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

Celebrated evolutionary biologist Lane (Life Ascending) outlines what he hopes are the "beginnings of a more predictive biology" that may make it "possible to predict the properties of life anywhere in the universe from the chemical composition of the cosmos." Lane eloquently argues that complex eukaryotic life, as wildly disparate as it seems, is stunningly uniform at base, deriving from a single event in which one bacterium entered another and overcame the constraints that held back other such organisms. This singular endosymbiotic occasion, most evident to us today via our cells' mitochondria (which were once free-floating bacteria), triggered an astonishing series of previously impossible evolutionary actions resulting in billions of animal and plant species that yet share a method of conserving energy: chemiosmosis, or the transfer of protons across a membrane. And according to Lane, "Evolution should continue to play out along similar lines, guided by similar constants, elsewhere in the universe."