Nick Lane

One of the deepest, most illuminating books about the history of life to have been published in recent years. The Economist"

Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life

The Vital Question

Heiki Riesenkampf

Andrei Leica

To explain the mystery of how life evolved on Earth, Nick Lane explores the deep link between energy and genes.

AJSingh

Why is life the way it is? Bacteria evolved into complex life just once in four billion years of life on earth-and all complex life shares many strange properties, from sex to ageing and death. If life evolved on other planets, would it be the same or completely different? In The Vital Question, Nick Lane radically reframes evolutionary history, putting forward a cogent solution to conundrums that have troubled scientists for decades. The answer, he argues, lies in energy: how all life on Earth lives off a voltage with the strength of a bolt of lightning. In unravelling these scientific enigmas, making sense of life's quirks, Lane's explanation provides a solution to life's vital questions: why are we as we are, and why are we here at all? This is ground-breaking science in an accessible form, in the tradition of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel.

The Vital Question Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life

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