YouSaid · the spoken record

Nick Lane

lines on the record: 247
first: 2022-09-07
most recent: 2022-09-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Not trying to diminish it in any way at all. Obviously, it's extraordinarily exquisitely complex. But I don't see a logical difficulty with how it works.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no. I mean, I think I can understand the wiring of a brain as a series of, in pretty much the same way as a computer in theory in terms of the circuitry of it, the mystery to me is how this system gives rise to feelings, as we were talking about earlier on.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't see intelligence as necessarily that difficult, I suppose. I mean, I see it as a form of computing and I don't know much about computing.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That it can happen so quickly, but we're used to human time scales. And what we need to talk about is generations of things that live for a year in the ocean. And then in a million years is a million generations and the amount of change that you can affect in that period of time is enormous. And we're dealing with large populations of things where selection is sensitive to pretty small changes and can So again as soon as you throw in the competition of predators and prey and you're ramping up the scale of evolution it's not very surprising that it happens very quickly when the environment allows it to happen. So I don't think there's a big mystery. There's lots of details that need to be filled in. I mean the big mystery in biology is consciousness.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of stasis, where the world is in a stable state and is not geared towards increasing complexity, it's just everything is in balance. And only when you have a catastrophic level, global level problem like a snowball earth, it forces everything out of balance and there's a tipping point and you end up somewhere else. Now the idea that evolution is slow is wrong. It can be incredibly fast. And I mentioned earlier on, in theory, it would take half a million years to invent an eye, for example, from a light sensitive spot. It doesn't take long to convert one kind of tube into a tube with knobbles on it, into a tube with arms on it, and then multiple arms. And then at one end is a head starts out as a swelling. It's not difficult intellectually to understand how these things can happen. It boggles the mind.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The assumption, and this is completely wrong, this assumption is then that evolution works really slowly and that you need billions of years to affect some small change and then another billion years to do something. And it's completely wrong. Evolution gets stuck in a stasis and it stays that way for tens of millions, hundreds of millions of years. And Stephen Jay Gould used to argue this, he called it punctuated equilibrium, but he was doing it to do with animals and to do with the last 500 million years or so, where it's much less obvious than if you think about the entire planetary history. And then you realize that the first two billion years was bacteria only. You have the origin of life, two billion years of just bacteria, oxygenic photosynthesis arising here. Then you have a global catastrophe, snowball Earths and great oxidation events, and then another billion years of nothing happening, and then some period of upheavals, and then another snowball earth, and then suddenly you see the Cambrian explosion. This is long periods.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that the biggest mystery? No, I don't think so. That's a particularly big mystery, really, anymore. I mean, it's. There are still mysteries about why then, and I've just said sulfate being washed into the oceans is one, it needs oxygen and oxygen levels rose around that time. So probably before that they weren't high enough for animals. What we're seeing with the Cambrian explosion is the beginning of predators and prey relationships. We're seeing modern ecosystems and we're seeing arms races and we're seeing the full creativity of evolution unleashed. So I've talked about the boring billion. Nothing happens for one and a half billion years, one and a half billion years.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Statistically, it's really hard. Maybe you can rule that in statistically, but this is the course of life on Earth without all that sulfate being raised up, the Scambrian explosion almost certainly would not have happened. And then we wouldn't have had animals and so on and so on. So it's, you know, it's.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're oxidizing carbon, organic carbon with sulfate, passing the electrons onto sulfate, that reacts with iron to form iron pyrides, or fool's gold, sinks down to the bottom, gets buried out of the system. And this can account for the mass balance. So why does it matter? It matters because what it says is there was a chance event tectonically there was a lot of sulfate sitting on land as some kind of mineral, so calcium sulfate minerals, for example, or evaporitic. And because there happened to be some continent, some continental collisions, mountain building, the sulfate was pushed up the side of a mountain and happened to get washed into the ocean.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you calculate the amount of oxygen based on the assumption that all this carbon-12 that's being taken out is being oxidized by oxygen, the answer is all the oxygen in the atmosphere gets stripped out. There is none left. And yet the rest of the geological indicators say, no, there's oxygen in the atmosphere. So it's kind of a paradox, and the only way to explain this paradox just on mass balance of how much stuff is in the air, how much stuff is in the oceans, and so on, is to assume that oxygen was not the oxygen, it was sulfate. Sulfate was being washed into the oceans. It's used as an electron acceptor by sulfate-reducing bacteria just as we use oxygen as an electron acceptor. So they pass their electrons to sulfate instead of oxygen. Yeah, yeah. So these are bacteria.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what that seems to be saying is the amount of carbon-12 in the oceans was disappearing. Which is to say, it was being oxidized. And if it's being oxidized, it's consuming oxygen, and so a big carbon-13 signal says the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 is really going down, which means there's much more carbon-12 being taken out and being oxidized. Sorry, this is getting too complex.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oil or whatever it may be, then it's no longer oxidized, so some oxygen remains left over in the atmosphere. And that's how oxygen accumulates in the atmosphere. And you can work out historically how much oxygen there must have been in the atmosphere by how much carbon was being buried. And you think, well, how can we possibly know how much carbon was being buried? And the answer is, well, if you're burying carbon-12, what you're leaving behind is more carbon-13 in the oceans. And that precipitates out into limestone. So you can look at limestones over these ages and work out what's the carbon-13 signal. And that gives you a kind of a feedback on what the oxygen content right before the Cambrian explosion, there was what's called a negative isotope anomaly excursion, which is basically the carbon-13 goes down by a massive amount and then back up again 10 million years later.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An enzyme. And so it's more likely to be fixed into organic matter. And so organic matter is enriched, and this is just an observation, it's enriched in carbon-12 by a few percent compared to carbon-13 relative to what you would expect if it was just equal. And if you then bury organic matter as coal or”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't really know why, but one of the reasons why that I discuss in the book is about sulfate being washed into the oceans, which sounds incredibly parochial. But the issue is, I mean, what the data is showing, we can track roughly how oxygen was going into the atmosphere from carbon isotopes. So there's two main isotopes of carbon that we need to think about here. One is carbon-12, 99% of carbon is carbon-12. And then 1% of carbon is carbon-13, which is a stable isotope. And then there's carbon-14, which is a trivial radioactive amount. So carbon-13 is 1%. And life and enzymes generally, you can think of carbon atoms as little balls bouncing around, bing bong balls, bouncing around. Carbon 12 moves a little bit faster than carbon-13 because it's lighter. And it's more likely to encounter.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think there is no reason. But at the end of it, there was a snowball earth. So there was a planetary catastrophe on a huge scale where the ice was frozen at the equator. And that forced change in one way or another. It's not long after that, 100 million years, perhaps after that, so not a short time. But this is when we begin to see animals. There was a shift to gain another tipping point that led to catastrophic change, that led to a takeoff then.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, after the first appearance of oxygen with the GOE, there was a tipping point which led to a long-term stable state that was equivalent to the Black Sea today, which is to say oxygenated at the very surface and stagnant, sterile, not sterile, but sulfurous lower down. And that was stable, certainly around the continental margins for more than a billion years. It was not a state that led to progression in an obvious way.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this idea that the world is constantly changing, that we're constantly evolving, that we're moving up some ramp is a very human idea, but in reality tipping points to a new stable equilibrium, where the cells that are producing oxygen are precisely counterbalanced by the cells that are consuming that oxygen, which is why it's 21% now and has been that way for hundreds of millions of years. We have a very precise balance. You go through a tipping point and you don't know where the next stable state is going to be, but it can be a long way from here. And so if we change the world with global warming, there will be a tipping point. The question is where and when and what's the next stable state. It may be uninhabitable to us. It'll be habitable to life for sure. But there may be something like the Permian extinction where 95% of species”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Through to around about the time of the Cambrian explosion when oxygen levels definitely got close to modern levels, which was around about 550 million years ago. So we've gone more than one and a half billion years where the Earth was in stasis. Nothing much changed. It's known as the boring billion, in fact. Probably stuff was, that was when eukaryotes arose somewhere in there.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then it happened at least 2.2 billion years ago, right before the GOE, maybe as long as 3 billion years ago, when there are some people say there are whiffs of oxygen as just kind of traces in the geochemical record that say maybe there's a bit of oxygen then, that's really disputed. Some people say it goes all the way back four billion years ago and that it was the common ancestor of life on Earth was focusynthetic. So immediately you've got groups of people who disagree over a two billion year period of time about when it started. Let's take the latest date when it's unequivocal. That's 2.2 billion years ago”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and that would be my second one, I think. But it's not so much, I mean, photosynthesis is part of the problem. It's a difficult thing to do. Again, we know it happened once. We don't know why it happened once. But the fact that It was kind of taken on board completely by plants and algae and so on as chloroplasts. And did very well in completely different environments than then on land and whatever else seems to suggest that there's no problem with exploring. You could have a separate origin that explored this whole domain over there that the bacteria had never gone into. So that kind of says that the reason that it only happened once is probably because it's difficult because the wiring is difficult.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Harsh that's pretty harsh, yeah. So Titan is different. Europa is probably quite similar to Earth in the sense that we're dealing with an ocean. It's an acidic ocean there, as the early Earth would have been, and it almost certainly has hydrothermal systems. Same with Enceladus. We can tell that from these plumes coming from the surface through the ice. We know there's a liquid ocean and we can tell roughly what the chemistry is. For Titan, we're dealing with liquid methane and things like that. So that would really, if there really is life there, it would really have to be very, very different to anything that we know on Earth.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if the stereochemistry was different, we have sugars, for example, that are the L form or the D form, and we have D sugars and L-amino acids right across all of life. But lipids, the bacteria have one stereoisomer and the bacteria have the other, the opposite stereoisomer. So it's perfectly possible to use one or the other one, and the same would almost certainly go from, and I think George Church has been trying to make life based on the opposite stereoisomer. So it's perfectly possible to do and it will work. And if we were to find life on Mars that was using the opposite stereo isomer, that would be unequivocal evidence that life had started independently there.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, if we found life on Mars and it had very similar genetic code, but it was slightly different, most people would interpret that immediately as evidence that there'd been transit one way or the other and that it was a common origin of life on Mars or on the Earth and it went one way or the other way. The other way to see that question though would be to say, well, actually the beginnings of life lie in deterministic chemistry and thermodynamics starting with the most likely abundant materials, CO2 and water and a wet rocky planet and Mars was wet and rocky at the beginning and will I won't say inevitably but potentially almost inevitably come up with a genetic code which is not very far away from the genetic code that we already have.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would be most interested in is how similar to life on Earth it would be. It would actually turn into quite a subtle problem because. The likelihood of life having gone to and fro between Mars and the Earth is quite, I wouldn't say high, but it's not low. It's quite feasible.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, either of them are chilling. But whether it's chilling or not, I don't think should force us to change our view about whether it's real or not. What I'm saying may or may not be true.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think that it's not going to happen inevitably, and there's something you know, it wasn't, that's not the only problem with complex life on Earth. I mentioned oxygen and animals and so on as well. And even humans, we came along very late. You go back five million years and would we be that impressed if we came across a planet full of giraffes? I mean, you'd think, hey, there's life here. It's a nice planet to colonize or something. We wouldn't think, oh, let's try and have a conversation with this giraffe.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would expect billions, tens of billions of planets with bacteria living on it, practically. I mean, there's probably, what, five to ten planets per star? Of which I would hope that at least one would have bacteria on. So I expect bacteria to be very common. I simply can't put a number otherwise. I mean, I expect it will happen elsewhere. It's not that I think we're living in a completely empty universe.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work out, so maybe it happened millions of times and it went wrong every time, or maybe it only happened once and it worked out because it was inevitable. And actually, we simply do not know enough now to say which of those two possibilities is true. But both of them are a bit grim.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yet, the ways of life are completely different. So this cell structure did not evolve in response to different ways of life, different environments. I'm in the ocean doing photosynthesis, I'm on land running around as part of an animal. I'm a fungus in a soil, spending out long kind of shoots into whatever it may be mycelium. They all have the same underlying cell structure. Why? Almost certainly it was driven by adaptation to the internal environment, to having these pesky endosymbionts that forced all kinds of change on the host cell. Now, in one way you could see that as a really good thing because it may be that there's some inevitability to this process as soon as you got endosymbionts, you're more or less bound to go in that direction, or it could be that there's a huge fluke about it and it's almost certain to go wrong in just about every case possible that the conflict will lead to effectively war, leading to death and extinction. And it simply doesn't.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Photosynthetic, they started out as algae in the oceans and so on. So think of algal bloom, single cell things. The basic cell structure that it's built from is exactly the same with a couple of small differences it's got chloroplast as well. It's got a vacuole, it's got a cell wall, but that's about it. Pretty much everything else is exactly the same in a plant cell and an animal cell.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you think about I'm in a minority view in this position, most biologists probably wouldn't agree with me anyway. But if you think about the starting point, we've got a simple cell. It's an archaeal cell. We can be fairly sure about that. So it looks a lot like a bacterium, but is in fact from this other domain of life. So it looks a lot like a bacterial cell. That means it doesn't have anything. It doesn't have a nucleus. It doesn't really have complex endomembrane. It has a little bit of stuff, but not that much. And it takes up an endosymbiont. So what happens next? And the answer is basically everything to do with complexity. To me, there's a beautiful paradox here. Plants and animals and fungi All have exactly the same type of cell They all have really different ways of living. So plants sell.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm saying tantamount to saying that it is impossible to build something as complex as a human being from bacterial cells.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the, I mean, the problem, the single great problem at the center of all of that, to my mind, is the origin of the Eukaryot itself, which happened once and without eukaryotes, nothing else would have happened. And that is something that...”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why so long? Seems to be planetary factors. It seems to be geology as much as anything else. And we don't really know what was going on. So the idea that there's a kind of an inevitable march towards complexity and sentient life, I don't think he's right. Not to say it's not going to happen, but I think it's not going to happen often.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the universe is very big, so some, but not as many as most people like to think is my view, because the idea that... That there is a trajectory going from Simple cellular life like bacteria all the way through to humans. Seems to me there's some big gaps along that way. The eukaryotic cell, the complex cell that we have is the biggest of them, but also photosynthesis is another. Another interesting gap is a long gap from the origin of the eukaryotic cells to the first animals. That was about a billion years, maybe more than that. A long delay in where oxygen began to accumulate in the atmosphere. So from the first appearance of oxygen in the great oxidation event, enough for animals to respire was close to 2 billion years.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, the problem with playing chess or something, if you were able to make all of those subconscious forward calculations about what is the likely outcome of this move now in the way that we can by running down a hillside or something, it's partly about what we have adapted to do. It's partly about the reality of the world that we're in, running fast downhill is something that we'd better be bloody good at otherwise we're going to be eaten, whereas trying to calculate multiple, multiple moves into the future is not something we've ever been called on to do in two or three, four moves into the future is quite enough for most of us, most of the time.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can just go incredibly fast, and you don't think about it at all. The entire conscious mind is shut out of it, and it's probably the same playing table, tennis or something. There's something in the mind which is doing a whole lot of subconscious calculations about exact, and it's amazing. You can run at astonishing speed down a hillside with no idea how you did it at all. And then you panic and you think, I'm going to break my leg if I keep doing this. I've got to think about where I'm going to put my foot. So you slow down a bit and try to bring those conscious mind in, and then you do. You crash. You cannot think consciously while running downhill. So it's amazing how many calculations the mind is able to make.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was used to go running when I was a boy and fell running, which is running up and down mountains. And I was never particularly great at it. But there were some people who were amazingly fast, especially at running down. And I realized in trying to do this that there's only really three possible ways of doing it, and there's only two that work. Either you go extremely slowly and carefully and you figure out, okay, there's a stone. I'll put my foot on this stone. And then there's another, there's a muddy puddle I'm going to avoid. It's slow. It's laborious. You figure it out step by step.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understand what we are like if we wish to craft an AI system which is somehow human like that we don't have a firm enough Grasp of what humans really are like in terms of how we are built.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, it There's a nice book by Arthur Kussler on. On the nature of creativity, and he likens it to a joke where the punchline goes off in a completely unexpected direction and says that this is the basis of human creativity, that some creative switch of direction to an unexpected place is similar to I'm not saying that's how it works, but it's a nice idea and there must be some truth in it. And it's one of these, most of the stories we tell are probably the wrong story and probably going nowhere and probably not helpful. And we definitely don't do as well at seeing patterns in things. But some of the most enjoyable human aspects is finding a new story that goes to an unexpected place. These are all aspects of what being human means to me. And maybe these are all things that AI figures out for itself, or maybe they're just aspects. But I just have the feeling sometimes that the people who are trying to”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I don't think it's going to look like pattern finding either. I mean, that's essentially what you're telling me. It does very well at the moment. And my point is it works very well where you're looking for the right pattern. But we are storytelling animals. And a hypothesis is a story. It's a testable story. But a new hypothesis is a leap into the unknown and is a new story, basically. And it says this leads to this, leads to that. It's a causal set of storytelling.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big differences in risk. So you can set AI onto this question of exactly what many of these base changes there are. That's just one possible solution that maybe there are a million of them and it does account for the greater part of the risk. Or the other one is they aren't. It's just not there. Actually, the risk lies in something you weren't even looking at. And this is where human intuition is very important. And there's this feeling that, well, I'm working on this and I think it's important and I'm bloody-minded about it. And in the end, some people are right. It turns out that it was important. You get AI to do that to be bloody minded.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A few single letter changes in that mitochondrial DNA, it controls some really basic processes. It controls not only all the energy that we need to live and to move around and do everything we do, but also biosynthesis to make the new building blocks to make new cells. And cancer cells very often kind of take over the mitochondria and rewire them so that instead of using them for making energy, they're effectively using them as precursors for the building blocks for biosynthesis. You need to make new amino acids, new nucleotides for DNA. You want to make new lipids to make your membranes and so on. So they kind of rewire metabolism. Now, the problem is that we've got all these interactions between mitochondrial DNA and the genes in the nucleus that are overlooked completely because people throw away, literally throw away the mitochondrial genes. And we can see in fruit flies that they interact and produce”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe there's a billion of them. So that's one way. The other way is to say Well, hang on a minute, you're missing a system here. That system is the mitochondrial DNA, which people tend to dismiss because it's small and it's not, it doesn't change very much.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you add them all up and try and say, well, so do they add up to explain the known genetic risk of this disease? And the known genetic risk often comes from twin studies, and you can say that if this twin gets epilepsy, there's a 40 or 50% risk that the other twin identical twin will also get epilepsy. Therefore, the genetic factor is about 50%. And so the gene similarities that you see should account for 50% of that known risk. Very often it accounts for less than a tenth of the known risk. And there's two possible explanations. And there's one which people tend to do, which is to say, ah, well, we don't have enough statistical power. If we, maybe there's a million, we've only found a thousand of them, but if we find the other million, they're weakly related, but there's a huge number of them, and so we'll account for that whole risk. Maybe there's.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Give you another example from my own work The risk of getting a disease as we get older, there are genetic aspects to it. You know, if you spend your whole life overeating and smoking and whatever, that's a whole separate question. But there's a genetic side to the risk. And we know a few genes that increase your risk of certain things. And for probably 20 years now, people have been doing what's called GWAS, which is genome-wide association. Single nucleotide polymorphisms, which is to say a single letter change in one place that has a higher association of being linked with a particular disease or not. And you can come up with thousands of these things across the genome.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two ways of doing it either you can look at the structures and the sequences of all the proteins and you can apply an immense mind to it and figure out what the patterns are and figure out what happens or you can look at the actual situation where it is and say well hang on it was actually quite simple it's got a charged environment and then it's forced to come out this way and then the question will be well do different ribosomes have different charged environments for what happens if a chaperone you know you're asking a different set of questions to come to the same answer in a way which is telling you a much simpler story and explains why it is rather than saying it could be this is one in a billion different possible confirmation or states that this protein could have you're saying well it has this one because that was the only one it could take given its setting”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's forced on you by an exit tunnel. So, the problem is actually much simpler than you thought. And then there's a whole army of Of proteins which change the conformational state, chaperone proteins. And they're only used when there's some presumably issue with how it came out of the exit tunnel and you want to do it differently to that. So very often the chaperone proteins will go there and will influence the way in which it falls.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much greater skill than the human mind has, but the human mind is capable of saying, well, hang on, let's look at this exit tunnel and try and work out what shape is this protein going to take. We can figure that out.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Confirmational set of changes onto it as it comes out of the ribosome. So by the time it's fully emerged, it's already got its shape, and that shape depended on the immediate environment that it was emerging into, one letter, one amino acid at a time. And I don't think that the field was looking at it that way. And this is, if that's correct, then that's very characteristic of science, which is to say it asks very often the wrong question and then does really amazingly sophisticated analyses on something, having never thought to actually think, well, what is biology doing? And biology is giving you a charged electrical environment that forces you to be this way. Now, did DeepMind come up through patterns with some answer that was like that? I've got absolutely no idea. It ought to be possible to deduce that from the shapes of proteins. It would require much greater...”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source