“The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life” by Dr. Nick Lane.
This is a complicated book. The first third or so is a distillation of a particular current in origin-of-life research (one of two that are being productively extended recently, in my view) that focuses on energy and metabolism rather than replication or translation (the latter being the second main current which has also made amazing strides lately but I will not talk about here). By focusing on the shared fundamental core of energy metabolism, the author and his laboratory productively extend a hypothesis first put forward by the geologist Mike Russell tying the origins of life to geology rather than organic chemistry. Specifically, he notes that most aspects of the core energy metabolism of all life and the oldest known biomass-production mechanisms are recapitulated inorganically in a particular geological context, alkaline hydrothermal vents. These would have been much more common on the early Earth and in an anoxic environment would have spontaneously taken water, air, and mantle minerals and created concentrated deposits of organics alongside reactive iron sulfide minerals which strikingly resemble the iron-sulfur clusters in the reactive centers of the central metabolic enzymes of all life. This view of the origin of life puts metabolism and geochemistry first with genetics and heredity coming along as an afterthought that at first encouraged the reactions and then ‘captured’ them from the geosphere. This view also puts the origin of life as something almost chemically inevitable from the energy gradient present in this geological context, which would exist most anywhere in the universe you have the confluence of water, rock, and air.
The rest of the book deals with the author’s thoughts on the origins of eukaryotes and complex life in general, mostly through the lens of the effects of having mitochondria on eukaryotic life. A few very important points about eukaryotes are made here, pointing out their origin was a very strange event given the huge constellation of weird traits that all eukaryotes share. He persuasively argues that the population genetic and energetic constrains presented by mitochondria explain a number of these odd traits. But he is very wedded to a particular model of the origin event, to an extent and degree of exclusivity that I do not think is warranted given several other strands of research about the origins of eukaryotic life and the biochemistry of mitochondria I am aware of. He is a bioenergetics type so he tends to see everything in terms of energy. Still makes some very important points but I would treat his conclusions (that the origin of eukaryotes is a freakish horribly unlikely one-off event in which a bacterium got inside an archaean and navigated a bizarre bioenergetic evolutionary gauntlet) as a hypothesis rather than anything resembling settled science.
Not really. The proposed production of prebiotic organics occurs at the surface where hydrothermal fluids which have interacted with mantle-derived rocks, becoming alkaline and producing hydrogen gas within the fluid by oxidizing ferrous iron during serpentinization, hit the acidic CO2-bearing ocean, and the pH gradient triggers redox reactions between the H2 and CO2 creating water methane and small organics most of which vent to the ocean. Reactive iron sulfide minerals also condense out under the same conditions and further encourage the redox reactions and electron transfer in a way similar to in living methanogenic organisms. The organics produced by experiments recapitulating these environments are more like formaldehyde, small carbs, and acetic acid (with various phosphorylated or thioester derivatives that allow them to interact in interesting ways). None of this really resembles Thomas Gold’s proposed and pretty well discredited ideas of high levels of promordial deep-mantle abiotic oil leakage driving large deep biospheres and would be concentrated locally within the pores of surface rocks at the vents themselves.
Granted, in this scenario once life escapes the vents by inventing its own way to locally create pH gradients and electron transfer, the early basal biosphere would be limited to chemolithotrophs exploiting redox gradients within rocks (potentially very deep but definitely limited in biomass) until something invents photosynthesis and would have started as thermophiles (though not hyperthermophiles), which were elements of his thoughts on the origin of life. It also fits with a point he made, that the origin of life should be thought of in a thermodynamic context.
“Susan Stanford Friedman’s Planetary Modernisms (2015) asks us to rethink our habits of associating “modernism” with Euro-America. Comparing a number of specific cultures across three continents and eleven centuries, she shows how the historical conditions often ascribed to a uniquely advanced Europe—rapid technological innovation, artistic experimentation, social upheaval, and cosmopolitan mixing—also describe places and times that lie far off conventional maps of modernity, including Tang Dynasty China and Mughal India.”
“The work of art is an especially self-aware kind of knowing because it knows it is an artifice, a mere model. But if all models simplify or abstract in order to make sense of existence or experience, then all models—scientific and historical and artistic—do the work of world-making.
What Cheah and Seltzer together make clear is that it is time to stop arguing about whether or not “the world” in world literature is too large an object of study. What is really at stake in the charge against world literature is in fact one specific, exceptionally destructive model of the world that has done too much world-making already: the enforced homogenization of cultures to serve Euro-American interests.”
Nonfiction Books Thread
“The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life” by Dr. Nick Lane.
This is a complicated book. The first third or so is a distillation of a particular current in origin-of-life research (one of two that are being productively extended recently, in my view) that focuses on energy and metabolism rather than replication or translation (the latter being the second main current which has also made amazing strides lately but I will not talk about here). By focusing on the shared fundamental core of energy metabolism, the author and his laboratory productively extend a hypothesis first put forward by the geologist Mike Russell tying the origins of life to geology rather than organic chemistry. Specifically, he notes that most aspects of the core energy metabolism of all life and the oldest known biomass-production mechanisms are recapitulated inorganically in a particular geological context, alkaline hydrothermal vents. These would have been much more common on the early Earth and in an anoxic environment would have spontaneously taken water, air, and mantle minerals and created concentrated deposits of organics alongside reactive iron sulfide minerals which strikingly resemble the iron-sulfur clusters in the reactive centers of the central metabolic enzymes of all life. This view of the origin of life puts metabolism and geochemistry first with genetics and heredity coming along as an afterthought that at first encouraged the reactions and then ‘captured’ them from the geosphere. This view also puts the origin of life as something almost chemically inevitable from the energy gradient present in this geological context, which would exist most anywhere in the universe you have the confluence of water, rock, and air.
The rest of the book deals with the author’s thoughts on the origins of eukaryotes and complex life in general, mostly through the lens of the effects of having mitochondria on eukaryotic life. A few very important points about eukaryotes are made here, pointing out their origin was a very strange event given the huge constellation of weird traits that all eukaryotes share. He persuasively argues that the population genetic and energetic constrains presented by mitochondria explain a number of these odd traits. But he is very wedded to a particular model of the origin event, to an extent and degree of exclusivity that I do not think is warranted given several other strands of research about the origins of eukaryotic life and the biochemistry of mitochondria I am aware of. He is a bioenergetics type so he tends to see everything in terms of energy. Still makes some very important points but I would treat his conclusions (that the origin of eukaryotes is a freakish horribly unlikely one-off event in which a bacterium got inside an archaean and navigated a bizarre bioenergetic evolutionary gauntlet) as a hypothesis rather than anything resembling settled science.
So, Thomas Gold’s Deep Biology still struggles along....but now everyone else gets research funding on it. sigh.
Not really. The proposed production of prebiotic organics occurs at the surface where hydrothermal fluids which have interacted with mantle-derived rocks, becoming alkaline and producing hydrogen gas within the fluid by oxidizing ferrous iron during serpentinization, hit the acidic CO2-bearing ocean, and the pH gradient triggers redox reactions between the H2 and CO2 creating water methane and small organics most of which vent to the ocean. Reactive iron sulfide minerals also condense out under the same conditions and further encourage the redox reactions and electron transfer in a way similar to in living methanogenic organisms. The organics produced by experiments recapitulating these environments are more like formaldehyde, small carbs, and acetic acid (with various phosphorylated or thioester derivatives that allow them to interact in interesting ways). None of this really resembles Thomas Gold’s proposed and pretty well discredited ideas of high levels of promordial deep-mantle abiotic oil leakage driving large deep biospheres and would be concentrated locally within the pores of surface rocks at the vents themselves.
Granted, in this scenario once life escapes the vents by inventing its own way to locally create pH gradients and electron transfer, the early basal biosphere would be limited to chemolithotrophs exploiting redox gradients within rocks (potentially very deep but definitely limited in biomass) until something invents photosynthesis and would have started as thermophiles (though not hyperthermophiles), which were elements of his thoughts on the origin of life. It also fits with a point he made, that the origin of life should be thought of in a thermodynamic context.
I had a few paragraphs here, and links, and lost it all on posting. sigh.
well, here is a biological reactor for your enjoyment. in Russian tho...
http://kommersant.ru/doc/3101388
Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error), Le Roy Ladurie 1975
The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code, Fox (review)
_Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_, by Thomas De Quincey (review)
How to Make Worlds
“Susan Stanford Friedman’s Planetary Modernisms (2015) asks us to rethink our habits of associating “modernism” with Euro-America. Comparing a number of specific cultures across three continents and eleven centuries, she shows how the historical conditions often ascribed to a uniquely advanced Europe—rapid technological innovation, artistic experimentation, social upheaval, and cosmopolitan mixing—also describe places and times that lie far off conventional maps of modernity, including Tang Dynasty China and Mughal India.”
“The work of art is an especially self-aware kind of knowing because it knows it is an artifice, a mere model. But if all models simplify or abstract in order to make sense of existence or experience, then all models—scientific and historical and artistic—do the work of world-making.
What Cheah and Seltzer together make clear is that it is time to stop arguing about whether or not “the world” in world literature is too large an object of study. What is really at stake in the charge against world literature is in fact one specific, exceptionally destructive model of the world that has done too much world-making already: the enforced homogenization of cultures to serve Euro-American interests.”