Nick Lane, my favorite science writer, recently gave an updated version of his talk on the origin of life and why life is the way it is. This talk summarizes his most recent book “The Vital Question” which I reviewed here.
The big ideas are:
- The emergence of life is probable and simple single-cell life, like bacteria, is probably common throughout the universe.
- Complex life, like plants and animals, resulted from a one-time “accident” 2 billion years ago, and will be rare in the universe.
- Increased energy played a key role in the emergence of complex life, as it does for human domination of the planet.
When you layer on top of this Varki’s theory, which explains the improbable singular emergence of the powerful human brain, our existence and its ability to understand this paragraph, becomes something to revere and protect.
The tragic irony is that we are not fighting to protect our special place in the universe because of the same mutation that enabled the emergence of our brain: denial of reality.
un-Denial 