And the Origins of Complex Life, Evolution, Energy

Very interesting read, but definitely not for mass consumption. I am a biology major and still needed to wade through all the terminology/ ideas presented within. I loved the book, but I would not recommend it to anyone who did not study science

Difficult reading for a non-biology major but definitely a profound set of concepts about the "accident" of life on planet earth. Dr. Lane is brilliant and he really goes deep into the micro biology.
Dave Clayton

Nick Lane provides one with an extremely readable and understandable explanation of how complex life may have come about - in fact his explanation starts with the origin of all life. He does this without talking down, and seems even-handed in his discussion of why some scientists may disagree with some of his assertions and conclusions. While the book does not require a background in chemistry, a familiarity with some biochemistry is helpful. His approach views energy flow as the starting point for his discussion and as the enabler of life, and moves on to the role of evolution in driving the improvements once an energy flow "organism" had been established. I would have liked to have a more complete discussion of how the DNA/RNA alphabet developed, but otherwise I thought the book was well written and fascinating in it's breadth of coverage. My only complaint is that in the Kindle version the diagrams were sometimes difficult to read and could not be enlarged. If this were possible I would have given it 6 stars.

This book derives from first principles all the important questions in biology in terms that is at once rigorous and forgiving to laymen.

A fantastic adventure through the inner workings of life.

This was an amazing read, an informative book about the origins of cellular life on our Planet. For all those curious about this Vital Question, this book is a must read. It is well written and deeply thought provoking, as deep as the alkaline hydrothermal vents that may have housed our common ancestors.

The author is one of the few laboratory biochemists with a penchant for big questions. How did life begin? Why is it so difficult to find a "missing link" between complex (eukaryotic) and simple (prokaryotic) cells? Would life on other worlds look much like life on Earth? Instead of molecular genetics, the author's focus is bioenergenics, a subject unduly neglected since the 1960s. Answers to those big questions are necessarily tentative, but even if the author turns out to be wrong, his book is worth reading.

Great book! Kind of unbelievable.
It is very chemistry heavy though. Some paragraphs I have to read several times to get through and still can't fully understand it. But this book is still mind blowing!!!

Excellent. Lane is DEEP. Very useful. Not suggested for minds with little knowledge of chemistry and physics. I have an electrical engineering degree (BS) and can only bridge carefully with Lane's notions. But they make undeniable sense.

This book derives from first principles all the important questions in biology in terms that is at once rigorous and forgiving to laymen.

A fantastic adventure through the inner workings of life.

A number of reviewers blames themselves for their inability to understand, follow, or get through this book. The problem is with the author and his writing...underneath there is some good information, but grammatically and structurally this books fails at the sentence, paragraph, and chapter level. From my perspective, it's barely coherent. Figures are poor. The metaphors are more confusing than useful, and not well thought out. Too many non-sequiturs, parenthetical asides, and stray thoughts. The book needs a good editor.

Despite lots of great information, the book is incredibly frustrating, because Nick is not aware of Gerald Pollack's work, which is essential for anyone trying to understand the origins of life. Pollack has shown that structured water, light, and molecule/particles will aggregate, and are likely the precursor to cellular life. Google "Pollack Origin of Life". Also see The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid, and Vapor and Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life

Every decade, I read some books that change the way I think. Prior decade-class works include The Selfish Gene, Who Wrote the Bible and Darwin's Dangerous Idea. I've read Lane's earlier books and found them fascinating, but The Vital Question lays out how biology arises from chemistry arises from physics in a satisfying way. I recommend this, along with Safina's Beyond Words, as books that have recently been shaping my world view.

I just finished this thought-provoking and well-argued book that brought together my deep interests in origin of life, evolution, and nuclear-organellar interactions. However, I am a Ph.D. molecular biologist and much as I liked the book agree with the reviewers who commented on how technical it is. I recommend it strongly to biologists who were schooled on a primordial methane-ammonia atmosphere as the alkaline vent explanation and involvement of proton gradients and iron-sulfur complexes is much more compelling. Highly motivated and well-read non-experts will also find it interesting. My one complaint is that I think that the illustrations could have been clearer in many cases, though some of the difficulty is certainly that they are black and white. I also don't think that the occasional reference to God adds anything Still, these are small quibbles and the book is superb.

The material in “The Vital Question” is remarkable and Lane has an engaging style. I did find some of his arguments difficult to follow and even inconsistent. Surprisingly, this was not a problem in the chapters on the origin of life, but in the chapters on complexity. I say surprisingly because I have a limited background in organic chemistry, but a good background in probability. In fact, after reading the chapter on the origin of sex, I brushed up on protist sex on the internet, and then turned to Lane’s earlier book, “Life Ascending”. The chapter on sex there was much clearer, and I do not think it was simply because it was less detailed. While “The Vital Question” is well worth reading, though challenging, I would recommend reading “Life Ascending” first as covering more ground, sometimes easier to follow, shorter and yet still providing a satisfying level of depth.

The most exciting idea in “The Vital Question” is that the bacteria and archaea independently arose from a precursor which evolved, but which we would not think of as a living organism by any traditional definition. Archaea and bacteria have fundamental differences, as in the composition of the cell walls and membranes, and in the replication of DNA – differences maintained throughout all subsequent evolution. Since eukaryotes arose when an archaea somehow absorbed a bacterium which evolved into the mitochondria, eukaryotes share the characteristic cell walls/membranes and DNA replication of the archaea. (Since mitochondria now rely on the archaea DNA for all those proteins/enzymes not involved in respiration I might have thought they would have lost the characteristics that let us infer their origin, but apparently this is incorrect. Many of the genes in the cell DNA did migrate from the bacteria).

Ostensibly the main purpose of “The Vital Question” is to explain why it apparently took so much more time for eukaryotes to evolve from archaea/bacteria then it took for prokaryote life to begin. As Lane points out, within the archaea/bacteria chimera that became the eukaryotes there was enormous conflict between the original archaea and absorbed bacterial DNA, which made the first eukaryotes “sickly”, as well as starting from a small population base. By conflict Lane means that the mitochondria were numerous, and when some died, their DNA fragments could incorporate into the archaea (now the cell) DNA, at random points. This was a reason for the nuclear membrane to become a necessity, as protection. At various times Lane refers to the creation of the chimera as a freak accident, but he states in his summary that endosymbiosis of bacteria (and presumably archae/bacteria) is not a “stringent" bottleneck (p.288), and there is even an organism that was found in contemporary waters that Lane hypothesizes might be another archaea/bacteria chimera on the path to eukaryote evolution. So if the time gap before eukaryotes arose is real it may be due to the difficulties of survival for the small, “sickly” early populations.

One other hypothesis I had particular problems with concerns the inheritance of mitochondria from the female (actually even in humans there is some evidence that some mitochondria can come from the male). The most plausible reason for female inheritance to me is that females produce all their (immature) eggs by birth, at least human females do; hence there is no cell DNA replication and less, if any, mitochondrial DNA duplication, so the female mitochondria are less subject to mutation than the male mitochondria in the sperm.

Among all the many bits of fascinating information, this stood out to me: the production of free radicals serves as a signaling device that more mitochondria are needed and they must work “harder”. Hence, the failure of vitamin E supplements to prolong human life, quite the contrary, may be due to disruption of this signaling device, even though it is true that free radicals are ultimately harmful (vitamin E is an anti-oxidant).

Forget the primordial sea, this is how life really started and is a much better story. Turns out based on DNA evidence we (complex life) all started from a very rare invasion of a bacteria carrying our mitochondrial DNA into another bacteria creating the a complex cell and ultimately everything other living thing. Until this happened bacteria had been the only living thing for about 3 billion years. When I finished the book I felt a Zen like oneness with my plant and animal brothers, a belief that we probably are the only complex life in the universe, and understanding of my own ageing process--that is a lot for a pretty short book.

A word on reading. After the wonderful introduction as I started in on the first chapter. The author has a nice conversational style but the subject in pretty complex and when I started the first chapter I found myself thinking this will be another book like Hawking’s, A Brief History of Time, which I didn’t get much past the introduction. To help prevent this I skipped to the second chapter then backed up a few pages to get the overview of what chapter one covered. Once I got the overall chapter concept it made it easier to go back and skip through the middle, moving on when it seemed to bog down. I found myself reading more of the later chapters once I got used to the material.

I read Life Ascending a few months ago, and loved it. It was written for the layman (me), and was extremely well written, and the subject matter was absolutely fascinating. This book seems to be written for biology students because it gets very scientific in trying to convince the reader of some hypotheses Nick Lane has about Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life. And it's a "slog" to get through. I was interested every now and then when presented with information I didn't have from his previous book, but I also had to refer to Wikipedia and the Khan Academy to clarify how mitochondria worked (which provides energy for every living cell). I do wish Nick Lane the best of luck in having his hypotheses in this book accepted. He's done a lot of work toward that goal. But I can wait a little longer for the final answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

The Vital Question is a difficult book on an important subject. What might disturb many lay readers the most is that they will be forced to take most of the assertions at a face value given the lack of sufficient proof so far. In the end, the author proposes a likely (in the eyes of a non-specialist) excellent but highly technical theory which is more likely to be eventually proven inadequate.

The author is brilliant while positing the questions about the creation of life and the knowledge gaps that have not only gone unanswered but also been unnoticed. He develops a theory that rests on the premise that one has to solve how energy is produced and consumed at the cell level to speculate how the complex life must have come about.

The chemical theories explained early on about energy gradient and free radicals are difficult but with mostly factual (or factual-sounding, testable) notions. From the discussions on the types of cell structures required for the “type" of energy shown as critical for life, the author moves towards once in a rare, rare, rare type of endosymbiosis where one type of prokaryote cell merges with another to lead to the first eukaryotic cells that are able to live through and evolve to all the complex life seen ever after. No matter how hard the author tries to prove through words and wordy examples, it is difficult to believe that the successful “merger” the author talks about was as rare as once in billions of years amid billions of prokaryotes all the time.

Too many leaps of faith are also in the details at least for the non-specialists. The book’s arguments appear convincing through the discussions of mitochondria versus the nucleus, their DNAs, their energy interactions etc etc. However, only extremely knowledgable readers are likely to appreciate what is truly new in these arguments, what is highly speculative and what is plain wrong. Most non-specialists are likely to be lost in extremely complex arguments. In effect, the broad hypotheses - once made - are proven or unproven only in the eyes of most beholders as their technical veracity could be judged only by the most erudite and also after years of experiments.

A very enjoyable, informative, and mind-opening read, with enough substance to interest a scientist (I'm a physicist) but also maintaining a compelling train of thought about a fascinating topic. Lane takes an appropriately multi-disciplinary approach, discussing evidence from biochemistry, physics, the fossil record, and phylogenetics (DNA sleuthing). He provides a gentle introduction to some of the relevant terminology, striking a good balance between avoiding jargon without being excessively vague & flowery (as some popular science books are wont to do). I have a better understanding and appreciation for biology after reading this book. The book would have benefitted from having citations in addition to references, as it is sometimes a bit difficult to know what is established knowledge and what is speculative (although most of the time it is clear).

Lane's thesis is that understanding how cellular organisms acquire the necessary energy to live and reproduce is the other, neglected key (beyond information storage via DNA) to understanding how complex life arose. There were three major stages, from an energy perspective, of the development of complex life. The first cells (with cell membranes, proteins, and DNA), from which all other life descended, were probably powered by naturally-existing proton concentration gradients existing in certain kinds of ocean-floor vents. The next stage was the adaptation of cells to use other sources of chemical energy to produce a proton gradient, allowing the cells to escape the vents and live in the larger world. Two branches of the tree of life, bacteria and archaea, diverged from this point, making different choices about how to solve this problem. Finally, the appearance of the first cells with mitochondria resulted a huge leap in the amount of available energy per unit of DNA that a cell could exploit. (The mitochondria is an atrophied bacteria that adapted to living inside an archaea.) The increase in energy supply allowed complex multicellular life to develop, whereas all previous life forms were single-cellular and lacked serious internal structures. Mitochondria also forced the host cell to sequester its DNA into a nucleus. Having mitochondria encouraged the adoption of sexual reproduction, and the formation of distinct sexes (the one from which the mitochondria are inherited). Sexual reproduction lead to the development of species, as well as aging and death. In this way, Lane sketches out the path from the chemical origins of life up to the point where Darwin takes over.

as a PhD behavioral scientist, my first point is that this is damn fine science writing; second, that this is a compelling and fascinating science hypothesis.

the fundamental theme is that the origin of life -- specifically complex, multicellular, eukaryotic life -- arises in the membrane, the thermodynamic barrier between the organism and the environment. and the beauty here is that the systemic holism of life in its environment that shapes the world view of ecological adaptation and the "gaia hypothesis" (the union of life with the planet) is found at the very beginning of life as well, in the way the mineral clefts and cracks of oceanic thermal vents nurtured the development of the first unicellular organisms.

like a detective sifting the clues, professor lane uses the most recent research evidence to disprove prior hypotheses about the origin of life and to lay out, beginning to end in all the details, a story about the origin of life that owes a great deal to the ideas of william martin. (on that note, the thematic bibliography at the end of this book is a superb entree to the research literature.)

it turns out that at the atomic and chemical level all multicellular organisms rely on the same, unexpectedly specific methods of producing energy: quantum methods of electron transfer and the electrical power of proton gradients. electron transfer turns out to be an easy problem for evolution to solve, and is so flexible it can be adapted to many different chemical equations for life. as a result, bacteria can thrive in acid or alkaline, heat or cold, sunlight or dark, iron or sulfur, carbon dioxide or oxygen. proton gradients are a much more intricate and limiting evolutionary problem, and the explanation for how they evolved and why they appear in all multicellular organisms provides deep insight both into the origins of life and the fundamental constraints on attributes of life -- senescence, sexual reproduction, and more. by explaining the origin of life, professor lane lays the foundation for a "predictive biology" that ultimately may explain how life must occur across the entire universe, and why life takes the forms that it does.

the last time i felt an equivalent intellectual excitement in biology was when i read dawkins's "selfish gene". it's a superb intellectual experience that seems to come along only once or twice in a decade. buy this book, devour it, and savor the feeling of deep science, translated into terms the layman can understand, that provide a new appreciation of the deep link between life and a planet that was able to create life.

Gave some engaging and detailed answers to the biggest questions in biology and in science more broadly - How did life start, and how did complex life originate?

The author did lose me in a lot of places, particularly when he dove into the complex chemical reactions involved in metabolism and described how they might have started in alkaline sub-ocean vents.

These descriptions (and others) assumed a fair amount familiarity with basic chemistry, and it's been a long time since my last chemistry class. However, I soldiered through these passages and still managed to sift out some very interesting ideas.

I would say this book compares favorably to other origins and evolution books, like _The Selfish Gene_, but it requires a little perseverance to make it through.

The book is quite fascinating as it elaborates on some possible answers for how life (especially complex life) originated on Earth and how it has evolved from simple prokaryote cell organisms (bacteria and archaea) into complex eukaryote cell life. The author is quite passionate about the subject and his arguments are quite compelling. In reading the book, it helps to understand the basics of chemistry.

I had no idea about mitochondria until I read this book. Proton pumping across membranes? Never heard of that either. Olivine is our (probable) original home? Rock from the very heart of Earth? Holy cow. Life explained by thermodynamics and selection.

A very interesting and compelling read. I am not an expert in biology, but found Lane's explanations clear and well-presented. His presented ideas on abiogenesis and genesis of eukaryotes are certainly satisfying answers if they are borne out by further data. The idea appears to me to have good explanatory power and multiple ways of being tested. It also answers many questions for why life is the way it is.

I certainly recommend to anyone interested in the formation of life and complex life. It doesn't skimp in its explanations, but, I believe, it does a good job of motivating and using any terms that are uncommon. I was glad to see a good explanation of Gibbs free energy (I know of that from thermodynamics and statistical physics), and learned a lot about mitochondria. Lane also does a good job of talking through all of the reasoning for his chosen model and why it is both plausible and falsifiable. In conclusion, read it if you are interested in those vital questions for the origins of life.

It's an amazing work. No one previously tackled the origin of life in a more comprehensive style. It's a tough slog for sure, but even if someone doesn't get all the chemistry, they do get it this: life came from an energy source (deep sea thermal vents being the most likely), and that complex life arose from having a lot of it, with the addition of mitochondria to the cell. If it were not for the emergence of mitochondria as a symbiont and cell powerhouse, there would only be single cell life on earth. All the life we have filling the earth is owed to a chance encounter between two single cell organisms. Don't lend out your copy, and read it twice.

MP3 Disc & Paperback cost LESS than the Kindle version?? Really, the store? That rant aside, this book throws a serious monkey wrench into the minds of those who think they have the world figured out. Definitely an interesting read.

We'll probably never know exactly how life, simple and complex, formed on the Earth but Nick Lane manages to walk through a plausible argument for a path that begins at simple chemicals and ends at complex cells. As most others have noted, this is *not* an easy read even for those of us with scientific backgrounds, but I haven't met an author better than Lane (Life Ascending, Oxygen) for explaining horrifically complex topics in an accessible way.

Nick Lane is, no doubt, a dedicated and passionate scientist who enjoys lively lunch-time and coffee sessions and pub sessions with his friends, grad students and colleagues swapping theories about everything chemical, biological, and biochemical. When those friends, students and colleagues said, "Nick... you should write a book...", Nick didn't get the joke.

While the subject matter of the book is a rich source of philosophical debate, translating the unknown biochemistry of an unknown primitive earth into a statement relatable to even well-educated John Q. and Mary J Public's is a task far beyond Mr. (Dr., I assume) Lane. He may well be a brilliant scientist and a gifted thinker, but John Gribben (In Search of Schroedinger's Cat, etc.) He ain't.

Even with a background in toxicology, pharmacokinetics, and physiology I found the book dense to the point of being impenetrable. Great ideas... no doubt. Solid reasoning... I'm sure. Chemically logical... absolutely. Interesting? Not at all! Sorry, Nick, you put me to sleep in the first 30 pages.

I was sorely disappointed. The book needed a co-author with the popularization credentials of a Carl Sagan or a John Gribben. The subject is just too interesting and too important to allow such great ideas to get lost to the dustbin of unread popularized science because of the poor communication skills of a professional academic.

I learned a lot from this book, and unlearned some old things about biology and biochemistry. Here's some notes I took about the book, to save on my computer:

0s Nick Lane: The Vital Question

1. Endosymbiosis was a one-off between an archaeon body and a bacterium that became mitochondrium. Golgi bodies may or may not have invaded later; other “subbodies” were likely produced by internal action, tho Lane doesn’t specify.
2. Archaea and bacteria didn’t diversify at black smoker vents on seafloor ridges, but rather at warm, yet cooler, and gentler-venting alkali vents about 10-30 miles away, which, with multiple holes, provided a “membrane” for proton pumping along with alkali gradient vs. acidic seawater for reduction potential gradients for CO2 to reduce to formic, then to methanol, but stopping before methane, which isn’t desired
3. It made evolutionary sense for nucleus to uptake most mitochondrial genes
4. Multicellular eukaryotes can either tolerate high levels of mitochondria vs nuclear gene defect rates and more adaptability, in exchange for short lives, (rats) or low tolerance and low birth rates, and low adaptability, in exchange for maintaining a high evolved fitness (birds, esp, which need high-performance mitochondria)
5. High mitochondrial defect rates affect neurons and muscles above all, hence human neuromuscular disease, and per germ cells, hence their hitting men more. Muscles and nerves have the highest metabolic rate, and we can’t replace out nerve cells, overall, in developed adults
6. A modified version of the old “free radical theory” might be true … while rejecting the idea that antioxidants can help (they can actually hurt, and not testing in body, rather than in lab, is how the original theory went wrong)
7. Cellular free-radical links aren’t bad, they’re signals
8. Mito-nuclear variants that affect ATP efficiency are linked to apoptosis, and seem to serve to signal it; apoptosis probably evolved early
9. Mito defects are probably related to many early-pregnancy spontaneous abortions. (He says that 40 percent of all ends this way, even higher than Ayala’s guess)
10. Per reptiles and SRY defect in mammals, he thinks temperature of development is key for sex differentiation, to the point he thinks that if what’s left of the Y chromosome finishes disintegration, mammals would find another temp-based way to distinguish sexes
11. Re SETI, he says that the chemiosmotic nature of life on earth will probably be found elsewhere if we find life elsewhere
12. “Energy is less forgiving than genes”

Throughout, he specifies when he is being speculative. Within that, he notes what speculative items are testable. He then subnotes which of these he or his students are already testing, or others he knows of are already testing.