A Bioenergetic Basis for the three domains of Life | Professor Nick Lane FLS 

Flawless talk. Very inspiring.

I want a new Nick Lane book within a year from now.

What we see in mitochondria, can be condensed in a general law for life and even technology: „There is a ladder made by steps of ubiquitous availabilities.“ Mitochondria removed the limitations of processing free energy in a single cell. We might call these steps „absoluta“, because with every absolutum, we get rid of 1:1 relations. Another instance is the optical sense, that‘s no more dependent on rather rare events, but can build upon a constant flow of rich information. Without absoluta higher development won‘t be possible. In technology we have a burst of absoluta like search engines, GPS, cell phones etc..

At 13:25 NL has LUCA in the hydrothermal vent, but is no tin can of a cell. It has already evolved tremendously sophisticated biochemistry, but at this stage gives rise to archaea and bacteria. The two lines cleave more or less instantaneously at some point in time. What was the first living thing? How, why and where did it come to be? There must be creative limits to the molecular 'engineering' that the process of blind chance marshals into collections of units. I'm seriously starting to think the functionality of the first living thing pre-existed in separate 'component' parts that, on/in earth's substrate surface, came together 'blindly' and simply started to work. Something in the laws of Nature must be there to ensure this case can arise. It just needs the right environment to allow the thing to evolve in spacetime, should all the ingredients be there to spontaneously accrue. Only, what in Hell is that aggregate template biochemical formula? And here is the interesting part: that irreducible 'thing' will start because it's components are hard-wired into the Universe. The archaea and bacteria are simply fractal expansions that have a hierarchical atomic framework that goes back to the 'thing' which, as yet, has no face. And quite possibly, the archaea and bacteria are, on some level, necessary bifurcations required as a prerequisite to the emergence of eukaryotes - sort of a triumvirate of life. Maybe that symbiosis between archaea and bacteria occurred in proliferation?

Ooooooooh! I am a big Nick Lane fan

What a delightful talk!