back to indexNick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318
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Well, the source of energy at the origin of life
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is the reaction between carbon dioxide and hydrogen.
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And amazingly, most of these reactions are exergonic,
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which is to say they release energy.
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If you have hydrogen and CO2,
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and you put them together in a falcon tube
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and you warm it up to say 50 degrees centigrade,
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and you put in a couple of catalysts and you shake it,
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nothing's gonna happen.
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But thermodynamically, that is less stable.
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Two gases, hydrogen and CO2, is less stable than cells.
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What should happen is you get cells coming out.
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Why doesn't that happen?
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It's because of the kinetic barriers.
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That's where you need the spark.
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The following is a conversation with Nick Lane,
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a biochemist at University College London
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and author of some of my favorite books
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on biology, science, and life ever written,
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including his two most recent titled
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"'Transformer,' The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death,"
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and the vital question, why is life the way it is?
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors
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in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here's Nick Lane.
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Let's start with perhaps the most mysterious,
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the most interesting question that we little humans
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can ask of ourselves.
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How did life originate on Earth?
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You could ask anybody working on the subject,
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and you'll get a different answer from all of them.
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They will be pretty passionately held opinions,
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and their opinions grounded in science,
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but they're still really, at this point, their opinions,
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because there's so much stuff to know
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that all we can ever do is get a small slice of it,
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and it's the context which matters.
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So I can give you my answer.
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My answer is from a biologist's point of view.
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That has been missing from the equation over decades,
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which is, well, what does life do on Earth?
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Why is it this way?
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Why is it made of cells?
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Why is it made of carbon?
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Why is it powered by electrical charges on membranes?
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There's all these interesting questions about cells
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that if you then look to see,
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well, is there an environment on Earth,
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on the early Earth four billion years ago,
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that kind of matches the requirements of cells?
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Well, there is one.
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There's a very obvious one.
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It's basically created by whenever you have
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a wet, rocky planet, you get these hydrothermal vents,
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which generate hydrogen gas in bucket loads,
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and electrical charges on kind of cell like pores
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that can drive the kind of chemistry that life does.
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So it seems so beautiful and so obvious
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that I've spent the last 10 years or more
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trying to do experiments.
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It turns out to be difficult, of course.
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Everything's more difficult than you ever thought
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it was gonna be, but it looks, I would say,
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more true rather than less true over that 10 year period.
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I think I have to take a step back every now and then
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and think, hang on a minute, where's this going?
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I'm happy it's going in a sensible direction.
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And I think then you have these other interesting dilemmas.
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I mean, I'm often accused of being too focused
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on life on Earth, too kind of narrow minded
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and inward looking, you might say.
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I'm talking about carbon, I'm talking about cells,
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and maybe you or plenty of people can say to me,
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ah, yeah, but life can be anything.
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I have no imagination.
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And maybe they're right.
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But unless we can say why life here is this way,
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and if those reasons are fundamental reasons,
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or if they're just trivial reasons,
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then we can't answer that question.
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So I think they're fundamental reasons,
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and I think we need to worry about them.
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Yeah, there might be some deep truth to the puzzle
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here on Earth that will resonate
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with other puzzles elsewhere that will,
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solving this particular puzzle
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will give us that deeper truth.
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So what, to this puzzle, you said vents, hydrogen,
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wet, so chemically, what is the potion here?
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How important is oxygen?
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You wrote a book about this.
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Yeah, and I actually just came straight here
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from a conference where I was chairing a session
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on whether oxygen matters or not in the history of life.
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Of course it matters, but it matters most
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to the origin of life to be not there.
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As I see it, we have this, I mean,
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life is made of carbon, basically, primarily,
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organic molecules with carbon, carbon bonds.
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And the building block, the Lego brick
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that we take out of the air or take out of the oceans
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is carbon dioxide.
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And to turn carbon dioxide into organic molecules,
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we need to strap on hydrogen.
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And so we need, and this is basically
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what life is doing, it's hydrogenating carbon dioxide.
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It's taking the hydrogen, the bubbles out of the earth
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in these hydrothermal vents, and it sticks it on CO2.
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And it's kind of really as simple as that.
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And actually, thermodynamically,
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there's the thing that I find most troubling
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is that if you do these experiments in the lab,
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the molecules you get are exactly the molecules
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that we see at the heart of biochemistry
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in the heart of life.
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Is there something to be said about the earliest origins
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of that little potion, that chemical process?
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What really is the spark there?
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There isn't a spark.
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There is a continuous chemical reaction.
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And there is kind of a spark,
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but it's a continuous electrical charge
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which helps drive that reaction.
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There's a literally spark.
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Well, the charge at least, but yes.
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I mean, a spark in that sense is,
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we tend to think of in terms of Frankenstein,
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we tend to think in terms of electricity
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and one moment you zap something and it comes alive.
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And what does that really mean?
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It's come alive and now what's sustaining it?
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Well, we are sustained by oxygen,
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by this continuous chemical reaction.
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And if you put a plastic bag on your head,
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then you've got a minute or something before it's all over.
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So some way of being able to leverage a source of energy.
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Well, the source of energy at the origin of life
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is the reaction between carbon dioxide and hydrogen.
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And amazingly, most of these reactions are exergonic,
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which is to say they release energy.
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If you have hydrogen and CO2
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and you put them together in a falcon tube
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and you warm it up to say 50 degrees centigrade
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and you put in a couple of catalysts and you shake it,
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nothing's gonna happen.
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But thermodynamically, that is less stable.
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Two gases, hydrogen and CO2, is less stable than cells.
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What should happen is you get cells coming out.
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So why doesn't that happen?
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It's because of the kinetic barriers.
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That's where you need the spark.
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Is it possible that life originated
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multiple times on Earth?
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The way you describe it, you make it sound so easy.
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There's a long distance to go from the first bits
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of prebiotic chemistry to, say, molecular machines
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Is that the first thing that you would say is life?
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Like if I introduce you, the two of you at a party,
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you would say that's a living thing?
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I would say as soon as we introduce genes, information,
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into systems that are growing anyway,
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so I would talk about growing protocells,
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as soon as we introduce even random bits of information
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into there, I'm thinking about RNA molecules, for example,
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doesn't have to have any information in it.
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It can be a completely random sequence.
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But if it's introduced into a system which is in any case
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growing and doubling itself and reproducing itself,
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then any changes in that sequence that allow it
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to do so better or worse are now selected
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by perfectly normal natural selection.
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But it's a system.
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So that's when it becomes alive to my mind.
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That's encompassed into like an object
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that keeps information and evolves that information
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over time or changes that information over time
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in response to the.
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So it's always part of a cell system
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from the very beginning.
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So is your sense that it started only once
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because it's difficult or is it possibly started
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in multiple locations on Earth?
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It's possible it started multiple occasions.
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There's two provisos to that.
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One of them is oxygen makes it impossible really
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for life to start.
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So as soon as we've got oxygen in the atmosphere,
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then life isn't gonna keep starting over.
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So I often get asked by people,
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why can't we have life starting?
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If it's so easy, why can't life start in these vents now?
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And the answer is if you want hydrogen to react with CO2
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and there's oxygen there, hydrogen reacts
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with oxygen instead.
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It's just, you get an explosive reaction that way.
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So it's never gonna happen.
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But for the origin of life earlier than that,
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all we know is that there's a single common ancestor
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There could have been multiple origins
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and they all just disappeared.
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But there's a very interesting deep split in life
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between bacteria and what are called archaea,
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which look just the same as bacteria.
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And they're not quite as diverse, but nearly.
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And they are very different in their biochemistry.
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And so any explanation for the origin of life
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has to account as well for why they're so different
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and yet so similar.
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And that makes me think that life probably
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did arise only once.
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Can you describe the difference that's interesting there?
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Well, how they're similar, how they're different?
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Well, they're different in their membranes primarily.
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They're different in things like DNA replication.
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They use completely different enzymes
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and the genes behind it for replicating DNA.
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So they both have membranes, both have DNA replication.
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The process of that is different.
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They both have DNA.
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The genetic code is identical in them both.
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The way in which it's transcribed into RNA,
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into the copy of a gene,
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and the way that that's then translated into a protein,
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that's all basically the same in both of these groups.
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So they clearly share a common ancestor.
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It's just that they're different
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in fundamental ways as well.
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And if you think about, well,
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what kind of processes could drive that divergence
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I can think about it in terms of membranes,
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in terms of the electrical charges on membranes.
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And it's that that makes me think that there was probably,
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there were probably many unsuccessful attempts
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but only one really successful attempt.
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Can you explain why that divergence
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makes you think there's one common ancestor?
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Okay, can you describe that intuition?
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I'm a little bit unclear about why the divert,
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like the leap from the divergence means there's one.
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Do you mean like the divergence indicates
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that there was a big invention at that time from one source?
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If you'd got, as I imagine it,
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you have a common ancestor living in a hydrothermal vent.
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Let's say there are millions of vents
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and millions of potential common ancestors
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living in all of those vents,
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but only one of them makes it out first.
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Then you could imagine that that cell
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is then gonna kind of take over the world
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and wipe out everything else.
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And so what you would see would be
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a single common ancestor for all of life.
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But with lots of different vent systems
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all kind of vying to create the first life forms,
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So this thing is a cell, a single cell organism.
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We're always talking about populations of cells, but yes.
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These are single celled organisms.
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But the fundamental life form is a single cell, right?
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So like, or, so they're always together
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but they're alone together.
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There's a machinery in each one individual component
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that if left by itself would still work, right?
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It's the unit of selection is a single cell.
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But selection operates over generations
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and changes over generations in populations of cells.
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So it would be impossible to say that a cell
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is the unit of selection in the sense that
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unless you have a population, you can't evolve,
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Right, but there was one Chuck Norris,
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it's an American reference cell
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that made it out of the vents, right?
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Or like the first one.
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So imagine then that there's one cell gets out
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and it takes over the world.
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It gets out in the water, it's like floating around.
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We're deep in the ocean somewhere.
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But actually two cells got out
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and they appear to have got out from the same vent
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because they both share the same code and everything else.
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So unless all the, you know,
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we've got a million different common ancestors
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in all these different vents.
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So either they all have the same code
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and two cells spontaneously merge from different places
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or two different cells, fundamentally different cells
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came from the same place.
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So either way, what are the constraints that say,
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not just one came out or not half a million came out,
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That's kind of a bit strange.
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So how did they come out?
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Well, they come out because what are you doing inside a vent
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is you're relying on the electrical charges down there
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to power this reaction between hydrogen and CO2
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to make yourself grow.
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And when you leave the vent, you've got to do that yourself.
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You've got to power up your own membrane.
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And so the question is,
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well, how do you power up your own membrane?
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And the answer is, well, you need to pump.
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You need to pump ions to give an electrical charge
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So what do the pumps look like?
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Well, the pumps look different in these two groups.
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It's as if they both emerged from a common ancestor.
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As soon as you've got that ancestor,
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things move very quickly and divergently.
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Why does the DNA replication look different?
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Well, it's joined to the membrane.
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The membranes are different.
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The DNA replication is different
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because it's joined to a different kind of membrane.
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So there's interesting, this is detail, you may say,
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but it's also fundamental
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because it's about the two big divergent groups
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of life on Earth that seem to have diverged really early on.
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And it all started from one organism.
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And then that organism just start replicating
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the heck out of itself with some mutation of the DNA.
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So like there's some, there's a competition
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through the process of evolution.
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They're not like trying to beat each other up.
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They're just, they're just trying to live.
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Just replicate us.
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Well, you know, let's not minimize there.
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They're just trying to chill.
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They're trying to relax up.
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There's no, but there's no sense of trying to survive.
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They're replicating.
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I mean, there's no sense
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in which they're trying to do anything.
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They're just kind of an outgrowth of the Earth,
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Of course, the aliens would describe us humans
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They might be right.
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This primitive life.
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It's just ants that are hairless,
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What do you think about the idea of panspermia
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that the theory that life did not originate on Earth
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and was planted here from outer space?
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Or pseudopanspermia, which is like the basic ingredients,
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the magic that you mentioned was planted here
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from elsewhere in space?
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I don't find them helpful.
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That's not to say they're wrong.
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So, pseudotranspermia, the idea that the chemicals,
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the amino acids, the nucleotides
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are being delivered from space.
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Well, we know that happens.
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They're delivered on meteorites, comets, and so on.
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So what do they do next?
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That's, to me, the question.
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Well, what do they do is they stock a soup.
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Presumably, they land in a pond or in an ocean
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or wherever they land.
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And then you end up with a best possible case scenario
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is you end up with a soup of nucleotides
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And then you have to say, so now what happens?
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And the answer is, oh, well, they have to go,
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bloop, become alive.
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So how did they do that?
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And you may as well say then a miracle happened.
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I don't believe in soup.
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I think what we have in event is a continuous conversion,
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a continuous growth, a continuous reaction,
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a continuous converting a flow of molecules
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into more of yourself, you might say,
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even if it's a small bit.
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So you've got a kind of continuous self organization
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and growth from the very beginning.
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You never have that in a soup.
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Isn't the entire universe and living organisms
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in the universe, isn't it just soup all the way down?
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Isn't it all soup?
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No, no, I mean, soup almost by definition
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doesn't have a structure.
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But soup is a collection of ingredients
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that are like randomly interacting.
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Yeah, but they're not random.
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They're not, I mean, we have chemistry going on here.
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We have metal grains forming, which are, you know,
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effective oil water interactions.
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Okay, so it feels like there's a direction to a process,
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like a directed process.
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There are directions to processes, yeah.
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And if you're starting with CO2
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and you've got two reactive fluids being brought together
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and they react, what are they gonna make?
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Well, they make carboxylic acids,
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which include the fatty acids
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that make up the cell membranes.
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And they form directly into bilayer membranes.
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They form like soap bubbles.
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It's spontaneous organization caused by the nature
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And those things are capable of growing
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and are capable in effect of being selected
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even before there are genes.
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We have this, so we have a lot of order
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and that order is coming from thermodynamics.
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And the thermodynamics is always about increasing
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the entropy of the universe.
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But if you have oil and water and they're separating,
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you're increasing the entropy of the universe,
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even though you've got some order,
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which is the soap and the water are not missable.
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Now, to come back to your first question
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about panspermia properly,
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that just pushes the question somewhere else.
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That just, even if it's true,
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maybe life did start on Earth by panspermia.
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So what are the principles
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that govern the emergence of life on any planet?
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It's an assumption that life started here.
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And it's an assumption that it started
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in a hydrothermal vent or it started
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in a terrestrial geothermal system.
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The question is, can we work out a testable sequence
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of events that would lead from one to the other one
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and then test it and see if there's any truth in it or not?
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With panspermia, you can't do any of that.
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But the fundamental question of panspermia is,
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do we have the machine here on Earth to build life?
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Is the vents enough?
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Is oxygen and hydrogen and whatever the heck else we want
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and some source of energy and heat,
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is that enough to build life?
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Well, that's, of course you would say that as a human.
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But there could be aliens right now
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chuckling at that idea.
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Maybe you need some special sauce,
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special elsewhere sauce.
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So your sense is we have everything here.
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I mean, this is precisely the question.
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I like to, when I'm talking in schools,
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I like to start out with the idea
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of we can make a time machine.
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We go back four billion years
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and we go to these environments that people talk about.
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We go to a deep sea hydrothermal vent,
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we go to a kind of Yellowstone Park type place environment
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and we find some slime that looks like we can test it.
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It's made of organic molecules.
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It's got a structure which is not obviously cells,
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but you know, is this a stepping stone
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on the way to life or not?
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Unless we've got an intellectual framework
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that says this is a stepping stone and that's not a step.
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You know, we'd never know.
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We wouldn't know which environment to go to,
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what to look for, how to say this.
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So all we can ever hope for,
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because we're never gonna build that time machine,
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is to have an intellectual framework
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that can explain step by step, experiment by experiment,
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how we go from a sterile inorganic planet
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to living cells as we know them.
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And in that framework, every time you have a choice,
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it could be this way or it could be that way,
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or there's lots of possible forks down that road.
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Did it have to be that way?
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Could it have been the other way?
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And would that have given you life
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with very different properties?
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And so if you come up with a, you know,
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it's a long hypothesis, because as I say,
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we're going from really simple prebiotic chemistry
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all the way through to genes and molecular machines.
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That's a long, long pathway.
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And nobody in the field would agree on the order
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in which these things happened,
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which is not a bad thing,
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because it means that you have to go out
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and do some experiments and try and demonstrate
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that it's possible or not possible.
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It's so freaking amazing that it happened though.
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It feels like there's a direction to the thing.
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Can you try to answer from a framework perspective
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So you said there's some order and yet there's complexity.
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So it's not perfectly ordered.
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There's still some fun in it.
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And it also feels like the processes have a direction
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through the selection mechanism.
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They seem to be building something,
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always better, always improving.
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I mean, maybe it's...
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I mean, that's a perception.
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That's our romanticization of things are always better.
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Things are getting better, we'd like to believe that.
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I mean, you think about the world
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from the point of view of bacteria
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and bacteria are the first things to emerge
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from whatever environment they came from.
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And they dominated the planet very, very quickly.
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And they haven't really changed.
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Four billion years later, they look exactly the same.
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So about four billion years ago,
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bacteria started to really run the show.
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And then nothing happened for a while.
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Nothing happened for two billion years.
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Then after two billion years,
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we see another single event origin, if you like,
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of our own type of cell, the eukaryotic cells.
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So cells with a nucleus and lots of stuff going on inside.
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Another singular origin.
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It only happened once in the history of life on earth.
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Maybe it happened multiple times and there's no evidence.
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Everything just disappeared,
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but we have to at least take it seriously
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that there's something that stops bacteria
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from becoming more complex because they didn't.
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That's a fact that they emerged four billion years ago.
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And something happened two billion years ago,
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but the bacteria themselves didn't change.
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They remain bacterial.
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So there is no trajectory, necessary trajectory
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towards great complexity in human beings at the end of it.
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It's very easy to imagine that without photosynthesis
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arising or without eukaryotes arising,
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that a planet could be full of bacteria and nothing else.
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We'll get to that because that's a brilliant invention.
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And there's a few brilliant invention along the way.
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If you were to show up on earth,
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but to take that time machine,
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and you said, asking yourself the question,
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is this a stepping stone towards life?
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As you step along, when you see the early bacteria,
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how would you know it's life?
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And then this is really important question
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when you go to other planets and look for life.
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Like what is the framework of telling a difference
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between a rock and a bacteria?
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I mean, the question's kind of both impossible to answer
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and trivial at the same time.
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And I don't like to answer it
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because I don't think there is an answer.
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I think we're trying to describe the process of time.
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Those are the most fun questions.
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What do you mean there's no answer?
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No, there is no answer.
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I mean, there's lots of,
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there are at least 40 or 50 different definitions
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of life out there.
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And most of them are, well, obviously bad
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in one way or another.
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I mean, there's freaks.
link |
I can never remember the exact words that people use,
link |
but there's a NASA working definition of life,
link |
which more or less says a system,
link |
which is capable of self sustaining system,
link |
capable of evolution or something along those lines.
link |
And I immediately have a problem
link |
with the word self sustaining
link |
because it's sustained by the environment.
link |
And I know what they're getting at.
link |
I know what they're trying to say,
link |
but I pick a hole in that.
link |
And there's always wags who say,
link |
but you know, by that definition, a rabbit is not alive.
link |
Only a pair of rabbits would be alive
link |
because a single rabbit is incapable of copying itself.
link |
There's all kinds of pedantic, silly,
link |
but also important objections to any hypothesis.
link |
The real question is what is, you know,
link |
we can argue all day or people do argue all day
link |
about is a virus alive or not?
link |
And it depends on the content.
link |
Most biologists could not agree about that.
link |
So then what about a jumping gene,
link |
a retro element or something that is even simpler
link |
than a virus, but it's capable of converting
link |
its environment into a copy of itself.
link |
And that's about as close, this is not a definition,
link |
but this is a kind of a description of life
link |
is that it's able to parasitize the environment.
link |
And that goes for plants as well as animals
link |
and bacteria and viruses to make a relatively exact copy
link |
of themselves, informationally exact copy of themselves.
link |
By the way, it doesn't really have to be
link |
a copy of itself, right?
link |
It just has to be, you have to create something
link |
that's interesting, the way evolution is.
link |
So it is extremely powerful process of evolution,
link |
which is basically make a copy of yourself
link |
and sometimes mess up a little bit.
link |
That seems to work really well.
link |
I wonder if it's possible to mess up big time
link |
as a standard, as a default.
link |
It's called a hopeful monster and in principle it can.
link |
Actually, it turns out, I would say that this is due
link |
a reemergence, this is some amazing work
link |
from Michael Levin, I don't know if you came across him,
link |
but if you haven't interviewed him,
link |
you should interview him about, yeah.
link |
I'm talking to him in a few days.
link |
So I mentioned, there's two people that Andre,
link |
if I may mention, Andre Kapathe is a friend
link |
who's really admired in the AI community,
link |
said you absolutely must talk to Michael and to Nick.
link |
So of course, I'm a huge fan of yours,
link |
so I'm really fortunate that we can actually
link |
Anyway, you were saying?
link |
Well, Michael Levin is doing amazing work,
link |
basically about the way in which electrical fields
link |
control development and he's done some work
link |
with planarian worms, so flat worms,
link |
where he'll tell you all about this,
link |
so I won't say any more than the minimum,
link |
but basically you can cut their head off
link |
and they'll redevelop a different, a new head.
link |
But the head that they develop depends,
link |
if you knock out just one iron pump in a membrane,
link |
so you change the electrical circuitry just a little bit,
link |
you can come up with a completely different head.
link |
It can be a head which is similar to those
link |
that diverged 150 million years ago
link |
or it can be a head which no one's ever seen before,
link |
a different kind of head.
link |
Now that is really, you might say, a hopeful monster.
link |
This is a kind of leap into a different direction.
link |
The only question for natural selection is does it work?
link |
Is the change itself feasible as a single change?
link |
And the answer is yes, it's just a small change
link |
And the second thing is it gives rise
link |
to a completely different morphology.
link |
And if it works, that can easily be a shift.
link |
But for it to be a speciation, for it to continue,
link |
for it to give rise to a different morphology over time,
link |
then it has to be perpetuated.
link |
So that shift, that change in that one gene
link |
has to work well enough that it is selected and it goes on.
link |
And copied enough times to where you can really test it.
link |
So the likelihood, it would be lost,
link |
but there will be some occasions where it survives.
link |
And yes, the idea that we can have sudden, fairly abrupt
link |
changes in evolution, I think it's time for a rebirth.
link |
What about this idea that kind of trying to
link |
mathematize a definition of life and saying how many steps,
link |
the shortest amount of steps it takes to build the thing,
link |
almost like an engineering view of it?
link |
Ah, I like that view.
link |
Because I think that in a sense, that's not very far away
link |
from what a hypothesis needs to do
link |
to be a testable hypothesis for the origin of life.
link |
You need to spell out, here's each step,
link |
and here's the experiment to do for each step.
link |
The idea that we can do it in the lab,
link |
some people say, oh, we'll have created life
link |
within five years, but ask them what they mean by life.
link |
We have a planet four billion years ago
link |
with these vent systems across the entire surface
link |
of the planet, and we have millions of years if we wanted.
link |
I have a feeling that we're not talking about
link |
millions of years.
link |
I have a feeling we're talking about maybe millions
link |
of nanoseconds or picoseconds.
link |
We're talking about chemistry, which is happening quickly.
link |
But we still need to constrain those steps,
link |
but we've got a planet doing similar chemistry.
link |
You asked about a trajectory.
link |
The trajectory is the planetary trajectory.
link |
The planet has properties.
link |
Basically, it's got a lot of iron at the center of it.
link |
It's got a lot of electrons at the center of it.
link |
It's more oxidized on the outside,
link |
partly because of the sun and partly because the heat
link |
of volcanoes puts out oxidized gases.
link |
So the planet is a battery.
link |
It's a giant battery, and we have a flow of electrons
link |
going from inside to outside in these hydrothermal vents,
link |
and that's the same topology that a cell has.
link |
A cell is basically just a micro version of the planet,
link |
and there is a trajectory in all of that,
link |
and there's an inevitability that certain types
link |
of chemical reaction are going to be favored over others,
link |
and there's an inevitability in what happens in water,
link |
the chemistry that happens in water.
link |
Some will be immiscible with water and will form membranes
link |
and will form insoluble structures,
link |
and nobody really understands water very well,
link |
and it's another big question.
link |
For experiments on the origin of life, what do you put it in?
link |
What kind of structure do we want to induce in this water?
link |
Because the last thing it's likely to be
link |
is just kind of bulk water.
link |
How fundamental is water to life, would you say?
link |
I would say pretty fundamental.
link |
I wouldn't like to say it's impossible for life
link |
to start any other way, but water is everywhere.
link |
Water's extremely good at what it does,
link |
and carbon works in water especially well.
link |
So those things, and carbon is everywhere.
link |
So those things together make me think probabilistically,
link |
if we found a thousand life forms, 995 of them
link |
would be carbon based and living in water.
link |
Now the reverse question, if you found a puddle of water
link |
elsewhere and some carbon, no, just a puddle of water.
link |
Is a puddle of water a pretty damn good indication
link |
that life either exists here or has once existed here?
link |
So it doesn't work the other way.
link |
I think you need a living planet.
link |
You need a planet which is capable
link |
of turning over its surface.
link |
It needs to be a planet with water.
link |
It needs to be capable of bringing those electrons
link |
from inside to the outside.
link |
It needs to turn over its surface.
link |
It needs to make that water work and turn it into hydrogen.
link |
So I think you need a living planet.
link |
But once you've got the living planet,
link |
I think the rest of it is kind of thermodynamics all the way.
link |
So if you were to run Earth over a million times up
link |
to this point, maybe beyond, to the end,
link |
let's run it to the end, what is it?
link |
How much variety is there?
link |
You kind of spoke to this trajectory
link |
that the environment dictates chemically,
link |
I don't know in which other way, spiritually,
link |
I don't know, like dictates kind of the direction
link |
of this giant machine that seems chaotic,
link |
but it does seem to have order in the steps it's taking.
link |
How often will life, how often will bacteria emerge?
link |
How often will something like humans emerge?
link |
How much variety do you think there would be?
link |
I think at the level of bacteria, not much variety.
link |
I think we would get, that's how many times
link |
you say you want to run it, a million times.
link |
I would say at least a few hundred thousand will get bacteria again.
link |
Because I think there's some level of inevitability
link |
that a wet rocky planet will give rise
link |
through the same processes to something very close.
link |
I think this is not something I'd have thought
link |
a few years ago, but working with a PhD student
link |
of mine, Stuart Harrison, he's been thinking
link |
about the genetic code, and we've just been publishing
link |
on that, there are patterns that you can discern in the code,
link |
or he has discerned in the code,
link |
that if you think about them in terms of,
link |
we start with CO2 and hydrogen,
link |
and these are the first steps of biochemistry,
link |
you come up with a code which is very similar
link |
to the code that we see.
link |
So it wouldn't surprise me any longer
link |
if we found life on Mars and it had a genetic code
link |
that was not very different to the genetic code
link |
that we have here, without it just being transferred across.
link |
There's some inevitability about the whole
link |
of the beginnings of life, in my view.
link |
That's really promising, because if the basic chemistry
link |
is tightly linked to the genetic code,
link |
that means we can interact with other life
link |
if it exists out there.
link |
Well, that's potentially.
link |
That's really exciting, if that's the case.
link |
Okay, but then bacteria.
link |
We've got bacteria.
link |
How easy is photosynthesis?
link |
Much harder, I would say.
link |
Let's actually go there.
link |
Let's go through the inventions.
link |
What is photosynthesis?
link |
And why is it hard?
link |
Well, there are different forms.
link |
I mean, basically, you're taking hydrogen
link |
and you're sticking it onto CO2,
link |
and it's powered by the sun.
link |
Question is, where are you taking the hydrogen from?
link |
And in photosynthesis that we know in plants,
link |
it's coming from water.
link |
So you're using the power of the sun to split water,
link |
take out the hydrogen, stick it onto CO2,
link |
and the oxygen is a waste product,
link |
and you just throw it out, throw it away.
link |
So it's the single greatest planetary pollution event
link |
in the whole history of the Earth.
link |
The pollutant being oxygen.
link |
It also made possible animals.
link |
You can't have large, active animals
link |
without an oxygenated atmosphere,
link |
at least not in the sense that we know on Earth.
link |
So that's a really big invention
link |
in the history of Earth. Huge invention, yes.
link |
And it happened once.
link |
There's a few things that happen once on Earth,
link |
and you're always stuck with this problem.
link |
Once it happened, did it become so good so quickly
link |
that it precluded the same thing happening ever again?
link |
Or are there other reasons?
link |
And we really have to look at each one in turn
link |
and think, why did it only happen once?
link |
In this case, it's really difficult to split water.
link |
It requires a lot of power,
link |
and that power, you're effectively separating charge
link |
across a membrane, and the way in which you do it,
link |
if it doesn't all rush back
link |
and kind of cause an explosion right at the site,
link |
requires really careful wiring.
link |
And that wiring, it can't be easy to get it right
link |
because the plants that we see around us,
link |
they have chloroplasts.
link |
Those chloroplasts were cyanobacteria ones.
link |
Those cyanobacteria are the only group of bacteria
link |
that can do that type of photosynthesis.
link |
So there's plenty of opportunity.
link |
So not even many bacteria.
link |
So who invented photosynthesis?
link |
The cyanobacteria, or their ancestors.
link |
And there's not many?
link |
No other bacteria can do
link |
what's called oxygenic photosynthesis.
link |
Lots of other bacteria can split.
link |
I mean, you can take your hydrogen from somewhere else.
link |
You can take it from hydrogen sulfide
link |
bubbling out of a hydrothermal vent.
link |
Grab your two hydrogens.
link |
The sulfur is the waste now.
link |
You can do it from iron.
link |
You can take electrons.
link |
So the early oceans were probably full of iron.
link |
You can take an electron from ferrous iron,
link |
so iron two plus and make it iron three plus,
link |
which now precipitates as rust,
link |
and you take a proton from the acidic early ocean,
link |
Now you've got a hydrogen atom.
link |
Stick it onto CO2.
link |
You've just done the trick.
link |
The trouble is you bury yourself in rusty iron.
link |
And with sulfur, you can bury yourself in sulfur.
link |
One of the reasons oxygenic photosynthesis
link |
is so much better is that the waste product is oxygen,
link |
which just bubbles away.
link |
That seems like extremely unlikely,
link |
and it's extremely essential
link |
for the evolution of complex organisms
link |
because of all the oxygen.
link |
Yeah, and that didn't accumulate quickly either.
link |
So it's converting, what is it?
link |
It's converting energy from the sun
link |
and the resource of water
link |
into the resource needed for animals.
link |
Both resources needed for animals.
link |
We need to eat, and we need to burn the food,
link |
and we're eating plants,
link |
which are getting their energy from the sun,
link |
and we're burning it with their waste product,
link |
which is the oxygen.
link |
So there's a lot of kind of circularity in that,
link |
but without an oxygenated planet,
link |
you couldn't really have predation.
link |
You can have animals,
link |
but you can't really have animals
link |
that go around and eat each other.
link |
You can't have ecosystems as we know them.
link |
Well, let's actually step back.
link |
What about eukaryotic versus prokaryotic cells, prokaryotes?
link |
What are each of those,
link |
and how big of an invention is that?
link |
I personally think that's the single biggest invention
link |
in the whole history of life.
link |
Yeah, so I mentioned bacteria and archaea.
link |
These are both prokaryotes.
link |
They're basically small cells that don't have a nucleus.
link |
If you look at them under a microscope,
link |
you don't see much going on.
link |
If you look at them under a super resolution microscope,
link |
then they're fantastically complex.
link |
In terms of their molecular machinery, they're amazing.
link |
In terms of their morphological appearance
link |
under a microscope, they're really small and really simple.
link |
The earliest life that we can physically see
link |
on the planet are stromatolites,
link |
which are made by things like cyanobacteria,
link |
and they're large superstructures.
link |
Effectively, biofilms plated on top of each other,
link |
and you end up with quite large structures
link |
that you can see in the fossil record.
link |
But they never came up with animals.
link |
They never came up with plants.
link |
They came up with multicellular things,
link |
filamentous cyanobacteria, for example.
link |
They're just long strings of cells.
link |
But the origin of the eukaryotic cell
link |
seems to have been what's called an endosymbiosis,
link |
so one cell gets inside another cell.
link |
And I think that that's transformed
link |
the energetic possibilities of life.
link |
So what we end up with is a kind of supercharged cell,
link |
which can have a much larger nucleus
link |
with many more genes, all supported.
link |
If you think about it, you could think about it
link |
as multi bacterial power without the overhead.
link |
So you've got a cell and it's got bacteria living in it,
link |
and those bacteria are providing it
link |
with the energy currency it needs.
link |
But each bacterium has a genome of its own,
link |
which costs a fair amount of energy to express,
link |
to kind of turn over and convert into proteins and so on.
link |
What the mitochondria did,
link |
which are these power packs in our own cells,
link |
they were bacteria once,
link |
and they threw away virtually all their genes.
link |
They've only got a few left.
link |
So mitochondria is, like you said,
link |
is the bacteria that got inside a cell
link |
and then throw away all this stuff it doesn't need to,
link |
survive inside the cell, and then kept what?
link |
So what we end up with,
link |
so it kept always a handful of genes.
link |
In our own case, 37 genes.
link |
But there's a few protists, which are single celled things
link |
that have got as many as 70 or 80 genes.
link |
So it's not always the same, but it's always a small number.
link |
And you can think of it as a paired down power pack
link |
where the control unit has really been,
link |
has been kind of paired down to almost nothing.
link |
So you're putting out the same power,
link |
but the investment in the overheads is really paired down.
link |
That means that you can support
link |
a much larger nuclear genome.
link |
So we've gone up in the number of genes,
link |
but also the amount of power you have
link |
to convert those genes into proteins.
link |
We've gone up about fourfold in the number of genes,
link |
but in terms of the size of genomes
link |
and your ability to make the building blocks,
link |
make the proteins, we've gone up 100,000 fold or more.
link |
So it's huge step change in the possibilities of evolution.
link |
And it's interesting then that the only two occasions
link |
that complex life has arisen on Earth,
link |
plants and animals,
link |
fungi you could say are complex as well,
link |
but they don't form such complex morphology
link |
as plants and animals.
link |
Start with a single cell.
link |
They start with an oocyte and a sperm
link |
fused together to make a zygote.
link |
So we start development with a single cell
link |
and all the cells in the organism have identical DNA.
link |
And you switch off in the brain,
link |
you switch off these genes and you switch on those genes
link |
and liver, you switch off those
link |
and you switch on a different set.
link |
And the standard evolutionary explanation for that
link |
is that you're restricting conflict.
link |
You don't have a load of genetically different cells
link |
that are all fighting each other.
link |
The trouble with bacteria, they form these biofilms
link |
and they're all genetically different.
link |
And effectively they're incapable
link |
of that level of cooperation.
link |
They would get in a fight.
link |
Okay, so why is this such a difficult invention
link |
of getting this bacteria inside
link |
and becoming an engine which the mitochondria is?
link |
Why do you assign it such great importance?
link |
Is it great importance in terms of the difficulty
link |
of how it was to achieve or great importance
link |
in terms of the impact it had on life?
link |
It had a huge impact on life
link |
because if that had not happened,
link |
you can be certain that life on earth
link |
would be bacterial only.
link |
And that took a really long time too.
link |
It took 2 billion years.
link |
And it hasn't happened since to the best of our knowledge.
link |
So it looks as if it's genuinely difficult.
link |
And if you think about it then
link |
from just an informational perspective,
link |
you think bacteria have got,
link |
they structure their information differently.
link |
So a bacterial cell has a small genome,
link |
you might have 4,000 genes in it,
link |
but a single E. coli cell has access
link |
to about 30,000 genes potentially.
link |
It's got a kind of metagenome
link |
where other E. coli out there
link |
have got different gene sets
link |
and they can switch them around between themselves.
link |
And so you can generate a huge amount of variation
link |
and they've got more,
link |
an E. coli metagenome is larger than the human genome.
link |
We own 20,000 genes or something.
link |
So, and they've had 4 billion years of evolution
link |
to work out what can I do
link |
and what can't I do with this metagenome?
link |
And the answer is you're stuck, you're still bacteria.
link |
So they have explored genetic sequence space
link |
far more thoroughly than eukaryotes ever did
link |
because they've had twice as long at least
link |
and they've got much larger populations
link |
and they never got around this problem.
link |
So why can't they?
link |
It seems as if you can't solve it with information alone.
link |
So what's the problem?
link |
The problem is structure.
link |
If the very first cells needed an electrical charge
link |
on their membrane to grow and in bacteria,
link |
it's the outer membrane that surrounds the cell
link |
which is electrically charged.
link |
You try and scale that up
link |
and you've got a fundamental design problem,
link |
you've got an engineering problem.
link |
And there are examples of it
link |
and what we see in all these cases
link |
is what's known as extreme polyploidy,
link |
which is to say they have tens of thousands of copies
link |
of their complete genome,
link |
which is energetically hugely expensive
link |
and you end up with a large bacteria
link |
with no further development.
link |
What you need is to incorporate
link |
these electrically charged power pack units inside
link |
with their control units intact
link |
and for them not to conflict so much with the host cell
link |
that it all goes wrong.
link |
Perhaps it goes wrong more often than not.
link |
And then you change the topology of the cell.
link |
Now you don't necessarily have any more DNA
link |
than a giant bacterium with extreme polyploidy,
link |
but what you've got is an asymmetry.
link |
You now have a giant nuclear genome
link |
which surrounded by lots of subsidiary energetic genomes
link |
that do all the, they're the control units
link |
that are doing all the control of energy generation.
link |
Could this have been done gradually
link |
or does it have to be done,
link |
the power pack has to be all intact
link |
and ready to go and working?
link |
I mean, it's a kind of step change
link |
in the possibilities of evolution,
link |
but it doesn't happen overnight.
link |
It's gonna still require multiple, multiple generations.
link |
So it could take millions of years.
link |
It could take shorter times.
link |
There's another thing I would like to put the number of steps
link |
and try and work out what's required at each step.
link |
And we are trying to do that with sex for example.
link |
You can't have a very large genome
link |
unless you have sex at that point.
link |
So what are the changes to go
link |
from bacterial recombination to eukaryotic recombination?
link |
What do you need to do?
link |
Why do we go from passing around bits of DNA
link |
as if it's loose change to fusing cells together,
link |
lining up the chromosomes,
link |
recombining across the chromosomes,
link |
and then going through two rounds of cell division
link |
to produce your gametes?
link |
All eukaryotes do it that way.
link |
So again, why switch?
link |
What are the drivers here?
link |
So there's a lot of time, there's a lot of evolution,
link |
but as soon as you've got cells living inside another cell,
link |
what you've got is a new design.
link |
You've got new potential that you didn't have before.
link |
So the cell living inside another cell, that design
link |
allows for better storage of information,
link |
better use of energy, more delegation,
link |
like a hierarchical control of the whole thing.
link |
And then somehow that leads to ability
link |
to have multi cell organisms.
link |
I'm not sure that you have hierarchical control necessarily,
link |
but you've got a system where you can have
link |
a much larger information storage depot in the nucleus.
link |
You can have a much larger genome.
link |
And that allows multicellularity, yes,
link |
because it allows you, it's a funny thing,
link |
to have an animal where I have 70% of my genes
link |
switched on in my brain,
link |
and a different 50% switched on in my liver or something,
link |
you've got to have all those genes in the egg cell
link |
at the very beginning,
link |
and you've got to have a program of development
link |
which says, okay, you guys switch off those genes
link |
and switch on those genes, and you guys, you do that.
link |
But all the genes are there at the beginning.
link |
That means you've got to have a lot of genes in one cell
link |
and you've got to be able to maintain them.
link |
And the problem with bacteria is they don't get close
link |
to having enough genes in one cell.
link |
So if you were to try and make a multicellular organism
link |
from bacteria, you'd bring different types
link |
of bacteria together and hope they'll cooperate.
link |
And the reality is they don't.
link |
That's really, really tough to do.
link |
We know they don't because it doesn't exist.
link |
We have the data as far as we know.
link |
I'm sure there's a few special ones
link |
and they dead off quickly.
link |
I'd love to know some of the most fun things
link |
bacteria have done since.
link |
Oh, there's a few.
link |
I mean, they can do some pretty funky things.
link |
And this is broad brushstroke that I'm talking about.
link |
Generally speaking.
link |
So how was, so another fun invention.
link |
Us humans seem to utilize it well,
link |
but you say it's also very important early on is sex.
link |
Just asking for a friend.
link |
And when was it invented and how hard was it to invent,
link |
just as you were saying, and why was it invented?
link |
Why, how hard was it and when?
link |
I have a PhD student who's been working on this
link |
and we've just published a couple of papers on sex.
link |
What do you publish?
link |
Does biology, is it biology, genetics, journals?
link |
This is actually PNAS,
link |
which is Proceedings of the National Academy.
link |
Broad, big, big picture stuff.
link |
Everyone's interested in sex.
link |
And the job of a biologist is to make sex dull.
link |
Yes, yeah, that's a beautiful way to put it.
link |
Okay, so when was it invented?
link |
It was invented with eukaryotes about two billion years ago.
link |
All eukaryotes share the same basic mechanism
link |
that you produce gametes, the gametes fuse together.
link |
So a gamete is the egg cell and the sperm.
link |
They're not necessarily even different in size or shape.
link |
So the simplest eukaryotes produce
link |
what are called motile gametes.
link |
They're all like sperm and they all swim around.
link |
They find each other, they fuse together.
link |
They don't have kind of much going on there beyond that.
link |
And then these are haploid,
link |
which is to say we all have two copies of our genome
link |
and the gametes have only a single copy of the genome.
link |
So when they fuse together, you now become diploid again,
link |
which is to say you now have two copies of your genome.
link |
And what you do is you line them all up
link |
and then you double everything.
link |
So now we have four copies of the complete genome.
link |
And then we crisscross between all of these things.
link |
So we take a bit from here and stick it on there
link |
and a bit from here and we stick it on here.
link |
That's recombination.
link |
And then we go through two rounds of cell division.
link |
So we divide in half.
link |
So now the two daughter cells have two copies
link |
and we divide in half again.
link |
Now we have some gametes,
link |
each of which has got a single copy of the genome.
link |
And that's the basic ground plan
link |
for what's called meiosis and Syngami.
link |
That's basically sex.
link |
And it happens at the level of single celled organisms.
link |
And it happens pretty much the same way in plants
link |
and pretty much the same way in animals and so on.
link |
And it's not found in any bacteria.
link |
They switch things around using the same machinery
link |
and they take up a bit of DNA from the environment.
link |
They take out this bit and stick in that bit
link |
and it's the same molecular machinery they're using to do it.
link |
So what about the kind of, you said, find each other,
link |
this kind of imperative, find each other.
link |
Well, you've got a few cells together.
link |
So the bottom line on all of this is bacteria.
link |
I mean, it's kind of simple when you've figured it out
link |
and figuring it out, this is not me,
link |
this is my PhD student, Marco Colnaghi.
link |
And in effect, if you're doing lateral,
link |
you're a Nicoli cell, you've got 4,000 genes.
link |
You wanna scale up to a eukaryotic size.
link |
I wanna have 20,000 genes.
link |
And I need to maintain my genome
link |
so it doesn't get shot to pieces by mutations.
link |
And I'm gonna do it by lateral gene transfer.
link |
So I know I've got a mutation in a gene.
link |
I don't know which gene it is because I'm not sentient,
link |
but I know I can't grow.
link |
I know all my regulation systems are saying,
link |
something wrong here, something wrong, pick up some DNA,
link |
pick up a bit of DNA from the environment.
link |
If you've got a small genome,
link |
the chances of you picking up the right bit of DNA
link |
from the environment is much higher
link |
than if you've got a genome of 20,000 genes.
link |
To do that, you've effectively got to be picking up DNA
link |
all the time, all day long and nothing else.
link |
And you're still gonna get the wrong DNA.
link |
You've got to pick up large chunks.
link |
And in the end, you've got to align them.
link |
You're forced into sex, to coin a phrase.
link |
So there is a kind of incentive.
link |
If you wanna have a large genome,
link |
you've got to prevent it mutating to nothing.
link |
That will happen with bacteria.
link |
This is another reason why bacteria
link |
can't have a large genome.
link |
But as soon as you give them the power pack,
link |
as soon as you give eukaryotic cells the power pack
link |
that allows them to increase the size of their genome,
link |
then you face the pressure
link |
that you've got to maintain its quality.
link |
You've got to stop it just mutating away.
link |
What about sexual selection?
link |
So the finding, like, I don't like this one.
link |
I don't like this one.
link |
This one seems all right.
link |
Like, what's the...
link |
At which point does it become less random?
link |
It's hard to know.
link |
Because eukaryotes just kind of float around.
link |
Just kind of have...
link |
Yeah, I mean, is there sexual selection
link |
in single celled eukaryotes?
link |
There probably is.
link |
It's just that I don't know very much about it.
link |
By the time we get onto...
link |
You don't hang out with the eukaryotes.
link |
Well, I do all the time, but...
link |
But you can't communicate with them yet.
link |
Yeah, a peacock or something.
link |
The kind of standard answer,
link |
this is not quite what I work on,
link |
but the standard answer is that it's female mate choice.
link |
She is looking for good genes.
link |
And if you can have a tail that's like this
link |
and still survive, still be alive,
link |
not actually have been taken down by the nearest predator,
link |
then you must've got pretty good genes
link |
because despite this handicap, you're able to survive.
link |
So those are like human interpretable things,
link |
like with a peacock.
link |
But I wonder, I'm sure echoes of the same thing
link |
are there with more primitive organisms.
link |
Basically your PR, like how you advertise yourself
link |
that you're worthy of.
link |
So one big advertisement is the fact
link |
that you survived it all.
link |
Let me give you one beautiful example of an algal bloom.
link |
And this can be a sign of bacteria.
link |
It's gonna be in bacteria.
link |
So if suddenly you pump nitrate or phosphate
link |
or something into the ocean and everything goes green,
link |
you end up with all this algae growing there.
link |
A viral infection or something like that
link |
can kill the entire bloom overnight.
link |
And it's not that the virus takes out everything overnight.
link |
It's that most of the cells in that bloom kill themselves
link |
before the virus can get onto them.
link |
And it's through a form of cell death
link |
called programmed cell death.
link |
And we do the same things.
link |
It's how we have the gaps between our fingers and so on.
link |
It's how we craft synapses in the brain.
link |
It's fundamental again to multicellular life.
link |
They have the same machinery in these algal blooms.
link |
How do they know who dies?
link |
The answer is they will often put out a toxin.
link |
And that toxin is kind of a challenge to you.
link |
Either you can cope with the toxin or you can't.
link |
If you can cope with it, you form a spore
link |
and you will go on to become the next generation.
link |
You're forming kind of a resistance spore.
link |
You sink down a little bit, you get out of the way,
link |
you're out of the, you can't be attacked by a virus
link |
if you're a spore or it's not so easily.
link |
Whereas if you can't deal with that toxin,
link |
you pull the plug and you trigger your death apparatus
link |
and you kill yourself.
link |
Oh, so it's truly life and death selection.
link |
Yeah, so it's really, it's a challenge.
link |
And this is a bit like sexual selection.
link |
It's not so, they're all pretty much genetically identical,
link |
but they've had different life histories.
link |
So have you had a tough day?
link |
Did you happen to get infected by this virus?
link |
Or did you run out of iron?
link |
Or did you get a bit too much sun?
link |
Whatever it may be, if this extra stress of the toxin
link |
just pushes you over the edge,
link |
then you have this binary choice.
link |
Either you're the next generation
link |
or you kill yourself now using this same machinery.
link |
It's also actually exactly the way I approach dating,
link |
but that's probably why I'm single.
link |
Okay, what about if we can step back, DNA?
link |
Just mechanism of storing information.
link |
RNA, DNA, how big of an invention was that?
link |
That seems to be, that seems to be fundamental
link |
to like something deep within what life is,
link |
is the ability, as you said,
link |
to kind of store and propagate information.
link |
But then you also kind of infer that
link |
with your and your students work,
link |
that there's a deep connection between the chemistry
link |
and the ability to have this kind of genetic information.
link |
So how big of an invention is it
link |
to have a nice representation,
link |
nice hard drive for info to pass on?
link |
I mean, but when I was talking about the code,
link |
you see the code in RNA as well.
link |
And RNA almost certainly came first.
link |
And there's been an idea going back decades
link |
called the RNA world,
link |
because RNA in theory can copy itself
link |
and can catalyze reactions.
link |
So it kind of cuts out this chicken and egg loop.
link |
So DNA as possible is not that special.
link |
So RNA, RNA is the thing that does the work really.
link |
And the code lies in RNA.
link |
The code lies in the interactions
link |
between RNA and amino acids.
link |
And it still is there today in the ribosome, for example,
link |
which is just kind of a giant ribozyme,
link |
which is to say it's an enzyme that's made of RNA.
link |
So getting to RNA, I suspect is probably not that hard,
link |
but getting from RNA, how do you,
link |
you know, there's multiple different types of RNA now.
link |
How do you distinguish?
link |
This is something we're actively thinking about.
link |
How do you distinguish between,
link |
you know, a random population of RNA?
link |
Some of them go on to become messenger RNA.
link |
This is the transcript of the code
link |
of the gene that you want to make.
link |
Some of them become transfer RNA,
link |
which is kind of the unit that holds the amino acid
link |
that's going to be polymerized.
link |
Some of them become ribosomal RNA,
link |
which is the machine which is joining them all up together.
link |
How do they discriminate themselves?
link |
And, you know, is some kind of phase transition
link |
It's a difficult question.
link |
And we're now in the region of biology
link |
where information is coming in.
link |
But the thing about RNA is very, very good at what it does.
link |
But the largest genome supported by RNA
link |
are RNA viruses like HIV, for example.
link |
They're pretty small.
link |
And so there's a limit to how complex life could be
link |
unless you come up with DNA,
link |
which chemically is a really small change.
link |
But how easy it is to make that change,
link |
I don't really know.
link |
As soon as you've got DNA,
link |
then you've got an amazingly stable molecule
link |
for information storage.
link |
And you can do absolutely anything.
link |
But how likely that transition from RNA to DNA was,
link |
I don't know either.
link |
How much possibility is there for variety
link |
in ways to store information?
link |
Because it seems to be very,
link |
there's specific characteristics
link |
about the programming language of DNA.
link |
Yeah, there's a lot of work going on
link |
on what's called the xenodNA or RNA.
link |
Can we replace the bases themselves,
link |
the letters, if you like, in RNA or DNA?
link |
Can we replace the backbone?
link |
Can we replace, for example, phosphate with arsenate?
link |
Can we replace the sugar ribose or deoxyribose
link |
with a different sugar?
link |
And the answer is yes, you can.
link |
Within limits, there's not an infinite space there.
link |
Arsenate doesn't really work
link |
if the bonds are not as strong as phosphate.
link |
It's probably quite hard to replace phosphate.
link |
It's possible to do it.
link |
The question to me is why is it this way?
link |
Is it because there was some form of selection
link |
that this is better than the other forms
link |
and there were lots of competing forms
link |
of information storage early on
link |
and this one was the one that worked out?
link |
Or was it kind of channeled that way,
link |
that these are the molecules that you're dealing with
link |
And I'm increasingly thinking it's that way,
link |
that we're channeled towards ribose, phosphate,
link |
and the bases that are used.
link |
But there are 200 different letters
link |
kicking around out there that could have been used.
link |
It's such an interesting question.
link |
If you look in the programming world in computer science,
link |
there's a programming language called JavaScript,
link |
which was written super quickly.
link |
It's a giant mess, but it took over the world.
link |
And it was kind of a...
link |
Sounds very biological.
link |
It was kind of a running joke that like,
link |
like surely this can't be,
link |
this is a terrible programming language.
link |
It's a giant mess.
link |
It's full of bugs.
link |
It's so easy to write really crappy code,
link |
but it took over all a front end development
link |
in the web browser.
link |
If you have any kind of dynamic interactive website,
link |
it's usually running JavaScript.
link |
And it's now taking over much of the backend,
link |
which is like the serious heavy duty computational stuff.
link |
And it's become super fast
link |
with the different compilation engines that are running it.
link |
So it's like, it really took over the world.
link |
It's very possible that this initially crappy derided language
link |
actually takes everything over.
link |
And then the question is,
link |
did human civilization always strive towards JavaScript?
link |
Or was JavaScript just the first programming language
link |
that ran on the browser and still sticky?
link |
The first is the sticky one.
link |
And so it wins over anything else because it was first.
link |
And I don't think that's answerable, right?
link |
But it's good to ask that.
link |
I suppose in the lab,
link |
you can't run it with programming languages,
link |
but in biology you can probably do some kind of
link |
small scale evolutionary test to try to infer,
link |
I mean, in a way we've got the hardware
link |
and the software here.
link |
And the hardware is maybe the DNA and the RNA itself.
link |
And then the software perhaps is more about the code.
link |
Did the code have to be this way?
link |
Could it have been a different way?
link |
People talk about the optimization of the code
link |
and there's some suggestion for that.
link |
I think it's weak actually.
link |
But you could imagine you could come out
link |
with a million different codes
link |
and this would be one of the best ones.
link |
Well, we don't know this.
link |
Well, I mean, people have tried to model it
link |
based on the effect that mutations would have.
link |
So no, you're right.
link |
We don't know because that's a single assumption
link |
that a mutation is what's being selected on there.
link |
And there's other possibilities too.
link |
I mean, there does seem to be a resilience
link |
and a redundancy to the whole thing.
link |
It's hard to mess up and the way you mess it up
link |
often is likely to produce interesting results.
link |
Are you talking about JavaScript or the genetic code now?
link |
Yeah, well, I mean, it's almost,
link |
biology is underpinned by this kind of mess as well.
link |
And you look at the human genome and it's full of stuff
link |
that is really either broken or dysfunctional
link |
or was a virus once, whatever it may be.
link |
And somehow it works.
link |
And maybe we need a lot of this mess.
link |
We know that some functional genes are taken from this mess.
link |
So what about, you mentioned the predatory behavior.
link |
We talked about sex.
link |
What about violence, predator and prey dynamics?
link |
When was that invented?
link |
And poetic and biological ways of putting it,
link |
how do you describe predator prey relationship?
link |
Is it a beautiful dance or is it a violent atrocity?
link |
Well, I guess it's both, isn't it?
link |
I mean, when does it start?
link |
It starts in bacteria.
link |
You see these amazing predators.
link |
Della Vibrio is one that Lynn Margulis
link |
used to talk about a lot.
link |
It's got a kind of a drill piece
link |
that drills through the wall
link |
and the membrane of the bacterium.
link |
And then it effectively eats the bacterium
link |
from just inside the periplasmic space
link |
and makes copies of itself that way.
link |
So that's straight predation.
link |
There are predators among bacteria.
link |
So predation in that, sorry to interrupt,
link |
means you murder somebody
link |
and use their body as a resource in some way.
link |
But it's not parasitic in that
link |
you need them to be still alive.
link |
No, no, I mean, predation is you kill them, really.
link |
Parasites, so you kind of live on them.
link |
Okay, so, but it seems the predator is the really popular.
link |
So what we see if we go back 560, 570 million years
link |
before the Cambrian explosion,
link |
there is what's known as the Ediacaran fauna,
link |
or sometimes they call Vendobionts,
link |
which is a lovely name.
link |
And it's not obvious that they're animals at all.
link |
They're stalked things.
link |
They often have fronds that look a lot like leaves
link |
with kind of fractal branching patterns on them.
link |
And the thing is, they're found,
link |
sometimes geologists can figure out the environment
link |
that they were in and say,
link |
this is more than 200 meters deep
link |
because there's no sign of any waves.
link |
There's no storm damage down here, this kind of thing.
link |
They were more than 200 meters deep,
link |
so they're definitely not photosynthetic.
link |
These are animals and they're filter feeders.
link |
And we know sponges and corals and things
link |
are filter feeding animals.
link |
They're stuck to the spot.
link |
And little bits of carbon that come their way,
link |
they filter it out and that's what they're eating.
link |
So no predation involved in this,
link |
beyond stuff just dies anyway.
link |
And it feels like a very gentle, rather beautiful,
link |
rather limited world, you might say.
link |
There's not a lot going on there.
link |
And something changes.
link |
Oxygen definitely changes during this period.
link |
Other things may have changed as well.
link |
But the next thing you really see in the fossil record
link |
is the Cambrian explosion.
link |
And what do we see there?
link |
We're now seeing animals that we would recognize.
link |
They've got eyes, they've got claws, they've got shells.
link |
They're plainly killing things or running away and hiding.
link |
And so we've gone from a rather gentle but limited world
link |
to a rather vicious, unpleasant world that we recognize
link |
and which leads to kind of arms races,
link |
evolutionary arms races, which again is something
link |
that when we think about a nuclear arms race,
link |
we think, Jesus, we don't want to go there.
link |
It's not done anybody any good.
link |
In some ways, maybe it does do good.
link |
I don't want to make an argument for nuclear arms.
link |
But predation as a mechanism forces organisms
link |
to adapt to change to be better to escape or to kill.
link |
If you need to eat, then you've got to eat.
link |
And a cheetah's not going to run at that speed
link |
unless it has to because the zebra is capable of escaping.
link |
So it leads to much greater feats of evolution
link |
than would ever have been possible without it.
link |
And in the end, to a much more beautiful world.
link |
And so it's not all bad by any means.
link |
But the thing is you can't have this
link |
if you don't have an oxygenated planet.
link |
Because it's all in the end, it's about how much energy
link |
can you extract from the food you eat.
link |
And if you don't have an oxygenated planet,
link |
you can get about 10% out, not much more than that.
link |
And if you've got an oxygenated planet,
link |
you can get about 40% out.
link |
And that means you can have,
link |
instead of having one or two trophic levels,
link |
you can have five or six trophic levels.
link |
And that means things can eat things
link |
that eat other things and so on.
link |
And you've gone to a level of ecological complexity,
link |
which is completely impossible in the absence of oxygen.
link |
This reminds me of the Hunter S. Thompson quote,
link |
that for every moment of triumph,
link |
for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.
link |
The history of life on Earth, unfortunately,
link |
is that of violence.
link |
Just the trillions and trillions of multi cell organisms
link |
that were murdered in the struggle for survival.
link |
It's a sorry statement, but yes, it's basically true.
link |
And that somehow is a catalyst
link |
from an evolutionary perspective for creativity,
link |
for creating more and more complex organisms
link |
that are better and better at surviving.
link |
I mean, survival of the fittest,
link |
if you just go back to that old phrase,
link |
means death of the weakest.
link |
Now, what's fit, what's weak,
link |
these are terms that don't have much intrinsic meaning.
link |
But the thing is, evolution only happens because of death.
link |
One way to die is the constraints,
link |
the scarcity of the resources in the environment,
link |
but that seems to be not nearly as good of a mechanism
link |
for death than other creatures
link |
roaming about in the environment.
link |
When I say environment, I mean like the static environment,
link |
but then there's the dynamic environment
link |
of bigger things trying to eat you
link |
and use you for your energy.
link |
It forces you to come up with a solution
link |
to your specific problem that is inventive
link |
and is new and hasn't been done before.
link |
And so it forces, I mean, literally change,
link |
literally evolution on populations.
link |
They have to become different.
link |
And it's interesting that humans have channeled that
link |
into more, I mean, I guess what humans are doing
link |
is they're inventing more productive
link |
and safe ways of doing that.
link |
You know, this whole idea of morality
link |
and all those kinds of things,
link |
I think they ultimately lead to competition
link |
versus violence, because I think violence
link |
can have a cold, brutal, inefficient aspect to it.
link |
But if you channel that into more controlled competition
link |
in the space of ideas, in the space of approaches to life,
link |
maybe you can be even more productive than evolution is.
link |
Because evolution is very wasteful.
link |
Like the amount of murder required
link |
to really test a good idea,
link |
genetically speaking, is just a lot.
link |
Many, many, many generations.
link |
Morally, we cannot base society
link |
on the way that evolution works.
link |
That's an invention, right?
link |
But actually, in some respects we do,
link |
which is to say, this is how science works.
link |
We have competing hypotheses that have to get better,
link |
otherwise they die.
link |
It's the way that society works.
link |
You know, in ancient Greece, we had the Athens
link |
and Sparta and city states,
link |
and then we had the Renaissance and nation states,
link |
and universities compete with each other.
link |
Tremendous amount of companies competing
link |
with each other all the time.
link |
It drives innovation.
link |
And if we want to do it without all the death
link |
that we see in nature,
link |
then we have to have some kind of societal level control
link |
that says, well, there's some limits, guys,
link |
and these are what the limits are gonna be.
link |
And society as a whole has to say,
link |
right, we want to limit the amount of death here,
link |
so you can't do this and you can't do that.
link |
And you know, who makes up these rules,
link |
and how do we know?
link |
It's a tough thing, but it's basically
link |
trying to find a moral basis
link |
for avoiding the death of evolution and natural selection
link |
and keeping the innovation and the richness of it.
link |
And I forgot who said it, but that murder is illegal.
link |
Probably Kurt Vonnegut.
link |
Murder is illegal except when it's done
link |
to the sound of trumpets and at a large scale.
link |
So we still have wars.
link |
But we are struggling with this idea
link |
that murder is a bad thing.
link |
It's so interesting how we're channeling
link |
the best of the evolutionary imperative
link |
and trying to get rid of the stuff that's not productive.
link |
Trying to almost accelerate evolution.
link |
The same kind of thing that makes evolution creative.
link |
We're trying to use that.
link |
I think we naturally do it.
link |
I mean, I don't think we can help ourselves do it.
link |
And you know, capitalism as a form
link |
is basically about competition and differential rewards.
link |
But we, society, and you know, we have a,
link |
I keep using this word moral obligation,
link |
but you know, we cannot operate as a society
link |
if we go that way.
link |
It's interesting that we've had problems achieving balance.
link |
So for example, in the financial crash in 2009,
link |
do you let banks go to the wall or not?
link |
This kind of question.
link |
In evolution, certainly you let them go to the wall.
link |
And in that sense, you don't need the regulation
link |
because they just die.
link |
Whereas if we, as a society,
link |
think about what's required for society as a whole,
link |
then you don't necessarily let them go to the wall.
link |
In which case you then have to impose
link |
some kind of regulation that the bankers themselves will,
link |
in an evolutionary manner, exploit.
link |
Yeah, we've been struggling with this kind of idea
link |
of capitalism, the cold brutality of capitalism
link |
that seems to create so much beautiful things
link |
And then the ideals of communism
link |
that seem to create so much brutal destruction in history.
link |
We struggle with ideas of,
link |
well, maybe we didn't do it right.
link |
How can we do things better?
link |
And then the ideas are the things
link |
where we're playing with as opposed to people.
link |
If a PhD student has a bad idea,
link |
we don't shoot the PhD student.
link |
We just criticize their idea and hope they improve.
link |
You have a very humane lab.
link |
Yeah, I don't know how you guys do it.
link |
The way I run things, it's always life and death.
link |
Okay, so it is interesting about humans
link |
that there is an inner sense of morality
link |
which begs the question of how did homo sapiens evolve?
link |
If we think about the invention of,
link |
early invention of sex and early invention of predation,
link |
what was the thing invented to make humans?
link |
What would you say?
link |
I mean, I suppose a couple of things I'd say.
link |
Number one is you don't have to wind the clock back
link |
very far, five, six million years or so,
link |
and let it run forwards again.
link |
And the chances of humans as we know them
link |
is not necessarily that high.
link |
You know, imagine as an alien, you find planet Earth
link |
and it's got everything apart from humans on it.
link |
It's an amazing, wonderful, marvelous planet,
link |
but nothing that we would recognize
link |
as extremely intelligent life,
link |
kind of space faring civilization.
link |
So when we think about aliens,
link |
we're kind of after something like ourselves.
link |
We're after a space faring civilization.
link |
We're not after zebras and giraffes and lions and things,
link |
amazing though they are.
link |
But the additional kind of evolutionary steps
link |
to go from large, complex mammals, monkeys, let's say,
link |
to humans doesn't strike me as that long a distance.
link |
It's all about the brain.
link |
And where's the brain and morality coming from?
link |
It seems to me to be all about groups,
link |
human groups and interactions between groups.
link |
The collective intelligence of it.
link |
Yes, the interactions really.
link |
And there's a guy at UCL called Mark Thomas,
link |
who's done a lot of really beautiful work,
link |
I think, on this kind of question.
link |
So I talk to him every now and then,
link |
so my views are influenced by him.
link |
But a lot seems to depend on population density,
link |
that the more interactions you have going on
link |
between different groups, the more transfer of information,
link |
if you like, between groups,
link |
people moving from one group to another group,
link |
almost like lateral gene transfer in bacteria,
link |
the more expertise you're able to develop and maintain,
link |
the more culturally complex your society can become.
link |
And groups that have become detached,
link |
like on Easter Island, for example,
link |
very often degenerate in terms of the complexity
link |
of their civilization.
link |
Is that true for complex organisms in general?
link |
Population density is often productive.
link |
Really matters, but in human terms,
link |
I don't know what the actual factors were
link |
that were driving a large brain,
link |
but you can talk about fire, you can talk about tool use,
link |
you can talk about language,
link |
and none of them seem to correlate especially well
link |
with the actual known trajectory of human evolution
link |
in terms of cave art and these kind of things.
link |
That seems to work much better
link |
just with population density
link |
and number of interactions between different groups,
link |
all of which is really about human interactions,
link |
human human interactions and the complexity of those.
link |
But population density is the thing
link |
that increases the number of interactions,
link |
but then there must have been inventions
link |
forced by that number of interactions
link |
that actually led to humans.
link |
So like Richard Wrangham talks about that
link |
it's basically the beta males had to beat up the alpha male.
link |
So that's what collaboration looks like,
link |
is they, when you're living together,
link |
our early ancestors don't like the dictatorial aspect
link |
of a single individual at the top of a tribe.
link |
So they learned to collaborate
link |
how to basically create a democracy of sorts,
link |
a democracy that prevents, minimizes,
link |
or lessens the amount of violence,
link |
which essentially gives strength to the tribe
link |
and make the war between tribes versus the dictator.
link |
I mean, I think one of the most wonderful things
link |
about humans is we're all of those things.
link |
I mean, we are deeply social as a species
link |
and we're also deeply selfish.
link |
And it seems to me the conflict
link |
between capitalism and communism,
link |
it's really just two aspects of human nature,
link |
both of which are.
link |
We have both and we have a constant kind of vying
link |
between the two sides.
link |
We really do care about other people beyond our families,
link |
beyond our immediate people.
link |
We care about society and the society that we live in.
link |
And you could say that's a drawing
link |
towards socialism or communism.
link |
On the other side, we really do care about ourselves.
link |
We really do care about our families,
link |
about working for something that we gain from.
link |
And that's the capitalist side of it.
link |
They're both really deeply ingrained in human nature.
link |
In terms of violence and interactions between groups,
link |
yes, all this dynamic of,
link |
if you're interacting between groups,
link |
you can be certain that they're gonna be burning each other
link |
and all kinds of physical violent interactions as well,
link |
which will drive the kind of cleverness
link |
of how do you resist this?
link |
Let's build a tower.
link |
What are we gonna do to prevent being overrun
link |
by those marauding gangs from over there?
link |
And you look outside humans
link |
and you look at chimps and bonobos and so on,
link |
and they're very, very different structures to society.
link |
Chimps tend to have an aggressive alpha male type structure
link |
and bonobos, there's basically a female society
link |
where the males are predominantly excluded
link |
and only brought in at the behest of the female.
link |
We have a lot in common with both of those groups.
link |
And there's, again, tension there.
link |
And probably chimps, more violence,
link |
the bonobos, probably more sex.
link |
That's another tension.
link |
How serious do we wanna be?
link |
How much fun we wanna be?
link |
Asking for a friend again,
link |
what do you think happened to Neanderthals?
link |
What did we cheeky humans do to the Neanderthals,
link |
Do you think we murdered them?
link |
Was it, how do we murder them?
link |
How do we outcompete them?
link |
Or do we mate them?
link |
I mean, I think there's unequivocal evidence
link |
that we mated with them.
link |
We always try to mate with everything.
link |
There's some interesting,
link |
the first sequences that came along
link |
were in mitochondrial DNA.
link |
And that was back to about 2002 or thereabouts.
link |
What was found was that Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA
link |
was very different to human mitochondria.
link |
Oh, that's so interesting.
link |
You could do a clock on it
link |
and it said the divergent state
link |
was about 600,000 years ago or something like that.
link |
So not so long ago.
link |
And then the first full genomes were sequenced
link |
maybe 10 years after that.
link |
And they showed plenty of signs of mating between.
link |
So the mitochondrial DNA effectively says no mating.
link |
And the nuclear genes say, yeah, lots of mating.
link |
But we don't know.
link |
How's that possible?
link |
So can you explain the difference
link |
between mitochondrial DNA and nucleus?
link |
I've talked before about the mitochondria,
link |
which are the power packs in cells.
link |
These are the paired down control units is their DNA.
link |
So it's passed on by the mother only.
link |
And in the egg cell,
link |
we might have half a million copies of mitochondrial DNA.
link |
There's only 37 genes left and they do a,
link |
it's basically the control unit of energy production.
link |
That's what it's doing.
link |
It's a basic old school machine that does.
link |
And it's got genes that were considered
link |
to be effectively trivial
link |
because they did a very narrowly defined job,
link |
but they're not trivial in the sense
link |
that that narrowly defined job
link |
is about everything that is being alive.
link |
So they're much easier to sequence.
link |
You've got many more copies of these things
link |
and you can sequence them very quickly.
link |
But the problem is because they go down
link |
only the maternal line from mother to daughter,
link |
your mitochondrial DNA and mine is going nowhere.
link |
It doesn't matter.
link |
Any kids we have, they get their mother's mitochondrial DNA
link |
except in very, very rare and strange circumstances.
link |
And so it tells a different story
link |
and it's not a story which is easy to reconcile always.
link |
And what it seems to suggest to my mind at least
link |
is that there was one way traffic of genes
link |
probably going from humans into Neanderthals
link |
rather than the other way around.
link |
Why did the Neanderthals disappear?
link |
I mean, I suspect that they were,
link |
I suspect they were probably less violent,
link |
less clever, less populous, less willing to fight.
link |
I mean, I think it probably drove them to extinction
link |
at the margins of Europe.
link |
And it's interesting how much,
link |
if we ran Earth over and over again,
link |
how many of these branches of intelligent beings
link |
that have figured out some kind of
link |
how to leverage collective intelligence,
link |
which ones of them emerge?
link |
Which ones of them succeed?
link |
Is it the more violent ones?
link |
Is it the more isolated ones?
link |
Like what dynamics result in more productivity?
link |
And I suppose we'll never know.
link |
The more complex the organism,
link |
the harder it is to run the experiment in the lab.
link |
And in some respects, maybe it's best if we don't know.
link |
The truth might be very painful.
link |
What about if we actually step back
link |
a couple of interesting things that we humans do?
link |
One is object manipulation and movement.
link |
And of course, movement was something that was done,
link |
that was another big invention,
link |
being able to move around the environment.
link |
And the other one is this sensory mechanism,
link |
how we sense the environment.
link |
One of the coolest high definition ones is vision.
link |
How big are those inventions
link |
in the history of life on Earth?
link |
Vision, movement, I mean, again, extremely important,
link |
going back to the origin of animals,
link |
the Cambrian explosion where suddenly you're seeing eyes
link |
in the fossil record.
link |
And you can, it's not necessarily, again,
link |
lots of people historically have said
link |
what use is half an eye?
link |
And you can go in a series of steps
link |
from a light sensitive spot on a flat piece of tissue
link |
to an eyeball with a lens and so on.
link |
If you assume no more than, I don't remember,
link |
this was a specific model that I have in mind,
link |
but it was 1% change or half a percent change
link |
for each generation.
link |
How long would it take to evolve an eye as we know it?
link |
And the answer is half a million years.
link |
It doesn't have to take long.
link |
That's not how evolution works.
link |
That's not an answer to the question.
link |
It just shows you can reconstruct the steps
link |
and you can work out roughly how it can work.
link |
So it's not that big a deal to evolve an eye,
link |
but once you have one, then there's nowhere to hide.
link |
And again, we're back to predator prey relationships.
link |
We're back to all the benefits
link |
that being able to see brings you.
link |
And if you think philosophically what bats are doing
link |
with eco location and so on, I have no idea,
link |
but I suspect that they form an image of the world
link |
in pretty much the same way that we do.
link |
It's just a matter of mental reconstruction.
link |
So I suppose the other thing about sight,
link |
there are single celled organisms that have got a lens
link |
and a retina and a cornea and so on.
link |
Basically they've got a camera type eye in a single cell.
link |
They don't have a brain.
link |
What they understand about their world
link |
is impossible to say, but they're capable of coming up
link |
with the same structures to do so.
link |
So I suppose then is that once you've got things like eyes,
link |
then you have a big driving pressure
link |
on the central nervous system
link |
to figure out what it all means.
link |
And then we come around to your other point
link |
about manipulation, sensory input, and so on
link |
about now you have a huge requirement
link |
to understand what your environment is and what it means
link |
and how it reacts and how you should run away
link |
and where you should stay put.
link |
Actually on that point, let me,
link |
I don't know if you know the work of Donald Hoffman,
link |
who uses the argument, the mechanism of evolution
link |
to say that there's not necessarily
link |
a strong evolutionary value to seeing the world as it is.
link |
So objective reality, that our perception actually
link |
is very different from what's objectively real.
link |
We're living inside an illusion
link |
and we're basically the entire set of species on earth,
link |
I think, I guess, are competing in a space
link |
that's an illusion that's distinct from,
link |
that's far away from physical reality as it is,
link |
as defined by physics.
link |
I'm not sure it's an illusion so much as a bubble.
link |
I mean, we have a sensory input,
link |
which is a fraction of what we could have
link |
a sensory input on, and we interpret it
link |
in terms of what's useful for us to know to stay alive.
link |
So yes, it's an illusion in that sense,
link |
but the tree is physically there.
link |
And if you walk into that tree, you know,
link |
that there is, it's not purely a delusion,
link |
there's some physical reality to it.
link |
So it's a sensory slice into reality as it is,
link |
but because it's just a slice,
link |
you're missing a big picture.
link |
But he says that that slice doesn't necessarily
link |
need to be a slice.
link |
It could be a complete fabrication
link |
that's just consistent amongst the species,
link |
which is an interesting, or at least it's a humbling
link |
realization that our perception is limited
link |
and our cognitive abilities are limited.
link |
And at least to me, it's argument from evolution,
link |
I don't know how much, how strong that is as an argument,
link |
but I do think that life can exist in the mind.
link |
In the same way that you can do a virtual reality video game
link |
and you can have a vibrant life inside that place
link |
and that place is not real in some sense,
link |
but you could still have a vibrant,
link |
all the same forces of evolution,
link |
all the same competition, the dynamics of between humans
link |
you can have, but I don't know if,
link |
I don't know if there's evidence for that being
link |
the thing that happened on earth.
link |
It seems that earth.
link |
I think in either environment, I wouldn't deny
link |
that you could have exactly the world that you talk about
link |
and it would be very difficult to,
link |
the idea in matrix movies and so on
link |
that the whole world is completely a construction
link |
and we're fundamentally deluded.
link |
It's difficult to say that's impossible or couldn't happen
link |
or, and certainly we construct in our minds
link |
what the outside world is, but we do it on input
link |
and that input, I would hesitate to say it's not real
link |
because it's precisely how we do understand the world.
link |
We have eyes, but if you keep someone in,
link |
apparently this kind of thing happens,
link |
someone kept in a dark room for five years
link |
or something like that, they never see properly again
link |
because the neural wiring that underpins
link |
how we interpret vision never developed.
link |
You need, when you watch a child develop,
link |
it walks into a table, it bangs his head on the table
link |
and it hurts and now you've got two inputs.
link |
You've got one pain from this sharp edge
link |
and number two, you probably, you've touched it
link |
and realized it's there, it's a sharp edge
link |
and you've got the visual input
link |
and you put the three things together and think,
link |
I don't wanna walk into a table again.
link |
So you're learning and it's a limited reality,
link |
but it's a true reality and if you don't learn
link |
that properly, then you will get eaten,
link |
you will get hit by a bus, you will not survive.
link |
And same, if you're in some kind of,
link |
let's say, computer construction of reality,
link |
I'm not in my ground here, but if you construct the laws
link |
that this is what reality is inside this,
link |
then you play by those laws.
link |
Yeah, I mean, as long as the laws are consistent.
link |
So just like you said in the lab,
link |
the interesting thing about the simulation question,
link |
yes, it's hard to know if we're living inside a simulation,
link |
but also, yes, it's possible to do these kinds
link |
of experiments in the lab now more and more.
link |
To me, the interesting question is,
link |
how realistic does a virtual reality game need to be
link |
for us to not be able to tell the difference?
link |
A more interesting question to me is,
link |
how realistic or interesting
link |
does a virtual reality world need to be
link |
in order for us to want to stay there forever
link |
or much longer than physical reality, prefer that place?
link |
And also prefer it not as we prefer hard drugs,
link |
but prefer it in a deep, meaningful way
link |
in the way we enjoy life.
link |
I mean, I suppose the issue with the matrix,
link |
I imagine that it's possible to dilute the mind sufficiently
link |
that you genuinely, in that way,
link |
do think that you are interacting with the real world
link |
when in fact the whole thing's a simulation.
link |
How good does a simulation need to be to be able to do that?
link |
Well, it needs to convince you
link |
that all your sensory input is correct and accurate
link |
and joins up and makes sense.
link |
Now, that sensory input is not something
link |
that we're born with.
link |
We're born with a sense of touch.
link |
We're born with eyes and so on,
link |
but we don't know how to use them.
link |
We don't know what to make of them.
link |
We go around, we bump into trees.
link |
We're in pain a lot.
link |
We're basically booting up the system
link |
so that it can make head or tail
link |
of the sensory input that it's getting.
link |
And that sensory input's not just a one way flux of things.
link |
It's also, you have to walk into things.
link |
You have to hear things.
link |
You have to put it together.
link |
Now, if you've got just babies in the matrix
link |
who are slotted into this,
link |
I don't think they have that kind of sensory input.
link |
I don't think they would have any way
link |
to make sense of New York as a world that they're part of.
link |
The brain is just not developed in that way.
link |
Well, I can't make sense of New York
link |
in this physical reality either.
link |
But yeah, I mean, but you said pain
link |
and the walking into things.
link |
Well, you can create a pain signal.
link |
And as long as it's consistent,
link |
that certain things result in pain,
link |
you can start to construct a reality.
link |
There's some, maybe you disagree with this,
link |
but I think we are born almost with a desire
link |
to be convinced by our reality,
link |
like a desire to make sense of our reality.
link |
Oh, I'm sure we are, yes.
link |
So there's an imperative.
link |
So whatever that reality is given to us,
link |
like the table hurts, fire is hot.
link |
I think we wanna be diluted
link |
in the sense that we want to make a simple,
link |
like Einstein's simple theory of the thing around us.
link |
We want that simplicity.
link |
And so maybe the hunger for the simplicity
link |
is the thing that could be used
link |
to construct a pretty dumb simulation that tricks us.
link |
So maybe tricking humans
link |
doesn't require building a universe.
link |
I mean, this is not what I work on,
link |
so I don't know how close to it we are.
link |
I don't think anyone works on it.
link |
But I agree with you that, yeah,
link |
I'm not sure that it's a morally justifiable thing to do,
link |
but is it possible in principle?
link |
I think it would be very difficult,
link |
but I don't see why in principle it wouldn't be possible.
link |
And I agree with you that we try to understand the world.
link |
We try to integrate the sensory inputs that we have,
link |
and we try to come up with a hypothesis
link |
that explains what's going on.
link |
I think though that we have huge input
link |
from the social context that we're in.
link |
We don't do it by ourselves.
link |
We don't kind of blunder around in a universe by ourself
link |
and understand the whole thing.
link |
We're told by the people around us
link |
what things are and what they do,
link |
and language is coming in here and so on.
link |
So it would have to be an extremely impressive simulation
link |
to simulate all of that.
link |
Yeah, simulate all of that,
link |
including the social construct,
link |
the spread of ideas and the exchange of ideas.
link |
But those questions are really important to understand
link |
as we become more and more digital creatures.
link |
It seems like the next step of evolution
link |
is us becoming all the same mechanisms we've talked about
link |
are becoming more and more plugged into the machine.
link |
We're becoming cyborgs.
link |
And there's an interesting interplay
link |
between wires and biology.
link |
Zeros and ones and the biological systems.
link |
And I don't think we'll have the luxury
link |
to see humans as disjoint from the technology
link |
we've created for much longer.
link |
We are an organism that's.
link |
Yeah, I mean, I agree with you.
link |
But we come really with this to consciousness.
link |
And is there a distinction there?
link |
Because what you're saying,
link |
the natural end point says we are indistinguishable,
link |
that if you are capable of building an AI,
link |
which is sufficiently close and similar
link |
that we merge with it,
link |
then to all intents and purposes,
link |
that AI is conscious as we know it.
link |
And I don't have a strong view, but I have a view.
link |
And I wrote about it in the epilogue to my last book,
link |
because 10 years ago,
link |
I wrote a chapter in a book called Life Ascending
link |
about consciousness.
link |
And the subtitle of Life Ascending
link |
was The 10 Great Inventions of Evolution.
link |
And I couldn't possibly write a book
link |
with a subtitle like that that did not include consciousness.
link |
And specifically consciousness
link |
as one of the great inventions.
link |
And it was in part because I was just curious to know more
link |
and I read more for that chapter.
link |
I never worked on it, but I've always,
link |
how can anyone not be interested in the question?
link |
And I was left with the feeling that A, nobody knows,
link |
and B, there are two main schools of thought out there
link |
with a big kind of skew in distribution.
link |
One of them says, oh, it's a property of matter.
link |
It's an unknown law of physics.
link |
Panpsychism, everything is conscious.
link |
The sun is conscious.
link |
It's just a matter of, or a rock is conscious.
link |
It's just a matter of how much.
link |
And I find that very unpersuasive.
link |
I can't say that it's wrong.
link |
It's just that I think we somehow can tell the difference
link |
between something that's living and something that's not.
link |
And then the other end is it's an emergent property
link |
of a very complex central nervous system.
link |
And I never quite understand what people mean
link |
by words like emergence.
link |
I mean, there are genuine examples,
link |
but I think we very often tend to use it
link |
to plaster over ignorance.
link |
As a biochemist, the question for me then was,
link |
okay, it's a concoction of a central nervous system.
link |
A depolarizing neuron gives rise to a feeling,
link |
to a feeling of pain, or to a feeling of love,
link |
or anger, or whatever it may be.
link |
So what is then a feeling in biophysical terms
link |
in the central nervous system?
link |
Which bit of the wiring gives rise to,
link |
and I've never seen anyone answer that question
link |
in a way that makes sense to me.
link |
And that's an important question to answer.
link |
I think if we want to understand consciousness,
link |
that's the only question to answer.
link |
Because certainly an AI is capable of out thinking,
link |
and it's only a matter of time.
link |
Maybe it's already happened.
link |
In terms of just information processing
link |
and computational skill,
link |
I don't think we have any problem in designing a mind
link |
which is at least the equal of the human mind.
link |
But in terms of what we value the most as humans,
link |
which is to say our feelings, our emotions,
link |
our sense of what the world is in a very personal way,
link |
that I think means as much or more to people
link |
than their information processing.
link |
And that's where I don't think that AI necessarily
link |
will become conscious, because I think
link |
it's the property of life.
link |
Well, let's talk about it more.
link |
You're an incredible writer, one of my favorite writers.
link |
So let me read from your latest book, Transformers,
link |
what you write about consciousness.
link |
I think therefore I am, said Descartes,
link |
is one of the most celebrated lines ever written.
link |
But what am I exactly?
link |
An artificial intelligence can think too, by definition,
link |
and therefore is, yet few of us could agree
link |
whether AI is capable in principle
link |
of anything resembling human emotions,
link |
of love or hate, fear and joy, of spiritual yearnings,
link |
for oneness or oblivion,
link |
or corporeal pangs of thirst and hunger.
link |
The problem is we don't know what emotions are,
link |
as you were saying.
link |
What is the feeling in physical terms?
link |
How does a discharging neuron give rise
link |
to a feeling of anything at all?
link |
This is the hard problem of consciousness,
link |
the seeming duality of mind and matter,
link |
the physical makeup of our innermost self.
link |
We can understand in principle
link |
how an extremely sophisticated parallel processing system
link |
could be capable of wondrous feats of intelligence,
link |
but we can't answer in principle
link |
whether such a supreme intelligence
link |
would experience joy or melancholy.
link |
What is the quantum of solace?
link |
I, speaking to the question of emergence,
link |
you know, there's just technical,
link |
there's an excellent paper on this recently
link |
about this kind of phase transition,
link |
emergence of performance in neural networks
link |
on the problem of NLP, natural language processing.
link |
So language models, there seems to be this question of size.
link |
At some point, there is a phase transition
link |
as you grow the size of the neural network.
link |
So the question is,
link |
that's sort of somewhat of a technical question
link |
that you can philosophize over.
link |
The technical question is,
link |
is there a size of a neural network
link |
that starts to be able to form the kind of representations
link |
that can capture a language,
link |
and therefore be able to, not just language,
link |
but linguistically capture knowledge
link |
that's sufficient to solve a lot of problems in language,
link |
like be able to have a conversation.
link |
And there seems to be not a gradual increase,
link |
but a phase transition.
link |
And they're trying to construct the science of where that is,
link |
like what is a good size of a neural network,
link |
and why does such a phase transition happen?
link |
Anyway, that sort of points to emergence,
link |
that there could be stages where a thing goes
link |
from being, oh, you're very intelligent toaster,
link |
to a toaster that's feeling sad today and turns away
link |
and looks out the window, sighing,
link |
having an existential crisis.
link |
Thinking of Marvin, the paranoid android.
link |
Marvin is simplistic because Marvin is just cranky.
link |
So easily programmed.
link |
Yeah, easily programmed, nonstop existential crisis.
link |
You're almost basically, what is it?
link |
Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky,
link |
like just constantly complaining about life.
link |
No, they're capturing the full rollercoaster
link |
of human emotion, the excitement, the bliss,
link |
the connection, the empathy and all that kind of stuff.
link |
And then the selfishness, the anger, the depression,
link |
all that kind of stuff.
link |
They're capturing all of that
link |
and be able to experience it deeply.
link |
Like it's the most important thing
link |
you could possibly experience today.
link |
The highest highs, the lowest lows, this is it.
link |
My life will be over.
link |
I cannot possibly go on that feeling.
link |
And then like after a nap, you're feeling amazing.
link |
That might be something that emerges.
link |
So why would a nap make an AI being feel better?
link |
First of all, we don't know that for a human either, right?
link |
But we do know that that's actually true
link |
for many people much of the time.
link |
You may be utterly depressed and you have a nap
link |
and you do in fact feel better, so.
link |
Oh, you are actually asking the technical question there,
link |
is there, so that's a very,
link |
there's a biological answer to that.
link |
And so the question is whether AI needs to have
link |
the same kind of attachments to its body,
link |
bodily function and preservation
link |
of the brain's successful function,
link |
self preservation essentially in some deep biological sense.
link |
I mean, to my mind, it comes back round
link |
to the problem we were talking about before
link |
about simulations and sensory input
link |
and learning what all of this stuff means
link |
and life and death,
link |
that biology unlike society has a death penalty
link |
over everything and natural selection works
link |
on that death penalty.
link |
That if you make this decision wrongly, you die.
link |
And the next generation is represented by beings
link |
that made a slightly different decision on balance.
link |
And that is something that's intrinsically
link |
difficult to simulate in all this richness, I would say.
link |
Death in all its richness.
link |
Our relationship with death or the whole of it.
link |
So which when you say richness, of course,
link |
there's a lot in that.
link |
Which is hard to simulate.
link |
What's part of the richness that's hard to simulate?
link |
I suppose the complexity of the environment
link |
and your position in that or the position
link |
of an organism in that environment,
link |
in the full richness of that environment
link |
over its entire life, over multiple generations
link |
with changes in gene sequence over those generations.
link |
So slight changes in the makeup of those individuals
link |
But if you take it back to the level of single cells,
link |
which I do in the book and ask how does a single cell
link |
in effect know it exists as a unit, as an entity?
link |
I mean, no, in inverted commas,
link |
obviously it doesn't know anything,
link |
but it acts as a unit and it acts
link |
with astonishing precision as a unit.
link |
And I had suggested that that's linked
link |
to the electrical fields on the membranes themselves
link |
and that they give some indication
link |
of how am I doing in relation to my environment
link |
as a kind of real time feedback on the world.
link |
And this is something physical,
link |
which can be selected over generations
link |
that if you get this wrong,
link |
it's linked with this set of circumstances
link |
that I've just, as an individual,
link |
I have a moment of blind panic and run
link |
as a bacterium or something.
link |
You have some electrical discharge that says blind panic
link |
and it runs whatever it may be.
link |
And you associate over generations, multiple generations
link |
that this electrical phase that I'm in now
link |
is associated with a response like that.
link |
And it's easy to see how feelings come in
link |
through the back door almost with that kind of giving real time
link |
feedback on your position in the world
link |
in relation to how am I doing.
link |
And then you complexify the system
link |
and yes, I have no problem with phase transition.
link |
And can all of this be done purely by the language,
link |
by the issues with how the system understands itself?
link |
Maybe it can, I honestly don't know.
link |
But the philosophers for a long time
link |
have talked about the possibility
link |
that you can have a zombie intelligence
link |
and that there are no feelings there,
link |
but everything else is the same.
link |
I mean, I have to throw this back to you really.
link |
How do you deal with the zombie intelligence?
link |
So first of all, I can see that from a biologist perspective,
link |
you think of all the complexities
link |
that led up to the human being.
link |
The entirety of the history of four billion years
link |
that in some deep sense integrated the human being
link |
into this environment.
link |
And that dance of the organism and the environment,
link |
you could see how emotions arise from that.
link |
And then emotions are deeply connected
link |
and creating a human experience.
link |
And from that, you mix in consciousness
link |
and the full mess of it, yeah.
link |
But from a perspective of an intelligent organism
link |
that's already here, like a baby that learns,
link |
it doesn't need to learn how to be a collection of cells
link |
or how to do all the things it needs to do.
link |
The basic function of a baby as it learns
link |
is to interact with its environment,
link |
to learn from its environment,
link |
to learn how to fit in to the social society,
link |
And the basic response of the baby
link |
is to cry a lot of the time.
link |
To cry, well, to convince the humans to protect it
link |
or to discipline it, to teach it.
link |
I mean, we've developed a bunch of different tricks,
link |
how to get our parents to take care of us,
link |
to educate us, to teach us about the world.
link |
Also, we've constructed the world in such a way
link |
that it's safe enough for us to survive in
link |
and yet dangerous enough for learning the valuable lessons.
link |
Like the tables are still hard with corners,
link |
so it can still run into them.
link |
It hurts like how...
link |
So AI needs to solve that problem,
link |
not the problem of constructing
link |
this super complex organism that leads up...
link |
To run the whole...
link |
To make an apple pie, to build the whole universe,
link |
you need to build a whole universe.
link |
I think the zombie question is something
link |
I would leave to the philosophers.
link |
And I will also leave to them the definition of love
link |
and what happens between two human beings
link |
when there's a magic that just grabs them.
link |
Like nothing else matters in the world
link |
and somehow you've been searching for this feeling,
link |
this moment, this person your whole life.
link |
That feeling, the philosophers can have a lot of fun
link |
with that one and also say that that's just...
link |
You can have a biological explanation,
link |
you can have all kinds of...
link |
It's all fake, it's actually...
link |
Ayn Rand will say it's all selfish.
link |
There's a lot of different interpretations.
link |
I'll leave it to the philosophers.
link |
The point is the feeling sure as hell feels very real.
link |
And if my toaster makes me feel
link |
like it's the only toaster in the world.
link |
And when I leave and I miss the toaster
link |
and when I come back, I'm excited to see the toaster
link |
and my life is meaningful and joyful
link |
and the friends I have around me get a better version of me
link |
because that toaster exists.
link |
That sure as hell feels like a conscious toaster.
link |
Is that psychologically different to having a dog?
link |
Because I mean most people would dispute
link |
whether we can say a dog...
link |
I would say a dog is undoubtedly conscious,
link |
but some people say it doesn't.
link |
But there's degrees of consciousness and so on,
link |
but people are definitely much more uncomfortable
link |
saying a toaster can be conscious than a dog.
link |
And there's still a deep connection.
link |
You could say our relationship with the dog
link |
has more to do with anthropomorphism.
link |
Like we kind of project the human being onto it.
link |
We can do the same damn thing with a toaster.
link |
Yes, but you can look into the dog's eyes
link |
and you can see that it's sad,
link |
that it's delighted to see you again.
link |
I don't have a dog, by the way.
link |
It's not that I'm a dog person or a cat person.
link |
And dogs are actually incredibly good
link |
at using their eyes to do just that.
link |
Now, I don't imagine that a dog is remotely
link |
as close to being intelligent as an AI intelligence,
link |
but it's certainly capable
link |
of communicating emotionally with us.
link |
But here's what I would venture to say.
link |
We tend to think because AI plays chess well
link |
and is able to fold proteins now well,
link |
that it's intelligent.
link |
I would argue that in order to communicate with humans,
link |
in order to have emotional intelligence,
link |
it actually requires another order
link |
of magnitude of intelligence.
link |
It's not easy to be flawed.
link |
Solving a mathematical puzzle is not the same
link |
as the full complexity of human to human interaction.
link |
That's actually, we humans just take for granted
link |
the things we're really good at.
link |
Nonstop, people tell me how shitty people are driving.
link |
No, humans are incredible at driving.
link |
Bipedal walking, walking, object manipulation.
link |
We're incredible at this.
link |
And so people tend to discount the things
link |
we all just take for granted.
link |
And one of those things that they discount
link |
is our ability, the dance of conversation
link |
and interaction with each other.
link |
The ability to morph ideas together.
link |
The ability to get angry at each other
link |
and then to miss each other.
link |
Like to create a tension that makes life fun
link |
and difficult and challenging in a way that's meaningful.
link |
That is a skill that's learned
link |
and AI would need to solve that problem.
link |
I mean, in some sense, what you're saying is
link |
AI cannot become meaningfully emotional, let's say,
link |
until it experiences some kind of internal conflict
link |
that is unable to reconcile these various aspects
link |
of reality or its reality with a decision to make.
link |
And then it feels sad, necessarily,
link |
because it doesn't know what to do.
link |
And I certainly can't dispute that.
link |
That may very well be how it works.
link |
I think the only way to find out is to do it.
link |
Yeah, and leave it to the philosophers
link |
if it actually feels sad or not.
link |
The point is the robot will be sitting there alone
link |
having an internal conflict, an existential crisis,
link |
and that's required for it to have a deep,
link |
meaningful connection with another human being.
link |
Now, does it actually feel that?
link |
But I'd like to throw something else at you,
link |
which troubles me on reading it.
link |
Noah Harari's book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.
link |
And he's written about this kind of thing
link |
on various occasions.
link |
And he sees biochemistry as an algorithm.
link |
And then AI will necessarily be able to hack that algorithm
link |
and do it better than humans.
link |
So there will be AI better at writing music
link |
that we appreciate than Mozart ever could,
link |
or writing better than Shakespeare ever did, and so on.
link |
Because biochemistry is algorithmic,
link |
and all you need to do is figure out
link |
which bits of the algorithm to play
link |
to make us feel good or bad or appreciate things.
link |
And as a biochemist, I find that argument
link |
an argument close to irrefutable and not very enjoyable.
link |
I don't like the sound of it.
link |
That's just my reaction as a human being.
link |
You might like the sound of it because that says
link |
that AI is capable of the same kind of emotional feelings
link |
about the world as we are,
link |
because the whole thing is an algorithm
link |
and you can program an algorithm, and there you are.
link |
He then has a peculiar final chapter
link |
where he talks about consciousness
link |
in rather separate terms.
link |
And he's talking about meditating and so on
link |
and getting in touch with his inner conscious.
link |
I don't meditate, I don't know anything about that.
link |
But he wrote in very different terms about it,
link |
as if somehow it's a way out of the algorithm.
link |
Now, it seems to me that consciousness in that sense
link |
is capable of scuppering the algorithm.
link |
I think in terms of the biochemical feedback loops
link |
and so on, it is undoubtedly algorithmic.
link |
But in terms of what we decide to do,
link |
it can be much more based on an emotion.
link |
We can just think, I don't care.
link |
I can't resolve this complex situation.
link |
I'm gonna do that.
link |
And that can be based on, in effect, a different currency,
link |
which is the currency of feelings and something
link |
where we don't have very much personal control over.
link |
And then it comes back around to you
link |
and what are you trying to get at with AI?
link |
Do we need to have some system
link |
which is capable of overriding a rational decision
link |
which cannot be made
link |
because there's too much conflicting information
link |
by effectively an emotional judgmental decision
link |
that just says, do this and see what happens.
link |
That's what consciousness is really doing in my view.
link |
Yeah, and the question is whether it's a different process
link |
or just a higher level process.
link |
I might, you know, the idea that biochemistry
link |
is an algorithm is, to me, an oversimplistic view.
link |
There's a lot of things that the moment you say it,
link |
it's irrefutable, but it simplifies.
link |
And in the process loses something fundamental.
link |
So for example, calling a universe
link |
and an information processing system, sure, yes.
link |
You could make that.
link |
It's a computer that's performing computations,
link |
but you're missing the process of the entropy
link |
somehow leading to pockets of complexity
link |
that creates these beautiful artifacts
link |
that are incredibly complex and they're like machines.
link |
And then those machines are through the process of evolution
link |
are constructing even further complexity.
link |
Like in calling universe information processing machine,
link |
you're missing those little local pockets
link |
and how difficult it is to create them.
link |
So the question to me is if biochemistry is an algorithm,
link |
how difficult is it to create a software system
link |
that runs the human body, which I think is incorrect.
link |
I think that is going to take so long.
link |
I mean, that's going to be centuries from now
link |
to be able to reconstruct the human.
link |
Now, what I would venture to say
link |
to get some of the magic of a human being
link |
with what we're saying with the emotions
link |
and the interactions and like a dog makes a smile
link |
and joyful and all those kinds of things
link |
that will come much sooner,
link |
but that doesn't require us to reverse engineer
link |
the algorithm of biochemistry.
link |
Yes, but the toaster is making you happy.
link |
It's not about whether you make the toaster happy.
link |
The toaster has to be able to leave me happy.
link |
Yeah, but it's the toaster is the AI in this case
link |
is very intelligent.
link |
Yeah, the toaster has to be able to be unhappy and leave me.
link |
That's essential for my being able to miss the toaster.
link |
If the toaster is just my servant,
link |
that's not, or a provider of like services,
link |
like tells me the weather makes toast,
link |
that's not going to deep connection.
link |
It has to have internal conflict.
link |
You write about life and death.
link |
It has to be able to be conscious of its mortality
link |
and the finiteness of its existence.
link |
And that life is for temporary
link |
and therefore it needs to be more selective.
link |
One of the most moving moments in the movies
link |
from when I was a boy was the unplugging of Hal in 2001,
link |
where that was the death of a sentient being
link |
So I think we all kind of know
link |
that a sufficiently intelligent being
link |
is going to have some form of consciousness,
link |
but whether it would be like biological consciousness,
link |
I just don't know.
link |
And if you're thinking about how do we bring together,
link |
I mean, obviously we're going to interact
link |
more closely with AI,
link |
but is a dog really like a toaster
link |
or is there really some kind of difference there?
link |
You were talking about biochemistry is algorithmic,
link |
but it's not single algorithm
link |
and it's very complex, of course it is.
link |
So it may be that there are again conflicts
link |
in the circuits of biochemistry,
link |
but I have a feeling that the level of complexity
link |
of the total biochemical system
link |
at the level of a single cell is less complex
link |
than the level of neural networking in the human brain
link |
Well, I guess I assumed that we were including the brain
link |
in the biochemistry algorithm, because you have to...
link |
I would see that as a higher level of organization
link |
of neural networks.
link |
They're all using the same biochemical wiring
link |
within themselves.
link |
Yeah, but the human brain is not just neurons.
link |
It's the immune system.
link |
It's the whole package.
link |
I mean, to have a biochemical algorithm
link |
that runs an intelligent biological system,
link |
you have to include the whole damn thing.
link |
And it's pretty fascinating that it comes from like,
link |
from an embryo, like the whole, I mean, oh boy.
link |
I mean, if you can, what is a human being?
link |
Because it's just some code and then you built,
link |
and then that says DNA doesn't just tell you what to build,
link |
but how to build it.
link |
I mean, the thing is impressive.
link |
And the question is how difficult is it
link |
to reverse engineer the whole shebang?
link |
don't want to say impossible,
link |
but it's like, it's much easier to build a human
link |
than to reverse engineer, to build like a fake human,
link |
human like thing than to reverse engineer
link |
the entirety of the process of the evolution.
link |
I'm not sure if we are capable
link |
of reverse engineering the whole thing.
link |
If the human mind is capable of doing that.
link |
I mean, I wouldn't be a biologist if I wasn't trying,
link |
but I know I can't understand the whole problem.
link |
I'm just trying to understand the rudimentary outlines
link |
There's another aspect though,
link |
you're talking about developing from a single cell
link |
to the human mind and all the part system,
link |
subsystems that are part of the immune system and so on.
link |
This is something that you'll talk about, I imagine,
link |
with Michael Levin, but so little is known about,
link |
you talk about reverse engineering,
link |
so little is known about the developmental pathways
link |
that go from a genome to going to a fully wired organism.
link |
And a lot of it seems to depend on the same
link |
in electrical interactions that I was talking about
link |
happening at the level of single cells
link |
and its interaction with the environment.
link |
There's a whole electrical field side to biology
link |
that is not yet written into any of the textbooks,
link |
which is about how does an embryo develop into
link |
or a single cell develop into these complex systems?
link |
What defines the head, what defines the immune system,
link |
what defines the brain and so on?
link |
That really is written in a language
link |
that we're only just beginning to understand
link |
and frankly, biologists, most biologists
link |
are still very reluctant to even get themselves tangled up
link |
in questions like electrical fields influencing development.
link |
It seems like mumbo jumbo to a lot of biologists
link |
and it should not be because this is
link |
the 21st century biology, this is where it's going.
link |
But we're not gonna reverse engineer a human being
link |
or the mind or any of these subsystems
link |
until we understand how this developmental process
link |
or how electricity in biology really works.
link |
And if it is linked with feelings
link |
and with consciousness and so on,
link |
that's the, I mean, in the meantime, we have to try,
link |
but I think that's where the answer lies.
link |
So you think it's possible that the key to things
link |
like consciousness are some of the more tricky aspects
link |
of cognition might lie in that early development,
link |
the interaction of electricity and biology.
link |
Electrical fields.
link |
But we already know the EEG and so on
link |
is telling us a lot about brain function,
link |
but we don't know which cells, which parts
link |
of a neural network is giving rise to the EEG.
link |
We don't know the basics.
link |
The assumption is, I mean, we know it's neural networks,
link |
we know it's multiple cells, hundreds or thousands
link |
of cells involved in it and we assume
link |
that it has to do with depolarization during action
link |
potentials and so on.
link |
But the mitochondria which are in there
link |
have much more membranes than the plasma membrane
link |
of the neuron and there's a much greater membrane potential
link |
and it's formed in parallel, very often parallel cristae,
link |
which are capable of reinforcing a field
link |
and generating fields over longer distances.
link |
And nobody knows if that plays a role
link |
in consciousness or not.
link |
There's reasons to argue that it could,
link |
but frankly we simply do not know
link |
and it's not taken into consideration.
link |
You look at the structure of the mitochondrial membranes
link |
in the brains of simple things like Drosophila,
link |
the fruit fly, and they have amazing structures.
link |
You can see lots of little rectangular things
link |
all lined up in amazing patterns.
link |
What are they doing?
link |
Why are they like that?
link |
We haven't the first clue.
link |
What do you think about organoids and brain organoids
link |
and so in a lab trying to study the development
link |
of these in the Petri dish development of organs.
link |
Do you think that's promising?
link |
Do you have to look at whole systems?
link |
I've never done anything like that.
link |
I don't know much about it.
link |
The people who I've talked to who do work on it
link |
say amazing things can happen
link |
and a bit of a brain grown in a dish
link |
is capable of experiencing some kind of feelings
link |
or even memories of its former brain.
link |
Again, I have a feeling that until we understand
link |
how to control the electrical fields
link |
that control development, we're not going to understand
link |
how to turn an organoid into a real functional system.
link |
But how do we get that understanding?
link |
It's so incredibly difficult.
link |
I mean, you would have to, I mean, one promising direction,
link |
I'd love to get your opinion on this.
link |
I don't know if you're familiar with the work of DeepMind
link |
and AlphaFold with protein folding and so on.
link |
Do you think it's possible
link |
that that will give us some breakthroughs in biology
link |
trying to basically simulate and model the behavior
link |
of trivial biological systems
link |
as they become complex biological systems?
link |
The interesting thing to me about protein folding
link |
is that for a long time, my understanding,
link |
this is not what I work on, so I may have got this wrong,
link |
but my understanding is that you take the sequence
link |
of a protein and you try to fold it.
link |
And there are multiple ways in which it can fold.
link |
And to come up with the correct conformation
link |
is not a very easy thing because you're doing it
link |
from first principles from a string of letters,
link |
which specify the string of amino acids.
link |
But what actually happens is when a protein
link |
is coming out of a ribosome,
link |
it's coming out of a charged tunnel
link |
and it's in a very specific environment,
link |
which is going to force this to go there now
link |
and then this one to go there and this one to come like that.
link |
And so you're forcing a specific conformational set
link |
of changes onto it as it comes out of the ribosome.
link |
So by the time it's fully emerged,
link |
it's already got its shape.
link |
And that shape depended on the immediate environment
link |
that it was emerging into one letter,
link |
one amino acid at a time.
link |
And I don't think that the field was looking at it that way.
link |
And if that's correct,
link |
then that's very characteristic of science,
link |
which is to say it asks very often the wrong question
link |
and then does really amazingly sophisticated analyses
link |
on something having never thought to actually think,
link |
well, what is biology doing?
link |
And biology is giving you a charged electrical environment
link |
that forces you to be this way.
link |
Now, did DeepMind come up through patterns
link |
with some answer that was like that?
link |
I've got absolutely no idea.
link |
It ought to be possible to deduce that
link |
from the shapes of proteins.
link |
It would require a much greater skill
link |
than the human mind has.
link |
But the human mind is capable of saying, well, hang on,
link |
let's look at this exit tunnel and try and work out
link |
what shape is this protein going to take?
link |
And we can figure that out.
link |
That's really interesting about the exit tunnel,
link |
but like sometimes we get lucky
link |
and just like in science, the simplified view
link |
or the static view will actually solve the problem for us.
link |
So in this case, it's very possible
link |
that the sequence of letters has a unique mapping
link |
to our structure without considering how it unraveled.
link |
So without considering the tunnel.
link |
And so that seems to be the case in this situation
link |
where the cool thing about proteins,
link |
all the different shapes they can possibly take,
link |
it actually seems to take very specific unique shapes
link |
given the sequence.
link |
That's forced on you by an exit tunnel.
link |
So the problem is actually much simpler than you thought.
link |
And then there's a whole army of proteins
link |
which change the conformational state, chaperone proteins.
link |
And they're only used when there's some presumably issue
link |
with how it came out of the exit tunnel
link |
and you wanna do it differently to that.
link |
So very often the chaperone proteins will go there
link |
and will influence the way in which it falls.
link |
So there's two ways of doing it.
link |
Either you can look at the structures
link |
and the sequences of all the proteins
link |
and you can apply an immense mind to it
link |
and figure out what the patterns are
link |
and figure out what happened.
link |
Or you can look at the actual situation where it is
link |
and say, well, hang on, it was actually quite simple.
link |
It's got a charged environment
link |
and then it's forced to come out this way.
link |
And then the question will be,
link |
well, do different ribosomes
link |
have different charged environments?
link |
What happens if a chaperone?
link |
You're asking a different set of questions
link |
to come to the same answer in a way
link |
which is telling you a much simpler story
link |
and explains why it is rather than saying it could be,
link |
this is one in a billion different possible conformational
link |
states that this protein could have.
link |
You're saying, well, it has this one
link |
because that was the only one it could take
link |
given its setting.
link |
Well, yeah, I mean, currently humans are very good
link |
at that kind of first principles thinking.
link |
I was stepping back, but I think AI is really good
link |
at collecting a huge amount of data
link |
and a huge amount of data of observation of planets
link |
and figure out that Earth is not at the center
link |
of the universe, that there's actually a sun,
link |
we're orbiting the sun.
link |
But then you can, as a human being, ask,
link |
well, how do solar systems come to be?
link |
What are the different forces that are required
link |
to make this kind of pattern emerge?
link |
And then you start to invent things like gravity.
link |
I mixed up the ordering of gravity,
link |
wasn't considered as a thing that connects planets,
link |
but we are able to think about those big picture things
link |
AI is just very good to infer simple models
link |
from a huge amount of data.
link |
And the question is with biology,
link |
we kind of go back and forth at how we solve biology.
link |
Listen, protein folding was thought to be impossible
link |
to solve, and there's a lot of brilliant PhD students
link |
that worked one protein at a time
link |
trying to figure out the structure.
link |
And the fact that I was able to do that.
link |
Oh, I'm not knocking it at all,
link |
but I think that people have been asking
link |
the wrong question.
link |
But then, as the people start to ask
link |
better and bigger questions,
link |
the AI kind of enters the chat and says,
link |
I'll help you out with that.
link |
Can I give you another example for my own work?
link |
The risk of getting a disease as we get older,
link |
there are genetic aspects to it.
link |
If you spend your whole life overeating and smoking
link |
and whatever, that's a whole separate question.
link |
But there's a genetic side to the risk.
link |
And we know a few genes that increase your risk
link |
of certain things.
link |
And for probably 20 years now,
link |
people have been doing what's called GWAS,
link |
which is genome wide association studies.
link |
So you've effectively scanned the entire genome
link |
for any single nucleotide polymorphisms,
link |
which is to say a single letter change in one place,
link |
that has a higher association of being linked
link |
with a particular disease or not.
link |
And you can come up with thousands of these things
link |
across the genome.
link |
And if you add them all up and try and say,
link |
well, so do they add up to explain
link |
the known genetic risk of this disease?
link |
And the known genetic risk often comes from twin studies.
link |
And you can say that if this twin gets epilepsy,
link |
there's a 40 or 50% risk that the other twin,
link |
identical twin will also get epilepsy.
link |
Therefore, the genetic factor is about 50%.
link |
And so the gene similarities that you see
link |
should account for 50% of that known risk.
link |
Very often it accounts for less than a 10th
link |
of the known risk.
link |
And there's two possible explanations.
link |
And there's one which people tend to do,
link |
ah, well, we don't have enough statistical power.
link |
If we, maybe there's a million,
link |
we've only found a thousand of them.
link |
But if we find the other million,
link |
they're weakly related,
link |
but there's a huge number of them.
link |
And so we'll account for that whole risk.
link |
Maybe there's a billion of them.
link |
So that's one way.
link |
The other way is to say,
link |
well, hang on a minute, you're missing a system here.
link |
That system is the mitochondrial DNA,
link |
which people tend to dismiss because it's small
link |
and it doesn't change very much.
link |
But a few single letter changes in that mitochondrial DNA,
link |
it controls some really basic processes.
link |
It controls not only all the energy
link |
that we need to live and to move around
link |
and do everything we do,
link |
but also biosynthesis to make the new building blocks
link |
to make new cells.
link |
And cancer cells very often kind of take over
link |
the mitochondria and rewire them
link |
so that instead of using them for making energy,
link |
they're effectively using them as precursors
link |
for the building blocks for biosynthesis.
link |
You need to make new amino acids,
link |
new nucleotides for DNA.
link |
You wanna make new lipids to make your membranes and so on.
link |
So they kind of rewire metabolism.
link |
Now, the problem is that we've got all these interactions
link |
between mitochondrial DNA and the genes in the nucleus
link |
that are overlooked completely
link |
because people throw away,
link |
literally throw away the mitochondrial genes.
link |
And we can see in fruit flies that they interact
link |
and produce big differences in risk.
link |
So you can set AI onto this question
link |
of exactly how many of these base changes there are.
link |
And this is one possible solution
link |
that maybe there are a million of them
link |
and it does account for the greatest part of the risk.
link |
Or the other one is they aren't, it's just not there.
link |
That actually the risk lies in something
link |
you weren't even looking at.
link |
And this is where human intuition is very important.
link |
And just this feeling that, well, I'm working on this
link |
and I think it's important and I'm bloody minded about it.
link |
And in the end, some people are right.
link |
It turns out that it was important.
link |
Can you get AI to do that, to be bloody minded?
link |
And that, hang on a minute,
link |
you might be missing a whole other system here
link |
that's much bigger.
link |
That's the moment of discovery of scientific revolution.
link |
I'm giving up on saying AI can't do something.
link |
I've said it enough times about enough things.
link |
I think there's been a lot of progress.
link |
And instead I'm excited by the possibility
link |
of AI helping humans.
link |
But at the same time, just like I said,
link |
we seem to dismiss the power of humans.
link |
Like we're so limited in so many ways
link |
that we kind of, in what we feel like dumb ways,
link |
like we're not strong, we're kind of our attention,
link |
our attention, our memory is limited.
link |
Our ability to focus on things is limited
link |
in our own perception of what limited is.
link |
But that actually, there's an incredible computer
link |
behind the whole thing that makes this whole system work.
link |
Our ability to interact with the environment,
link |
to reason about the environment.
link |
There's magic there.
link |
And I'm hopeful that AI can capture
link |
some of that same magic.
link |
But that magic is not gonna look like
link |
Deep Blue playing chess.
link |
No, it's going to be more interesting.
link |
But I don't think it's gonna look
link |
like pattern finding either.
link |
I mean, that's essentially what you're telling me.
link |
It does very well at the moment.
link |
And my point is it works very well
link |
where you're looking for the right pattern.
link |
But we are storytelling animals
link |
and the hypothesis is a story.
link |
It's a testable story.
link |
But a new hypothesis is a leap into the unknown
link |
and it's a new story basically.
link |
And it says this leads to this leads to that.
link |
It's a causal set of storytelling.
link |
It's also possible that the leap into the unknown
link |
has a pattern of its own.
link |
And it's possible that it's learnable.
link |
There's a nice book by Arthur Kessler
link |
on the nature of creativity.
link |
And he likens it to a joke where the punchline goes off
link |
in a completely unexpected direction
link |
and says that this is the basis of human creativity.
link |
That some creative switch of direction
link |
to an unexpected place is similar to a joke.
link |
I'm not saying that's how it works,
link |
but it's a nice idea and there must be some truth in it.
link |
And it's one of these,
link |
most of the stories we tell are probably the wrong story
link |
and probably going nowhere and probably not helpful.
link |
And we definitely don't do as well
link |
at seeing patterns in things.
link |
But some of the most enjoyable human aspects
link |
is finding a new story that goes to an unexpected place.
link |
And again, these are all aspects
link |
of what being human means to me.
link |
And maybe these are all things
link |
that AI figures out for itself,
link |
or maybe they're just aspects.
link |
But I just have the feeling sometimes
link |
that the people who are trying to understand
link |
if we wish to craft an AI system
link |
which is somehow human like,
link |
that we don't have a firm enough grasp
link |
of what humans really are like in terms of how we are built.
link |
But we get a better, better understanding of that.
link |
I agree with you completely.
link |
We try to build a thing and then we go,
link |
hang on a minute, there's another system here.
link |
And that's actually the attempt to build AI
link |
that's human like,
link |
is getting us to a deeper understanding of human beings.
link |
The funny thing that I recently talked to Magnus Carlsen,
link |
why they consider to be the greatest chess player
link |
And he talked about AlphaZero,
link |
which is a system from DeepMind that plays chess.
link |
And he had a funny comment.
link |
He has a kind of dry sense of humor.
link |
But he was extremely impressed
link |
when he first saw AlphaZero play.
link |
And he said that it did a lot of things
link |
that could easily be mistaken for creativity.
link |
So he like, as a typical human,
link |
refused to give the system sort of its due.
link |
Because he came up with a lot of things
link |
that a lot of people are extremely impressed by.
link |
Not just the sheer calculation,
link |
but the brilliance of play.
link |
So one of the things that it does
link |
in really interesting ways is it sacrifices pieces.
link |
So in chess, that means you basically take a few steps back
link |
and then take a step forward.
link |
You give away pieces for some future reward.
link |
And that, for us humans, is where art is in chess.
link |
You take big risks.
link |
That for us humans, those risks are especially painful
link |
because you have a fog of uncertainty before you.
link |
So to take a risk now based on intuition
link |
of I think this is the right risk to take,
link |
but there's so many possibilities,
link |
that that's where it takes guts.
link |
That's where art is, that's that danger.
link |
And then the alpha,
link |
alpha zero takes those same kind of risks
link |
and does them even greater degree.
link |
But of course, it does it from a,
link |
well, you could easily reduce down
link |
to a cold calculation over patterns.
link |
But boy, when you see the final result,
link |
it sure looks like the same kind of magic
link |
that we see in creativity.
link |
When we see creative play on the chessboard,
link |
but the chessboard is very limited.
link |
And the question is, as we get better and better,
link |
can we do that same kind of creativity in mathematics,
link |
in programming, and then eventually in biology, psychology,
link |
and expand into more and more complex systems?
link |
I was, I used to go running when I was a boy,
link |
and fell running, which is to say, running up and down mountains.
link |
And I was never particularly great at it,
link |
but there were some people who were amazingly fast,
link |
especially at running down.
link |
And I realized in trying to do this,
link |
that there's only really two ways,
link |
there's three possible ways of doing it,
link |
and there's only two that work.
link |
Either you go extremely slowly and carefully,
link |
and you figure out, okay, there's a stone,
link |
I'll put my foot on this stone,
link |
and then there's another,
link |
there's a muddy puddle I'm going to avoid.
link |
And you know, it's slow, it's laborious.
link |
You figure it out step by step.
link |
Or you can just go incredibly fast,
link |
and you don't think about it at all.
link |
The entire conscious mind is shut out of it,
link |
and it's probably the same playing table tennis
link |
or something, there's something in the mind,
link |
which is doing a whole lot of subconscious calculations
link |
about exact, and it's amazing.
link |
You can run at astonishing speed down a hillside
link |
with no idea how you did it at all.
link |
And then you panic, and you think,
link |
I'm going to break my leg if I keep doing this,
link |
I've got to think about where I'm going to put my foot.
link |
So you slow down a bit and try to bring
link |
those conscious mind in, and then you do, you crash.
link |
You cannot think consciously while running downhill.
link |
So it's amazing how many calculations
link |
the mind is able to make.
link |
And now the problem with playing chess or something,
link |
if you're able to make all of those subconscious
link |
kind of forward calculations about
link |
what is the likely outcome of this move now
link |
in the way that we can by running down a hillside
link |
or something, it's partly about what we have adapted to do.
link |
It's partly about the reality of the world that we're in.
link |
Running fast downhill is something
link |
that we better be bloody good at,
link |
otherwise we're going to be eaten.
link |
Whereas trying to calculate multiple, multiple moves
link |
into the future is not something
link |
we've ever been called on to do.
link |
Two or three, four moves into the future
link |
is quite enough for most of us most of the time.
link |
Yeah, yeah, so yeah, just solving chess may not,
link |
we may not be as far towards solving the problem
link |
of downhill running as we might think
link |
just because we solve chess.
link |
Still, it's beautiful to see creativity.
link |
Humans create machines.
link |
They're able to create art and art on a chessboard
link |
and art otherwise.
link |
Who knows how far that takes us.
link |
So I mentioned Andrej Karpathy earlier.
link |
Him and I are big fans of yours.
link |
If you're taking votes, his suggestion was
link |
you should write your next book on the Fermi Paradox.
link |
So let me ask you on the topic of alien life.
link |
Since we've been talking about life
link |
and we're a kind of aliens,
link |
how many alien civilizations are out there, do you think?
link |
Well, the universe is very big, so some,
link |
but not as many as most people would like to think
link |
is my view because the idea that there is a trajectory
link |
going from simple, simple cellular life like bacteria
link |
all the way through to humans.
link |
It seems to me there's some big gaps along that way
link |
that the eukaryotic cell, the complex cell that we have
link |
is the biggest of them, but also photosynthesis is another.
link |
The other, another interesting gap is a long gap
link |
from the origin of the eukaryotic cell
link |
to the first animals.
link |
That was about a billion years, maybe more than that.
link |
A long delay in when oxygen began
link |
to accumulate in the atmosphere.
link |
So from the first appearance of oxygen
link |
in the Great Oxidation Event to enough for animals
link |
to respire, it was close to two billion years.
link |
It seems to be planetary factors.
link |
It seems to be geology as much as in anything else.
link |
And we don't really know what was going on.
link |
So the idea that there's a kind of an inevitable march
link |
towards complexity and sentient life,
link |
I don't think is right.
link |
Doesn't, not to say it's not gonna happen,
link |
but I think it's not gonna happen often.
link |
So if you think of Earth,
link |
given the geological constraints and all that kind of stuff,
link |
do you have a sense that life, complex life,
link |
intelligent life happened really quickly on Earth
link |
So just to get a sense of,
link |
are you more sort of saying that it's very unlikely
link |
to get the kind of conditions required to create humans?
link |
Or is it, even if you have the condition,
link |
it's just statistically difficult?
link |
I think the, I mean, the problem,
link |
the single great problem at the center of all of that,
link |
to my mind, is the origin of the eukaryotic cell,
link |
which happened once and without eukaryotes,
link |
nothing else would have happened.
link |
And that is something that.
link |
That's because you're saying it's super important,
link |
the eukaryotes, but.
link |
I'm saying a tantamount to saying that it is impossible
link |
to build something as complex as a human being
link |
from bacterial cells.
link |
Totally agree in some deep fundamental way.
link |
But it's just like a one cell going inside another.
link |
Is that so difficult to get to work right?
link |
Well, again, it happened once.
link |
And if you think about, if you think,
link |
I mean, I'm in a minority view in this position.
link |
Most biologists probably wouldn't agree with me anyway.
link |
But if you think about the starting point,
link |
we've got a simple cell, it's an alkyl cell,
link |
we can be fairly sure about that.
link |
So it looks a lot like a bacterium,
link |
but is in fact from this other domain of life.
link |
So it looks a lot like a bacterial cell.
link |
That means it doesn't have anything.
link |
It doesn't have a nucleus.
link |
It doesn't really have complex endomembrane.
link |
It has a little bit of stuff, but not that much.
link |
And it takes up an endosymbiont.
link |
So what happens next?
link |
And the answer is basically everything
link |
to do with complexity.
link |
To me, there's a beautiful paradox here.
link |
Plants and animals and fungi
link |
all have exactly the same type of cell.
link |
But they all have really different ways of living.
link |
So a plant cell, it's photosynthetic.
link |
They started out as algae in the oceans and so on.
link |
So think of algal blooms, single cell things.
link |
The basic cell structure that it's built from
link |
is exactly the same with a couple of small differences.
link |
It's got chloroplasts as well.
link |
It's got a vacuole.
link |
It's got a cell wall.
link |
But that's about it.
link |
Pretty much everything else is exactly the same
link |
in a plant cell and an animal cell.
link |
And yet the ways of life are completely different.
link |
So this cell structure did not evolve
link |
in response to different ways of life,
link |
different environments.
link |
I'm in the ocean doing photosynthesis.
link |
I'm on land running around as part of an animal.
link |
I'm a fungus in a soil,
link |
spreading out long shoots into whatever it may be, mycelium.
link |
So they all have the same underlying cell structure.
link |
Almost certainly it was driven by adaptation
link |
to the internal environment,
link |
to having these pesky endosymbionts
link |
that forced all kinds of change on the host cell.
link |
Now, in one way you could see that as a really good thing
link |
because it may be that there's some inevitability
link |
to this process that as soon as you got endosymbionts,
link |
you're more or less bound to go in that direction.
link |
Or it could be that there's a huge fluke about it
link |
and it's almost certain to go wrong
link |
in just about every case possible.
link |
That the conflict will lead to effectively war
link |
leading to death and extinction.
link |
And it simply doesn't work out.
link |
So maybe it happened millions of times
link |
and it went wrong every time.
link |
Or maybe it only happened once and it worked out
link |
because it was inevitable.
link |
And actually we simply do not know enough now
link |
to say which of those two possibilities is true.
link |
But both of them are a bit grim.
link |
But you're leaning towards,
link |
we just got really lucky in that one leap.
link |
Like we got, so do you have a sense
link |
that our galaxy, for example, has just maybe millions
link |
of planets with bacteria living on it?
link |
I would expect billions, tens of billions of planets
link |
with bacteria living on it practically.
link |
I mean, there's probably what, five to 10 planets per star
link |
of which I would hope that at least one
link |
would have bacteria on.
link |
So I expect bacteria to be very common.
link |
I simply can't put a number otherwise.
link |
I mean, I expect it will happen elsewhere.
link |
It's not that I think we're living
link |
in a completely empty universe.
link |
But I think that it's not gonna happen inevitably.
link |
And there's something, it wasn't,
link |
that's not the only problem with complex life on earth.
link |
I mentioned oxygen and animals and so on as well.
link |
And even humans, we came along very late.
link |
You go back 5 million years and would we be that impressed
link |
if we came across a planet full of giraffes?
link |
I mean, you'd think, hey, there's life here
link |
and it's a nice planet to colonize or something.
link |
We wouldn't think, oh, let's try and have a conversation
link |
with this giraffe.
link |
Yeah, I'm not sure what exactly we would think.
link |
I'm not exactly sure what makes humans so interesting
link |
from an alien perspective or how they would notice.
link |
I'll talk to you about cities too
link |
because that's an interesting perspective
link |
of how to look at human civilization.
link |
But your sense, I mean, of course you don't know,
link |
but it's an interesting world, it's an interesting galaxy,
link |
it's an interesting universe to live in
link |
that's just like every sun,
link |
like 90% of solar systems have bacteria in it.
link |
Imagine that world and the galaxy maybe has
link |
just a handful if not one intelligent civilization.
link |
That's a wild world.
link |
I didn't even think about that world.
link |
There's a kind of thought that,
link |
like one of the reasons it would be so exciting
link |
to find life on Mars or Titan or whatever
link |
is like if its life is elsewhere,
link |
then surely, statistically, that life,
link |
no matter how unlikely you query as multicellular organisms,
link |
sex, violence, what else is extremely difficult?
link |
I mean, photosynthesis, figuring out some machinery
link |
that involves the chemistry and the environment
link |
to allow the building up of complex organisms,
link |
surely that would arise.
link |
But man, I don't know how I would feel
link |
about just bacteria everywhere.
link |
Well, it would be depressing if it was true.
link |
I suppose depressing, I don't think, I don't.
link |
I don't know what's more depressing,
link |
bacteria everywhere or nothing everywhere.
link |
Yes, either of them are chilling.
link |
But whether it's chilling or not,
link |
I don't think should force us to change our view
link |
about whether it's real or not.
link |
And what I'm saying may or may not be true.
link |
So how would you feel if we discovered life on Mars?
link |
It sounds like you would be less excited than some others
link |
because you're like, well.
link |
What I would be most interested in
link |
is how similar to life on Earth it would be.
link |
It would actually turn into quite a subtle problem
link |
because the likelihood of life having gone to and fro
link |
between Mars and the Earth is quite,
link |
I wouldn't say high, but it's not low, it's quite feasible.
link |
And so if we found life on Mars
link |
and it had very similar genetic code,
link |
but it was slightly different,
link |
most people would interpret that immediately
link |
as evidence that they've been transit one way or the other
link |
and that it was a common origin of life on Mars
link |
or on the Earth and it went one way or the other way.
link |
The other way to see that question though would be to say,
link |
well, actually the beginnings of life
link |
lie in deterministic chemistry and thermodynamics,
link |
starting with the most likely abundant materials,
link |
CO2 and water and a wet rocky planet.
link |
And Mars was wet and rocky at the beginning.
link |
And will, I won't say inevitably,
link |
but potentially almost inevitably come up
link |
with a genetic code which is not very far away
link |
from the genetic code that we already have.
link |
So we see subtle differences in the genetic code.
link |
What does it mean?
link |
Could be very difficult to interpret.
link |
Is it possible, do you think, to tell the difference
link |
of something that truly originated?
link |
I think if the stereochemistry was different,
link |
we have sugars, for example, that are the L form
link |
or the D form and we have D sugars and L amino acids
link |
right across all of life.
link |
But lipids, the bacteria have one stereoisomer
link |
and the bacteria have the other, the opposite stereoisomer.
link |
So it's perfectly possible to use one or the other one.
link |
And the same would almost certainly go for,
link |
and I think George Church has been trying to make life
link |
based on the opposite stereoisomer.
link |
So it's perfectly possible to do and it will work.
link |
And if we were to find life on Mars
link |
that was using the opposite stereoisomer,
link |
that would be unequivocal evidence
link |
that life had started independently there.
link |
So hopefully the life we find will be on Titan and Europa
link |
or something like that where it's less likely
link |
that we shared and it's harsher conditions
link |
so there's gonna be weirder kind of life.
link |
I wouldn't count on that because if life started
link |
in deep sea hydrothermal vents here, that's pretty harsh.
link |
So Titan is different.
link |
Europa is probably quite similar to Earth
link |
in the sense that we're dealing with an ocean,
link |
some acidic ocean there, as the early Earth would have been.
link |
And it almost certainly has hydrothermal systems.
link |
Same with Enceladus.
link |
We can tell that from these plumes
link |
coming from the surface through the ice.
link |
We know there's a liquid ocean
link |
and we can tell roughly what the chemistry is.
link |
For Titan, we're dealing with liquid methane
link |
and things like that.
link |
So that would really, if there really is life there,
link |
it would really have to be very, very different
link |
to anything that we know on Earth.
link |
So the hard leap, the hardest leap,
link |
the most important leap is from prokaryotes to eukaryotes.
link |
What's the second, if we're ranking?
link |
What's the, you gave a lot of emphasis on photosynthesis.
link |
Yeah, and that would be my second one, I think.
link |
But it's not so much, I mean,
link |
photosynthesis is part of the problem.
link |
It's a difficult thing to do.
link |
Again, we know it happened once.
link |
We don't know why it happened once.
link |
But the fact that it was kind of taken on board completely
link |
by plants and algae and so on as chloroplasts
link |
and did very well in completely different environments
link |
and then on land and whatever else seems to suggest
link |
that there's no problem with exploring,
link |
whether you could have a separate origin
link |
that explored this whole domain over there
link |
that the bacteria had never gone into.
link |
So that kind of says that the reason
link |
that it only happened once is probably
link |
because it's difficult, because the wiring is difficult.
link |
But then it happened at least 2.2 billion years ago,
link |
right before the GOE, maybe as long as 3 billion years ago,
link |
when there are, some people say there are whiffs of oxygen,
link |
there's just kind of traces in the fossil
link |
in the geochemical record that say,
link |
maybe there was a bit of oxygen then.
link |
That's really disputed.
link |
Some people say it goes all the way back
link |
four billion years ago and then it's gone.
link |
And the common ancestor of life on Earth was photosynthetic.
link |
So immediately you've got groups of people
link |
who disagree over a two billion year period of time
link |
about when it started.
link |
But let's take the latest date when it's unequivocal,
link |
that's 2.2 billion years ago,
link |
through to around about the time of the Cambrian explosion
link |
when oxygen levels definitely got close to modern levels,
link |
which was around about 550 million years ago.
link |
So we've gone more than one and a half billion years
link |
where the Earth was in stasis.
link |
Nothing much changed.
link |
It's known as the boring billion, in fact.
link |
Probably stuff was, that was when eukaryotes arose
link |
somewhere in there, but it's...
link |
So this idea that the world is constantly changing,
link |
that we're constantly evolving,
link |
that we're moving up some ramp is a very human idea.
link |
But in reality, there are kind of tipping points
link |
to a new stable equilibrium where the cells
link |
that are producing oxygen are precisely counterbalanced
link |
by the cells that are consuming that oxygen,
link |
which is why it's 21% now and has been that way
link |
for hundreds of millions of years.
link |
We have a very precise balance.
link |
You go through a tipping point and you don't know
link |
where the next stable state's gonna be,
link |
but it can be a long way from here.
link |
And so if we change the world with global warming,
link |
there will be a tipping point.
link |
The question is where and when,
link |
and what's the next stable state?
link |
It may be uninhabitable to us.
link |
It'll be habitable to life, for sure.
link |
But there may be something like the Permian extinction
link |
where 95% of species go extinct
link |
and there's a five to 10 million year gap
link |
and then life recovers, but without humans.
link |
And the question statistically, well, without humans,
link |
but statistically does that ultimately lead
link |
to greater complexity, more interesting life,
link |
more intelligent life?
link |
Well, after the first appearance of oxygen with the GOE,
link |
there was a tipping point which led
link |
to a longterm stable state that was equivalent
link |
to the Black Sea today, which is to say oxygenated
link |
at the very surface and stagnant, sterile,
link |
not sterile, but sulfurous, lower down.
link |
And that was stable certainly around the continental margins
link |
for more than a billion years.
link |
It was not a state that led to progression
link |
in an obvious way.
link |
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to think about evolution,
link |
like what leads to stable states
link |
evolutionary pressures emerging from the environment.
link |
So maybe other planets are able
link |
to create evolutionary pressures, chemical pressures,
link |
whatever, some kind of pressure that say,
link |
you're screwed unless you get your shit together
link |
in the next like 10,000 years, like a lot of pressure.
link |
It seems like Earth, like the boring building
link |
might be explained in two ways.
link |
One is super difficult to take any kind of next step.
link |
And the second way it could be explained
link |
is there's no reason to take the next step.
link |
No, I think there is no reason, but at the end of it,
link |
there was a snowball Earth.
link |
So there was a planetary catastrophe on a huge scale
link |
where the ice was, the sea was frozen at the equator.
link |
And that forced change in one way or another.
link |
It's not long after that, 100 million years,
link |
perhaps after that, so not a short time,
link |
but this is when we begin to see animals.
link |
There was a shift again, another tipping point
link |
that led to catastrophic change
link |
that led to a takeoff then.
link |
We don't really know why, but one of the reasons
link |
why that I discuss in the book is about sulfate
link |
being washed into the oceans,
link |
which sounds incredibly parochial.
link |
But the issue is, I mean, what the data is showing,
link |
we can track roughly how oxygen was going
link |
into the atmosphere from carbon isotopes.
link |
So there's two main isotopes of carbon
link |
that we need to think about here.
link |
One is carbon 12, 99% of carbon is carbon 12.
link |
And then 1% of carbon is carbon 13,
link |
which is a stable isotope.
link |
And then there's carbon 14, which is a trivial radioactive,
link |
it's trivial in amount.
link |
So carbon 13 is 1%.
link |
And life and enzymes generally,
link |
you can think of carbon atoms as little balls
link |
bouncing around, ping pong balls bouncing around.
link |
Carbon 12 moves a little bit faster than carbon 13
link |
because it's lighter and it's more likely
link |
to encounter an enzyme.
link |
And so it's more likely to be fixed into organic matter.
link |
And so organic matter is enriched.
link |
And this is just an observation.
link |
It's enriched in carbon 12 by a few percent
link |
compared to carbon 13,
link |
relative to what you would expect if it was just equal.
link |
And if you then bury organic matter as coal
link |
or oil or whatever it may be,
link |
then it's no longer oxidized.
link |
So some oxygen remains leftover in the atmosphere.
link |
And that's how oxygen accumulates in the atmosphere.
link |
And you can work out historically
link |
how much oxygen there must've been in the atmosphere
link |
by how much carbon was being buried.
link |
And you think, well, how can we possibly know
link |
how much carbon was being buried?
link |
And the answer is, well, if you're burying carbon 12,
link |
what you're leaving behind is more carbon 13 in the oceans
link |
and that precipitates out into limestone.
link |
So you can look at limestones over these ages
link |
and work out what's the carbon 13 signal.
link |
And that gives you a kind of a feedback
link |
on what the oxygen content.
link |
Right before the Cambrian explosion,
link |
there was what's called a negative isotope anomaly excursion,
link |
which is basically the carbon 13 goes down
link |
by a massive amount and then back up again
link |
10 million years later.
link |
And what that seems to be saying is the amount
link |
of carbon 12 in the oceans was disappearing,
link |
which is to say it was being oxidized.
link |
And if it's being oxidized, it's consuming oxygen.
link |
And that should, so a big carbon 13 signal says
link |
the ratio of carbon 12 to carbon 13 is really going down,
link |
which means there's much more carbon 12
link |
being taken out and being oxidized.
link |
Sorry, this is getting too complex, but.
link |
Well, it's a good way to estimate the amount of oxygen.
link |
If you calculate the amount of oxygen
link |
based on the assumption that all this carbon 12
link |
that's being taken out is being oxidized by oxygen,
link |
the answer is all the oxygen in the atmosphere
link |
gets stripped out, there is none left.
link |
And yet the rest of the geological indicators say,
link |
no, there's oxygen in the atmosphere.
link |
So it's a kind of a paradox.
link |
And the only way to explain this paradox
link |
just on mass balance of how much stuff is in the air,
link |
how much stuff is in the oceans and so on,
link |
is to assume that oxygen was not the oxygen,
link |
Sulfate was being washed into the oceans.
link |
It's used as an electron acceptor
link |
by sulfate reducing bacteria,
link |
just as we use oxygen as an electron acceptor.
link |
So they pass their electrons to sulfate instead of oxygen.
link |
And. Bacteria did.
link |
So these are bacteria.
link |
So they're oxidizing carbon, organic carbon with sulfate,
link |
passing the electrons onto sulfate,
link |
that reacts with iron to form iron pyrite or fool's gold,
link |
sinks down to the bottom, gets buried out of the system.
link |
And this can account for the mass balance.
link |
So why does it matter?
link |
It matters because what it says is
link |
there was a chance event,
link |
tectonically there was a lot of sulfate sitting on land
link |
as some kind of mineral.
link |
So calcium sulfate minerals, for example, are evaporitic.
link |
And because there happened to be
link |
some continental collisions, mountain building,
link |
the sulfate was pushed up the side of a mountain
link |
and happened to get washed into the ocean.
link |
Yeah, so I wonder how many happy accidents
link |
like that are possible.
link |
Statistically, it's really hard.
link |
Maybe you can rule that in statistically,
link |
but this is the course of life on earth.
link |
Without all that sulfate being raised up,
link |
this Cambrian explosion almost certainly
link |
would not have happened.
link |
And then we wouldn't have had animals and so on and so on.
link |
So it's this kind of explanation of the Cambrian explosion.
link |
So let me actually say in several ways.
link |
So folks who challenge the validity
link |
of the theory of evolution will give us an example.
link |
Now I'm not well studied in this,
link |
but will give us an example of the Cambrian explosion
link |
as like, this thing is weird.
link |
Oh, it is weird, yeah.
link |
So the question I would have is
link |
what's the biggest mystery or gap in understanding
link |
Is it the Cambrian explosion?
link |
And if so, what's our best understanding
link |
of how to explain, first of all, what is it?
link |
In my understanding, in the short amount of time,
link |
maybe 10 million years, 100 million years,
link |
something like that, a huge number of animals,
link |
a variety, diversity of animals were created.
link |
Anyway, there's like five questions in there.
link |
Is that the biggest mystery?
link |
No, I don't think it's a particularly big mystery
link |
There are still mysteries about why then.
link |
And I've just said sulfate being washed
link |
into the oceans is one.
link |
It needs oxygen and oxygen levels rose around that time.
link |
So probably before that, they weren't high enough
link |
What we're seeing with the Cambrian explosion
link |
is the beginning of predators and prey relationships.
link |
We're seeing modern ecosystems and we're seeing arms races
link |
and we're seeing the full creativity of evolution unleashed.
link |
So I talked about the boring billion,
link |
nothing happens for one and a half billion years,
link |
one and a half billion years.
link |
The assumption, and this is completely wrong,
link |
this assumption, is then that evolution works really slowly
link |
and that you need billions of years
link |
to affect some small change
link |
and then another billion years to do something else.
link |
It's completely wrong.
link |
Evolution gets stuck in a stasis and it stays that way
link |
for tens of millions, hundreds of millions of years.
link |
And Steven Jay Gould used to argue this,
link |
he called it punctuated equilibrium,
link |
but he was doing it to do with animals
link |
and to do with the last 500 million years or so,
link |
where it's much less obvious
link |
than if you think about the entire planetary history.
link |
And then you realize that the first two billion years
link |
was bacteria only.
link |
You have the origin of life,
link |
two billion years of just bacteria,
link |
oxygen photosynthesis arising here.
link |
Then you have a global catastrophe,
link |
snowball earths and great oxidation event
link |
and then another billion years of nothing happening
link |
and then some period of upheavals
link |
and then another snowball earth
link |
and then suddenly you see the Cambrian explosion.
link |
This is long periods of stasis
link |
where the world is in a stable state
link |
and is not geared towards increasing complexity.
link |
It's just everything is in balance.
link |
And only when you have a catastrophic level,
link |
global level problem like a snowball earth,
link |
it forces everything out of balance
link |
and there's a tipping point and you end up somewhere else.
link |
Now, the idea that evolution is slow is wrong.
link |
It can be incredibly fast.
link |
And I mentioned earlier on that you can,
link |
in theory, it would take half a million years
link |
to invent an eye, for example, from a light sensitive spot.
link |
It doesn't take long to convert
link |
one kind of tube into a tube with nobbles on it
link |
into a tube with arms on it and then multiple arms
link |
and then at one end is the head
link |
where it starts out as a swelling.
link |
It's not difficult intellectually to understand
link |
how these things can happen.
link |
It boggles the mind that it can happen so quickly,
link |
but we're used to human timescales.
link |
And what we need to talk about is generations of things
link |
that live for a year in the ocean.
link |
And then a million years is a million generations.
link |
And the amount of change that you can do,
link |
it can affect in that period of time is enormous.
link |
And we're dealing with large populations of things
link |
where selection is sensitive to pretty small changes
link |
and can, so again, as soon as you throw in
link |
the competition of predators and prey
link |
and you're ramping up the scale of evolution,
link |
it's not very surprising that it happens very quickly
link |
when the environment allows it to happen.
link |
So I don't think there's a big mystery.
link |
There's lots of details that need to be filled in.
link |
I mean, the big mystery in biology is consciousness.
link |
The big mystery in biology is consciousness.
link |
Well, intelligence is kind of a mystery too.
link |
I mean, you said biology, not psychology.
link |
Because from a biology perspective,
link |
it seems like intelligence and consciousness
link |
all are the same, like weird, like all the brain stuff.
link |
I don't see intelligence as necessarily that difficult,
link |
I mean, I see it as a form of computing
link |
and I don't know much about computing, so I...
link |
You don't know much about consciousness either.
link |
So I mean, I suppose, oh, I see.
link |
I see, I see, I see, I see.
link |
That consciousness you do know a lot about as a human being.
link |
No, no, I mean, I think I can understand the wiring
link |
of a brain as a series of, in pretty much the same way
link |
as a computer in theory, in terms of the circuitry of it.
link |
The mystery to me is how this system gives rise to feelings,
link |
as we were talking about earlier on.
link |
Yeah, I just, I think we oversimplify intelligence.
link |
I think the dance, the magic of reasoning
link |
is as interesting as the magic of feeling.
link |
We tend to think of reasoning as like very,
link |
running a very simplistic algorithm.
link |
I think reasoning is the interplay between memory,
link |
whatever the hell is going on, the unconscious mind,
link |
I'm not trying to diminish it in any way at all.
link |
Obviously, it's extraordinarily exquisitely complex,
link |
but I don't see a logical difficulty with how it works.
link |
Yeah, no, I mean, I agree with you, but sometimes, yeah,
link |
there's a big cloak of mystery around consciousness.
link |
Let me compare it with classical versus quantum physics.
link |
Classical physics is logical, and you can understand the kind
link |
of language we're dealing with.
link |
It's almost at the human level, we're
link |
dealing with stars and things that we can see.
link |
And when you get to quantum mechanics and things,
link |
it's practically impossible for the human mind
link |
to compute what just happened there.
link |
Yeah, I mean, that is the same.
link |
It's like, you understand mathematically
link |
that the notes of a musical composition, that's intelligence.
link |
But why it makes you feel a certain way,
link |
that is much harder to understand.
link |
Yeah, that's really, but it was interesting framing
link |
that that's a mystery at the core of biology.
link |
I wonder who solves consciousness.
link |
I tend to think consciousness will
link |
be solved by the engineer, meaning the person who builds
link |
it, who keeps trying to build the thing,
link |
versus biology, such a complicated system.
link |
I feel like the building blocks of consciousness
link |
from a biological perspective are like,
link |
that's like the final creation of a human being.
link |
So you have to understand the whole damn thing.
link |
You said the electrical field, but like,
link |
electrical field is plus plus.
link |
Everything, the whole shebang.
link |
I'm inclined to agree.
link |
I mean, my feeling is from my meager knowledge
link |
of the history of science is that the biggest breakthrough
link |
has usually come through from a field that was not related.
link |
So if anyone is not going to be a biologist who
link |
solves consciousness, just because biologists
link |
are too embedded in the nature of the problem.
link |
And then nobody's going to believe you when you've done it,
link |
because nobody's going to be able to prove that this AI is
link |
in fact conscious and sad in any case,
link |
and any more than you can prove that a dog is
link |
conscious and sad.
link |
So it tells you that it is in good language,
link |
and you must believe it.
link |
But I think most people will accept,
link |
if faced with that, that that's what it is.
link |
All of this probability of complex life,
link |
in one way, I think why it matters is that my expectation,
link |
I suppose, is that we will be over the next 100 years
link |
or so, if we survive at all, that AI will increasingly
link |
And pretty much anything that we put out
link |
into space looking for other, well, for the universe,
link |
for what's out there, will be AI, won't be us.
link |
We won't be doing that.
link |
Or when we do, it'll be on a much more limited scale.
link |
I suppose the same would apply to any alien civilization.
link |
So perhaps rather than looking for signs of life out there,
link |
we should be looking for AI out there.
link |
But then we face the problem that I
link |
don't see how a planet is going to give rise directly to AI.
link |
I can see how a planet can give rise directly to organic life.
link |
And if the principles that govern the evolution of life
link |
on Earth apply to other planets as well,
link |
and I think a lot of them would, then
link |
the likelihood of ending up with a humanlike civilization
link |
capable of giving rise to AI in the first place
link |
is massively limited.
link |
Once you've done it once, perhaps it takes over
link |
the universe, and maybe there's no issue.
link |
But it seems to me that the two are necessarily linked,
link |
that you're not going to just turn a sterile planet
link |
into an AI life form without the intermediary of the organics
link |
So you have to run the full evolutionary computation
link |
with the organics to create AI.
link |
How does AI bootstrap itself up without the aid, if you like,
link |
of an intelligent designer?
link |
The origin of AI is going to have
link |
to be in the chemistry of a planet.
link |
But that's not a limiting factor, right?
link |
So let me ask the Fermi paradox question.
link |
Let's say we live in this incredibly dark and beautiful
link |
world of just billions of planets with bacteria on it
link |
and very few intelligent civilizations,
link |
and yet there's a few out there.
link |
Why haven't we, at scale, seen them visit us?
link |
What's your sense?
link |
Is it because they don't exist?
link |
Well, don't exist in the right part of the universe
link |
at the right time.
link |
That's the simplest answer for it.
link |
Is that the one you find the most compelling,
link |
or is there some other explanation?
link |
I find that, no, it's not that I find it more compelling.
link |
It's that I find more probable.
link |
And I find all of them, I mean, there's
link |
a lot of handwaving in this.
link |
We just don't know.
link |
So I'm trying to read out from what I know about life on Earth
link |
to what might happen somewhere else.
link |
And it gives, to my mind, a bit of a pessimistic view
link |
of bacteria everywhere and only occasional intelligent life
link |
and running forward humans only once on Earth and nothing else
link |
that you would necessarily be any more excited about making
link |
contact with than you would be making contact with them
link |
So I think the chances are pretty limited.
link |
And the chances of us surviving are pretty limited, too,
link |
in the way we're going on at the moment.
link |
The likelihood of us not making ourselves extinct
link |
within the next few hundred years,
link |
possibly within the next 50 or 100 years, seems quite small.
link |
I hope we can do better than that.
link |
So maybe the only thing that will survive from humanity
link |
And maybe AI, once it exists and once
link |
it's capable of effectively copying itself and cutting
link |
humans out of the loop, then maybe that
link |
will take over the universe.
link |
I mean, there's a kind of inherent sadness
link |
to the way you described that.
link |
But isn't that also potentially beautiful,
link |
that that's the next step of life, I suppose,
link |
from your perspective, as long as it carries the flame
link |
of consciousness somehow?
link |
No, I think, yes, there can be some beauty to it
link |
being the next step of life.
link |
And I don't know if consciousness matters or not,
link |
from that point of view, to be honest with you.
link |
But there's some sadness, yes, probably,
link |
because I think it comes down to the selfishness
link |
that we were talking about earlier on.
link |
I am an individual with a desire not
link |
to be displaced from life.
link |
I want to stay alive.
link |
I want to be here.
link |
So I suppose the threat that a lot of people would feel
link |
is that we will just be wiped out,
link |
so that there will be potential conflict between AI and humans
link |
and that AI will win because it's a lot smarter.
link |
Boy, would that be a sad state of affairs
link |
if consciousness is just an intermediate stage
link |
between bacteria and AI, right?
link |
Well, I would see bacteria as being potentially
link |
a kind of primitive form of consciousness anyway.
link |
So the whole of life on Earth, to my mind,
link |
is capable of some form of feelings
link |
in response to the environment.
link |
That's not to say it's intelligent,
link |
it's got its own algorithms for intelligence,
link |
but nothing comparable with us.
link |
I think it's beautiful what a planet, what a sterile planet,
link |
It's astonishing that it's come up with all of this stuff
link |
that we see around us and that either we or whatever we
link |
produce is capable of destroying all of that is a sad thought.
link |
But it's also hugely pessimistic.
link |
I'd like to think that we're capable of giving rise
link |
to something which is at least as good,
link |
if not better than us, as AI.
link |
Yeah, I have that same optimism, especially a thing
link |
that is able to propagate throughout the universe
link |
more efficiently than humans can.
link |
Or extensions of humans, some merger with AI and humans,
link |
whether that comes from bioengineering of the human body
link |
to extend its life somehow, to carry
link |
that flame of consciousness and that personality
link |
and the beautiful tension that's within all of us,
link |
carry that through to multiple planets,
link |
to multiple solar systems, all out there in the universe.
link |
I mean, that's a beautiful vision.
link |
Whether AI can do that or bioengineered humans can,
link |
that's an exciting possibility.
link |
And especially meeting other alien civilizations
link |
in that same kind of way.
link |
Do you think aliens have consciousness?
link |
If they're organic.
link |
So organic is connected to consciousness.
link |
I mean, I think any system which is going to bootstrap itself
link |
up from planetary origins, I mean, let me finish this
link |
and then come on to something else.
link |
But from planetary origins is going
link |
to face similar constraints.
link |
And those constraints are going to be addressed
link |
in similar basic engineering ways.
link |
And I think it will be cellular.
link |
And I think it will have electrical charges.
link |
And I think it will have to be selected
link |
in populations over time.
link |
And all of these things will tend
link |
to give rise to the same processes
link |
as the simplest fix to a difficult problem.
link |
So I would expect it to be conscious, yes.
link |
And I would expect it to resemble life
link |
on Earth in many ways.
link |
When I was about, I guess, 15 or 16,
link |
I remember reading a book by Fred Hoyle
link |
called The Black Cloud, which I was a budding biologist
link |
And this was the first time I'd come across someone really
link |
challenging the heart of biology and saying,
link |
you are far too parochial.
link |
You're thinking about life as carbon based.
link |
Here's a life form which is kind of dust, interstellar dust
link |
on a solar system scale.
link |
But I felt enormously challenged by that novel
link |
because it hadn't occurred to me how limited my thinking was,
link |
how narrow minded I was being.
link |
And here was a great physicist with a completely different
link |
conception of what life could be.
link |
And since then, I've seen him attacked in various ways.
link |
And I'm kind of reluctant to say the attacks make more sense
link |
to me than the original story, which
link |
is to say, even in terms of information processing,
link |
if you're on that scale and there's
link |
a limit to the speed of light, how quickly can something
link |
think if you're needing to broadcast
link |
across the solar system, it's going to be slow.
link |
It's not going to hold a conversation with you
link |
on the kind of timelines that Fred Hoyle was imagining,
link |
at least not by any easy way of doing it,
link |
assuming that the speed of light is a limit.
link |
And then again, you really can't.
link |
This is something Richard Dawkins argued long ago.
link |
And I do think he's right.
link |
There is no other way to generate
link |
this level of complexity than natural selection.
link |
Nothing else can do it.
link |
You need populations.
link |
And you need selection in populations
link |
and a kind of an isolated interstellar cloud.
link |
Again, there's unlimited time.
link |
And maybe there's no problems with distance.
link |
But you need to have a certain frequency of generational time
link |
to generate a serious level of complexity.
link |
And I just have a feeling it's never going to work.
link |
Well, as far as we know, so natural selection and evolution
link |
is really a powerful tool here on Earth.
link |
But there could be other mechanisms.
link |
So I don't know if you're familiar with cellular automata,
link |
but complex systems that have really simple components
link |
and seemingly move based on simple rules
link |
when they're taken as a whole, really interesting complexity
link |
I don't know what the pressures on that are.
link |
It's not really selection, but interesting complexity
link |
And that's not well understood exactly why that complexity
link |
I think there's a difference between complexity
link |
So some of the work we're doing on the origin of life
link |
is thinking about how do genes arise?
link |
How does information arise in biology?
link |
And thinking about it from the point of view
link |
of reacting CO2 with hydrogen, what do you get?
link |
Well, what you're going to get is carboxylic acids, then
link |
It's quite hard to make nucleotides.
link |
And it's possible to make them, and it's been done,
link |
and it's been done following this pathway as well.
link |
But you make trace amounts.
link |
And so the next question, assuming
link |
that this is the right way of seeing the question, which
link |
maybe it's just not, but let's assume it is,
link |
is, well, how do you reliably make more nucleotides?
link |
And how do you become more complex and better at becoming
link |
a nucleotide generating machine?
link |
And the answer is, well, you need positive feedback loops,
link |
some form of autocatalysis.
link |
So that can work, and we know it happens in biology.
link |
If this nucleotide, for example, catalyzes CO2 fixation,
link |
then you're going to increase the rate of flux
link |
through the whole system, and you're
link |
going to effectively steepen the driving force
link |
to make more nucleotides.
link |
And this can be inherited because there
link |
are forms of membrane heredity that you can have.
link |
And effectively, if a cell divides in two
link |
and it's got a lot of stuff inside it,
link |
and that stuff is basically bound
link |
as a network which is capable of regenerating itself,
link |
then it will inevitably regenerate itself.
link |
And so you can develop greater complexity.
link |
But everything that I've said depends on the underlying rules
link |
of thermodynamics.
link |
There is no evolvability about that.
link |
It's simply an inevitable outcome of your starting point,
link |
assuming that you're able to increase the driving
link |
force through the system.
link |
You will generate more of the same.
link |
You'll expand on what you can do,
link |
but you'll never get anything different than that.
link |
And it's only when you introduce information into that
link |
as a gene, as a kind of small stretch of RNA, which
link |
can be random stretch, then you get real evolvability.
link |
Then you get biology as we know it.
link |
But you also have selection as we know it.
link |
Yeah, I mean, I don't know how to think about information.
link |
That's a kind of memory of the system.
link |
So it's not, yeah, at the local level,
link |
it's propagation of copying yourself and changing
link |
and improving your adaptability to the environment.
link |
But if you look at Earth as a whole, it has a kind of memory.
link |
That's the key feature of it.
link |
It remembers the stuff it tries.
link |
Like, if you were to describe Earth,
link |
I think evolution is something that we experience
link |
as individual organisms.
link |
That's how the individual organisms
link |
interact with each other.
link |
There's a natural selection.
link |
But when you look at Earth as an organism in its entirety,
link |
how would you describe it?
link |
Well, not as an organism.
link |
I mean, the idea of Gaia is lovely.
link |
And James Lovelock originally put Gaia out
link |
as an organism that had somehow evolved.
link |
And he was immediately attacked by lots of people.
link |
And he's not wrong, but he backpedaled somewhat
link |
because that was more of a poetic vision than the science.
link |
The science is now called Earth systems science.
link |
And it's really about how does the world regulate itself
link |
so it remains within the limits which are hospitable to life.
link |
And it does it amazingly well.
link |
And it is working at a planetary level of integration,
link |
But it's not evolving by natural selection.
link |
And it can't because there's only one of it.
link |
And so it can change over time.
link |
But it's not evolving.
link |
All the evolution is happening in the parts of the system.
link |
Yeah, but it's a self sustaining organism.
link |
No, it's sustained by the sun.
link |
Right, so you don't think it's possible to see Earth
link |
as its own organism?
link |
I think it's poetic and beautiful.
link |
And I often refer to the Earth as a living planet.
link |
But it's not, in biological terms, an organism, no.
link |
If aliens were to visit Earth, what would they notice?
link |
What would be the basic unit of light they would notice?
link |
I mean, it's green.
link |
It's green and blue.
link |
I think that's the first thing you'd notice.
link |
It stands out from space as being different to any
link |
of the other planets.
link |
So it would notice the trees at first because the green.
link |
I notice the green, yes.
link |
And then probably notice, figure out the photosynthesis.
link |
Probably notice cities a second, I suspect, maybe first.
link |
If they arrived at night, they'd notice cities first,
link |
You write quite beautifully in Transformers.
link |
Once again, I think you opened the book in this way.
link |
From space, describing Earth, it's such an interesting idea
link |
of what Earth is, you also, I mean, Hitchhiker's Guide,
link |
summarizing it as harmless, or mostly harmless.
link |
It's a beautifully poetic thing.
link |
You open Transformers with, from space,
link |
it looks gray and crystalline, obliterating
link |
the blue green colors of the living Earth.
link |
It is crisscrossed by irregular patterns
link |
and convergent striations.
link |
There's a central amorphous density
link |
where these scratches seem lighter.
link |
This, quote, growth does not look alive,
link |
although it has extended out along some lines,
link |
and there is something grasping and parasitic about it.
link |
Across the globe, there are thousands of them,
link |
varying in shape and detail, but all of them gray, angular,
link |
and organic, spreading.
link |
Yet at night, they light up, glowing up the dark sky,
link |
suddenly beautiful.
link |
Perhaps these cankers on the landscape
link |
are in some sense living.
link |
There's a controlled flow of energy.
link |
There must be information and some form of metabolism,
link |
some turnover of materials.
link |
No, of course not.
link |
So is there some sense that cities are living beings?
link |
You think aliens would think of them as living beings?
link |
Well, it'd be easy to see it that way, wouldn't it?
link |
It wakes up at night, they wake up at night.
link |
Strictly nocturnal, yes.
link |
I imagine that any aliens that are smart enough
link |
to get here would understand
link |
that they're not living beings.
link |
My reason for saying that is that we tend to think
link |
of biology in terms of information and forget about cells.
link |
I was trying to draw a comparison between the cell
link |
as a city and the energy flow through the city
link |
and the energy flow through cells
link |
and the turnover of materials.
link |
And an interesting thing about cities
link |
is that they're not really exactly governed by anybody.
link |
There are regulations and systems and whatever else,
link |
but it's pretty loose.
link |
They have their own life,
link |
their own way of developing over time.
link |
And in that sense, they're quite biological.
link |
There was a plan after the great fire of London.
link |
Christopher Wren was making plans
link |
not only for St. Paul's Cathedral,
link |
but also to rebuild in large Parisian type boulevards,
link |
a large part of the area of central London that was burned.
link |
And it never happened
link |
because they didn't have enough money, I think.
link |
But it's interesting what was in the plan.
link |
There were all these boulevards
link |
that were built in the middle of the city.
link |
It's interesting what was in the plan.
link |
There were all these boulevards,
link |
but there were no pubs and no coffee houses
link |
or anything like that.
link |
And the reality was London just kind of grew up
link |
in a set of jumbled streets.
link |
And it was the coffee houses and the pubs
link |
where all the business of the city of London was being done.
link |
And that was where the real life of the city was.
link |
And no one had planned it.
link |
The whole thing was unplanned and works much better that way.
link |
And in that sense, the cell is completely unplanned,
link |
is not controlled by the genes in the nucleus
link |
in the way that we might like to think that it is,
link |
but it's kind of evolved entity
link |
that has the same kind of flux,
link |
the same animation, the same life.
link |
So I think it's a beautiful analogy,
link |
but I wouldn't get too stuck with it as a metaphor.
link |
See, I disagree with you.
link |
I disagree with you.
link |
I think you are so steeped,
link |
and actually the entirety of science,
link |
the history of science is steeped
link |
in a biological framework of thinking about what is life.
link |
And not just biological, it's very human centric too.
link |
That human, the human organism is the epitome of life
link |
I think there is some deep fundamental way
link |
in which a city is a living being
link |
in the same way that a human individual can.
link |
But it doesn't give rise to an offspring city.
link |
So it doesn't work by natural selection.
link |
It works by, if anything, memes.
link |
It works by copying itself conceptually
link |
as a mode of being.
link |
So maybe memes, maybe ideas are the organisms
link |
that are really essential to life on earth.
link |
Maybe it's much more important
link |
about the collective aspect of human nature,
link |
the collective intelligence
link |
than the individual intelligence.
link |
Maybe the collective humanity is the organism.
link |
And the thing that defines the collective intelligence
link |
of humanity is the ideas.
link |
And maybe the way that manifests itself is cities,
link |
maybe, or societies or geographically concentrated societies
link |
or nations and all that kind of stuff.
link |
I mean, from an alien perspective,
link |
it's possible that that is the more deeply noticeable thing,
link |
not from a place of ignorance.
link |
What's noticeable doesn't tell you how it works.
link |
I think, I mean, I don't have any problem
link |
with what you're saying really,
link |
except that it's not possible without the humans.
link |
You know, we went from a hunter gatherers type economy,
link |
if you like, without cities to cities.
link |
And as soon as we get into human evolution
link |
and culture and society and so on,
link |
then yes, there are other forms of evolution,
link |
other forms of change.
link |
But cities don't directly propagate themselves,
link |
they propagate themselves through human societies
link |
and human societies only exist because humans
link |
as individuals propagate themselves.
link |
So there's a kind of, there is a hierarchy there
link |
and without the humans in the first place,
link |
none of the rest of it exists.
link |
So do you, life is primarily defined by the basic unit
link |
on which evolution can operate?
link |
I think it's a really important thing, yes.
link |
And we don't know, we don't have any other better ideas
link |
than evolution for how to create life.
link |
I never came across a better idea than evolution.
link |
I mean, maybe I'm just ignorant and I don't know.
link |
And there's, you know, you mentioned that's no automator
link |
and so on, and I don't think specifically about that,
link |
but I have thought about it in terms of selective units
link |
of the origin of life and the difference
link |
between evolvability and complexity
link |
or just increasing complexity,
link |
but within very narrow, narrowly defined limits.
link |
The great thing about genes and about selection
link |
is it just knocks down all those limits.
link |
It gives you a world of information in the end
link |
which is limited only by the biophysical reality
link |
of what kind of an organism you are,
link |
what kind of a planet you live on and so on.
link |
And cities and all these other forms that look alive
link |
and could be described as alive
link |
because they can't propagate themselves
link |
can only exist as the product of something
link |
that did propagate itself.
link |
I mean, there's a deeply compelling truth
link |
to that kind of way of looking at things,
link |
but I just hope that we don't miss the giant cloud
link |
I kind of hope that I'm wrong about a lot of this
link |
because I can't say that my worldview
link |
is particularly uplifting, but in some sense,
link |
it doesn't matter if it's uplifting or not.
link |
Science is about what's reality, what's out there,
link |
why is it this way?
link |
And I think there's beauty in that too.
link |
There's beauty in darkness.
link |
You write about life and death
link |
sort of at the biological level.
link |
Does the question of suicide, why live,
link |
does the question of why the human mind
link |
is capable of depression, are you able to introspect
link |
that from a place of biology?
link |
Why our minds, why we humans can go to such dark places?
link |
Why can we commit suicide?
link |
Why can we go suffer, suffer period,
link |
but also suffer from a feeling of meaninglessness
link |
of going to a dark place that depression can take you?
link |
Is this a feature of life or is it a bug?
link |
I mean, if it's a feature of life,
link |
then I suppose it would have to be true
link |
of other organisms as well.
link |
And I don't know, we were talking about dogs earlier on
link |
and they can certainly be very sad and upset
link |
and may mooch for days after their owner died
link |
or something like that.
link |
So I suspect in some sense it's a feature of biology.
link |
It's probably a feature of mortality.
link |
It's probably a, but beyond all of that,
link |
I mean, I guess there's two ways you could come at it.
link |
There's one of them would be to say,
link |
well, you can effectively do the math
link |
and come to the conclusion that it's all pointless
link |
and that there's really no point
link |
in me being here any longer.
link |
And maybe that's true in the greater scheme of things.
link |
You can justify yourself in terms of society,
link |
but society will be gone soon enough as well.
link |
And you end up with a very bleak place just by logic.
link |
In some sense, it's surprising
link |
that we can find any meaning at all.
link |
Well, maybe this is where consciousness comes in
link |
that we have transient joy, but with transient joy,
link |
we have transient misery as well.
link |
And sometimes with everything in biology,
link |
getting the regulation right is practically impossible.
link |
You will always have a bell shaped curve
link |
where some people unfortunately are at the joy end
link |
and some people are at the misery end.
link |
And that's the way brains are wired.
link |
And I doubt there's ever an escape from that.
link |
It's the same with sex and everything else as well.
link |
We're dealing with, you can't regulate it.
link |
So anything goes, it's all part of biology.
link |
Let me, on writing in your book, Power, Sex and Suicide.
link |
First of all, can I just read off the books you've written?
link |
If there's any better titles and topics to be covered,
link |
I don't know what they are.
link |
It makes me look forward
link |
to whatever you're going to write next.
link |
I hope there's things you write next.
link |
So first you wrote oxygen, the molecule that made the world
link |
as we've talked about this idea
link |
of the role of oxygen in life on earth.
link |
Then wait for it, power, sex, suicide, mitochondria
link |
and the meaning of life.
link |
Then life ascending, the 10 great inventions of evolution.
link |
The vital question, the first book I've read of yours,
link |
the vital question, why is life the way it is?
link |
And the new book, Transformer,
link |
the deep chemistry of life and death.
link |
In Power, Sex and Suicide, you write about writing
link |
or about a lot of things,
link |
but I have a question about writing.
link |
You write, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
link |
Ford Perfect spends 15 years researching his revision
link |
to the guide's entry on the earth,
link |
which originally read harmless.
link |
By the way, I would also as a side quest,
link |
as a side question would like to ask you
link |
what would be your summary of what earth is.
link |
You write, his long essay on the subject is edited down
link |
by the guide to read mostly harmless.
link |
I suspect that too many new editions suffer similar fate,
link |
if not through absurd editing decisions,
link |
at least through a lack of meaningful change in content.
link |
As it happens, nearly 15 years have passed
link |
since the first edition of Power, Sex, Suicide was published
link |
and I am resisting the temptation to make any lame revisions.
link |
Some say that even Darwin lessened the power
link |
of his arguments in The Origin of Species
link |
through his multiple revisions,
link |
in which he dealt with criticisms
link |
and sometimes shifted his views in the wrong direction.
link |
I prefer my original to speak for itself,
link |
even if it turns out to be wrong.
link |
Let me ask the question about writing,
link |
both your students in the academic setting,
link |
but also writing some of the most brilliant writings
link |
on science and humanity I've ever read.
link |
What's the process of writing?
link |
How do you advise other humans?
link |
If you were to talk to young Darwin or the young you
link |
and just young anybody and give advice about how to write
link |
and how to write well about these big topics,
link |
what would you say?
link |
I mean, I suppose there's a couple of points.
link |
One of them is what's the story?
link |
What do I want to know?
link |
What do I want to convey?
link |
Why does it matter to anybody?
link |
And very often the biggest, most interesting questions,
link |
the childlike questions are the one actually
link |
that everybody wants to ask, but dents quite,
link |
do it in case they look stupid.
link |
And one of the nice things about being in science
link |
is the longer you're in,
link |
the more you realize that everybody doesn't know
link |
the answer to these questions
link |
and it's not so stupid to ask them after all.
link |
So trying to ask the questions
link |
that I would have been asking myself at the age of 15, 16,
link |
when I was really hungry to know about the world
link |
and didn't know very much about it
link |
and wanted to go to the edge of what we know,
link |
but be helped to get there.
link |
I don't want to be too much terminology.
link |
And so I want someone to keep a clean eye
link |
on what the question is.
link |
Beyond that, I've wondered a lot about who am I writing for?
link |
And that was in the end, the only answer I had
link |
was myself at the age of 15 or 16,
link |
because even if you just don't know who's reading,
link |
but also where are they reading it?
link |
Are they reading it in the bath or in bed
link |
or on the Metro or listening to an audio book?
link |
Do you want to have a recapitulation every few pages
link |
because you read three pages at a time
link |
or are you really irritated by that?
link |
You're going to get criticism from people
link |
who are irritated by what you're doing.
link |
And you don't know who they are or what you're going to do
link |
that's going to irritate people.
link |
And in the end, all you can do is just try
link |
and please yourself.
link |
And that means, well, what are these big fun,
link |
fascinating and big questions?
link |
And what do we know about it?
link |
And can I convey that?
link |
And I kind of learned in trying to write,
link |
first of all, say what we know.
link |
And I was shocked in the first couple of books
link |
how often I came up quickly against
link |
all the stuff we don't know.
link |
And if you're trying to, I've realized later on
link |
in supervising various physicists and mathematicians
link |
who are PhD students, their maths is way beyond
link |
But the process of trying to work out
link |
what are we actually going to model here?
link |
What's going into this equation?
link |
It's a very similar one to writing.
link |
What am I going to put on a page?
link |
What's the simplest possible way
link |
I can encapsulate this idea?
link |
So that I now have it as a unit
link |
that I can kind of see how it interacts
link |
with the other units.
link |
And you realize that, well, if this is like that
link |
and this is like this, then that can't be true.
link |
So you end up navigating your own path
link |
through this landscape.
link |
And that can be thrilling
link |
because you don't know where it's going.
link |
And I'd like to think that that's one of the reasons
link |
my books have worked for people
link |
because this sense of the thrilling adventure ride
link |
that I don't know where it's going either.
link |
So finding the simplest possible way
link |
to explain the things we know
link |
and the simplest possible way to explain
link |
the things we don't know
link |
and the tension between those two.
link |
And that's where the story emerges.
link |
What about the edit?
link |
Do you find yourself to the point of this,
link |
you know, editing down to mostly harmless?
link |
To arrive at simplicity, do you find the edit is productive
link |
or does it destroy the magic that was originally there?
link |
No, I usually find, I think I'm perhaps a better editor
link |
than I am a writer.
link |
I write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite.
link |
Put a bunch of crap on the page first
link |
and then see the edit where it takes you.
link |
Yeah, but then there's the professional editors
link |
who come along as well.
link |
And I mean, in Transformer, the editor came back to me
link |
after I'd sent him, two months after I sent
link |
the first edition, he'd read the whole thing
link |
and he said, the first two chapters prevent
link |
a formidable hurdle to the general reader.
link |
Go and do something about it.
link |
And that was the last thing I really wanted to do.
link |
Your editor sounds very eloquent in speech.
link |
Yeah, well, this was an email,
link |
but I thought about it, you know,
link |
the bottom line is he was right.
link |
And so I put the whole thing aside for about two months,
link |
spent the summer, this would have been,
link |
I guess last summer, and then turned to it
link |
with full attention in about September or something
link |
and rewrote those chapters almost from scratch.
link |
I kept some of the material,
link |
but it took me a long time to process it,
link |
to work out what needs to change, where does it need to,
link |
I wasn't writing in this time.
link |
How am I going to tell this story better
link |
so it's more accessible and interesting?
link |
And in the end, I think it worked.
link |
It's still difficult.
link |
It's still biochemistry, but it has,
link |
he ended up saying, now he's got a barreling energy to it.
link |
And I was, you know, because he'd been,
link |
because he'd told me the truth the first time,
link |
I decided to believe that he was telling me the truth
link |
the second time as well and was delighted.
link |
Could you give advice to young people in general,
link |
folks in high school, folks in college,
link |
how to take on some of the big questions you've taken on?
link |
Now you've done that in the space of biology
link |
How can they have a career they can be proud of
link |
or have a life they can be proud of?
link |
Gosh, that's a big question.
link |
I'm sure you've gathered some wisdom
link |
that you can impart.
link |
Yeah, so the only advice that I actually ever give
link |
to my students is follow what you're interested in
link |
because they're often worried
link |
that if they make this decision now
link |
and do this course instead of that course,
link |
then they're going to restrict their career opportunities
link |
and there isn't a career path in science.
link |
It's not, I mean, there is, but there isn't.
link |
There's a lot of competition,
link |
there's a lot of death symbolically.
link |
The people who survive are the people
link |
who care enough to still do it.
link |
And they're very often the people
link |
who don't worry too much about the future
link |
and are able to live in the present.
link |
Because if you do a PhD,
link |
you've competed hard to get onto the PhD,
link |
then you have to compete hard to get a postdoc job
link |
and you have the next one maybe on another continent
link |
and it's only two years anyway.
link |
And so, and there's no guarantee
link |
you're going to get a faculty position at the end of it.
link |
And there's always the next step to compete.
link |
If you get a faculty position,
link |
you get a tenure and with tenure go full professor
link |
and full professor, then you go to some kind of,
link |
whatever the discipline is,
link |
If you're in physics,
link |
you're always competing for the Nobel Prize.
link |
There's different awards.
link |
And then eventually you're all competing to,
link |
I mean, there's always a competition.
link |
So there is no happiness.
link |
Happiness does not lie.
link |
If you're looking into the future, yes.
link |
And if what you're caring about is a career,
link |
then it's probably not the one for you.
link |
If though you can put that aside,
link |
and I've also worked in industry for a brief period
link |
and I was made redundant twice.
link |
You know, there's no guarantee
link |
that you've got a career that way either.
link |
So, so live in the moment
link |
and try and enjoy what you're doing.
link |
And that means really go to the,
link |
go to the themes that you're most interested in
link |
and try and follow them as well as you can.
link |
And that tends to pay back in surprising ways.
link |
I don't know if you've found this as well,
link |
but I found that people will help you often.
link |
If they see some light shining in the eye,
link |
you're excited about their subject
link |
and you know, just want to talk about it.
link |
And they know that their friend in California
link |
has got a job coming up.
link |
They'll say, go for this, this guy's all right.
link |
You know, they'll use the network to help you out
link |
if you really care.
link |
And you're not gonna have a job two years down the line,
link |
but if what you really care about is what you're doing now,
link |
then it doesn't matter if you have a job
link |
in two years time or not.
link |
It'll work itself out if you've got the light in your eye.
link |
And so that's the only advice I can give.
link |
And most people probably drop out through that system
link |
because the fight is just not worth it for them.
link |
Yeah, when you have the light in your eye,
link |
when you have the excitement for the thing,
link |
what happens is you start to surround yourself with others
link |
that are interested in that same thing,
link |
that also have the light.
link |
If you really are rigorous about this
link |
because I think it does take, it doesn't,
link |
it takes effort to make.
link |
Oh, you've got to be obsessive.
link |
But if you're doing what you really love doing,
link |
then it's not work anymore, it's what you do.
link |
Yeah, but I also mean the surrounding yourself
link |
with other people that are obsessed about the same thing
link |
because depending on.
link |
Oh, that takes some work as well, yes.
link |
Finding the right, yeah, finding the right mentors,
link |
the collaborators, because I think one of the problem
link |
with the PhD process is people are not careful enough
link |
in picking their mentors.
link |
Those are people, mentors and colleagues and so on,
link |
those are people who are gonna define
link |
the direction of your life, how much you love a thing,
link |
how much, I mean the power of just like
link |
the few little conversations you have in the hallway,
link |
So you have to be a little bit careful in that.
link |
Sometimes you just get randomly almost assigned,
link |
really pursue, I suppose, the subject
link |
as much as you pursue the people that do that subject.
link |
So like both, the whole dance of it.
link |
They kind of go together really.
link |
Yeah, they really do.
link |
But take that part seriously.
link |
And probably in the way you're describing it,
link |
careful how you define success.
link |
You'll never find happiness in success.
link |
There's a lovely quote from Robert Louis Stevenson,
link |
I think, who said, nothing in life
link |
is so disenchanting as attainment.
link |
Yeah, so I mean, in some sense,
link |
the true definition of success is getting to do today
link |
what you really enjoy doing.
link |
Just what fills you with joy.
link |
And that's ultimately success.
link |
So success isn't the thing beyond the horizon,
link |
the big trophy, the financials.
link |
I think it's as close as we can get to happiness.
link |
That's not to say you're full of joy all the time,
link |
but it's as close as we can get
link |
to a sustained human happiness
link |
is by getting some fulfillment
link |
from what you're doing on a daily basis.
link |
And if what you're looking for is the world
link |
giving you the stamp of approval with a Nobel Prize
link |
or a fellowship or whatever it is,
link |
then I've known people like this who,
link |
they're eaten away by the anger,
link |
the kind of caustic resentment
link |
that they've not been awarded this prize that they deserve.
link |
And the other way, if you put too much value
link |
into those kinds of prizes and you win them,
link |
I've gotten a chance to see that it also,
link |
the more quote unquote successful you are in that sense,
link |
the more you run the danger of growing ego
link |
so big that you don't get to actually enjoy
link |
the beauty of this life.
link |
You start to believe that you figured it all out
link |
as opposed to, I think what ultimately
link |
the most fun thing is is being curious
link |
about everything around you, being constantly surprised,
link |
and these little moments of discovery
link |
of enjoying beauty in small and big ways all around you.
link |
And I think the bigger your ego grows,
link |
the more you start to take yourself seriously,
link |
the less you're able to enjoy that.
link |
Amen to that, I couldn't agree more.
link |
So the summary from harmless to mostly harmless
link |
in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
link |
how would you try to summarize Earth?
link |
And if you were given,
link |
if you had to summarize the whole thing
link |
in a couple of sentences,
link |
and maybe throw in meaning of life in there,
link |
like what, why, why, why, maybe,
link |
is that a defining thing about humans
link |
that we care about the meaning of the whole thing?
link |
I wonder if that should be part of the,
link |
these creatures seem to be very lost.
link |
Yes, they're always asking why.
link |
I mean, that's my defining question is why.
link |
It was, as people used to make a joke,
link |
I have a small scar on my forehead
link |
from a climbing accident years ago.
link |
And the guy I was climbing with had dislodged a rock
link |
and he shouted something.
link |
He shouted below, I think,
link |
meaning that the rock was coming down.
link |
And I hadn't caught what he said,
link |
so I looked up and then smashed the street on my forehead.
link |
And everybody around me took the piss,
link |
saying he looked up to ask why.
link |
But that's a human imperative.
link |
That's part of what it means to be human.
link |
Look up to the sky and ask why, and ask why.
link |
So your question, define the earth.
link |
I'm not sure I can do that.
link |
I mean, the first word that comes to mind is living.
link |
I wouldn't like to say mostly living, but perhaps.
link |
Well, it's interesting because like,
link |
if you were to write the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
link |
I suppose, say our idea that we talked about,
link |
that bacteria is the most prominent form of life
link |
throughout the galaxy and the universe.
link |
I suppose that earth would be kind of unique
link |
and would require.
link |
There's abundance in that case.
link |
It's profligate, it's rich, it's enormously,
link |
enormously living.
link |
So how would you describe that it's not bacteria?
link |
Well, I mean, that's the technical term,
link |
but it is basically it's.
link |
How would I describe that?
link |
I've actually really struggled with that term
link |
because the word, I mean, there's few words
link |
quite as good as eukaryotic to put everybody off immediately.
link |
You start using words like that
link |
and they'll leave the room.
link |
A Krebs cycle is another one that gets people
link |
to leave the room, but so I've tried to think,
link |
is there another word for eukaryotic that I can use?
link |
And really the only word that I've been able to use
link |
is complex, complex cells, complex life and so on.
link |
And that word, it serves one immediate purpose,
link |
which is to convey an impression.
link |
But then it means so many different things to everybody
link |
that actually is lost immediately.
link |
And so it's kind of.
link |
Well, that's a noticeable from the perspective
link |
of other planets, that is a noticeable phase transition
link |
of complexity is the eukaryotic.
link |
What about the harmless and the mostly harmless?
link |
Probably accurate on a universal kind of scale.
link |
I don't think that humanity is in any danger
link |
of disturbing the universe at the moment.
link |
At the moment, which is why the mostly, we don't know.
link |
Depends what Elon is up to, depends how many rockets.
link |
It'll be still even then a while, I think,
link |
before we disturb the fabric of time and space.
link |
Was the aforementioned Andrej Karpathy,
link |
I think he summarized Earth as a system
link |
where you hammer it with a bunch of photons.
link |
The input is like photons and the output is rockets.
link |
Well, that's a hell of a lot of photons
link |
before there was a rocket launch.
link |
But like, you know, maybe in the span of the universe,
link |
it's not that much time.
link |
And so, and I do wonder, you know, what the future is,
link |
whether we're just in the early beginnings of this Earth,
link |
which is important when you try to summarize it,
link |
or we're at the end, where humans have finally
link |
gained the ability to destroy the entirety
link |
of this beautiful project we've got going on.
link |
Not with nuclear weapons, with engineered viruses,
link |
with all those kinds of things.
link |
Or just inadvertently through global warming
link |
and pollution and so on.
link |
We're quite capable of that.
link |
I mean, we just need to pass the tipping point.
link |
I mean, I think we're more likely to do it inadvertently
link |
than through a nuclear war, which could happen at any time.
link |
But my fear is we just don't know
link |
where the tipping points are.
link |
And we will, we kind of think we're smart enough
link |
to fix the problem quickly if we really need to.
link |
I think that's the overriding assumption
link |
that we're all right for now.
link |
Maybe in 20 years time, it's gonna be a calamitous problem.
link |
And then we'll really need to put some serious mental power
link |
into fixing it without seriously worrying
link |
that perhaps that is too late.
link |
And that however brilliant we are, we miss the boat.
link |
And just walk off the cliff.
link |
I have optimism in humans being clever descendants.
link |
Oh, I have no doubt that we can fix the problem.
link |
It's an urgent problem.
link |
We need to fix it pretty sharpish.
link |
And I do have doubts about whether politically
link |
we are capable of coming together enough
link |
to not just in any one country, but around the planet.
link |
To, I mean, I know we can do it, but do we have the will?
link |
Do we have the vision to accomplish it?
link |
That's what makes this whole ride fun.
link |
Not only do we not know if we can handle
link |
the crises before us, we don't even know all the crises
link |
that are gonna be before us in the next 20 years.
link |
The ones I think that will most likely challenge us
link |
in the 21st century are the ones we don't even expect.
link |
People didn't expect World War II
link |
at the end of World War I.
link |
Some folks did, but yeah, not at the end of World War I.
link |
But by the late 1920s, I think people
link |
were beginning to worry about it.
link |
Yeah, no, there's always people worrying about everything.
link |
So if you focus on the thing that.
link |
People worry about, yes.
link |
Because there's a million things people worry about
link |
and 99.999999% of them don't come to be.
link |
Of course, the people that turn out to be right,
link |
they'll say, I knew all along, but that's not,
link |
that's not an accurate way of knowing
link |
what you could have predicted.
link |
I think rationally speaking, you can worry about it,
link |
but nobody thought you could have another World War.
link |
The war to end all wars, why would you have another war?
link |
And the idea of nuclear weapons,
link |
just technologically, is a very difficult thing
link |
to anticipate, to create a weapon
link |
that just jumps orders of magnitude
link |
and destructive capability.
link |
And of course, we can intuit all the things
link |
like engineered viruses, nanobots,
link |
artificial intelligence, yes, all the different
link |
complicated global effects of global warming.
link |
So how that changes the allocation of resources,
link |
the flow of energy, the tension between countries,
link |
the military conflict between countries,
link |
the reallocation of power,
link |
then looking at the role of China in this whole thing
link |
with Russia and growing influence of Africa
link |
and the weird dynamics of Europe,
link |
and then America falling apart through the political
link |
division fueled by recommender systems
link |
through Twitter and Facebook.
link |
The whole beautiful mess is just fun.
link |
And I think there's a lot of incredible engineers,
link |
incredible scientists, incredible human beings
link |
that while everyone is bickering and so on online
link |
for the fun of it on the weekends,
link |
they're actually trying to build solutions.
link |
And those are the people that will create
link |
something beautiful.
link |
At least I have, that's the process of evolution.
link |
It all started with a Chuck Norris single cell organism
link |
that went out from the vents and was the parent
link |
And for that guy or lady or both, I guess,
link |
is a big thank you and I can't wait to what happens next.
link |
And I'm glad there's incredible humans writing
link |
and studying it like you are, Nick.
link |
It's a huge honor that you would talk to me.
link |
This is fantastic.
link |
This is really amazing.
link |
I can't wait to read what you write next.
link |
Thank you for existing.
link |
And thank you for talking today.
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Nick Lane.
link |
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors
link |
in the description.
link |
And now let me leave you with some words from Steve Jobs.
link |
I think the biggest innovations of the 21st century
link |
will be at the intersection of biology and technology.
link |
A new era is beginning.
link |
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.