Book SummaryThe Vital Question, by Nick Lane

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of The Vital Question

Biology has a big, unanswered question: “Why does life on earth work the way it does?” Are all of life’s characteristic features the product of random evolutionary mutations, or did organisms need to evolve a certain way to meet specific physical and chemical challenges that were present at the dawn of life on this planet? Can the study of genetics and natural selection explain all of life’s mysterious quirks, or do we have to look deeper into the machinery of life to explain why certain peculiar properties are shared by every living thing on a microcellular level?

In The Vital Question, published in 2015, Nick Lane argues that genetics alone is insufficient to explain why living cells function in the specific way they do. He says that to explain the origin of life, we have to understand how cells process energy and the physical conditions that gave rise to the peculiar mechanisms that all life uses to power itself. Answering how that process arose also gives us clues as to why life remained stunted in bacterial forms for 2 billion...

The Vital Question Summary How Life Works

Before discussing the origin of life, it’s important to think about what life is. Lane says that in its simplest form, life is a process by which matter self-organizes into complex, self-replicating molecules—a process that can only sustain itself with a continual flow of energy. That energy allows living systems to avoid decomposing long enough to reproduce, creating an internal electrical voltage to power microscopic molecular machines that use carbon atoms as their basic building blocks.

In our everyday experience, disorganized matter doesn’t spontaneously arrange itself into complex forms, any more than a pile of bricks can turn into a house without outside help. And yet, at first glance it seems that life does this, especially when it comes to its origin. Not only can it seem unlikely that organization can arise from chaos, but doing so might be viewed as violating the laws of thermodynamics—which is why those laws must be clearly understood.

The second law of thermodynamics states that in any given system, entropy—the amount of chaos and disorder—will increase over time. However, living things seem to contradict this by growing, reproducing, and evolving into ever more...

The Vital Question Summary The First Cells

Evolutionary biology has a “chicken or egg” problem. The question is which came first—self-replicating molecules such as DNA or the organic structures of the cell within which those molecules thrive. Lane argues that researchers have ignored this problem by focusing exclusively on the lineage of the DNA molecule, but the origins of life can’t be fully understood without also discussing where it began and what sort of environmental conditions gave rise to the first life on Earth. The fossil record and genetic evidence give some clues to the path on which life developed, but there are gaps in our knowledge that scientists can’t fill via direct observation.

Consider what our world was like 4 billion years ago. The chemical makeup of ancient zircon crystals shows that the young Earth was temperate and wet, but the atmosphere was primarily carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water vapor. There wasn’t any free oxygen yet, since that’s a byproduct of organic respiration. The earliest geological evidence of the chemistry of life dates back 3.8 billion years, but the first microfossils of single-celled organisms don’t appear until 300 million years later. Lane admits that much of this is...

The Vital Question Summary The First Complex Cells

The event that prompted the explosion of complex life from simpler, single-celled forms has long been shrouded in mystery. Lane proposes that eukaryotes—the domain of life that includes everything more advanced than bacteria and archaea—arose from a single, unlikely symbiosis between two very different single-celled creatures that unlocked the limits on how cells use energy and undammed the flow of evolutionary progress. Lane explains what distinguishes eukaryotic cells, the idea of evolution by symbiosis, and the energy problem that holds bacteria and archaea back while propelling eukaryotic life to ever greater organization and complexity, eventually evolving into the plant and animal kingdoms.

What defines eukaryotic life is that the cell’s DNA is contained within a protective nucleus, whereas in archaea and bacteria, the DNA is attached to the outer cell wall right next to the enzymes that produce ATP. Not every eukaryote is multicellular, but they all dwarf bacteria and archaea in terms of the size of their genome and the complexity of their molecular machines. Eukaryotes are full of mitochondria that generate the relatively enormous amount of power eukaryotic...

Shortform Exercise: Reflect on the Origin of Life

Lane describes the process by which the very first life may have evolved in alkaline hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor. He later discusses how all complex life descends from a single union of two microbes that led to a revolution in how cells function. Think about whether you agree with Lane’s assertions and consider what their implications might be.

What do you find most surprising or counterintuitive about Lane’s description of the origin of life? In what way does his depiction of the process contradict or agree with your understanding of evolution?