Life seems to have occupied every niche on Earth. Short of flouting the laws of physics, anything looks possible. But that view is deceptive. All complex life is composed of the same type of cell, which arose just once in the four-billion-year history of life. The barrier to complexity was probably not genetic, but energetic. Bacteria are constrained by the way they generate energy, through an electrical charge on their bounding membrane with the force of a bolt of lightning. This force can be traced back to life’s putative origins in deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Here, the flow of charge can drive a network of chemical reactions, starting from CO2, which prefigures the metabolism of all cells today. Concealed within the genetic code itself are patterns which suggest that biological information arose from direct physical interactions in metabolism. If so, genetic information emerges predictably from chemistry and should be similar in life on any of the 40 billion wet, rocky planets in the Milky Way. Physicists have long been puzzled by the fine-tuning of the cosmological constants, yet the story from biology is equally unsettling. Life is this way for a reason. But the singular origin of complex life was no miracle. The Gifford Lectures: Beyond the Series introduces a new strand within the historic Gifford Lectures, hosted by the University of Edinburgh - a series of standalone autumn lectures that carry the spirit of the original programme into fresh and timely directions.This inaugural lecture features award-winning author and evolutionary biochemist Professor Nick Lane, who will explore the origins and constraints of life in a fascinating talk titled “Why is Life the Way it Is?”. This lecture took place in October 2025. This article was published on 2025-07-09
