Spring 2012
- Exploring the Arctic from Space
- What has Facebook done to us?
- What has Facebook done to us?
- Is complex life a freak accident?
- The triumph of Human Rights: dream or nightmare?
- The lure of the Kremlin: the court of Ivan the Terrible and global networks in the 16th century
- Cutting to cure cancer the 'the limits set by nature'
- The mystery of Master Humphrey: one of Dickens's most enigmatic characters
- John Bull vs Stinkomalee: Tory opposition in the early days of the University of London (now UCL)
- The metaphysics of concrete
- Genetic testing for risk of heart disease: fact or fiction?
- From Euclid to modern geometry: do the angles of a triangle really add up to 180?
- The Great American Novel: how and why?
- Patents stop people doing things. So why are they a good thing?
- Having it all: dispelling the myths about work and motherhood
- The search for genius and Einstein's brain
- 3D imaging: nanotechnology and the quest for better medical sensors
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Is complex life a freak accident?
3 February 2012
Tuesday 24 January 2012
Dr Nick Lane (UCL Genetics, evolution and environment)
Natural selection is a kind of search engine. Given enough time, and suitably vast populations, it should find the best solutions repeatedly. So why are bacteria still bacteria? And why did all complex life on our planet share an ancestor that only arose once in four billion years? In this lecture Nick Lane suggests that everything we see around us stemmed from a freak accident two billion years ago. We are far from inevitable, and may be alone in a universe of bacteria.
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