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

“I mean, I suppose a couple of things I'd say. Number one is you don't have to wind the clock back very far, five, six million years or so, and let it run forwards again. And the chances of humans, as we know them, is not necessarily that high. Imagine as an alien, you find planet Earth and it's got everything apart from humans on it, it's amazing, wonderful, marvelous planet, but nothing that we would recognize as extremely intelligent life, space-faring civilization. So when we think about aliens, we're kind of after something like ourselves. We're after a space-faring civilization. We're not after zebras and giraffes and lions and things. Amazing, though they are. But the additional kind of evolutionary steps to go from large, complex mammals, monkeys, let's say, to humans doesn't strike me as that long.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We society, and you know, we have I keep using this word moral obligation, but we cannot operate as a society if we go that way. It's interesting that We've had problems achieving balance. So, for example, in the financial crash in 2009, do you let banks go to the wall or not, this kind of question in evolution, certainly you let them go to the wall. And in that sense, you don't need the regulation because they just die. Whereas if we as a society think about what's required for society as a whole, then you don't necessarily let them go to the wall, in which case you then have to impose some kind of regulation that the bankers themselves will in an evolutionary manner exploit.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we naturally do it. I mean, I don't think we can help ourselves do it. Capitalism as a form is basically about competition and differential rewards.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tremendous amount companies competing with each other all the time. It drives innovation. And if we want to do it without all the death that we see in nature, then we have to have some kind of societal level control that says, well, there's some limits, guys, and these are what the limits are going to be. And society as a whole has to say, right, we want to limit the amount of death here, so you can't do this and you can't do that. And, you know, who makes up these rules and how do we know? It's a tough thing, but it's basically trying to find a moral basis for avoiding the death of evolution and natural selection and keeping the innovation and the richness of it.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But actually, in some respects, we do, which is to say this is how science works. We have competing hypotheses that have to get better, otherwise they die. It's the way that society works. In ancient Greece, Athens and Sparta and city-states, and then we had the Renaissance and nation states. And we, universities compete with each other.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Forces you to come up with a solution to your specific problem that is inventive and is new and hasn't been done before. And so it forces, I mean, literally change, literally evolution on populations. They have to become different.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, survival of the fittest, if you just go back to that old phrase, means death of the weakest. Now, what's fit, what's weak? These are terms that don't have much intrinsic meaning. But the thing is, evolution only happens because of death.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or six trophic levels, and that means things can eat things that eat other things and so on, and you've gone to a level of ecological complexity, which is completely impossible in the absence of oxygen.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a mechanism forces organisms to adapt to change to be better to escape or to kill. If you need to eat, then you've got to eat. And a cheater's not going to run at that speed unless it has to because the zebra is capable of escaping. So it leads to much greater feats of evolution than would ever have been possible without it. And in the end, to a much more beautiful world. And so it's not all bad by any means. But the thing is, you can't have this if you don't have an oxygenated planet because it's all in the end. It's about how much energy can you extract from the food you eat. And if you don't have an oxygenated planet, you can get about 10% out, not much more than that. And if you've got an oxygenated planet, you can get about 40% out. And that means you can have, instead of having one or two trophic levels, you can have...”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something changes. Oxygen definitely changes during this period. Other things may have changed as well. But the next thing you really see in the fossil record is the Cambrian explosion. And what do we see there? We're now seeing animals that we would recognize. They've got eyes. They've got claws. They've got shells. They're plainly killing things or running away and hiding. And so we've gone from a rather gentle but limited world to a rather vicious, unpleasant world that we recognize, and which leads to kind of arms races, evolutionary arms races, which again is something that when we think about a nuclear arms race, we think Jesus, we don't want to go there. It's not done anybody any good in some ways. Maybe it does do good. I don't want to make an argument for nuclear arms, but predation.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More than 200 meters deep, so they're definitely not photosynthetic. These are animals and they're filter feeders and we know sponges and corals and things are filter feeding animals. They're stuck to the spot and little bits of carbon that come their way. They filter it out and that's what they're eating. So no predation involved in this beyond stuff just dies anyway. And it feels like a very gentle, rather beautiful rather limited world, you might say. There's not a lot going on there.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what we see if we go back 560, 570 million years before the Cambrian explosion, there is what's known as the Ediacran fauna, or sometimes they call vendobionce, which is a lovely name. And it's not obvious that they're animals at all. They're stalked things. They often have fronds that look a lot like leaves with kind of fractal branching patterns on them. The thing is they're found sometimes geologists can figure out the environment that they were in and say this is more than 200 meters deep because there's no sign of any waves. No storm damage down here, this kind of thing.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I guess it's both, isn't it? I mean, when did it start? It starts in bacteria. You see these amazing predators. Della Vibrio is one that Lynn Margulis used to talk about a lot. It's got a kind of a drill piece that drills through the wall and the membrane of the bacterium and then it effectively eats the bacterium from just inside the periplasmic space and makes copies of itself that way. So that's straight predation. There are predators among bacteria.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You look at the human genome, and it's full of stuff that is really either broken or dysfunctional or was a virus once or whatever it may be. And somehow it works. And maybe we need a lot of this mess. We know that some functional genes are taken from this mess.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talking about JavaScript or the genetic code now I mean, it's almost, you know, biology is underpinned by this kind of mess as well”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People have tried to model it based on the effect that mutations would have. So, no, you're right, we don't know because that's a single assumption that a mutation is what's being selected on there. There's other possibilities too.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, in a way, we've got the hardware and the software here. And the hardware is maybe the DNA and the RNA itself. And then the software perhaps is more about the code. Did the code have to be this way? Could it have been a different way? People talk about the optimization of the code and there's some suggestion for that. I think it's weak, actually. But you could imagine you can come out with a million different codes and this would be one of the best ones.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is it because there was some form of selection that this is better than the other forms and there were lots of competing forms of information storage early on and this one was the one that worked out? Or was it kind of channeled that way that these are the molecules that you're dealing with and they work? And I'm increasingly thinking it's that way that we're channeled towards ribos, phosphate and the bases that are used. But there are 200 different letters kicking around out there that could have been used.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a lot of work going on on what's called Xeno DNA or RNA. Can we replace the bases themselves, the letters, if you like, in RNA or DNA? Can we replace the backbone? Can we replace, for example, phosphate with arsenate? Can we replace the sugar ribose or deoxyribose with a different sugar? And the answer is yes, you can. Within limits, there's not an infinite space there. Arsenate doesn't really work if the bonds are not as strong as phosphate. It's probably quite hard to replace phosphate. Possible to do it. The question to me is why is it this way?”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Small. And so there's a limit to how complex life could be unless you come up with DNA, which chemically is a really small change, but how easy it is to make that change, I don't really know. As soon as you've got DNA, then you've got an amazingly stable molecule for information storage. And you can do absolutely anything. But how likely that transition from RNA to DNA was? I don't know either.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Getting from RNA, how do you, you know, there's multiple different types of RNA now. How do you distinguish this is something we're actively thinking about? How do you distinguish between a random population of RNA? Some of them go on to become messenger RNA. This is the transcript of the code, of the gene that you want to make. Some of them become transfer RNA, which is kind of the unit that holds the amino acid that's going to be polymerized. Some of them become ribosomal RNA, which is the machine which is joining them all up together. How do they discriminate themselves? Some kind of phase transition going on there. I don't know. It's a difficult question. And we're now in the region of biology where information is coming in. But the thing about RNA is very, very good at what it does. But the largest genomes supported by RNA of RNA viruses like HIV, for example, they're pretty...”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, RNA is the thing that does the work, really. And the code lies in RNA. The code lies in the interactions between RNA and amino acids. And it still is there today in the ribosome, for example, which is just kind of a giant ribosome, which is this ASN enzyme that's made of RNA. So getting to RNA, I suspect is probably not that hard.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Huge, I suspect. I mean, but when I was talking about the code, you see the code in RNA as well. And RNA almost certainly came. And there's been an idea going back decades called the RNA world because RNA in theory can copy itself and can catalyze reactions. So it kind of cuts out this chicken and egg loop.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's really a challenge. And this is a bit like sexual selection. It's not so, they're all pretty much genetically identical. But they've had different life histories. So have you had a tough day? Did you happen to get infected by this virus or did you run out of iron or did you get a bit too much sun, whatever it may be, if this extra stress of the toxin just pushes you over the edge, then you have this binary choice. Either you're the next generation or you kill yourself now using this same machinery.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is kind of a challenge to you. Either you can cope with the toxin, or you can't. If you can cope with it, you form a spore, and you will go on to become the next generation. You form a kind of a resistant spore, you sink down a little bit, you get out of the way, you're out of, you can't be attacked by a virus if you're a spore, or at least not so easily. Whereas if you can't deal with that toxin, you pull the plug and you trigger your death apparatus and you kill yourself.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me give you one beautiful example of an algal bloom. This can be a sign of bacteria, it's going to be in bacteria. So if suddenly you pump nitrate or phosphate or something into the ocean and everything goes green, you end up with all this algae growing there. A viral infection or something like that can kill the entire bloom overnight. And it's not that the virus takes out everything overnight. It's that most of the cells in that bloom kill themselves before the virus can get onto them. And it's through a form of cell death called programmed cell death. And we do the same things is how we have the different gaps between our fingers and so on. It's how we craft synapses in the brain. It's fundamental again to multicellular life. They have the same machinery in these algal blooms. How do they know who dies? The answer is they will often put out a toxin. And that toxin...”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Peacock or something. The kind of standard, this is not quite what I work on, but the standard answer is that it's female mate choice. She is looking for good genes. And if you can have a tail that's like this and still survive, still be alive, not actually have been taken down by the nearest predator, then you must have got pretty good genes because despite this handicap, you're able to survive.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you want to have a large genome, you've got to prevent it mutating to nothing. That will happen with bacteria. So there's another reason why bacteria can't have a large genome. But as soon as you give them the eukaryotic cells, the power pack that allows them to increase the size of their genome, then you face the pressure that you've got to maintain its quality. You've got to stop it just mutating away.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you've got a small genome, the chances of you picking up the right bit of DNA from the environment is much higher than if you've got a genome of 20,000 genes. To do that, you've effectively got to be picking up DNA all the time, all day long and nothing else, and you're still going to get the wrong DNA. You've got to pick up large chunks. And in the end, you've got to align them. You're forced into sex, to coin a phrase.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you've got a few cells together. So the bottom line on all of this is bacteria. I mean, it's kind of simple when you've figured it out and figuring it out, this is not me, this is my PhD student, Marco Colnagi. And in effect, if you're doing an E. coli cell, you've got 4,000 genes. You want to scale up to a eukaryotic size. I want to have 20,000 genes. And I need to maintain my genome so it doesn't get shot to pieces by mutations. And I'm going to do it bilateral gene transfer. So I know I've got a mutation in a gene. I don't know which gene it is because I'm not sentient, but I know I can't grow. I know all my regulation systems are saying something wrong here, something wrong. Pick up some DNA. Pick up a bit of DNA from the environment.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which has got a single copy of the And that's the basic ground plan for what's called meiosis and syngami. That's basically sex. And it happens at the level of single-celled organisms, and it happens pretty much the same way in plants and pretty much the same way in animals and so on. And it's not found in any bacteria. They switch things around using the same machinery and they take up a bit of DNA from the environment. They take out this bit and stick in that bit. And it's the same molecular machinery they're using to do it.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was invented with eukaryotes about two billion years ago. All eukaryotes share the same basic mechanism that you produce gametes, that gametes fuse together, so a gamete is a Not necessarily even different in size or shape. So there's the simplest eukaryotes produce what are called motor algamuts. They're all like sperm and they all swim around. They find each other. They fuse together. They don't have kind of much going on there beyond that. And then these are haploid, which is to say we all have two copies of our genome. And the gametes have only a single copy of the genome. So when they fuse together, you now become diploid again, which is to say you now have two copies of your genome. And what you do is you line them all up and then you double everything. So now we have four copies of the complete genome. And then we crisscross between all of these things. So we take a bit from here and stick it on there and a bit from here and we stick it on here. That's recombination. And then we go through two rounds of cell division. So we divide in half. So now the two daughter cells have two copies and we divide in half again. Now we have some gametes.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a funny thing to have an animal where I have 70% of my genes switched on in my brain and a different 50% switched on in my liver or something, you've got to have all those genes in the egg cell at the very beginning and you've got to have a program of development which says, okay, you guys switch off those genes and switch on those genes and you guys, you do that. But all the genes are there at the beginning. That means you've got to have a lot of genes in one cell and you've got to be able to maintain them. And the problem with bacteria is they don't get close to having enough genes in one cell. So if you were to try and make a multicellular organism from bacteria, you'd bring different types of bacteria together and hope they'll cooperate. And the reality is they don't.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not sure that you have hierarchical control necessarily, but you've got a system where you can have a much larger information storage depot in the nucleus. You can have a much larger genome. And that allows multicellularity, yes, because it allows you”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's a kind of step change in the possibilities of evolution, but it doesn't happen overnight. It's going to still require multiple, multiple generations. So it could take millions of years. It could take shorter times. There's another thing I would like to put the number of steps and try and work out what's required at each step. And we are trying to do that with sex, for example. You can't have a very large genome unless you have sex at that point. So what are the changes to go from bacterial recombination to eukaryotic recombination? What do you need to do? Why do we go from passing around bits of DNA as if it's loose change to fusing cells together, lining up the chromosomes, recombining across the chromosomes, and then going through two rounds of cell division to produce your gametes? All eukaryotes do it that way. So again, why switch? What are the drivers here? So there's a lot of times, a lot of evolution, but as soon as you've got cells living inside another cell, what you've got is a new design, you've got new potential that you didn't have before.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No further development. What you need is to incorporate these electrically charged power pack units inside with their control units intact. And for them not to conflict so much with the host cell that it all goes wrong, perhaps it goes wrong more often than not. And then you change the topology of the cell. Now, you don't necessarily have any more DNA than a giant bacterium with extreme polyploidy, but what you've got is an asymmetry. You now have a giant nuclear genome surrounded by lots of subsidiary energetic genomes that they're the control units that are doing all the control of energy generation.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Explored genetic sequence space far more thoroughly than eukaryotes ever did because they've had twice as long at least and they've got much larger populations and they never they never got around this problem. So why can't they? It seems as if you can't solve it with information alone. So what's the problem? The problem is structure. If the very first cells needed an electrical charge on their membrane to grow And in bacteria, it's the outer membrane that surrounds the cell which is electrically charged. You try and scale that up and you've got a fundamental design problem. You've got an engineering problem. And there are examples of it. And what we see in all these cases is what's known as extreme polyploidy, which is to say they have tens of thousands of copies of their complete genome, which is energetically hugely expensive and you end up with a large bacteria with...”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It took two billion years. It hasn't happened since, to the best of our knowledge. So it looks as if it's genuinely difficult. And if you think about it then from just an informational perspective, you think bacteria have got, they structure their information differently. So a bacterial cell has a small genome. You might have 4,000 genes in it, but a single E. coli cell has access to about 30,000 genes, potentially. It's got a kind of metagenome where other ecoli out there have got different gene sets and they can switch them around between themselves. And so you can generate a huge amount of variation. And they've got an E. coli metagenome is larger than the human genome. We own 20,000 genes or something. And they've had four billion years of evolution to work out what can I do and what can't I do with this metagenome? And the answer is you're stuck. You're still bacteria. So they have...”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It had a huge impact on life because if that had not happened, you can be certain that life on Earth would be bacterial only.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The standard evolutionary explanation for that is that you're restricting conflict. You don't have a load of genetically different cells that are all fighting each other. And so it works. The trouble with bacteria is they form these biofilms and they're all genetically different and effectively they're incapable of that level of cooperation they would get in a fight.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've gone over about fourfold in the number of genes, but in terms of the size of genomes and your ability to make the building blocks, make the proteins, we've gone over 100,000 fold or more. So it's a huge step change in the possibilities of evolution. And it's interesting then that the only two occasions that complex life has arisen on Earth, plants and animals, fungi you could say are complex as well, but they don't form such complex morphology as plants and animals. Start with a single cell. They start with an oocyte and a sperm fused together to make a zygote. So you start development with a single cell and all the cells in the organism. DNA and you switch off in the brain, you switch off these genes and you switch on those genes and liver, you switch off those and you switch on a different set.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what we end up with, so it kept always a handful of genes. In our own case, 37 genes. But there's a few protists which are single-celled things that have got as many as 70 or 80 genes. So it's not always the same, but it's always a small number. And you can think of it as a paired-down power pack where the controlled unit has really been kind of paired down to almost nothing. So it's putting out the same power, but the investment in the overheads is really paired down. That means that you can support a much larger nuclear genome. So we've gone up in the number of genes, but also the amount of power you have to convert those genes into proteins.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eukaryotic cell seems to have been what's called an endosymbiosis, so one cell gets inside another cell. And I think that that transform the energetic possibilities of life. So what we end up with is a kind of supercharged cell, which can have a much larger nucleus with many more genes, all supported. If you think about, you could think about it as multibacterial power without the overhead. So you've got a cell and it's got bacteria living in it. And those bacteria are providing it with the energy currency it needs. But each bacterium has a genome of its own, which costs a fair amount of energy to express, to kind of turn over and convert into proteins and so on. What the mitochondria does, which are these power packs in our own cells, they were bacteria once and they threw away virtually all their genes. They've only got a few left”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I mentioned bacteria and archaea. These are both prokaryotes. They're basically small cells that don't have a nucleus. If you look at them under a microscope, you don't see much going on. If you look at them under a super resolution microscope, then they're fantastically complex. In terms of their molecular machinery, they're amazing. In terms of their morphological appearance under a microscope, they're really small and really simple. The earliest life that we can physically see on the planet are stromatolites, which are made by things like cyanobacteria and their large superstructures. Effectively, biofilms plated on top of each other, and you end up with quite large structures that you can see in the fossil record. But they never came up with animals. They never came up with plants. They came up with multicellular things, filamentous cyanobacteria, for example. They're just long strings of cells. But the origin of the...”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Resources needed for animals. We need to eat and we need to burn the food where eating plants, which are getting there energy from the sun and we're burning it with their waste product, which is the oxygen. So there's a lot of kind of circularity in that. But without an oxygenated planet, you couldn't really have predation. You can have animals, but you can't really have animals that go around and eat each other. You can't have ecosystems as we know them.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No other bacteria can do what's called oxygenic photosynthesis. Lots of other bacteria can split. I mean, you can take your hydrogen from somewhere else. You can take it from hydrogen sulfide bubbling out of a hydrothermal vent, grab your two hydrogens, the sulfur is the waste now. You can do it from iron. You can take electrons. So the early oceans were probably full of iron. You can take an electron from ferrous iron. So iron 2 plus and make it iron 3 plus, which now precipitates as rust. And you take a proton from the sidic early ocean, stick it there. Now you've got a hydrogen atom, stick it onto CO2. You've just done the trick. The trouble is you bury yourself in rusty iron. And with sulfur, you can bury yourself in sulfur. One of the reasons oxygenic photosynthesis is so much better is that the waste product is oxygen, which just bubbles away.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It can't be easy to get it right because, you know, the plants that we see around us, they have chloroplasts. Those chloroplasts were cyanobacteria ones. Those cyanobacteria are the only group of bacteria that can do that type of photosynthesis. So there's plenty of opportunity.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And it happened once. There's a few things that happen once on earth, and you know, you're always stuck with this problem. Once it happened, did it become so good so quickly that it precluded the same thing happening ever again? Or are there other reasons? And we really have to look at each one in turn and think, why did it only happen once? In this case, it's really difficult to split water. It requires a lot of power, and that power, you're effectively separating charge across a membrane. And the way in which you do it, if it doesn't all rush back and kind of cause an explosion right at the site, requires really careful wiring. And that wiring...”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Yeah. It also made possible animals. You can't have large active animals without an oxygenated atmosphere, at least not in the sense 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
“Well, there are different forms. I mean, basically, you're taking hydrogen and you're sticking it onto CO2, and it's powered by the sun. The question is, where are you taking the hydrogen from? And in photosynthesis that we know in plants, it's coming from water. So you're using the power of the sun to split water, take out the hydrogen, stick it onto CO2. And the oxygen is a waste product, and you just throw it out, throw it away. So it's the single greatest planetary pollution event in the whole history of the Earth.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source