The hypothesis described in this article sounds remarkably similar to one advanced by Günter Wächtershäuser back in 1988 [1], the key concepts being that a) "metabolism" preceded and eventually gave rise to life and b) arose in and among iron-sulfur mineral beds near oceanic volcanic vents.
Looking forward to reading Lane's work and seeing how it compares. I'm particularly interested in hypotheses and theories about abiogenesis and I remember being struck by the elegance of the Wächtershäuser paper when I first read it, even if it was over my head at times. Hoping for a similar feeling here!
Is there anything new in Lane's new book ("Transformer") that readers of "The Vital Question" wouldn't have already read? I have read a few of his books now, and have enjoyed them. Curious about the new one.
Having just read through both recently, "Transformer" is more about the Krebs Cycle than the origin of life itself (although it of course addresses those latter points). "Transformer" is also much denser... more of an organic chemistry textbook in most places. The most "approachable" organic chem textbook I've ever read... but still an organic chem textbook. Would highly recommend both but don't expect Transformer to be the Vital Question.
>Still, while Lane’s explanation doesn’t answer all the questions about how life started, it addresses difficult ones about how the energy-intensive synthesis of proteins and other essential biomolecules could have occurred.
Made me wonder: if the theory was true, how would this change our view of life being created on other planets?
The deep sea vents providing electricity differences sounds pretty important, so I guess that would make Mars and Venus less likely (I've never heard anyone discuss deep sea vents in their oceans, and neither is all that tectonically active, so maybe they couldn't have many?), but makes Europa more likely - it's nothing but ocean, and super-tectonically active.
Two things all articles like this fail to mention that seem essential:
1. Oceans were absolutely saturated with reactive metal complexes, particularly including iron. A billion years later oxygen poisoning started, and it all oxidized and precipitated out, but life was established by then and (some) survived the catastrophe. So, the chemical environment was very different than is easy to reproduce today, and full of stuff that would have catalyzed all kinds of reactions that go very slowly without.
2. Oceans were also absolutely lousy with nucleic and amino acids, and random RNA sequences. An RNA that copies other RNAs it bumps into was nothing special, but when two of them bumped, suddenly in a (geological) eye-blink the entire ocean was teeming with their highly-optimized descendants, along with any other RNAs that proved helpful to have around. Natural selection was already hard at work, no cells or genes needed.
So that is the environment that life arose in, utterly unlike anything found anywhere today. Any random drop of water that got caught up in a membrane would be full of those RNAs that had proven most useful at copying, and also all those random catalytic metal complexes.
I gather that nowhere in the natural world do we find any cellular process that creates a membrane from scratch; all everywhere grow from bits pinched off from membranes already on hand. Arguably, what is really essential to species is being made of bits extended from the first membrane that wrapped enough replication machinery to do the whole process inside. It would need to have been better at allowing loose nucleic acids in than letting assembled RNAs out. Life is bags of water and stuff that pack the bag with catalyzed reaction products and can extend the bag as it fills up. When a lobe gets pinched off with enough stuff inside, off it goes.
(1) is correct, but I believe (2) is no longer assumed to be true (especially the part about random RNA in the ocean).
The major problem is concentration. Even if you invoke geological timescales and a favourable redox environment, concentrations of reactants would be rapidly diluted in the ocean. Since there are quite a few dehydration reactions in the synthesis of oligonucleotides (like RNA) and proteins, when diluted in the ocean, the plentiful water drives the equilibrium back towards the starting materials. Without some mechanism to accumulate the reactants to form the first R/DNA, it remains an open question how the process got started.
There used to be a homeostasis-first theory—to compete with the metabolism-first and oligonucleotide-first theories—but it hasn't gained a lot of traction as an independent theory.
Catalysis lowers the activation barrier, sure, but you still have to contend with the thermodynamic equilibrium in the absence of the catalyst, in addition to subsequent degradation by light, etc.
> ocean full or random stuff that we can't actually imagine today
We probably can't ever really know what was in the Earth's ocean before life, but quite a bit of research has been put into figuring out some plausible conditions and then testing the hypothesised pathways put forward by the leading theories under said conditions.
All this is to say, yes, clearly abiogenesis occurred, but there are major gaps in the leading theories that are interesting and testable. I don't think it's very useful to gloss over the details, even if in the end the best we can hope for is a plausible pathway given a specific set of assumed conditions.
Is catalysis always symmetric? Or do some catalysts only work in one direction?
I imagine one that splits a molecule could work only or mostly in the one direction, if to go the other way would require both constituent parts to come together at the same time. But that is an example favoring entropy.
What would one that favors assembling molecules look like? A ribosome seems like the extreme example; those don't disassemble proteins. But is a much simpler example very unlikely?
The difference in entropy is so small that we are talking about entropy of dissolution. It's not hard on those conditions to introduce some element that weakly bias the reactions on a different way.
I don't want to minimize the gaps on our knowledge. We don't know how any macromolecule polymerization occurred. But I also don't want to maximize the gap. Those kinds of reaction are completely mundane and occur on a huge variety of environments. The fact that we don't know what environment it was doesn't mean it's an outwordly phenomenon. And adding just a few of those mundane reactions is enough for life to appear.
(Anyway, I question your certainty about the concentration of water on our primordial oceans. Abiogenesis research usually uses a model of water origins that gives a precise estimation for its amounts, but not only we know that this model is wrong - water is cycled by geologic means like any other mineral - but we also do not have anything with near that amount of precision to the other substances that composed it.)
Articles like this tend to be heavily constrained by space, and have a target audience that's probably a bit more lay than what you would prefer.
I can recommend the author's book 'The Vital Question', which dives into some hypotheses addressing precisely these considerations in much more detail.
When I glanced at that cover photo I thought they had interviewed him in a cafe! What a menu!
On a more germain topic, this is a more attractive theory to me, though I don’t buy the criticism of the “just happened on the surface” argument: the fact that we see the result of some random selection doesn’t make it more or less likely — the same would apply to the formation of our planet!
Having read his book, I remember that his main critique of the surface argument was that you really need compartmentalization to create life, i.e. you need to borrow a house before you have the tools to make one.
Yeah, at first (once my immediate confusion was dispelled) I thought they might be the Harvard Museum of Natural History but then realized his institution. Thanks for the reference; I’ll check it out the next time I’m nearby.
The first part of my comment was more a lighthearted comment on magazine photography + a little brain quirk.
For those unfamiliar with Nick Lane - his books are really good reads even if you're not familiar with the subject matter. Easy to approach, witty, and wry.
I just finished 2005's "Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life", which sets the foundations for some of the thesis in this article while trying to identify just how mitochondria got wrapped up with eukaryotes.
I started reading that ebook a few years ago, and struggled to feel engaged -- but the frequent recommendations for Nick Lane's work on HN prompted me to revisit, and I'm really glad I did. I'm about 90% of the way through the audiobook of his penultimate work, The Vital Question, from 2015, and it's been thoroughly enjoyable.
I should revisit some of his earlier works, but I get the feeling some of the questions about gaps in knowledge & research in those books would be covered off and answered in his later works. (I could be totally off the mark there, however.)
Sean Carroll did a great podcast with Nick Lane. Highly recommended for anyone who wants an easy to understand, yet into the weeds discussion on Lane's metabolism first concept.
Around 35m he says the structure of a cell has a distant reflection of the structure of a planet.
First, cell membranes channel electrical charges between external acidic environment with interior basic environment to catalyze hydrogenation of hydrogen on a carbon skeleton.
Well, that's succinct. But also, that layering is perhaps a recapitulation of acidic oceans on top of basic on top of basic mineral floors, so that cells have the same schematic layout as oceans on planets, with the sea floor as catalytic membrane.
Ray Kurzweil would call that a “deathist statement”. And then, not giving a damn about Chesterton, continue banging against that stupid and useless fence.
Don't you love the British. Who thought of the name "University College"?
Metabolism before genes makes perfect sense. Defining life is silliness as far as I'm concerned, but DNA is a very specific mechanism of reproduction whereas metabolism is more universal basic concept. Or so it seems to me...
In the US, the terms university and college are used more or less interchangeably.
In the UK, a university is a collection of semi-independent colleges, each with their own students and faculty and their own departments for all the various subjects. A university college is the founding college in a university. (University College London is a constituent college of the University of London.)
So the name might sound comically redundant to Americans, but it makes sense in the British system.
I think that happens when other language nouns are added to English. Case in point "chai" tea and "naan" bread. Chai means tea and naan means bread but here we are...
Anyone who isn't associated with the Angels banged on about the ridiculousness of their claimed home change (which notably did not involve an actual move) before they ever did it. They're nowhere near Los Angeles and have no historical association with the city. MLB never should have let them claim the name, despite the even more ridiculous "of Anaheim" qualifier. They're the Anaheim Angels, no matter what else they try to say they are.
> In the US, the terms university and college are used more or less interchangeably.
no they're not, generally colleges focus on teaching and undergraduate programs, and universities revolve around research and graduate schools. In some cases, there are colleges within universities, particularly in ye olde schools.
Probably the same, but in Canada, a lot of our Universities have "embedded" colleges. For example, York University has Glendon College which is a French school, and quite a few other colleges under the York umbrella. University of Western Ontario has Elborn College (among a couple others) and 3 university colleges.
I think it is probably very common for Universities to have college faculties. They also often have Halls, Lodges, Schools, and so on, under the main University umbrella.
Hmmm. Even THE Ohio State University has a University College. It's noted for being the only college within the university that doesn't grant degrees. It's primary focus is offering courses helping students succeed in university life. It's also the college all incoming students are enrolled in.
This. University College London is the product of the early 19th century and the Benthamite secular education movement. Jeremy is in a glass case in the foyer. At the time, degrees in colleges at Oxford and Cambridge demanded adherence to the 39 articles of the Anglican faith.
Birkbeck college which is also a constituent of the university of london (like UCL) is a contemporary and focussed on technical education for working people, with teaching at night so they could both work, and study. It also has Jeremy Bentham in it's DNA.
(worked at UCL in the 80s. my mum went to the slade school of art there in the 1940s. its a great place)
At least one pub had a spare head. I feel this is a lot like Uberto Eco name of the rose "the reliquary included the head of John the baptist: as a child and as an adult"
ancient times - Oxford and Cambridge universities come into being, composed of multiple independent and mostly equivalent colleges (ie all teaching the full range of subjects)
1826 - London University founded
1829 - King's College founded
1836 - London University and King's College combine to form the University of London, comprising two colleges roughly on the Oxbridge model; London University is renamed to University College
University College may be a silly name, but what else would they have called it? London College? Hardly better.
Note that University College, Oxford and University College Dublin are called that for completely different reasons.
I’m not a fan of this explanation. Entropy generation is only a side effect of life. It’s easy to imagine life arising in a universe without our version of entropy.
I'm very confused by this whole thread. Entropy is independent of 'life'. It's most canonically understood in terms of heat transfer, as it arose first from the study of thermodynamics.
Unless I missed someone recently receiving a Nobel prize for demonstrating proof of isentropic metabolism, or non-metabolic life, this doesn't answer the question whatsoever.
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
Generic tangents are much less interesting than specific responses to an article (or specific tangents!) because the more generic a claim, the more that (1) there is less that is meaningful to be said about it, and (2) the more repetitive it is. That's a really bad combo for a site that's trying to be good for curiosity.
My point was to say that darwinian evolution is no more acceptable for an engineer since biochemistry describes irreductible complexity mecanisms, engines, pumps, codes, coders, decoders, machines etc... in life at the molecular level.
After that, anyone is free to conclude that we don't know where it comes from, or a designer did it, and who is this designer. But darwinian evolution is dead as a "science".
Indeed. Darwinism is about evolution, and does not touch on Origin of Life - only what happened once Life had already been sparked into existence. A lot of people have mixed the two up, especially religiously because of failing to recognize that difference.
The reason phylogenetic trees can be so thorough is because evolution is real.
First God created life, then God continued to create life. Life evolved just the ways cars and airplanes have evolved -- in reaction to the environment and greater understanding. Once roads developed painted lines the cars could adapt to add painted-line-sensors, for instance.
As an engineer, I cannot swalow this kind of hypothesis and the darwinian evolution theory :
The first self-replicating cell (LUCA=Last Universal Common Ancestor) must have all in one :
- a computer code that makes a full functionnal self-replicating cell (DNA is a code even for darwinian evolutionnists)
- a kind of cd-rom to store the code
- a kind of cd-rom reader to read the code
- a kind of cd-rom printer to reprint the code for the next generation
- a kind of 3D printer to interpret the code and manufacture the proteins
- and of course 1 billion times more complicated than that
- keep in mind that a functionnal protein has 1/10^500 or so to appear by pure chance in a mutation (the universe has 10^80 particles)
Nike Lane theory and others are "just so stories", there is no science neither any proof behind it.
How an engineer can accept this ?
This is just pure faith in a materialistic kind of creationism.
Look at the flagelle rotary engine architecture, Michael Behe Intelligent Design theory, and Pr James Tour lectures on YT.
Some readers might be unfamiliar with the "arch principle". An arch may seem impossible to construct because only once the keystone is in place could it stand at all. If this were suggested, one would immediately think of a scaffolding, since taken down.
Structures in living systems often came about by such a process. Features that had made intermediate forms adaptively useful are not in evidence, but sometimes appear in related species, or in embryonic development. Evolution cannot plan for the future, but it is happy to discard what is not useful anymore. It is our challenge to imagine the structures discarded, and how they were useful in that form, and scientists' to find evidence preferring one path of development over others.
Anyone can give up and say "God did it" on any day. Others do not give up, and biology as it stands today is a product of not giving up. We might wonder how it could have got here, but it too has come through many intermediate forms, with much since discarded.
This is not logical : it is the main contribution of Michael Behe who coined the term "irreductible complexity".
The arch cannot be build from gradual micro evolutions, because each stone (or function) has no benefit (and will not be selected for the offspring) until it is totally build with the keystone. This is pure logic.
Also the identical solutions that appear in different species are named "convergent evolution" (e.g. the eye of vertebrates and cephalopods); it is by no way a validation of gradual evolution because chance could not build the exact same solutions. It is on the contrary a proof of design (reuse of building blocks)
Nature is not bound by any logic of convenience. Nature is happy to take the long way around, without care for our ease of understanding that path. (May I suggest your God is neither so constrained?)
"Irreducible complexity" is specifically what the arch principle answers. The uncompleted arch along with everything holding it up is of immediate value, as it is, for maximizing reproductive fitness; it is our task to understand how. Later, the completed arch has value as, possibly, something entirely else, where the scaffolding did not and fell away.
Nature doesn't care what the arch or its intermediate forms were "for". Any structure may be used in any way that aids fitness (or, often, not). Insects' extra wings become protective wing covers. Legs that were once fins may walk instead of swimming, or fly, or type. T. rex's arms, and ostrich's, waggle uselessly.
The evolution of eyes has been traced from eye spots through to completed eyes, and each intermediate stage is in fact better for reproductive fitness than the previous one. The form of eyes is dictated by their use, but human eyes' present form is decidedly inferior to squids'. (Ask your God about that?) It has lately turned out that the basis for eyes was already in the last common ancestor of squids and us. It has been a very long time since eyes were a persuasive example. Maybe read up?
The "arch principle" is a nice terminology to say that we have no clue of which gradual steps led to the final irreductible complex system. Being irreductibly complex, the missing of only one part leads to nothing and cannot pass the natural selection. M. Behe gives dozen of examples.
Also time is missing in any cases, see the evolution of a little mammal into a whale for example. In less than 5 million years a little moppet becomes a giant submarine with at least a hundred new coordinated organs and functions. Have you ever designed a complex system ? Each function has to be designed, and each interface has to be taken into account for both sides. And all this through a code, and in a code the finality must precede the result.
About the eye, which common ancestor to squids and vertebrates is it ?
The argument from incredulity has not held up well. Nature is infinitely more clever, creative, and patient than (if I may say) you, or I. Anything that can reproduce is foundation for a next stage. Each individual in each generation may sport an innovation, which if reproduced joins the rest. Five million years is a very long time, too long really for human apprehension. (How many times could a pharmacist fill your prescription, in that time?) Whales' niche favors increasing size, although, that filled, other niches were discovered by porpoises.
You are aware that all species that existed 500 million years ago are extinct, leaving only their descendants? That would include our common ancestor, leaving squids, and us, and fruit flies. (Some coeval species left fossils, though probably not that one.) But the gene that places our eyes, inserted into a fruit fly chromosome at a place dictating growth of a body part, grows an eye there. A fruit fly eye, of course.
It is interesting that your dogma is gradualism, and you explain gradualism through gradualism.
Then you appeal to the God of time, but many great paleothologists and mathematician have demonstrated that it is not enough !
Please note that I am not a fixist creationnist, apparition (evolution ?) of species happened in history, but what is the engine of evolution ?
Where the new information to build new orders, reigns, branches, proteins, functions, organs, orders, species, came from ?
Chance applied to a code can by no way create new functions. It is easy to understand as any programmer will tell you. There is no computer science domain, neither developpers who use chance to create or improve a computer program.
Nevertheless, a computer can run more generations than nature had for many new species to appear.
If positive mutation happen, it is a build-in system, it cannot be pure chance (a lot of maths on the subject)
If it is a build-in system, it is one more mystery to explain how chance can create codes, coders, decoders, engines, pumps, pipes, organs, species, self-replicating systems, and also self-improving systems.
You argue that software is impossible, but here we are using it. Where did the ideas that went into the software come from? Were they all divinely inspired, or were they logical next steps upon what came before?
Careful: claiming software you wrote is divinely inspired will not go over well at code review, particularly if you insist it doesn't need to pass tests.
I argue random mutations applied to software does not create any new fonctions, it breaks eveverything.
Also that any usable software was designed by a mind.
Where comes this mind from is another question.
Which random mutated software are you using ?
You will acknowledge, I hope, that biological systems are much more forgiving of random mutations than software is. We don't need intelligent choice when Nature just tries everything, and keeps what works. Not efficient or quick, but Nature doesn't mind. Nature acknowledges no deadlines. Or goals.
So, a series of not-excessively-harmful monkey-patches accumulate under stringent testing to significant improvement. We don't need to guess about that: it has been demonstrated by laboratory experiment, which you may read all about if you care to. Or don't, and continue parroting Behe's sterile talking points long after they have been thoroughly discredited.
As a former biochemist graduate ... I strongly disagree with Michael Behe's ideas on Irreducible Complexity.
It is not 'pure logic' because your analogy is flawed - biological systems are not arches or mousetraps. Imagine a system as a triangle of three components that all rely on each other. The vertices of the triangle are component (proteins, organs, whatever) and the edges are 'dependencies' of some kind.
Now add a fourth component, dependent on some (or all) of the others. Now remove some of the edges until you have a square (or 4-cycle). Now this system is 'irreducible' as breaking the dependent links breaks the cycle.
Essentially, all biological systems have a 'chain' of previous versions that were functional and evolvable into the next version. This is only possible because these systems have redundant parts, and flexible associations. For example, many proteins 'moonlight' as alternate roles within an organism.
Ok this is the définition of gradualism, but it is a great claim, a nice story never scientifically proven. Which mecanism ? which statistics, odd of creation of functional protéins ? Since biochemistry darwinists have to work and to prove now !
Who said it had to be scientifically proven? Behe's claim is that it is theoretically impossible, and clearly that is not the case.
"Since biochemistry darwinists have to work and to prove now!" - This sentence doesn't even make sense. It is Intelligent Design advocates like Behe that are making the claim that these systems "could not" have evolved.
As another commenter said, this is the 'Argument from Ignorance' : "We do not know how it evolved so it could not have!". We know the structure of biological systems in more and more detail. We know how they change at the smallest level. The theory is fairly basic : redundant, self-assembling, flexible systems can change through gradual evolution.
Gould would talk about 'rewinding' the tape of history. There's no way to go back in time and see for sure what previous systems looked like. However that in no way means the tape itself does not exist.
Ok i Give up !!
We are not talking about natural stone arches...
As many software developers are reading HN, you can meditate about the creative power of randomly mutated code.... which is the official engine of darwinian évolution.
You are maybe aware that living systems are chemical, not digital?
Changing a single bit in computer code is very likely to have an arbitrarily large, commonly fatal effect. Changing a single base in a gene rarely does. But a lot of bases changed is likely to have some effect; the more changes, the more effect.
What critics of natural selection always miss is that the set of small changes between one state and another, in a breeding population, do not need to happen one after the other. It could take hundreds of steps, but they all may exist scattered through the population at the same time, and can over just a few dozen generations propagate to all, when conditions favor that; or even fewer if lacking most is fatal.
Bacteria need a lot more generations to evolve, because they don't swap genes around much. But their generations are very short. Some mutations they do swap around, particularly antibiotic resistance, and ability to infect a new host, via plasmids. Anthrax normally lives in soil, but picks up virulence genes from plasmids it happens upon.
Looking forward to reading Lane's work and seeing how it compares. I'm particularly interested in hypotheses and theories about abiogenesis and I remember being struck by the elegance of the Wächtershäuser paper when I first read it, even if it was over my head at times. Hoping for a similar feeling here!
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC373159/