TheVitalQuestion_WhyIsLifetheWayItIs_ - (EPUB全文下载)

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THE VITAL QUESTION
NICK LANE is a biochemist in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London and leads the UCL Origins of Life Programme. He was awarded the 2015 Biochemical Society Award for his outstanding contribution to the molecular life sciences. He is the author of Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, which won the 2010 Royal Society Prize for Science Books, as well as Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life and Oxygen: The Molecule that Made the World.
THE VITAL QUESTION
WHY IS LIFE THE WAY IT IS?
NICK LANE
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by
PROFILE BOOKS LTD
3 Holford Yard
Bevin Way
London
WC1X 9HD
www.profilebooks.com
Copyright © Nick Lane, 2015
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eISBN 978 1 84765 880 7
For Ana
My inspiration and companion On this magical journey
CONTENTS
Introduction: Why is life the way it is?
PART I: The Problem
1   What is life?
2   What is living?
PART II: The Origin of Life
3   Energy at life’s origin
4   The emergence of cells
PART III: Complexity
5   The origin of complex cells
6   Sex and the origins of death
PART IV: Predictions
7   The power and the glory
Epilogue: From the deep
Glossary
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
List of illustrations
Index
INTRODUCTION:
WHY IS LIFE THE WAY IT IS?
There is a black hole at the heart of biology. Bluntly put, we do not know why life is the way it is. All complex life on earth shares a common ancestor, a cell that arose from simple bacterial progenitors on just one occasion in 4 billion years. Was this a freak accident, or did other ‘experiments’ in the evolution of complexity fail? We don’t know. We do know that this common ancestor was already a very complex cell. It had more or less the same sophistication as one of your cells, and it passed this great complexity on not just to you and me but to all its descendants, from trees to bees. I challenge you to look at one of your own cells down a microscope and distinguish it from ............

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