less

This is a nicely written science book for intelligent people. No interviews or fashion commentary. Lane examines the fundamental requirement of life, namely energy. The starts off with examining what life and living is and then takes a look at how (and where) the first cells possibly evolved. Many hypotheses are examined, discarded or elaborated upon. Lane also takes cell evolution further by examining the evolution of complex cells, why most eukaryotes have two different sexes, how cells die, what powers a cell, and a host of other interesting goodies. There is a fair amount of physics, biochemistry and chemistry in this book, along with several illustrations and diagrams. Lane tends to be a bit repetitive, but with a complex subject show more like this, it probably helps to recap previous points. This is a fascinating book that makes a great addition to his previous book Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life. show less

What a juggernaut this is. It deals with the latest in the research about the origins of life, and while it once was a question too hard to answer, over the last decade real progress has been made. The question from the title deals with why all complex life is the way it is (including sex & death), and why that differs from bacteria – who evolved for 4 billion years without changing their basic form.

Lane’s book is about his own research, and it is both a thesis and a page turner. I have to admit there were a few pages that went over my head, and some sections were maybe too detailed for my tastes, but the bulk of the book is accessible to the layman, that is if you are willing to put in a serious effort, and have brains enough to show more recall some of the chemistry from high school. Lane’s prose is smooth and snappy. Instantly one of my favorite non-fiction books, with a broad scope – genetics, biology, chemistry, geology: it’s all relevant to the answers. I’ve read praise saying this is on a Copernican level, but I can’t judge that myself.

I read the original, but I’ve noticed it’s available in Dutch too, with the terrible title 'De Belangrijkste Vraag Van Het Leven'.

Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It show less

A very clear explanation of the importance of bioenergetics in the origin of life and the evolution of the eukaryotes, and a detailed discussion of the possible role of endosymbiosis in the evolution of complex organisms, sex, apoptosis and aging. A lot has happened since I learned the Krebs cycle, and just the update, including the extraordinary appearance of ATP synthase, along with the discussion relating biochemistry to evolution makes the book worthwhile. Dr. Lane's imagined trip through a mitochondrion, shrinking us to the size of an ATP molecule, to explain chemiosmotic coupling is inspired.

(Rating: 4.0 / 5.0, even)

The twenty to thirty percent of this book that I actually understood was excellent. The Vital Question is a thoughtful, persuasive treatise, full of fascinating proposals like, say, a conjecture that the vibrant plumage of male birds demonstrates mitochondrial health to female birds (as most pigments are synthesized in the mitochondria). Nick Lane outlines an emerging theory about the origins of the eukaryotic cell, leading us through a history of the field's ideas (cellular biology’s "oxphos wars" were a highlight), uprooting some established doctrines while defending and expanding on others. Unfortunately, even if I'm not the book’s intended audience, the amount of time I spent thumbing back and forth show more between the book and its glossary in an attempt to parse any given sentence is a clue that the writing could have been clearer – my willingness to do so, however, speaks to the ultimate success of this book. Undoubtedly, I'll read more Nick Lane, but I'll likely do so with a calorie-dense jar of peanut butter handy to sustain my own vitality. show less

He describes his writing not as "popular science" but "accessible science", but even that is a pretty strong claim. A random paragraph yields these technical terms: eukaryotes, chimeric, phylogenetic, endosymbiont, prokaryotes, archaea. I have a vague idea about some of those, but I would say the reader needs at least an A-level if not a first degree in biochemistry to really get the message. That said, it is mostly written in an engaging way and I managed to grasp some key points: e.g. The Miller Urey experiment ( Lightning flash through primordial soup), originally proposed by Darwin, was a bit of a dead end. DNA is important but has rather taken over the research agenda in recent decades. The important thing is how energy flows show more through the living world. Likely origin of life is in thermal vents on the sea bed, but not the popular black smokers, alkaline thermal vents.By coincidence Lane was interviewed on Radio 4 just as i was reading this; that helped a lot to get his overall message. I finished up with some regret, skipping much of the second half show less