Oxygen
Explores the impact oxygen has had on earth - history of life, origin of two sexes, evolution of aging and death (why we age and what we can do about it).
Stats for nerds
7recommend
19mentions
15people
2012–2026years
42% recommend58% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Thank you for this. Well told story. Nick Lane’s book “Oxygen“ is a favorite.
- On this topic, I would highly recommend Nick Lane's Oxygen: The Molecule that Made the World. Interesting learning about how life worked different when oxygen was much lower, and much higher than today.
- Of course. Not looking at a bookshelf or doing much effort to recall, but enjoyed the Baroque Cycle by Neil Stephenson, almost anything by Gore Vidal. On the nonfiction side, I will always recommend books by Nick Lane, especially the first one I read: Oxygen - it made me wish that I had continued my Biochemistry studies into university.
- I don't enjoy the science writing at Quanta. Their articles in fields I know something about are so inarticulate and misleading that I have to doubt whether their reporting in fields to which I am largely ignorant (particularly the publication's namesake, quantum mechanics) would stand up to scrutiny.
In this case, you should know that the phagocytic model of endosymbiosis has been radically upended since the successful culturing of a Lokiarchaeota in (ecto)symbiosis with a delta-proteobacterium in 2019 by Imachi et al.
"Isolation of an archaeon at the prokaryote–eukaryote interface" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1916-6 doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1916-6
The striking images of the branching, filamentous prokaryotic Lokiarchaeotum grappling its metabolic partner resembled nothing I had ever seen in biology before, save maybe the mycorrhizal root nodules of a legume at a ~2000x smaller scale. The prevailing model of the process of eukaryotic endosymbiosis is now "entangle-engulf-endogenize", rather than phagocytosis, which might be a secondary post-mitochondrial lifestyle adaptation.
If the Nature paper is difficult for you to read or access, this summary is well written and provides better citations than the Quanta article.
"Challenging Eukaryogenesis: The Story of the Eukaryotic Ancestor" https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.06608 doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2008.06608
If you are interested in this topic, I cannot praise Nick Lane's nonfiction trilogy of books on mitochondria and evolution highly enough:
• "Oxygen: The Molecule that Made the World" (2002) https://www.amazon.com/Oxygen-Molecule-that-Made-World/dp/0198508034 • "Sex, Power, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life" (2005) https://www.amazon.com/Power-Sex-Suicide-Mitochondria-Meaning/dp/0192804812 • "The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life" (2015) https://www.amazon.com/Vital-Question-Evolution-Origins-Complex/dp/0393088812 - Don’t forget Oxygen. Amazing book and my intro to Nick Lane.
- Usually animals that have faster metabolic rate have shorter lifespans. It's theorized that this might be because mitochondria get damaged as they provide energy for the cells. Eventually they start leaking free radicals and destroying the cell.
Flying creatures are exception. For flight animal needs extreme amounts of energy so in theory bats should have livespan shorter than mice but that's not the case. Somehow bats manage to pass huge amounts of energy during their lifetime and still have pretty decent livespan. Evolution can figure out workarounds for even most fundamental problems if there's proper motivation. Some people think that aging and cancer are just result of evolution sloppiness cause by the lack of need for cancer-free, living longer than necessary individuals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rate-of-living_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrion#Possible_relatio...
There's another clue that mitochondria age and get worse as they work and and are very important. All of our mitochondria come from female reproductive cell. Mitochondria from male reproductive cells are discarded, possibly because they degraded when male reproductive cell traveled meet to female reproductive cell. Female reproductive cell is inert and created very early in life and stored throughout lifetime to provide untarnished mitochondria to offspring. Male reproductive cells are created throughout life of an individual, but they get gradually less mobile when they were made by older individual. It's possible that this loss of mobility is caused by damage that mitochondria sustained during male lifetime.
I can recommend https://www.amazon.com/Oxygen-Molecule-World-Popular-Science...
It's bit speculative towards the end but makes many very interesting points. Written by Nick Lane, Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London
Another clue that mitochondria have costant damaging effect on cells probably increasing in intensity with aging http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/306179.php
