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Lee Cronin

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276
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2022-03-11
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2022-03-11
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  1. “Okay, it was tongue in cheek, but yeah, I think, and I meant it as tongue in cheek. I am not doing the origin of life research. I'm trying to make artificial life. And I also want to bound the likelihood of the origin of life on Earth, but more importantly to find origin of life elsewhere. But let me directly address the tweet. There are many, many good chemists out there doing Origin of Life research. But I want to nudge them. And I think the brilliant, there's no question the chemistry they are doing, their motivation is great. So what I meant by that tweet is saying that maybe they're making assumptions about saying if only I could make this particular type of molecule, say this RNA molecule or this phosphodiester or this other molecule, it's going to somehow unlock the origin of life. And I think that origin of life has been looking at this for a very long time. And whilst I think it's brilliant to work out how you can get to those molecules, I think that chemistry and chemists doing origin of life could”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, I think the actual molecules that we have in biology right now are entirely contingent on the history of life on Earth. There are so many possible solutions. And this is where chemistry got itself into origin of life. Chemistry gets itself into a bit of a trap.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It basically is a combination of two different polymer systems. So RNA and peptides. So the RNA world, if you like, gets transmitted and builds proteins and the proteins are responsible for all the catalysis. The majority of the catalysis goes on in cell. No ribosome, no proteins, no decoding, no evolution.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, that's exactly it. So selection is the default in the inverse. If you want to, and what happens is that the solution that life has got on Earth, life on Earth, biology on Earth, is unique to us. And that was really hard fought for. But that is a solution that works on Earth, the ribosome, the fundamental machine that is responsible for every life or, you know, every cell on Earth of wherever it is in the kingdom of life. That is an incredibly complex object, but it was evolved over time and it wasn't involved in a vacuum. And I think that once we understand that selection can occur without the ribosome, but what the ribosome does, it's a phase transition in replication. And I think that that and also technology that is probably much easier to get to than we think.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “So it's a bit like these, they all work in synergy to make this chain of events that grow. And it doesn't take a very sophisticated model to show that if you have these objects competing and then collaborating to help one another build, they just grow out of the mess. And although they seem improbable, they are improbable, in fact impossible in one step. There's multiple steps. This is when the blind people look at the blind watchmaker argument and you're talking about how could a watch spontaneously emerge? Well, it doesn't. It's a lineage of watchers and cruder devices that are bootstrapped onto one another.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “To it and some electrons they make these molecules, you just cannot possibly imagine would be constructed big gigantic wheels of 154 molybdenum atoms in a wheel or icosadodecahedron of 132 molybdenum atoms all in the same pot and I realized and I just finished experiments two years ago I've just published a couple of papers on this that they're actually There is a random small molecule with 12 atoms in it that can form randomly but it happens to template its own production and then by chance it templates the ring just an accident just like just an absolute accident and that ring also helps make the small 12 myrrh and so you have what's called an autocatalytic set where a makes B and B helps make A and vice versa and you then make this loop.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “As ever, I've always been corrected. It's a great fact. But there's a lot of molecules in the water. And so there's a lot of. So, although it's for you and me really hard to conceive of, if existence is not the default for a long period of time, because what happens is a molecules get degraded. So much of the possibilities in the universe are just broken back into atoms. So you have this kind of destruction of the molecules for our chemical reactions. So you only need one or two molecules to become good at copying themselves for them suddenly to then take resources in the pool and start to grow. And so then replication actually over time when you have bonds I think is much simpler and much easier. And I even found this in my lab years ago. I had one of the reasons I started doing inorganic chemistry and making rust, making a bit of rust based on a thing called molybdenum, molybdenum oxide, is this molybdenum oxide very simple. But when you add...”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I think it's really, really easy. Well, let's take a step back. I think replication molecules are rare, but if you say, you know, I think I was saying on, I probably got into trouble on Twitter the other day. There's about more than 18 mils of water in there. So one mole of water, 6.022 times 10 to the 23 molecules. That's about the number of stars in the universe, I think, of the order. So there's three universe worth.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Architect assembles through just existence, so random stuff bumping in together and you make this first molecule. So you have molecule A and molecule A interacts with another random molecule B and they get together and they realize by working together they can make more of themselves But then they realize they can mutate so they can make AB prime so AB prime is different to AB and then AB prime can then act back where A and B were being created and slightly nudge that causal chain and make AB prime more evolvable or learn more so that's the closing the loop part”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Exactly, imperfectly. So, but what I mean is I think he liked this idea of thinking about how could a Turing machine literally build itself without a Turing machine. It's like literally how do state machines emerge? And I think that von Neumann constructors, he wanted to conceive of a minimal thing, autonomous, that could build itself. And what would those rules look like in the world? And that's what von Neumann kind of constructor looked like. Like it's a minimal hypothetical object that could build itself, self-replicate. And I'm really fascinated by that because I think that although it's probably not exactly what happened, it's a nice model because as chemists, if we could go back to the origin of life and think about what is a minimal machine that can get structured randomly, so like with no prime mover, we've no...”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “There was a couple of people did at the same time, and then Conway obviously took it on, and then Wolf Ram loves CAs. There is his fabric of the universe. And what I think he imagined was that he wasn't satisfied. And this may be incorrect recollection. So a lot of what I say is going to be kind of just way out of my”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “So John von Neumann is a real hero, actually, of not just me, but many people, I think, computer science and physics. He was an incredible intellect who probably solved a lot of the problems that we're working on today and just forgot to write them down. And I'm not sure if it's John von Neumann or Johnny, as I think his friends called him, but I think he was Hungarian mathematician came to the US and basically was involved in the Manhattan Project and developing computation and came up with all sorts of ideas. And I think it was one of the first people to come up with cellular autometer. Really?”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And this keeps happening in steps. And before you know it, almost these waves of discrete reactions work together and you start to build a machinery that is run by existence. So as you go forward in time, the fact that the molecules, the bonds, there are more bonds in a molecule, there's more function, there's more capability for this molecule to interact with other molecules, to redirect them. It's like a series of little, and I don't want to use this term too much, but it's almost thinking about the simplest von Neumann constructor that's the simplest molecule that could build a more complicated molecule that build a more complicated molecule. And before you know it, when that more complicated molecule can act on the causal chain that's produced itself and change it, suddenly you start to get towards some kind of autonomy. And that's where life, I think, emerges in earnest.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Those trajectories are quite complex. You don't really look at that as productive selection because it's not doing anything to improve its function. But is it the asteroid belt has existed for some time? So there is some selection going on, but the functionality is somewhat limited. On Earth, at the formation of Earth, interaction of chemicals and molecules in the environment gave selection and then things could happen because you could think about in chemistry We can have an infinite number of reactions happen, but all the reactions are allowed to happen don't happen. Why? Because they're energy barriers. So there must be some things called catalysts out there, or there are bits of minerals that when two molecules get together on that mineral, it lowers the energy barrier for the reaction, and so the reaction is promoted. So suddenly you get one reaction over another series of possibilities occurring that makes a particular molecule.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “The complexity of this cup isn't just in the object, it is literally the lineage of people making cups and recognizing that seeing that in their head, making an abstraction of a cup and then making a different one. So I wonder how many billions of cups have come before this one. And that's a process of selection and existence. And the only reason the cup is still uses is quite useful. I like the handle. It's convenient so I don't die. I keep hydration. And so I think we are missing something fundamental in the universe about selection. And I think what biology is, is a selection amplifier. And this is where autonomy comes in. And actually, I think how humanity is going to, humans and autonomous robots or whatever we're going to call them in the future will supercharge that even further. So selection is happening in the universe. But if you look in the asteroid belt, selection, if objects are being kicked in and out of the asteroid belt,”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “In consciousness. So we're going back to selection in the universe and origin of life on Earth. I mean, selection is a, I'm convinced that selection is a force in the universe, not a fundamental force, but a directing force because existence, although existence appears to be the default, the existence of what? And we can get to this later, I think, but it's amazing that discrete things exist. And, you know, you see this cup. It's not the, you know, the sexiest cup in the world, but it's pretty functional. This cup.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Well, I don't know. I am genuinely curious. So, my curate, so I have, you know, like everybody, ego problems, but my curiosity is bigger than my ego. So as long as that happens,”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Sure, but I'm an experimentalist as well. So I have two superpowers, my stupidity, and I don't mean that as a, you know, I'm like absolutely completely witless, but I mean my ability to kind of just start again and ask the question and then do it with an experiment. I always want to be a theoretician growing up, but I just didn't have the intellectual capability. But I was able to think of experiments in my head I could then do in my lab or when I was a child outside and then those experiments in my head and then outside reinforced one another. So I think that's a very good way of kind of grounding the science, right?”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I would say that there is an elegant order to it that bonds allow selection, allows the emergence of life, allows the emergence of multicellularity, and then more information processing, building state machines all the way up. However, you could imagine a situation if you had, I don't know, a neutron star or a sun or a ferromenetic loops interacting with one another, and these oscillators building state machines and these state machines reading something out in the environment Over time, these state machines would be able to literally record what happened in the past and sense what's going on in the present and imagine the future. However, I don't think it's ever going to be within a human comprehension, that type of life. I wouldn't count it out because whenever you say I know in science, whenever I say something's impossible, I then wake up the next day and say, no, that's actually wrong. I mean, there are some limits, of course.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “You go up the kind of the path of complexity. And so at least on Earth, as we know it, there was a sufficient pool of available chemicals to start searching that commentorial space of bonds.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “So, what is chemistry? Well, chemistry is the thing that happens when you bring electrons together and you form bonds. So bonds, or I say to people when they talk about life elsewhere, and I just say, when there's bonds, there's hope. Because bonds allow you to get heterogeneity. They allow you to record those memories. Or at least on Earth, you could imagine world where you might have life emerging or intelligence emerging before life. That may be something like Solaris or something. But, you know, to get to selection, if you can form, if atoms can combine and form bonds, those bonds can bond to different elements and those molecules will have different identities and interact with each other differently. And then you can start to have some degree of causation or interaction and then selection and then existence. And then you...”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Sure. I mean, as a chemist, the card carrying chemist, if I'm allowed a card, I don't know. I don't know what I am most days.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “And then complexity, and then the degree of autonomy and sophistication. Because I think that people misunderstand what life is. Some people say that life is a cell and some people that say that life is a virus or life is an on-off switch. I don't think it's that. Life is the universe developing a memory. And the laws of physics, and the way there are no laws of physics, physics is just memory free stuff. So there's only a finite number of ways you can arrange the fundamental particles to do the things.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Common as the formation of a star. And if you start framing it in that way, it allows you to then look at the universe slightly differently. And we can get into this, I think, in quite some detail. But I think to come back to your question, I have little idea of how life got started, but I know it was simple, and I know that the process of selection had to occur before the biology was established so that selection built the framework from which life kind of grew in complexity and capability and functionality and autonomy. And I think these are all really important words that we can unpack over the next while.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Yeah, I agree. I think it's much more inevitable. And I think I tried to kind of not provoke, but try and push chemists to think about, because chemists are central to this problem, right? Of understanding the origin of life on Earth at least, because we're made of chemistry. But I wonder if the origin of life on a planet or sorry, the emergence of life on the planet is as”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “If we go back to the origin of Earth and you think about maybe 4.7, 4.6, 4.5 billion years ago, planet was quite hot. There was a limited number of minerals. There was some carbon, some water. And I think that maybe it's a really simple set of chemistry that we really don't understand. So that means you've got a finite number of elements that are going to react very simply with one another. And out of that mess comes a cell. So literally sand turns into cells. And it seems to happen quick. So what I think I can say with some degree of, I think not certainty, but curiosity, genuine curiosity is that life happened fast.”

    2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source