Exploring the Deep Mystery of Life's Origins

As an evolutionary biochemist at University College London, Nick Lane explores the deep mystery of how life evolved on Earth. His hypothesis that life arose through primitive metabolic reactions in deep-sea hydrothermal vents illuminates the outsized role that energy may have played in shaping evolution.

[Beastwck]

Criminally under-viewed channel for how stellar the content is

[AKrn]

Seven minutes of Nick Lane? How can you do just seven minutes? This is like giving someone a sip of wine and telling them to get lost!

[officiallukeforester]

Quanta I love your videos!! Can you please post more of them? Like waaaay more. I could EASILY down 3-5 Quanta Magazine videos a week, they’re so good!

[hazzah]

6:11 moments like these are why we love science.

[corley-ai]

His books are amazing. My favorite was oxygen.

[mikecaetano]

"Nature abhors a gradient." --E.S. Schneider, et al. (1989)

[Nathouuuutheone]

How do we know it happened just once? What tells us that in the primordial puddles there wasn't multiple lineages figuring out cell walls?

[johnathancorgan]

This was a reverie, not an argument or even a statement of hypothesis, with production values taking the place of any sort of coherent thesis other than "wouldn't it be neat if..."

[chaunguyen]

Thank you so much for creating this Quanta. This is so well done and awe-inspriing.

[yungjim]

"At some point, a eukaryotic cell engulfed an aerobic prokaryote, which then formed an endosymbiotic relationship with the host eukaryote, gradually developing into a mitochondrion."

[mahjabinahmed]

that's really remarkable to think about life on earth, we don't even know how many mysteries are waiting for us.

[mrb]

Everytime I watch these videos I kick myself for having majored in Physics and not BioPhysics. Thank you, Nick Lane. Yes, I still miss Stephan J. Gould as well.

[hbt]

Another Amazing video from this channel!

[aynazafsari]

I watched this video multiple times in the span of a few hours and i find it absolutely fascinating.I have always had some sort of grudge against biology because that always meant for the people around me that i am to become a doctor, but this video made me interested in biology in a whole new sense.there is however an idea that i can’t quite grasp and that is when mr. Lane says”if we shrink ourselves to the size a molecule that is equivalent to a bolt of lightning”.can someone please recommend me further reading into this matter?

[nrosko]

Love Nick Lane his books are really fantastic & such a down to earth gent.

[Taric]

I was expecting some science and to see some math, and all this video had were a bunch of adjectives and ethereal music.

[DrZedDrZedDrZed]

I JUST bought Transformer today. Haha, what a treat. Nick Lane is amazing.

[rhenaldkarrel]

If he was my teacher back on school, maybe I can fall in love with science

[kirkp_nextguitar]

I don’t see the point of this video. The title promises some kind of revelation, but it’s just dreamy talk about what we haven’t learned yet. The fact that energy plays a role seems obvious.

[zerotwo]

although the specific design and position is extremely important and specific, you could also quantify that in energy terms. It just not practical. Hence his explanation is good and very contextualized. I'm happy to see this kind of thought in academia.