Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

This Biology Book Blew Me Away

gatesnotes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 107 posts

Re: This Biology Book Blew Me Away

#61

Post by keithpeter »

OA title image was taken in the Micrarium at the Grant Museum of Zoology at UCL. Open to the public and well worth a visit should you happen to live in London. The whole place has a decidedly steam-punk feel with skeletons, brass instruments, and handwritten labels.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/zoology

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/zoology/about/collections/objec...

Now, I shall have to get the book. I've not read much about biology and energy since finding Schroedinger's What is life in the library at school.

Re: This Biology Book Blew Me Away

#62

Post by Balgair »

red-indian wrote: post #23
civilian wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had read the book, you would know that Archaea and Bacteria both share some genes. Not many genes, but a few genes that are very fundamental. And not even the genes we were expecting to be the "minimum viable product" for life. Nick Lane thinks that the evidence is for there being a common ancestor between Archaea and Bacteria too. The genetic evidence backs it. Your intuition and suspicious about bias just do…

Horizontal gene transfer is well established. Existence of a small number of common genes between two species does not necessarily indicate a common ancestor.

I mean, at this point you have to define what an 'ancestor' is then. HGT kinda breaks the rules of what an ancestor is. With us, it's a little easier, we have tons of genes and a few viral infections don't break the concept of ancestor. When you have 100 genes total, 75 of which are from HGT, 10 from viruses, and 15 from the mother cell, who can be called the ancestor then? Remember, this was WAY back when too. Modern prokaryotes have some complex stuff to deal with all this, the first million generations did not (maybe). In that early soup, the basic concepts of what life is today don't have relevance. What is a mother cell anyways? Was it really gene transfer, or was that just what they all naturally did all the time? ETC.

Re: This Biology Book Blew Me Away

#63

Post by acqq »

searine wrote: post #12
red-indian wrote: post #5

I recommend these biology books: Molecular Cell Biology - Lodish http://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Cell-Biology-Harvey-Lodish/d... Molecular Biology of the Cell - Alberts http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0815344325/

Classics. I think I have a subtle preference for Alberts, rather than Lodish in terms of text, but I think the Lodish illustrations are better. At this point I think I have three copies of Alberts stashed in various closets and trunks.

Looking in the Amazon description, 6.6 pounds each?

Re: This Biology Book Blew Me Away

#64

Post by areyousure »

dnautics wrote: post #10
lumpypua wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this book and the author's previous books cover exactly those topics among others. Nick Lane is a fucking awesome writer.

It's not the events themselves that are underestimated- it's the details. Do the books specifically address using water as a reductant? My experience is that not even scientists in the field (I worked at reprogramming hydrogen-producing enzymes) have a full appreciation of how bizzare that is.

You should read the book and tell us whether it lives up to your standards. If so, then we know that the book is a particularly valuable contribution.

Re: This Biology Book Blew Me Away

#65

Post by CamperBob2 »

niels_olson wrote: post #3

> All complex life on earth shares a common ancestor, a cell that arose from simple bacterial progenitors on just one occasion in 4 billion years. This strikes me as a commonly held but deeply flawed origin story, and a close read suggests Gates doesn't buy it either, but fell into the literary trap of writing it anyway. If we believe the first form of life occurred on the sea floor, why shouldn't we believe that new…

If we believe the first form of life occurred on the sea floor, why shouldn't we believe that new forms of life are spontaneously occurring on the sea floor all the time?

Many people don't seem to understand just how incredibly different the environmental conditions on Earth were when life was first ramping up. Those conditions not only no longer prevail, but the world is also full of competitors that weren't there in the beginning.

Also, we probably haven't cataloged 10% of the life forms on our ocean floors yet. There's still a lot to learn, and there will be surprises.

Re: This Biology Book Blew Me Away

#67

Post by niels_olson »

snowwrestler wrote: post #58
niels_olson wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economy is not a fundamental principle of physical law. I recommend you try to work up from thermodynamics. Start by asking yourself how many molecules of water are in the ocean, and how frequently they vibrate.

Didn't Feynman win a Nobel Prize for showing that particles are always most likely to take the most efficient path? Anyway, Occam's razor is about preferring theories, not physical laws. If two theories match a given set of observations, there is no objective reason to prefer one over the other. But it is easier to work with a simpler theory, so scientists prefer it out of self-interest. Put another way, if there is…

> Nobel Prize for showing that particles are always most likely to take the most efficient path

I only have a BS in physics, so do please correct me, but the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics helps predict particle behavior but doesn't say anything is most likely to happen all the time. Indeed, it requires considering how often very absurd things happen.

> it is easier to work with a simpler theory, so scientists prefer it out of self-interest

Thermodynamics is definitely simpler than any phylogenetic analysis trying to peer backward through a graph with many, many cycles in it. But thermodynamics requires accepting the possibilities of just how many times some very unlikely event might happen.

Re: This Biology Book Blew Me Away

#68

Post by niels_olson »

btilly wrote: post #47
niels_olson wrote: post #3

> All complex life on earth shares a common ancestor, a cell that arose from simple bacterial progenitors on just one occasion in 4 billion years. This strikes me as a commonly held but deeply flawed origin story, and a close read suggests Gates doesn't buy it either, but fell into the literary trap of writing it anyway. If we believe the first form of life occurred on the sea floor, why shouldn't we believe that new…

If we believe the first form of life occurred on the sea floor, why shouldn't we believe that new forms of life are spontaneously occurring on the sea floor all the time? Once a cell has formed, through the miracle of exponential growth its descendants will quickly suck up available nutrients until you run out of some key nutrient, and then it can never happen again. Suppose that that formation of a viable cell was a…

> 1 in a million year event

per what unit volume? Or unit surface area?

Re: This Biology Book Blew Me Away

#69

Post by cgio »

jrcii wrote: post #13
xrange wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have original ideas that explain a lot about the world Surely you aren't going to leave us hanging without giving us a synopsis of the top three...

1. The evolutionary advantage of cooperative problem solving is what gives rise to the human tendency to self-identify with mutually exclusive groups of every scope including political territories, religions, sports teams, etc. and in turn some of the largest aspects of human culture. 2. Our concept of knowledge, which is based on prediction from past observations, is rooted in the design of our nervous system. Intui…

At least from an etymology perspective, analyze should come before organize. My version is Anticipate->Sense->Decide->Understand but I think it's not mine exclusively.

Re: This Biology Book Blew Me Away

#70

Post by apo »

I really like books that expose holes in scientific knowledge. Books that attempt to fill in those holes with conjecture based on observation are even better. This book does both very well.

However, I did notice some glaring factual errors relating to chemistry (my speciality). Chapter 2 includes the passage:

> Second, and more telling, a major distinction between bacterial and archaeal membranes seems to be purely random - bacteria use one stereoisomer (mirror form) of glycerol, while archaea use the other. ...

This is false. Glycerol is achiral - devoid of stereochemistry. It is its own mirror form.

What Lane may be talking about is lipid hydrolysis, in which functionality at one of the two prochiral oxygens of a lipid is cleaved preferentially, but I haven't followed up on this yet.

Either way, Lane spins a scenario where the two main groups of organisms make two different kinds of glycerol. This simply can't be true.

This isn't merely a minor technical error. Enantiomeric purity and the same configuration of amino acids has been a hot topic in the origin of life because the kind of scenarios that are supported there are quite different than if various species used mixtures of amino acid stereoisomers or different pure isomers.

Post reply on HN