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What it argues
Life Ascending is Nick Lane's examination of what he calls evolution's ten greatest inventions: the origin of life itself, DNA, photosynthesis, the complex cell, sex, movement, sight, hot blood, consciousness, and death. Each chapter takes one invention and asks both how it arose and why it matters for understanding life's present form. Lane is a biochemist by training and writes with unusual depth about the chemistry underlying processes that most popular science books treat as black boxes.
The chapter on the origin of life illustrates Lane's approach. Rather than gesturing toward primordial soup and the mystery of self-replication, he walks through the chemistry in detail, focusing on alkaline hydrothermal vents as the likely setting. The argument involves proton gradients, chemiosmosis, and the machinery cells still use to generate energy — the same mechanism powering the mitochondria in every cell of the reader's body. The argument is that life didn't begin in spite of thermodynamic challenges but because of them: the steep energy gradients at vent sites provided the driving force.
What it gets right
- 1.
Life likely originated at alkaline hydrothermal vents, where natural proton gradients provided the energy driving force that modern cells still replicate with their mitochondria.
- 2.
DNA's role is often overstated. The genetic code is near-universal, but the ribosome — the molecular machine that translates DNA into proteins — is arguably equally fundamental and has not changed in two billion years.
- 3.
Photosynthesis split water to release oxygen, and the resulting oxidative atmosphere was initially catastrophic for most life. The Great Oxidation Event was evolution's first mass pollution crisis.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Nick Lane is a British biochemist and science writer at University College London, where his research focuses on bioenergetics, the origin of life, and the evolution of complex cells. He is the author of several books on evolutionary biochemistry including Oxygen: The Molecule That Made the World, Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life, and The Vital Question. He has won the Royal Society of Biology book prize and is widely regarded as one of the most rigorous popular science writers working on evolutionary biology today.
