Andrej Karpathy mentioned The Vital Question by Nick Lane 5 times

Easily one of my favorite books ever - Nick Lane is an excellent scientist author, mixing engaging presentation, highly intriguing ideas, and tons of technical details. I learned a lot about origins of life and unlocked a whole new level of appreciation of the fantastic cosmic story every one of us is a part of, with all of the happy accidents along the way. 5/5

— Andrej Karpathy

2022-05-22 on goodreads.com

I used to think that the origin of life was this magical rare event. But then you read books like, for example, Nick Lane, "The Vital Question", "Life Ascending", et cetera. And he really gets in, he really makes you believe that this is not that rare. [...] I do feel like the story in these books, like Nick Lane's books and so on, sort of makes sense and it makes sense how life arose on earth uniquely. And yeah, I don't need to reach for more exotic explanations right now.

— Andrej Karpathy

I think in biology as an example, "The Vital Question" is a good one. Anything by Nick Lane really, "Life Ascending" I would say is a bit more potentially representative as like a summary of a lot of the things he's been talking about.

— Andrej Karpathy

exactly, that's where my eyes were first opened, love the book a lot

— Andrej Karpathy

So. Good.

— Andrej Karpathy