I recently finished a book that goes immediately to my shelf of favorites, "The Vital Question; Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life" by Nick Lane. It took me about 6 weeks to read. The closely argued story of life ascending was only clear to me after rereading many passages several times, and only when I was alert and rested. In every session of reading I found multiple epiphanies and delightful passages. I have been reading about evolutionary biology, genetics, epigenetics and biochemistry for about a dozen years, with excursions into geohistory and biochemistry. This very clearly written book severely stressed my layman's knowledge.
Lane brings together the current knowledge of geohistory (what the earth and oceans were like 4 billion years ago), alkaline hydrothermal vent discoveries, and basic redox chemistry, to make plausible the bacterial beginnings of life. The process included discussion of bioenergetics and lipid chemistry, with genetics of bacteria and archaea. These two domains hung around very little changed for about 2 billion years, making a living by various biochemical tricks, and sharing their genes haphazardly. They could not take much advantage of natural selection because they had no organized nucleus. They produce clones. They proliferated widely over the earth, and are still everywhere, and continue to adapt to their environments.
Then a very unlikely event happened. An archaea merged with a bacteria and the combination prospered. Their genomes interacted and one, the archaea, became host and the bacteria became the mitochondria via natural selection. All multi celled creatures and plants are descended from that event. This story, modulated by the energetics of all life, ATP production,and modern genomics and biochemistry, is what this book is about, why is complex life the way it is.
There is a 4 page section plus a figure starting on page 238 that brought home to me why this book is so fascinating. The passage discusses the respiratory proteins in mitochondria, which transfer electrons from food to oxygen, along a series of protein complexes embedded in the mitochondrial membrane while pumping protons across the membrane. The complete story is more complicated than I can reproduce here, but the depth of scientific knowledge is breathtaking. Each complex is made up of dozens of proteins, consisting of hundreds of amino acids. The exact positioning of the complexes and the amino acid placement is critical in the quantum tunneling of the electrons along the membrane from complex to complex to the ATP synthase all embedded in the membrane. Many genetic diseases arise from slight faults in the arrangement if the proteins. One angstrom makes a 10 fold difference in the transfer rate, in turn affecting the ATP production rate. The figure shows a model of the membrane with the embedded complexes. The figure has shading that shows which part of the overall structure is produced from the DNA blueprint in the cell nucleus and which part is from the blueprint in the 13 genes in the mitochondria!. There is a discussion of how the bioenergetics and natural selection brought this complexity about. He also shows
why complex beings have sex, just two sexes, and death as part of this discussion. Consilience!
The knowing detail in this passage blows my mind. How can human beings decipher this amazing factory that is in all animal cells? Lots of Nobel prizes came out of this area. This type of passage fills the book. My enjoyment in this reading comes from putting the discovered facts into a logical structure, suddenly seeing "the big picture"
I also like to read history, economics, mysteries and modern novels, but this kind of book thrills me.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Vital-Question-Evolution-Origins/dp/0393088812?ie=UTF8&keywords=Lane%20Nick&qid=1459201268&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1
