4 replies to this topic

[brokenportal]

I stumbled upon this book with what seems like a peculiar name. It looks like it might actually be something interesting and not some sort of snake oil or occultism.

Maybe this is very common knowledge, I dont know, but I remember from biology class I believe it was, that there is some chance that mitochondria may have originally been in a symbiotic relationship with simple celled organisms cells. This book appears to delve into those types of things.

 power sex suicide mitochondria and the meaning of life longecity.jpg   15.26KB   4 downloads

http://www.amazon.co...g/dp/0192804812

"If it weren't for mitochondria, scientists argue, we'd all still be single-celled bacteria. Indeed, these tiny structures inside our cells are important beyond imagining. Without mitochondria, we would have no cell suicide, no sculpting of embryonic shape, no sexes, no menopause, no aging.

In this fascinating and thought-provoking book, Nick Lane brings together the latest research in this exciting field to show how our growing insight into mitochondria has shed light on how complex life evolved, why sex arose (why don't we just bud?), and why we age and die. These findings are of fundamental importance, both in understanding life on Earth, but also in controlling our own illnesses, and delaying our degeneration and death. Readers learn that two billion years ago, mitochondria were probably bacteria living independent lives and that their capture within larger cells was a turning point in the evolution of life, enabling the development of complex organisms. Lane describes how mitochondria have their own DNA and that its genes mutate much faster than those in the nucleus. This high mutation rate lies behind our aging and certain congenital diseases. The latest research suggests that mitochondria play a key role in degenerative diseases such as cancer. We also discover that mitochondrial DNA is passed down almost exclusively via the female line. That's why it has been used by some researchers to trace human ancestry daughter-to-mother, to "Mitochondrial Eve," giving us vital information about our evolutionary history."

[s123]

Funny enough I bought this book just a few weeks ago. I'm first reading "Oxygen: the molecule that made the world" by the same author. It spends several chapters on aging. I would certainly recommend this book!

[tn22]

howvwere the books?

 

 

[erzebet]

I'm glad you mentioned this book here. I stumbled upon it quite by chance and it proved to be one of the best ones I ever read because it completely changed my brain in how I view life and death now.

 

Now after several years and a more mature brain, I am not as convinced that mitochondria are little selfish organelles turning me older just so they can survive because several negligible senescence species do have mitochondria as well! Still it was the book that whet my appetite for the science of aging and it was an entertaining read as well.

 

 

[Darryl]

I can't recommend Nick Lane's 2015 book: The Vital Question: Why Life is the Way it Is? (UK title) / The Vital Question Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life (US title) highly enough.

While I'm only up to chapter 3, it goes into considerably more detail than the relevant chapters in Life Ascending. Among the questions it attempts to answer:

 

Why did life evolve in the perplexing way it did, and why are cells are powered in such a peculiar fashion?

 

Why did life start so early?

 

Why did it stagnate in morphological structure for billions of years?

 

Why do all living cells use redox chemistry as a source of free energy?

 

Why do all cells conserve this energy in the form of proton gradients over membranes?

 

Forms of growth that at first glance seem to have little in common, such as photosynthesis in plants, and respiration in animals, turn out to be basically the same in that they both involve the transfer of electrons down ‘respiratory chains’. Why should this be?

 

Bacteria and archaea live alongside each other in almost all environments, frequently in very close symbioses. Why would one of these groups have gone to the serious trouble of replacing all their membrane lipids, on just one occasion?

 

Why do prokaryotes not continuously, or even occasionally, give rise to cells and organisms with greater complexity?

 

Why did complex, eukaryotic, cells arise just once in 4 billion years?

 

I don’t live much like a mushroom, so why are my cells so similar?

 

How and why did the nucleus evolve?

 

Why did the host cell pick up so many genes from its own endosymbionts, and why did it integrate them so tightly into its own fabric, replacing many of its existing genes in the process?

 

Where did the extravagant internal membranes come from? 

 

How did the cytoskeleton become so dynamic and flexible?

 

What about sex?

 

Why do virtually all eukaryotes have two sexes?

 

Why does sexual cell division (‘meiosis’) halve chromosome numbers by first doubling them up?

 

Why, if all of these traits arose by natural selection, in which each step offers some small advantage, did equivalent traits not arise on other occasions in various bacterial groups?

 

Why do we age, get cancer, and die?