Nick Lane

Dwarkesh Patel × Nick Lane

Nick Lane argues that life’s chemistry may be common on wet, rocky worlds, while complex eukaryotic life arose only once in four billion years because mitochondria solved an energy bottleneck, not an information deficit.That thesis is supported by repeated giant-bacterium failures but remains probabilistic: one counterexample could break it, purine synthesis in water remains unresolved, and a full metabolic-flux demonstration may take decades.