YouSaid · the spoken record

Manolis Kellis

lines on the record: 152
first: 2020-09-12
most recent: 2020-09-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“That will basically be saved for the future generations. And everything outside that lineage is almost superfluous. If you think about it, the rest of your body, all it does is ensure that that lineage will make it to the next generation, that these germlines will make it to the next generation. The rest is packaging. I'm sorry to be so blunt. And if you look at nutrition, You know, we're deterostomes. What does deterostome mean? Dutero means second. Where this is the second mouth. The first mouth is actually down here, it's the esophagus. So dirt or stones have evolved a second layer of eating, kind of like alien with the two mouths. So you can think of us as alien where the first mouth is up here, and then the second mouth is down there.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that transformation has taken several additional leaps. So basically, you know, Life on Europa, I'm pretty sure has gotten to the stage of A makes B, makes C, makes A again. But getting to the FZE is a whole other level. And that level requires cooperation. That level requires altruism. That level requires specialization. Remember how we were talking about the RNA specializing into DNA for storage, proteins, and then compartmentalizations. And if you look at prokaryotic life, there's no nucleus. It's all one soup of things intermingling. If you look at eukaryotic life, again, you for true good, you know. So a eukaryote basically has a nucleus. And that's where you compartmentalize further the organization of the information storage from all of the daily activities. If you look at a human body plan or any animal, you have a compartmentalization of the germline. You basically have one link.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So basically, there's layers. I sort of see life, you know. When we talk about the meaning of life, life can be construed at many levels. We talked about life in the simplest form of sort of the ignition of evolution. And that's sort of the basic definition that you can check off. Yes, it's alive. But when Alexander the Great was asked to whom do you owe your life to your teachers or to your parents? And Alexander the Great answered I owe to my parents the zine, the life itself, and I owe to my teachers the F zine, like euphony. F means good, the opposite of cacophony, which means, you know, bad. So F zine in his words was basically living a human life, a proper life. So basically we can go from the zine to the F zine.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I mean, in many ways it is. But my immediate answer was no, no, no, no, wait, life challenges physics. It supersedes physics. It sort of fights against physics. And that's what I would look for in Europe. I would basically look for this fight against physics, for anything that sort of signatures of not just entropy at work, not just things diffused. Clear signatures of, you remember when I was talking earlier about this whole selection for environment, selection for biospheres, for ecosystems, for this multi-organism form of life. And I think that's sort of the first thing that you can look for, chemical signatures that are not simply predicted from the reactions you would get randomly.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Life is unmistakable, I would say. The way that life transforms a planet surrounding it is not the kind of thing that you would expect from the physical laws alone. So I would say that as soon as Life arises, it creates this compartmentalization, it starts pushing things away, it starts sort of keeping things inside that are self, and there's a whole signature that you can see from that. So when I was organizing my Meaning of Life Symposium, my friend who's an astrophysicist basically we're deciding on what would be the themes for the symposium. And then I said, well, we're going to have biology, we're going to have physics. And she's like, come on, biology is just a small part of physics.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it won't be able to sort of attack. I mean, the scene from, I don't know, Independence Day, where they're communicating with computer and they're like, ooh, I'm in. I mean, it's hilarious because Macs and PCs have trouble communicating. I mean, let alone an alien technology or even alien DNA.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't have case bugs for things we don't even know about. So we won't, yeah, we won't be able to know that these chemical tastes funny.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anyone kill you. So, the other question is, do we have taste receptors? Where does her taste come from? Adaptations to chemical molecules that we are used to seeing.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It'll take massive amounts of engineering to create machines that will go there and sample the The oceans basically drill through the layers of ice to basically sample and see what life is like there and detecting it will probably be trivial. It definitely won't be DNA based. It's not like we're going to send a sequencer, but it'll be some other kind of combination of chemicals that will look non-random.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, there's a lot of science fiction movies based on that principle. And that's sort of what causes the public to be so scared. But if you think about sort of Would Europa life be scared of humans coming over and taking over? Chances are no. Not even like earth bacteria, because earth bacteria would be wiped out in an instant in this foreign world because they don't know how to metabolize energy that doesn't come from the types of energy sources that are here. The levels of acidity may just kill us all off. And at the same way, in the converse way, if you bring life from Europa on Earth, it'll die instantly because it's too hot or because it doesn't know how to cope with, I don't know, the sun's radiation so close to this completely inhabitable zone by their standards.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, as a scientist, I can't wait to see non-DNA-based lifeforms. I can't wait because we are so born in sort of Bornay, as I would say in French, but basically we're sort of so narrow-minded in our thinking of what life should look like that I can't wait for all that to just be blown away by... The discovery of life elsewhere”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Europa basically has all the ingredients it has you know the core that can emit energy it has the shielding through the ice sheet protecting it just like an atmosphere would it even has a layer of oxygen probably sufficiently dense to sustain life so my guess is that there's probably independently a reason life form already teeming in Europa because as soon as it today”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A new innovation. That's why when you're asking is a separate information storage medium a definition of life, like no, any kind of self-preservation, self reinforcement. And it didn't need to be RNA based initially. It didn't need to be self-replication initially. You just need to have enough RNA molecules randomly arising that reinforce each other, that ultimately lead to the closing of that loop and the ignition of the evolutionary process.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You basically now have RNA. Again, we like to think of transcription as the normal reverse transcription as the odd ball. Well, RNA preceded DNA, so reverse transcription actually was the first invention before transcription itself. So basically RNA invents proteins. RNA and proteins together invent DNA. So you now have a more stable medium, a more stable backbone with two helices instead of one. Strands instead of one, the double helix, and RNA basically says, listen, I'm tired. I'm going to delegate all information stores to DNA, and I'm going to delegate most actuation to proteins.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But again, you can't think of great inventions as one time steps. They're basically, you know, the culmination of probably many competing software infrastructures for live preservation that won out. And then when the ribosome was so efficient at making proteins, all the other ones basically died out. And then the life forms that were using the modern ribosome were basically the more successful ones because they could make proteins. And now those proteins are much more versatile because RNA only has four bases. Proteins eventually have 20 amino acids, not initially, but eventually. And then they can form in much more complex shapes and they can create all kinds of additional machines, one of which is reverse transcriptase.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ribosome is this massive factory that is able to translate RNA into protein. Ribosome, I mean, if you if you want, I don't know, divine intervention in the history of life, the ribosome is it.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In that process of evolution then led to major innovations. The first innovation was translation. So you start with an RNA molecule and you translate it into another kind of form. And that's the first kind of encoding. You're like, well, do you need some kind of code? Yeah, but the code was in fact one thing. It was conflated with the actuators. The actuators were separated from the code only later on. So you first had the self replicating code, which was also the actuator, and then you kind of have a functionalization, partitioning of the functionalization, a sub-functionalization of the proteins that are now going to be the workhorse of life, but they're not self-replicating. The code remains the RNA. So the most beautiful and most complex RNA machine known to man is the ribosome.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Self hybridization. So basically, the same way that DNA molecules can hybridize with themselves. Basically, form this double helix. The single stranded RNA molecule can form partial double helices in various places, creating structure as if you had a long string with complementary parts and you could then sort of design kind of like origami-like structures that will fold onto themselves. And then you can make any shape from that. That early RNA world eventually got to replication. Where enzymes encoded in RNA would replicate RNA itself. And then that process basically kicked off evolution.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We like to think of life as the information propagation, which is DNA, the messenger, which is RNA, and then the action, which is protein. So basically DNA, we think, is an essential part of life. That's where the storage is. And therefore, that early life forms have had some kind of storage medium DNA. If you look at how life actually evolved, DNA was invented much later. Proteins were invented later. And RNA was fined by itself. Thank you very much in an RNA world. So the early version of life as we know it today was in fact RNA molecules performing all of the functions. The RNA molecule itself was the protein actuator By creating three-dimensional folds through self-hybridization.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any kind of self reinforcement is what you need to ignite the process of evolution. After you've ignited that process, Know, I don't want to say all Hellberg's clues, but all Paradise breaks loose. So basically you then boom, you know, have life going. And the moment you have A, B, C, some kind of thing looping back onto A, you can make modifications and you can improve and then you let natural selection work.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Metabolism, it basically means transformation again in the Greek. It basically means taking stuff from nutrients or energy source or anything and then making it your own. The second one is compartmentalization. If there's no notion of self, there can't be evolution. You have to know where your own boundaries end and where the non-self-boundaries begin. And that's basically the lipid bilayer nowadays, which is extremely simple to form. It's basically just a bunch of lipids, and then they eventually just self-organize into a membrane. So that's a very natural way of forming a self. And then the third component is replication. Replication doesn't need to be self replication. It could be A helps make more of B. B helps make more of C, and C helps make more of A.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So basically, life on the surface is one option, and then the idea there is that there's tides with the moon and the sun sort of causing all these movement and this movement is basically causing nutrients to sort of, you know, coalesce and bounce around, etc. That's one option. The second option, massive amount of energy under, you know, from our the core of our planet, basically exploited leading to these basic ingredients of life forms. And what are these basic ingredients? Metabolism, being able to take energy from the environment and put it as part of yourself.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, you know, snails with all kinds of crazy appendages and collars and round things and five way symmetric things and eight-way symmetric things, all kinds of crazy body plans. And only the tetrapod fish managed to get out. And then they gave rise to all the boring plans we kind of see today of basically humans with four limbs, birds with four limbs, lizards with four limbs, and, you know, right? It's kind of boring. If you look at by comparison, life underwater is teeming with diversity. So now let's roll back the clock and basically say where did life in the ocean come from.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you look at life under the sea, I mean, I don't know if you're a diver, but when you go diving, you're. Again, when I say the boring life forms is what we see all the time, like tetrapods? I mean, what a stupid boring body plan. Seriously. Like, just go diving and you'll see that a tiny little minority of the stuff under the sea, under the surface of the sea, is actually tetrapods.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Life outside the water is horrible. It takes huge amounts of evolutionary innovations to sustain living outside the water.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whereas our planet has basically all of the right ingredients, why wouldn't evolve here? So basically, let's kind of ignore that one. And now the two other competing hypotheses are from the outside in or from the inside out. The outside in means from the surface to the bottom of the ocean. From the inside out means from the bottom of the ocean to the surface. So life on the surface is pretty brutal. Life obviously evolved in the water, and then there was an out-of-water event. Basically, before it exited Was clearly in the water, which is a much nicer and shielded environment.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That basically there's a meteorite out there that sort of landed on Earth and it brought with it DNA material. I think it's a little silly because it kind of pushes the buck down the road. Basically, the next question is how did it evolve over there?”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, sure, life now. Most of life that we above the surface look at has to do with exploiting the solar energy for our daily behavior. But that's not the case everywhere on the planet. If you look at the bottom of the ocean, there are hydrothermal vents. There's both black smokers and white smokers. And they are near these volcanic ducts that basically emanate a massive amount of energy from the core of our planet. What does life need? It needs energy. Does it need energy from the sun? Couldn't care less. Does it need energy from, you know, the earth itself? Yeah, possibly it could use that. And if you look at how did life evolve on Earth, there are many theories. I mean, a kind of silly theory is that it came from outer space.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And 200 Earth months or 200 Earth years. So basically, if you look at the timescale that we inhabit on Earth, it is very much dictated by the amount of energy that we receive from the Sun. If you look at, I don't know, Europa. The smallest, the fourth smallest moon of Jupiter, the smallest of the Galilean moons, and also the smallest in its distance from Jupiter. It has an iron core. It has a rock exterior. It has ice all around it, and it has probably massive liquid oceans underneath. And the gravitation of pool, the gravitational pool of Jupiter is probably creating all kinds of movement under that ice. How did life evolve on Earth?”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How it's structured. Yeah. So you're getting to the very definition of life. You're getting to the very definition of what makes life life and how do we decode that life. And it's so easy to think that every life form would basically have to, you know, like oxygen, have to like heat from the sun and rely on sort of being in the habitable zone of its solar system and so on and so forth. But I think we have to sort of go beyond this sort of, oh, life on another planet must be exactly like life is on Earth. Because of course, life on Earth happens to rely on the proximity to the sun and benefit from that amount of energy. But we're talking at timescales of human life, where we kind of live, I don't know, between, and I'm going to be super wide here. We're going to live between six earth months.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the question that you're asking is applicable to every species on the Earth, not on earth. Yeah, so basically, you know, dolphins are a great example. We know that they're clearly capable hardware-wise and behavior-wise of intelligence. How do we communicate? So basically, if your question is about crossing species boundaries of communication, The way that I want to put it is that humans have achieved a level of sophistication in our behaviors, in our communication, in our language, in our ways of expressing ourselves, that I have no doubt that if we encounter the human-like form of intelligence, we'd figure out their language in a few weeks. Like it'd be just fine. As long as, you know, of course, they're both trusting each other, not annihilating each other, and not sort of fearing each other and attacking each other.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know, but how do you define intelligence? Basically, like I was saying last time, you know, stupid is a stupid dot and smart is a smart does. If the dolphins are basically super smart, figure out the meaning of life So basically, it's very difficult to sort of judge a species intelligence unless they kind of go out of the way to demonstrate it.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, if you look at their brains, if you look at the way that they play, if you look at the way that they learn, you know, I mean, they don't have a posable thumbs and we do. So, you know, that probably made a big difference.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And speaking of species that are intelligent and sort of what's left of evolution. It is a shame, exactly like you say, that so many different amazing life forms were extinct. And the kind of boring ones remained. So if you look at dinosaurs, I mean, the diversity that they had, if you look at sub, you know, like there's just so many different lineages of life that were just abruptly killed. And yet out of that death emerged many new kinds of really awesome lineages.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the same way that we'll know if it's a question of useful, they were probably super useful. My thinking is that they were scary, that basically something that almost resembles you. Is something that you try to eliminate first.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're describing this as if the wolves made a choice. It's possible that the wolves never had a say, that basically humans were just so overpowering that they had captive wolves. And then at every generation killed off eight of the nine pups and only kept the one that was milder.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But even before the Out of Africa, within Africa selection, which was probably massive battles of larger and larger tribes selecting for our social networking and savviness and probably all our conspiracy theory genes or dating back from then. And so there's a lot of this mischievousness in the history of human evolution that unfortunately still present in many ugly forms today. But probably contributed to our success as a species in wiping out other species.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Across all kinds of life. Yeah. So basically, if you now transport that to the sort of humans arriving in Europe and Neanderthals are everywhere, what are you going to do? You're going to kill them off. You know, there's this battle for territory and this battle for they're not like us. We have to get rid of them. So basically there's a very interesting mix there. But when you look at the genetics, there's tons of gene flow between them. So basically, you know, love, romance between, you know, near speech.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so if you look at a lot of human traits today, they're probably not that far removed from the human traits that got us where we are now. So, you know, this whole tribalism, you're my sports team or you're my, you know, political party or you're my tiny little village. And therefore, you know, if you're from that other village, I hate you. But as soon as we're both in the major city, I can't believe we're from the same region. My friend, my family, and like two neighboring countries fighting. And as soon as they're off in another country, we're like, oh, I can't believe that. So it's kind of funny, like this tribalism is nonsensical in many ways. It's like cognitive incongruent that basically we like kin. And selection for sort of liking kin is hugely advantageous genetically”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who knows if stories of dragons were inspired by bones of dinosaurs? Basically, this archaeological evidence has been there and has probably entered the folk imagination, migrating into those stories, but it's not that far removed from what actually happened of massive wars, of wiping out Neanderthals as humans are populating Europe.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no, no, no. That's yet another one, though. Homo fluorensis. It had the little folks in sort of Indonesia. But then the Nisavans are basically another branch that we only know about genetically from that one bone and eventually we realize that it's one of the three major branches along with Neanderthal, modern human, and the Nisivan. And then that one branch has now resurfaced in many different areas, and we kind of know about the gene flow that happened in between them. So when I was reading my Greek mythology, it was talking about the age of the heroes. These eras of human-like precursors that were wiped out by Zeus or by all kinds of wars and so on and so forth, like the Titans and it's ridiculous to sort of read these stories as a kid because you're like, oh yeah, whatever. And then you're growing up and you're like, whoa, layers and layers of human-like ancestors. And who knows if those stories were inspired by bones that they found that kind of looked human-like, but were not quite human-like.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out of Africa events. So basically, there's Neanderthals, there's Denise events. What is the evidence for Denisevans? One tiny little fragment of one pinky from one cave in Siberia.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“know in the out of Africa event and you know all of this sort of human history of evolution so basically if you look at Neanderthal genes for example which again happened long after that out of Africa event there's incompatibilities between Neanderthal genes and modern human genes that can lead to diseases so in the context of the Neanderthal genome that gene version that allele was fine but in the context of the modern human genome that Neanderthal gene version is actually detrimental. So it's you know that cellular environment constitutes the genetics of that gene but also of course all of the epigenomics of that gene.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, let's again sort of break down these different layers. So basically, if you think about the environment in which a gene operates, that gene, of course, the first definition of environment that we think of is pollution or sunlight or heat or cold and so on and so forth. That's the external environment. But every gene also operates at the level of the internal cellular environment that it's in. If I take a gene from, say, an African individual and I put it in a European context, Will it perform the same way? Probably not because there's a cellular context of thousands of other genes that that gene has co-evolved with.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was probably selected. And it was probably selected because those species that were just nasty to each other didn't survive as a species. And now if you think about Symbiosis of, you know, there's plants, for example, that love CO2 and there's humans that love O2. And we're sort of, you know, trading different types of gases to each other. You look at ecosystems where one organism was just really nasty, that organism actually died because everyone they were being nasty to was killed off. And then that kind of, you know, The universe of life is gone. So basically, what emerges is selection at so many different layers of benefit, including all of these nucleotides within a body, interacting for the emergent functions at the body level.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let me break this down. So you basically have at the very bottom every single nucleotide being selected. But then that nucleotide's function is selected at the level of each gene and not even each gene, each gene regulatory control element. And then those control elements are basically converging onto the function of the gene. And many genes are converging onto the function of one cell and many cells are converging onto the function of one tissue or organ. And all of these organs are converging onto the level of an organism. But now that organism is not in isolation. So if you basically think about why is altruism, for example, a thing? Why are people being nice to each other?”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does that work? It's a very good insight, and you can even go beyond that and basically say evolution doesn't select at the level of an organism. It actually selects at the level of whole environments, whole ecosystems.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And each of those pieces are all encoded in the same DNA, but what the epigenome allows you to do is effectively conduct the orchestra and sort of coordinate the pieces so that every instrument plays only the things that it needs to play.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is in many ways. And every single cell plays a different part of that score. It's like having all of human knowledge in 23 volumes, like 23 giant books, which are your chromosomes. And every single cell has a different profession, a different role. Some cells play the piano, and they're looking at chapter seven from chromosome 23 and chapters 4 from chromosome 2 and so on and so forth.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, being Greek, epi means on top of. So the genome is the DNA. And the epigenome is anything on top of the DNA. There's three types of things on top of the DNA. The first is chemical modifications on the DNA itself. So we like to think of four bases of the DNA, ACGT. C has a methyl form, which is sometimes referred to as the fifth base. So methyl C takes a different meaning. So in the same way that you have annotations in an orchestra score that basically say whether you should place something softly or loudly or space it out or interpret basically the score, the human epigenome allows you to modify that primary score. So a modified C basically says, play this one softly. It's basically a sign of repression in a gene regulatory region.”
2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source