The vital question by Nick Lane

Book Review

After a recommendation from a friend, I picked this book almost immediately. Let me be clear with the fact that this is not an easy read. It is packed with information that gets more & more speculative as the chapters pass by. And set aside atleast a couple of months to read and admire its entirety. Needless to say, there is a lot of homework that can help in understanding the intricacies of the book.

The book opens with a promise to explore one of the very possible ways that life came to existence. That is exactly what the book delivers indeed. The author takes on a wild journey all the way down to the cell level and starts speculating how such mysterious building blocks of pretty much all life could have born out of materials that existed a couple of billion years ago on earth.

I am very impressed by the way the author explains proton gradient as the fundamental driving element of life. Then he ventures on a very impressive journey to explain the origins of prokaryotes - leading to even the possible seperation of archea & bacteria. This part of the book is well written and definitely is the highlight of the entire book.

Then he continues to speculate about the possible evolution of eukaryotes. It gets very speculative and monotonous by this point. This part of the book is nice, but it did not excite me at the same level as the prokaryotes section did. Nevertheless, the discussion on energy being one of the fundamental driving forces is very intriguing.

The book sets out vast amounts of material & opinions for very interesting thoughts. It is very engaging in the way it is written. However, the author’s sense of humor is definitely not on par with his intellectual!