Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318

well the source of energy at the origin

of life is the reaction between carbon

dioxide and hydrogen and amazingly most

of these reactions are

exergonic which is to say they release

energy this if you have hydrogen and co2

and you put them together in a falcon

tube and you warm it up to say 50

degrees centigrade and you put in a

couple of catalysts and you shake it

nothing's gonna happen but

thermodynamically

that is less stable two gases hydrogen

and co2 is less stable than cells what

should happen is you get cells coming

out why doesn't that happen is because

of the kinetic barriers it's because

that's where you need the spark

the following is a conversation with

nick lane a biochemist at university

college london and author of some of my

favorite books on biology science and

life

ever written

including his two most recent titled

transformer the deep chemistry of life

and death

and

the vital question

why is life the way it is

this is the lex friedman podcast to

support it please check out our sponsors

in the description and now dear friends

here's nick

lane

let's start with perhaps the most

mysterious the most interesting question

that uh we

little humans can ask of ourselves how

did life originate on earth you could

you could ask anybody working on the

subject

and you'll get a different answer from

all of them they will be pretty

passionately held

opinions and their opinions grounded in

science

um

but they're still really at this point

their opinions because there's so much

stuff to know

that all we can ever do is get a kind of

a small slice of it and it's the context

which matters so i can give you my

answer

my answer is

from a biologist's point of view

that has been missing from the equation

over decades

which is well what does life do on earth

what what why is it this way why is it

made of cells why is it made of carbon

why does it why is it powered by

electrical charges on membranes there's

all these interesting questions about

cells

that if you then look to see well is

there an environment on earth on the

early earth four billion years ago it

kind of matches the requirements of

cells well there is one there's a very

obvious one it's basically created by

whenever

you have a wet rocky planet you get

these hydrothermal vents

which generate

hydrogen gas in bucket loads and

electrical charges on kind of cell-like

pores

that can can drive the kind of chemistry

that life does so it seems so beautiful

and so

so obvious

um that

i've spent the last 10 years or more

trying to do experiments it turns out to

be difficult of course everything's more

difficult than you ever thought it was

going to be

but it looks i would say more true

rather than less true over that 10-year

period i think i have to take a step

back every now and then and think hang

on a minute where's this going uh i'm

happy it's going in a sensible direction

and i think then you have these other

interesting dilemmas i mean i'm often

accused of being

too focused on life on earth

too kind of

narrow-minded and inward looking you

might say i'm think i'm talking about

carbon i'm talking about cells and maybe

you or plenty of people can say to me ah

yeah but life can be anything i have no

imagination and maybe they're right but

unless we can say why life here is this

way and if those reasons are fundamental

reasons or if they're just trivial

reasons then we can't answer that

question um so so i think they're

fundamental reasons and i think we need

to worry about them yeah there might be

some deep truth to the puzzle here on

earth that will resonate with

other puzzles elsewhere that will

solving this particular puzzle will give

us that deeper truth so what to this

puzzle you said

vents

hydrogen

wet so

chemically what is the potion here how

important is oxygen you wrote a book

about this yeah and i actually just came

straight here from a conference where i

was sharing a session on whether oxygen

matters or not in the history of life of

course it matters

but it matters most of the origin of

life to be not there um

as i see it we have this

i mean life is made of carbon basically

primarily um organic molecules with

carbon-carbon bonds

and

the building block the lego brick that

we take out of the air or take out of

the oceans is carbon dioxide and to turn

carbon dioxide into organic molecules we

need to strap on hydrogen and so we need

an and this is basically what life

is doing it's hydrogenating carbon

dioxide it's taking the hydrogen the

bubbles out of the earth in these

hydrothermal vents and it sticks it on

co2

um and it's kind of really as simple as

that um and actually thermodynamically

there's the the thing that i find most

troubling

is that you if you do these experiments

in the lab the molecules you get are

exactly the molecules that we see at the

heart of biochemistry in the heart of

life is there something to be said about

the earliest origins of that

little uh

potion

that chemical process

what really is the spark there

there isn't

a spark um

there is a continuous chemical reaction

and there is kind of a spark but it's a

continuous electrical charge which helps

drive that reaction so literally spark

uh well the charge at least but yes i

mean a spark in that sense is um

we're we tend to think of in terms of

frankenstein we tend to think in terms

of electricity and one one moment you

zap something and it comes alive and

what does that really mean you've it's

come alive and now what's sustaining it

well

we are sustained by oxygen by this

continuous chemical reaction

and if you put a plastic bag on your

head then you've got a minute or

something before it's all over so some

way of being able to leverage a source

of energy well the source of energy at

the origin of life is the reaction

between carbon dioxide and hydrogen and

amazingly most of these reactions are

exergonic which is to say they release

energy this if you have hydrogen and co2

and you put them together in a falcon

tube and you warm it up to say 50

degrees centigrade and you put in a

couple of catalysts and you shake it

nothing's gonna happen but

thermodynamically

that is less stable two gases hydrogen

and co2 is less stable than cells what

should happen is you get cells coming

out um

so why doesn't that happen is because of

the kinetic barriers is because that's

where you need the spark

is it possible that life originated

multiple times on earth

the way you describe it you make it

sound so easy

there's a long distance to go from the

first bits of prebiotic chemistry to say

molecular machines like ribosomes is

that the first

thing that you would say is life

like if i introduce you to the two of

you at a party you would say that's a

living thing

i would say as soon as we introduce

genes information

into systems that are growing anyway so

i i would i would talk about growing

protocells as soon as we in

introduce even random bits of

information into

into there

i'm thinking about rna molecules for

example it doesn't have to have any

information it can be completely random

sequence but if it's introduced into a

system which is in any case growing and

doubling itself and reproducing itself

then any changes in that sequence that

allow it to do so better or worse are

now selected by perfectly normal natural

selection but the system so that's when

it becomes alive to my mind that's

encompassed into like um

an object

that

keeps information and involves that

information over time or changes that

information over time yes exactly in

response to that so it's always part of

a cell system from the very beginning so

is your sense that it started only once

because it's difficult or is it possibly

started in multiple locations on earth

it's possible to start on multiple

occasions

um

there's two provisos to that one of them

is

oxygen

makes it

impossible really for life to start so

as soon as we've got oxygen in the

atmosphere then life isn't going to keep

starting over so i often get asked by

people you know why can't we have life

starting if it's so easy why can't i

start in these vents now and the answer

is you've got if you want hydrogen to

react with co2 and there's oxygen there

hydrogen reacts with oxygen instead it's

just you know you you get an explosive

reaction that way it's rocket fuel so

it's never going to happen but the other

for the origin of life earlier than that

all we know

is that there's a single common ancestor

for all of life there could have been

multiple origins and they all just

disappeared um

but there's a very interesting deep

split in life between bacteria and what

are called archaea which look just the

same as bacteria

and they're not quite as diverse but

nearly and they are very different in

their biochemistry and so any

explanation for the origin of life has

to account as well for why they're so

different and yet so similar and that

makes me think that life probably did

arise only once

can you describe the difference that's

interesting there

how they're similar how they're

different well they're different in uh

in their membranes primarily they're

different in things like dna replication

they use completely different enzymes

and the genes behind it for replicating

dna so they both have membranes both

have dna replication yes the process of

that is different they have d they both

have dna the genetic code is identical

in them both the way in which it's uh

transcribed into rna into the copy of a

gene and the way that that's then

translated into a protein that's all

basically the same in both these groups

so they clearly share

a common ancestor it's just that they're

different in fundamental ways as well

and if you think about what kind of

processes could drive that divergence

very early on

um i can think about it in terms of

membranes in terms of the electrical

charges on membranes and it's that that

makes me think that uh there's probably

probably many unsuccessful attempts at

only one really successful attempt

can you explain why that divergence

makes you think there's one answer uh

one common ancestor

okay can you describe that intuition i'm

a little bit unclear about why the diver

like the leap from the divergence

means there's one

do you mean like the divergence

indicates that there was a big invention

at that time yes

if it was if if you've got

as i imagine it you have a common

ancestor living in a hydrothermal vent

let's say there are you know millions of

vents and millions of potential common

ancestors living in all of those vents

but only one of them makes it out first

then you could imagine that that cell is

then going to kind of take over the

world and and wipe out everything else

and so you what you would see would be a

single common ancestor for all of life

but with you know lots lots of different

vent systems all kind of

vying to create the first life forms you

might say so this thing is a cell a

single cell well

we're always talking about populations

of cells but yes

these are cell organisms but the

fundamental

life form is a single cell

right so like

or

so they're always together

but they're alone together

yeah there's a machinery in each one

individual component that if left by

itself would still

work yes yes yes it's the unit of

selection is a single cell but selection

operates over generations and changes

over generations in populations of cells

so it would be impossible to say that a

cell is the unit of selection in the

sense that

you unless you have a population you

can't evolve you can't change

right but there was one

chuck norris

it's an american reference yeah uh cell

that made it out of the vents

right or

like the first one so imagine then

there's one cell gets out and it takes

over the world it gets out in the water

it's like floating around we're deep in

the ocean somewhere yeah but actually

two cells got out

um and they appear to have got out from

the same

vent

because they both share the same code

and everything else so unless all the

you know we've got a million different

common ancestors in in all these

different vents so either they all have

the same code and two cells

spontaneously merge from different

places or

two two different cells fundamentally

different cells came from the same place

so either way what are the constraints

that say not just one came out or not

half a million came out but two

came out that's kind of a bit strange uh

so how did they come out well they come

out because

what you're doing inside event is you're

relying on the electrical charges down

there to power this reaction between

hydrogen and co2 to make yourself grow

and when you leave the vent you've got

to do that yourself you've got to power

up your own membrane and so the question

is well how do you power up your own

membrane

and the answer is well you need to pump

you need to pump ions to give an

electrical charge on the membrane so

what do the pumps look like well the

pumps look different in these two groups

it's as if they they both emerge from a

common ancestor as soon as you've got

that ancestor things move very quickly

um and

and divergently why does the dna

replication look different well it's

joined to the membrane the membranes are

different the dna replication is

different because it's joined to a

different kind of membrane so there's

interesting you know this this is detail

you may say but it's also fundamental

because it's about the two big divergent

groups of life on earth that seem to

have diverged really early on it all

started from

one organism

and then

that organs just start replicating the

heck out of itself

with some mutation of the dna so like

there's some um there's a competition

through the process of evolution they're

not like trying to beat each other up

they're just

they're just trying to live they just

replicate us

yeah well you know let's not minimize

their yeah

there's no sense of trying to survive

they're replicating i mean there's no

sense in which they're trying to do

anything they're just a kind of an

outgrowth of the earth you might say of

course the aliens would describe us

humans in that same way

they might be right primitive life it's

just it's just ants that are hairless

mostly hairless overgrown ants overgrown

ants okay um what do you think about the

idea of

panspermia that

the theory that life did not originate

on earth and was planted here from outer

space

or pseudo panspermia which is like the

basic ingredients the magic that you

mentioned was planted here from

elsewhere in space

i don't find them helpful that's not to

say they're wrong

uh

so so pseudotranspermia the idea that

you know the chemicals the amino acids

the nucleotides are being delivered from

space well we know that happens it's

unequivocal they're delivered on

meteorites comets and so on

um

so what do they do next that's to me the

question and well what they do is they

stock a soup like presumably they land

in a pond or in an ocean or wherever

they land

and then you end up with a you know best

possible case scenario is you end up

with a super nucleotides and amino acids

and then you have to say so now what

happens and the answer is oh well they

have to go

become alive so how did they do that you

may as well say then a miracle happened

i don't believe in soup

i i think what we have in a vent is a

continuous conversion a continuous

growth a continuous reaction continuous

converting a flow of molecules into more

of yourself you might say even if it's a

small bit so you've you've got

you've got a kind of continuous

self-organization and growth from the

very beginning you never have that in a

soup

isn't

the entire universe and living organisms

in the universe isn't it just uh

soup all the way down isn't it also no

no i mean soup almost by definition

doesn't have a structure

but soup is a collection of ingredients

that are like randomly

yeah they're not i mean

we have chemistry going on here we have

metadata forming which are which are you

know effective oil water interactions

okay so it feels like there's a

direction to a process like a director

there are

there are directions to processes yeah

and if you are com if you're starting

with co2 and you've got two reactive

fluids being brought together and they

they react what are they going to make

well they they make carboxylic acids

which include the fatty acids that make

up the cell membranes and and they form

directly into bilayer membranes they

form like soap bubbles it's spontaneous

organization

caused by the nature of the molecules

and and those things are capable of

growing and are capable in effect of

being selected even before there are

genes we have this so we have a lot of

order and that order is coming from

thermodynamics and the thermodynamics is

always about increasing the entropy of

the universe but if you have

if you have oil and water and they're

separating you're increasing the entropy

of the universe even though you've got

some order which is the soap and the

water are not not miscible now

to come back to your first

question about um panspermia properly

um

that just pushes the question somewhere

else that just even if it's true maybe

life did start on earth by panspermia

but but so what are the principles

that govern the emergence of life on any

planet we it's an assumption that life

started here and it's an assumption that

it you know it started in a hydrothermal

vent or it started in a terrestrial

geothermal system the question is can we

work out a testable sequence of events

that would lead from one to the other

one and then test it and see if there's

any truth in it or not with panspermia

you can't do any of that but the the

fundamental question of past sperm is do

we have

the machine here on earth to build life

is the vents enough

is

oxygen and hydrogen

and whatever the heck else we want and

some source of energy and heat is that

enough to build life

or

well that's

of course you would say that as a human

uh but there could be aliens right now

chuckling at that idea maybe you need

some special um

special sauce

special elsewhere sauce your senses

we have everything i mean this is

precisely the the question so i i like

to when when i'm talking in schools i

like to start out with the idea of we

make we can make a time machine

we go back four billion years and we go

to these environments that people talk

about we go to a deep sea hydrothermal

event we go to a kind of yellowstone

park type

place environment

and we find some slime that looks like

we can we can test it it's made of

organic molecules

it's got a structure which is not

obviously cells but you know it's is is

this a stepping stone on the way to life

or not yeah how do we know

unless we've got an intellectual

framework that says this is this is a

stepping stone and that's not us that

you know we'd never know we wouldn't

know which environment to go to what to

look for how to say this so all we can

ever hope for because we're never going

to build that time machine is to have an

intellectual framework that can explain

step by step experiment by experiment

how we go from a sterile inorganic

planet to living cells as we know them

and in that framework every time you

have a choice it could be this way or it

could be that way or you know there's

lots of

possible forks down that road um

did it have to be that way could it have

been the other way and would that have

given you life with very different

properties

um and so if you if you come up with a

you know it's a long hypothesis because

as i say we're going from really simple

prebiotic chemistry all the way through

to genes and molecular machines that's a

long long pathway and nobody in the

field would agree on the order in which

these things happened which is not a bad

thing because it means that you have to

go out and do some experiments and try

and demonstrate that it's possible or

not possible it's so

freaking amazing

that it happened though

it feels

like there's a direction to the thing

can you try to

answer

from a framework perspective of what is

life

so you said there's some order

and yet

there's complexity

so it's not perfectly ordered it's not

boring there's still some fun in it and

it also feels like the processes have a

direction

through the selection mechanism they

seem to be

building something always better

always improving i mean maybe it's i

mean that's a perception that's our

romanticization of things are always

better

things are getting better we'd like to

believe that i mean you think about the

world from the point of view of bacteria

and bacteria are the first things to

emerge from whatever environment they

came from and they dominated the planet

very very quickly and they haven't

really changed four billion years later

they look exactly the same so about four

billion years ago

bacteria started to

to really run the show

and then

nothing happened for a while nothing

happened for two billion years yep then

after two billion years we see another

single event origin if you like of of

our own type of cell the eukaryotic cell

so cells with a nucleus and loss of

stuff going on inside

another singular origin it only happened

once in the history of life on earth

maybe it happened multiple times and

there's no evidence everything just

disappeared but we have to at least

take it seriously

that there's

something that stops bacteria from

becoming more complex because they

didn't you know that's a fact that they

emerged

four billion years ago and something

happened two billion years ago but the

bacteria themselves didn't change they

remain bacterial so there is no

trajectory necessary trajectory towards

great complexity in human beings at the

end of it it's very easy to imagine that

without photosynthesis arising or

without eukaryotes arising that a planet

could be full of bacteria and nothing

else

we'll get to that because that's a

brilliant invention and there's a few

brilliant invention along the way but

what is life

if you were to show up on earth but to

take that time machine and you said

asking yourself the question is this a

stepping stone towards life

as you step along

when you see the early bacteria

how would you know it's life

is and then this is really important

question when you go to other planets

and look for life

like what

uh what is the framework of telling the

difference between a rock

and a bacteria

i mean the question's kind of both

impossible to answer and trivial at the

same time and i don't like to answer it

because i don't think there is an answer

i think we're trying to describe one

question approaching me there's no

answer so there's no i mean there's lots

of there are at least 40 or 50 different

definitions of life out there and most

of them are

well convincingly obviously bad in one

way or another

um uh i mean there's this phrase i i can

never remember the exact words that

people use but there's a nasa uh working

definition of life uh which more or less

has a a system which is capable of

of a self-sustaining system capable of

evolution or something along those lines

and i immediately have a problem with

the word self-sustaining because it's

sustained by the environment and

i know what they're getting at i know

what they're trying to say but but i

pick a hole in that and there's you know

there's always wags who say but you know

by that definition a rabbit is not alive

only a pair of rabbits would be alive

because a single rabbit is incapable of

copying yourself

there's all kinds of pedantic

silly but also important objections to

any hypothesis the real question is what

what is you know

we can argue all day or people do argue

all day about is is a virus alive or not

and it depends on the content but most

biologists could not agree about that so

then what about a jumping gene a retro

element or something like this even

simpler than a virus but it's capable of

converting its environment into a copy

of itself

and that's about as close it's not a

definition but this is a kind of a

description of life

is that it's it's able to

parasitize the environment and that goes

for plants as well as animals and

bacteria and viruses

um to make a a relatively exact copy of

themselves informationally exact copy of

themselves by the way it doesn't really

have to be

a copy of itself right it just has to be

you have to create something

that's interesting

the way evolution is

so it is extremely powerful process of

evolution which is basically make a copy

yourself and sometimes mess up a little

bit okay that seems to work really well

i wonder if it's possible to

mess up big time mess up big time as a

standard that's the default uh it's

called the hopeful monster and you know

this doesn't work

in principle it can actually it turns

out i would say that this is due a

re-emergence this is some amazing work

from michael levine i don't know if you

came across him but uh you if you

haven't interviewed him you should

interview him yeah uh yeah

about yeah i'm

talking to him in a few days oh

fantastic i mentioned off yes there's

some people that anja if i may mention

uh andre kapathi is a friend who's

really admired in the ai community said

you absolutely must talk

to to michael and to nick this is so

this of course i'm a huge fan of yours

so i'm really fortunate that we can

actually make this happen anyway

well michael levin is doing amazing work

uh basically about the way in which

electrical fields control development um

and he's done some work with planarian

worms so flatworms well he'll tell you

all about this so i won't say any more

than the minimum but basically you can

cut their head off and they'll redevelop

a different

a new head but the head that they

develop depends if you knock out just

one

um

one one iron pump in a membrane so you

change the electrical circuitry just a

little bit you can come up with a

completely different head it can be a

head which is similar to those that

diverged 150 million years ago or it can

be a head which no one's ever seen

before a different kind of of head um

now that is really you might say a

hopeful monster this is a kind of leap

into a different direction the only

question for natural selection is does

it work is the change itself

feasible as a single change and the

answer is yes it's just a small change

to a single gene and the second thing is

it gives rise to a completely different

morphology does it work and if it works

that can easily be

a shift

it but for it to be a speciation for it

to

to continue for it to to give rise to a

different morphology over time

then it has to be perpetuated so that

shift that change in the

in in that one gene

has to work well enough that it is

selected and it goes on and copied

enough times to where you can really

test it and so the likelihood it would

be lost but but there will be some

occasions where it survives and yes the

idea that we can have sudden fairly

abrupt changes in evolution i think it's

time for a rebirth what about this idea

that

kind of trying to

mathematize

a definition of life and saying how many

steps

the shortest amount of steps it takes to

build the thing almost like an

engineering view of it

i like that view

um because i think that in a sense

that's not very far away from what it

what what what a hypothesis needs to do

to be a testable hypothesis for the

origin of life you need to spell out

here's here's each step

and here's the experiment to do for each

step

the idea that we can do it in the lab

some people say oh well i've you know

we'll have created life within five

years but you know ask them what they

mean by life

um

we have a planet four billion years ago

with these vent systems across the

entire surface of the planet and we have

millions of years if we wanted i have a

feeling that we're not talking about

millions of years i have a feeling we're

talking about

maybe millions of nanoseconds or

picoseconds we're talking about

chemistry which is happening quickly

but we still need to constrain those

steps but we've got a you know a planet

uh doing similar chemistry you asked

about a trajectory the trajectory is the

planetary trajectory the planet has

properties it's basically it's got a lot

of iron at the center of it it's got a

lot of electrons at the center of it

it's more oxidized on the outside partly

because of the sun and partly because

the heat of volcanoes puts out oxidized

gases so

the planet is a battery it's a giant

battery um

and we have a flow of electrons going

from inside to outside in these

hydrothermal vents and that's the same

topology that a cell has a cell is

basically just a micro version of the

planet um

and it's uh

there is a trajectory in all of that and

there's an inevitability that certain

types of chemical reaction are going to

be favored over others and there's an

inevitability in

in what happens in water the chemistry

that happens in water some

some will be miscible with water and

will form membranes and will form

insoluble structures and you know

water's a

nobody really understands water very

well

um and it's uh it's another big question

for experiments on the origin of life

what do you put it in

what kind of structure do we want to

induce in this water because the last

thing is likely to be is just kind of

bulk bulk water

how fundamental is water to life would

you say i would say pretty fundamental

um

i wouldn't like to say it's impossible

for life to start any other way

but

water is everywhere

water is extremely good at what it does

and carbon carbon works in water

especially well so those things and

carbon is everywhere so those things

together make me think probabilistically

if we found a thousand life forms

995 of them would be carbon-based and

living in water

now the reverse question if you found a

puddle of water elsewhere and some

carbon

no just a puddle of water is a pot of

water

a pretty damn good indication that life

has

is either exists here

or

has once existed here no

so it doesn't work the other way

i think you need a living planet

you need a planet which is capable of

turning over its surface it needs to be

a planet with water it needs to be

capable of of

bringing those electrons from inside to

the outside it needs to turn over its

surface it needs to make that water work

and turn it into hydrogen so i think you

need a living planet but once you've got

the living planet i think the rest of it

uh is kind of thermodynamics all the way

so if you were to run earth over a

million times

up to this point

maybe beyond to the end let's run it to

the end

uh what is it uh how much variety is

there you kind of spoke to this

trajectory that the environment dictates

like chemically i don't know in which

other way

um spiritually

like dictates kind of the direction of

this giant machine that seems uh chaotic

but it does seem to have order in the

steps it's taking

uh how much

how often will life

how often will bacteria emerge how often

will something like humans emerge how

much variety do you think there would be

i think at the level of bacteria

not much variety i think we would get

that's how many times you say you want

to run it a million times

um i would say at least a few hundred

thousand will get bacteria again oh wow

um nice because i i think there's some

level of inevitability that a wet rocky

planet will give rise through

through the same processes

to something very close i i think this

is not something i'd have thought a few

years ago but we're working with a phd

student of mine stuart harrison he's

been thinking about the genetic code and

we've just been publishing on that um

there are patterns that you can discern

in the co or he has discerned in the

code

that if you if you think about them in

terms of we start with co2 and hydrogen

and these are the first steps of

biochemistry you come up with a code

which is very similar to the code that

we see

so it wouldn't surprise me any longer if

we found life on mars and it had a

genetic code that was not very different

to the genetic code that we have here

without it just being transferred across

some inevitability about the whole of

the beginnings of life in my view that's

really promising because if the basic

chemistry is tightly linked to the

genetic code

that means

we can interact with other life if it

exists

potentially

that's that's really exciting if that's

if that's the case okay but then

bacteria we've got then we've got

bacteria yeah um

how easy is photosynthesis

much harder i would say

let's actually go there let's let's go

through the inventions yeah um what is

photosynthesis

and why is it hard 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 this is you know the single

greatest planetary pollution event in

the whole history of of the earth the

pollutant being oxygen yes

yeah it also made possible animals you

can't have large active animals without

an oxygenated atmosphere at least not

not in the sense that we know on earth

so that's a really big invention in this

huge intervention 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 is it once it

happened did it become so good so

quickly that it precluded the the same

thing happening ever again or are there

other reasons and we really have to look

at each one in turn and think

what's

why does 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 and kind of cause an

explosion right at the site requires

really careful wiring um and that wiring

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 cyanobacterial ones those

cyanobacteria are the only group of

bacteria that can do that type of

photosynthesis so there's plenty of

opportunity so not even many bacteria so

who who invented photosynthesis that the

cyanobacteria or their ancestors and

there's not many um 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

um 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 ion so iron two

plus and make it iron three plus which

now precipitates as rust

uh and you take a a proton from the

acidic 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 the

waste product is oxygen which just

bubbles away

that seems like extremely unlikely and

it's extremely essential for the

evolution of complex organisms

because of all the oxygen

yeah and that didn't accumulate quickly

either

so it's converting

what is it it's converting energy from

the sun

and the resource of water

into

the resource needed for animals

both resources needed for animals we

need to eat and we need to burn the food

and the we're eating plants um which are

getting their energy from the sun and

we're burning it with their waste

products which is the oxygen

so there's a lot of kind of circularity

in that but with with without an

oxygenated planet you couldn't really

have

um

predation

you

you don't 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 well let's

actually step back what about eukaryotic

versus prokaryotic cells prokaryotes

what how big

what are each of those and how big of an

invention is that

i personally think that's the single

biggest invention in the whole history

of life exciting

so what what are they can you explain

yeah so so so i mentioned bacteria and

archaea these are both prokaryotes

um 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 then they're

large superstructures effectively

biofilms plated on top of each other

and and you end up with quite quite

large structures that you can see in the

fossil record

but they they don't

they never came up with animals they

never came up with plants they they hear

with multicellular things filamentous

cyanobacteria for example they're just

long you know strings of cells

but the origin of the eukaryotic cell

seems to have been what's called an

endosymbiosis so one cell gets inside

another cell

and i think that that transformed 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 a multi-bacterial power without

the overhead so you've got you've got a

cell and it's got bacterial 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

to to express to to kind of turn over

and convert into proteins and so on

what the mitochondria did 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

so mitochondria is like you said is the

bacteria that got inside a cell

and then throw away all this stuff it

doesn't need to survive inside the cell

and then kept what so what we end up

with so it kept always a handful of

genes

in our own case 37 genes

um but there's a there's a few protists

which are single cells 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

um and

you can think of it as a paired down

power pack where the control unit is

really being has been kind of paired

down to almost nothing so you're putting

out the same power but the the

investment in 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

we've gone up about four-fold in the

number of genes but in terms of the the

size of genomes and your ability to to

make the building blocks make the

proteins we've gone up a hundred

thousand fold or more so it's huge step

change in the possibilities of evolution

uh and it is it's interesting then that

the only 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 we start development

with a single cell and all the cells in

the organism have identical 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

and the standard evolution explanation

for that is that you've you you're

restricting conflict you don't have a

load of genetically different cells that

are all fighting each other um and so it

works the trouble with bacteria 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

okay so uh why is this such a difficult

invention

of getting this bacteria inside and

becoming an engine

which the mitochondria is why was that

why do you assign it such great

importance is it great importance in

terms of the difficulty of how it was to

achieve a great importance in terms of

the impact they had

on life both uh it had a huge impact on

life because

if if that had not happened you can be

certain that life on earth would be

bacterial only and that took a really

long time too it took two billion years

yeah and 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 from from just

an informational perspective you you

think bacteria

have got

they 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 meta

genome where other e coli 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 you know they've got more

an e coli

meta genome is larger than the human

genome

we own 20 000 genes or something

so 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 explored

genetic sequence space

far more thoroughly than eukaryotes ever

did because they've had twice as long at

least and they've 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 what's what's the problem the

problem is structure

if if if cells if the very first cells

needed an electrical charge on their

membrane to grow

and in bacteria it's this is 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 you know energetically hugely

expensive and

you end up with a large bacteria with

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 we're surrounded by lots

of subsidiary energetic genomes that do

do all the and they're the control units

that are doing all the

all the control of energy generation

could this have been done gradually or

does it have to be done

the power pack has to be all intact and

ready to go and uh it works i mean it's

a kind of step changing the

possibilities of evolution but it

doesn't happen overnight it's going to

still require multiple multiple

generations so it could take you know it

could take millions of years

it could take shorter time this is

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 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 you know

why switch what are the drivers here so

there's a lot of 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 is a new design you

you've got new potential that you didn't

have before so the

cell living inside another cell that

design

allows for

better storage of information

better use of energy

uh more delegation like a hierarchical

control of the whole thing

and then

and then somehow that leads to ability

to have multi-cell organisms i'm not

sure that you have hierarchical control

necessarily but you you've got a system

where you can 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

um it allows you

it's it's a funny thing you to to have a

to have a an animal where i have you

know 70 of my genes switched on in my

brain and i have 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 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 they would 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 that's really really tough

to do yeah coming into we know they

don't because they're it doesn't exist

we have the data as far as we know i'm

sure there's a few like special ones and

they did off quickly

i'd love to know some of the most fun

things bacteria have done since

oh there's a few i mean they can do some

pretty funky things and this is big this

is broad brush stroke that i'm talking

about

yeah generally speaking uh so how was uh

so another you know fun invention

us humans seem to uh utilize it well but

you say it's also very important early

on is sex

so uh

what is sex uh just asking for a friend

and when was it invented and how hard

was it to invent just as you were saying

and why was it invented why

how hard was it and when

i have a phd student who's been working

on this and we've just asked a couple of

papers on sex yes yes what do you

publish these biology is it biology

genetics journals yeah this is actually

pnas which is

proceedings of the national academy

broad big big picture everyone's

interested in sex

of biologists is to make sex dull

yes yeah that's a beautiful way to put

it okay so when was it invented

uh it was invented with eukaryotes about

two billion years ago

um all eukaryotes

share the same basic mechanism that you

produce gametes the gametes fuse

together so a gamete is the egg cell and

the sperm they're not necessarily even

different in size or shape so the

simplest eukaryotes produce what are

called motile gametes they're all like

sperm and they all swim around they find

each other they fuse together they don't

have kind of much

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 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

um and then you and then you double

everything so now we have four copies of

the complete genome and then we criss

cross 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

um and 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 don't divide in half again

now we have some gametes each of which

has got a single copy of the genome

and that's the basic ground plan for

what's called meiosis and uh and

enhancing

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 so what about the kind of you

said find each other this kind of

imperative

yeah find each other

what is that

like is that well you've got a few cells

together

so the bottom the bottom line on all of

this is is is bacteria i mean it's kind

of simple uh when when you when you've

figured it out and figuring it out this

is not me this is my phd student marco

kolnagi um

and uh and

in effect if you if you're doing lateral

you're an e coli cell you've got 4 000

genes you want to scale up to a

eukaryotic size and i want to have 20

000 genes um and i'm and i need to

maintain my genome so it doesn't get

shot to pieces by mutations and i'm

going to do it by lateral 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

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

to kind of phrase um

so yeah

uh so it's it's so there is a kind of uh

um incentive

uh if you want to have a large genome

you've got to prevent it mutating to

nothing

that will happen with bacteria there's

another reason why bacteria can't have a

large genome but as soon as you give

them the power path as soon as you give

your carotid 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

what about sexual selection so the the

finding

uh like uh i don't like this one i don't

like this one this one seems all right

like what's the the

the is is it at which point does it

become less random it's hard to know

because your courier's just kind of

floated around i'm just kind of have

yeah there's everything that's their

section

in single cell do you characterize the

probably is it's just that i don't know

very much about it by the time you don't

hang out with the acquisitions well i do

all the time but you know but they can't

communicate with them yet yeah

peacock or something yes um

the kind of standardize is not quite

what i work on but the standard answer

uh is that

it's female mate choice she is looking

for good genes

um and and if you can have a tail that's

like this

and and still survive still be alive not

actually being taken down by the nearest

predator then you must have got pretty

good genes because despite this handicap

you're able to survive so so those are

like human interpretable things like

with a peacock but i wonder i'm sure

echoes of the same thing

are there with more primitive

organisms

basically your pr like uh how you

advertise yourself that you're worthy

yeah of uh absolutely so one big

advertisement is the fact that you

survived it all

let me give you one one beautiful

example uh of an algal bloom

and this can be this can be a

cyanobacteria it can be in bacteria

so so if if suddenly you you know you

pump nitrate or phosphate or something

into the ocean and everything goes green

you end up with all this

uh

algae growing there

um

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 we do the

same thing this is how we have the

different you know the gaps between our

fingers and so on it's how we craft

synapses in the brain

um it you know is fundamental again to

to

to multicellular life they have the same

machinery in these in these algal blooms

how do they know who dies the answer is

they will often put out a toxin

and that toxin

is a 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 you you form a kind of a

resistance spore you sink down a little

bit you get out of the way you're out of

the out out of you can't be attacked by

a virus if you're a spore at least not

so easily whereas if you can't deal with

that toxin you pull the plug and you you

you you trigger your death apparatus and

you kill yourself because it's truly

life and death

yeah

so it's really it's 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 you know a tough day

did you 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 it's also actually exactly the

way i approach dating but that's

probably why i'm single okay

uh what about if we can step back dna

just mechanism of storing information

rna dna yeah how big of an invention was

that that seems to be you that seems to

be fundamental to

like

something

deep within what life is is the ability

as you said to kind of store and

propagate information but then you also

kind of infer that with your and your

students work that

there's a deep connection between the

chemistry and the ability

uh to have this kind of genetic

information so how big of an invention

is is it to have

a nice representation a nice hard drive

for info to pass on huge i suspect uh i

mean but

when i was talking about the code you

see the code in rna as well and rna

almost certainly came first

um 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 so dna

it's possible it's not that special so

our rna 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 ribozyme which is

to say it's an enzyme that's made of rna

so

getting to rna i suspect is probably not

that hard

but getting from rna

how do you you know there's multiple

different types of rna now how do how do

how do you distinguish this is something

where actively thinking about how do you

distinguish between you know a random

population of rnas some of them go on to

become

messenger rna that this is the the

transcript of the code of the gene that

you you want to make some of them become

transfer rna which is which is the kind

of the unit that holds the amino acid

that's going to be polynomial

polymerized some of them become

ribosomal rna which is the machine which

is joining them all up together

how do they

discriminate themselves and

you know some kind of phase transition

going on there what's 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 small

and 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

um and you can do absolutely anything

but how likely that transition from rna

to dna was i don't know either

how much possibility is there for

variety

in ways to store information because it

seems to be very specific

characteristics about

the the programming language of dna yeah

there's a lot of work going on what's

called xenodna or

rna can we replace the the bases

themselves the the letters if you like

in in 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

um

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 um

it's possible to do it the question to

me is

why is it this way

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

um and and they work uh and i'm

increasingly thinking it's that way that

we're channeled towards ribose phosphate

and and

and the bases that are used but there

are you know 200 different letters

kicking around out there that could have

been used it's such an interesting

question if you look at in the

programming world in computer science

there's a programming language called

javascript yeah which was uh written

super quickly it's a giant mess but it

took over the world

and it was sounds very biological it was

it was kind of a running joke that like

um

like surely this can't be

the it's a terrible programming language

it's a giant mess it's full of

bugs it's so easy to write really crappy

code but it took over all of front-end

development in the web browser

if you have any kind of dynamic

interactive website it has it's usually

running javascript

and it's now taking over much of the

backend which is like the serious heavy

duty computational stuff and it's become

super fast with the different

compilation engines

um that are running it so it's like it

really took over the world it's very

possible that this

initially crappy

uh derided language actually takes

everything over and then the question is

did human civilization always strive

towards javascript

or was javascript just the first

programming language that ran on the

browser and still sticky the first the

first is the sticky one and so it wins

over anything else because it was first

and we i don't think that's answerable

right but it's good to

ask that i suppose in the lab

you can't you can't

run it with programming languages but in

biology you can probably

do some kind of

um

small scale evolutionary

tests to try to infer which which is

which yeah i mean in a way we've we've

got the hardware and the software here

and and the the hardware is maybe the

the dna and the rna itself and then the

software perhaps is more about the code

is did the code have to be this way

could it have been a different way yeah

people talk about the optimization of

the code and there's some suggestion for

that uh i think it's weak actually

but you could imagine you could come out

with a million different codes and and

this would be one of the best ones

um

well we don't know this well i mean

people have tried to model it based on

the effect that mutations would have

um so no you're right we don't know

because that's the thing that's a single

assumption that a mutation is is what's

being selected on there and there's

other possibilities too i mean there

does seem to be a resilience and a

redundancy to the whole thing it's hard

to mess up

in in the way you mess it up

often

is likely to produce interesting results

so it's um are you talking about

javascript or the genetic code now

yeah well i mean it's almost you know

biology is underpinned by this kind of

mess as well you look at the human

genome and it's full of stuff that is

really either broken or dysfunctional or

was a virus once whatever it may be and

somehow it works and maybe we need a lot

of this mess you know we know that some

functional genes are taken from this

mess

so what about you mentioned

predatory behavior

yeah we talked about sex what about

violence predator and prey dynamics

how uh when was that invented

and uh

poetic and biological ways of putting it

like what how do you describe a

predator-prey relationship is it a

beautiful dance or is it a

violent atrocity

well i guess it's both isn't it i mean

when does it start it starts in bacteria

you see these amazing predators

delivibrio is one that lynne margulis

used to talk about a lot um it's 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

so predation in that sorry to interrupt

means

you murder somebody and

use their body as a resource

in some way

yeah but it's not parasitic

in that you need them to be still alive

no no i mean predation is you kill them

really murder parasite is so you kind of

live on them okay so but it seems the

predator is really popular

uh um

so what we see if we go back

560 570 million years

before the cambrian explosion there is

um

what's known as the ediacaran fauna or

sometimes they call vendo bions which is

a lovely name

uh and and it's not obvious that they're

animals at all

uh they're stalked things they often

have fronds that look a lot like leaves

with kind of fractal branching patterns

on them um

and

the thing is they've 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

there's no you know

no storm damage down here this kind of

thing

they were more than 200 meters deep so

they're definitely not photosynthetic

these are animals

and they're they're filter feeders and

we know things you know sponges and

corals and things are filter-feeding

animals they're stuck to the spot uh and

little bits of carbon that come their

way they they filter it out and that's

what they're eating

um 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

and

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 you

know they're plainly killing things or

running away

um and and hiding um and 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 we maybe it does do

good i don't want to make an argument

for nuclear arms but but predation

as a as a mechanism

forces organisms to adapt to change to

be better to escape to to or to kill um

if you need to eat then you've got to

eat and you know a cheetah is not going

to run at that speed unless it's

unless it has to because the the zebra

is capable of escaping so it leads to

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 the the but the thing is

you can't have this if you don't have an

oxygenated planet because if you 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 um 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 trophy

levels

you can have five or six trophies levels

and that means things can eat things

that eat other things and so on and and

you've gone to a level of ecological

complexity which is completely

impossible in the absence of oxygen

this reminds me of the hunter s thompson

quote that for every moment of triumph

for every instance of beauty

many souls must be trampled

i their the history of life on earth

unfortunately is

that of violence

just the trillions and trillions of

multi-cell organisms that were murdered

in the in this struggle it's a sorry

statement but yes it's basically true

and that's somehow

is a catalyst

from an evolutionary perspective for

creativity for

creating more and more complex organisms

that are better and better at survival i

mean survival of the fittest if you just

go back to that old phrase means death

of the weakest um 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

one way to die is the the constraints

the scarcity of the resources in the

environment

but that seems to be not nearly as good

of a mechanisms

mechanism for death

than other creatures

roaming about in the environment when i

say environment i mean like the static

environment but then there's the dynamic

environment of

bigger things trying to eat you and use

you for your energy

it forces you to come up with a with a

solution to your specific problem

that you that is inventive and is new

and hasn't been done before and so it

forces i mean literally uh change

literally evolution on on populations

they have to become different and it's

interesting that humans have channeled

that

into more

i mean i guess what humans are doing is

they're inventing

more productive and safe ways of doing

that you know this whole idea of

morality and all those kinds of things

i think they ultimately lead

to competition

versus violence because i think

violence can have a

cold

brutal inefficient aspect to it but if

you channel that into more

controlled competition

in the space of ideas

in the space of approaches to life maybe

you can

um

be even more productive than evolution

is because evolution is very wasteful

like the amount of murder required to

really test the good idea yeah

genetically speaking is just a lot yeah

many many many generations morally we

cannot

base society on the way that evolution

works that's that's not mentioned right

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 we you

know in in in ancient greece we had we

had the the the athens and sparta and

city-states and then we had the

renaissance and and nation-states and we

you know universities compete with each

other yes tremendous amounts of

companies competing with each other all

the time it it drives innovation um

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 hit the 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 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 the

the innovation and the and the richness

of it

i forgot who said it but

that murder is illegal probably current

finding it murder is illegal except when

it's done to the sound of trumpets and

at a large scale

so we still have wars

but we are struggling with this idea

that murder is a bad thing

it's so interesting how we're channeling

the best

of the evolutionary imperative

and trying to um get rid of the stuff

that's not productive

trying to almost accelerate evolution

the same kind of

thing that um

uh makes evolution creative we're trying

to use that i think we naturally do it i

mean i don't think we can help ourselves

do it and you know capitalism capitalism

as a form is is basically about

competition and and differential rewards

but

we society and you know we have a

i keep using this world moral obligation

but you know 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 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

uh in which case you then have to impose

some kind of regulation that the bankers

themselves will in an evolutionary

manner exploit

yeah it's we've been struggling with

this kind of idea of capitalism

the the the cold brutality of capitalism

that seems to create so much

beautiful things in this world

and then the

the ideals of communism that seem to

create so much brutal destruction in

history and we struggle with ideas

of well maybe we didn't do it right how

can we do things better and then the

ideas are the things we're playing with

as opposed to people if a phd student

has a bad idea we don't shoot the phds

we just criticize their idea and i hope

they improve you have a very humane lab

yeah yeah i don't know how you guys do

it you know

the way i run things uh it's always life

and death okay so it is interesting

about humans that there is an inner

sense of morality

which begs the question of

how did homo sapiens

evolve if we think about the invention

of

early invention of sex and early

invention of predation

what was the thing invented

to make humans

what would you say 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 and and

and let it run forwards again and the

chances of

humans as we know them is not

necessarily that high

and you know imagine

as an alien you find planet earth and

it's got everything apart from humans on

it it's an amazing wonderful marvelous

planet but nothing that we would

recognize as

extremely intelligent life and

space-faring civilization so when we

think about aliens we we we're kind of

after something like ourselves or after

a space-faring civilization we're not

after you know

zebras and giraffes and lions and things

amazing though they are

but the

the additional kind of evolutionary

steps to go from

large complex mammals monkeys let's say

to

to humans

doesn't strike me as that longer a

distance it's all about the brain and

where's the where's the brain and

morality coming from it seems to me

to be all about groups human groups and

interactions between groups the

collective intelligence of it the yes

the interactions really and there's some

there's a guy at ucl uh called mark

thomas who's done a lot of really

beautiful work i think on on this kind

of question so i talk to him every now

and then so my views are influenced by

him

um

but a lot seems to depend on population

density

that the more interactions you have

going on between different groups the

more transfer

of information if you like between

groups

of people moving from one group to

another group almost like lateral gene

transfer in bacteria

the more expertise you're able to

develop and maintain

the more

culturally complex your society can

become and groups that have become

detached

like on easter island for example very

often degenerate in terms of the

complexity of their civilization is that

true for complex organisms in general

population density is often productive

really matters but in human terms

um

i don't know what the actual factors

were that were driving a a large brain

but you know you can you can talk about

fire you can talk about tool use you can

talk about language and none of them

seem to correlate especially well with

the actual known trajectory of human

evolution in terms of

cave art and these kind of things that

that seems to work much better just with

with population density and number of

interactions between different groups

all of which is really

about

human interactions human human

interactions and the complexity of those

but

population density is the thing that

increases the number of interactions but

then there must have been inventions

uh forced by that

number of interactions that actually led

to humans so like richard wrangham

talks about that

it's basically the beta males had to

beat up the alpha male so that's what

collaboration looks like is they when

you're living together they don't like

this

the

our early ancestors

don't like the dictatorial aspect of a

single individual at the top of a tribe

so they uh they they learn to

collaborate how to

uh basically create a democracy uh of

sorts a democracy that prevents

minimizes or lessens the amount of

violence which essentially

gives strength to the tribe and make the

war

between tribes

uh versus the dictator i mean i think

one of the what most wonderful things

about humans is we're all of those

things i mean we are deeply social as a

species and we're also deeply selfish

and it seems to me the conflict between

capitalism and communism it's really

just two aspects of human nature both of

which are both we have both uh and we

have a constant kind of vying between

the two sides we really do care about

other people beyond our families beyond

our immediate people we care about

society and the society that we live in

and and you could say that's a you know

a drawing towards socialism or communism

on the other side we really do care

about ourselves we really do care about

our families about working for something

that we gain from and that's the

capitalist side of it they're both

really deeply ingrained in human nature

in terms of violence um and

and interactions between groups yes all

this dynamic of if you're interacting

between groups you can be certain that

they're going to be burning each other

and all kinds of interact physical

violent interactions as well which will

drive

the kind of cleverness of how do you

resist this let's build a tower let's

you know what are we going to do to to

to to prevent being overrun by those

marauding gangs from over there

um and you look you look outside humans

and you look at chimps and bonnibos and

so on and they're very very different

structures to society chimps tend to

have an aggressive alpha male type

structure and bonobos are you know they

they there's basically a female society

where the males are predominantly

excluded and only brought in at the

behest of the female

we have a lot in common with both

both of those groups and there's again

tension there yeah and uh probably

chimps more violence with bonobos

probably more sex

that's another tension

[Laughter]

how serious do i do do we want to be how

much fun we want to be uh asking for a

friend again

what do you think happened to

neanderthals what did we

cheeky humans do to the neanderthals

homo sapiens do you think we murdered

them was it

that how do we murder them how do we

out-compete them

um

do we i made them i don't know i mean i

i think there's unequivocal evidence

that we mated with them yeah we always

try to meet with everything yes pretty

much

there's some interesting the first

sequences that came along were in

mitochondrial dna

and that was back to about 2002 or

thereabouts

what was found was that neanderthal

mitochondrial dna was very different to

human mitochondria that's so interesting

you could do a clock on it and it said

the divergent state was about 600 000

years ago or something like that so not

so long ago

um and then the first full genomes were

secrets maybe 10 years after that

and they showed plenty of signs of

mating between so so the mitochondrial

dna effectively says no mating

and the the nuclear

genes say yeah lots of mating

um but we don't know is that possible so

can you explain the difference between

mitochondrial cell yes and new uh

nucleus i've talked before about the

mitochondria which are the power packs

in cells these are the paired down

control units is that is their dna

so

it's passed on by the mother only

and

in the egg cell we might have half a

million copies of mitochondrial dna

there's only 37 genes left

and and they do a

it's basically the control unit of

energy production that's what is that's

what it's doing it's a basic old-school

machine that does and it's got genes

that were considered to be effectively

trivial because they did they did a a

very narrowly defined job but they're

not trivial in the sense that that

narrowly defined job is about

everything is being alive yeah um so

so they're much easier to sequence

you've got many more copies of these

things and you can sequence them very

quickly

um but the problem is because they go

down only the maternal line from mother

to daughter your mitochondrial dna and

mine is going nowhere doesn't matter any

kids we have they get their mother's

mitochondrial dna

um except in very very rare and strange

circumstances

um and so it tells a different story and

it's not a story which is easy to

reconcile always

um and and what it seems to suggest to

my mind at least is that there was one

way

uh traffic of genes probably going from

humans into neanderthals rather than the

other way around

why did the neanderthals disappear i i

don't know i mean i i suspect that they

were

i suspect they were probably less

violent less clever

uh less populous

less

willing to fight i i don't know i mean i

i think it drove them to extinction at

the margins of europe

and it's interesting how much if we ran

earth over and over again

how many of these branches of

intelligent beings

that have

figured out some kind of

how to leverage collective intelligence

which ones of them emerge which ones of

them succeed is it the more violent ones

is it um

uh the more isolated one you know like

what dynamics results in more

productivity and we i suppose we'll

never know it's

the more complex the organism the harder

it is to run the experiment in the lab

yes

and in some respects maybe it's best if

we don't know

yeah the truth might be very painful

what about if we actually step back

a couple of interesting things that we

humans do

one is object manipulation and

movement

and of course movement was something

that was done

that was another big invention being

able to move around the environment

and the other one is

this sensory mechanism how we sense the

environment one of the coolest high

definition ones is vision

uh how big are those inventions in the

history of

life on earth

vision movement uh i mean again

extremely important going back to the

origin of animals the cambrian explosion

where suddenly you're seeing eyes

in the fossil record and you can it's

not necessarily again lots of people

historically have said what use is half

an eye and and

you know you can go in a series of steps

uh from a a light sensitive spot on a

flat

piece of tissue

to an eyeball with a lens and so on um

if you assume no more than then i i

don't remember this this was a specific

model that i have in mind but it was you

know

one percent change or half a percent

change for each generation how long

would it take to evolve and high as we

know it and the answer is half a million

years

um it doesn't have to take long that's

not how evolution works that's not a

that's not an answer to the question it

just shows you can reconstruct the steps

and you can work out roughly how it can

work

so it's not that big a deal to evolve an

eye

but once you have one then there's

nowhere to hide and again we're back to

predator prey relationships where back

to all the benefits that being able to

see brings you and if you think you know

philosophically what bats are doing with

ecolocation and so on

i have no idea but i suspect that they

form an image of the world in pretty

much the same way that we do it's just a

matter of mental reconstruction so i

suppose the other thing about sight

there are single celled

organisms that have got a lens

and a a retina and a and a cornea and so

on basically they've got a camera type

eye in a single cell they don't have a

brain

um

what they understand about their world

is impossible to say but but they're

capable of coming up with with the same

structures to do so so i suppose then

is that once you've got things like eyes

then you have a big driving pressure on

the central nervous system to figure out

what it all means and we come around to

your other point about manipulation

sensory input and so on about you now

now you

you you you have a huge requirement to

understand what your environment is and

what it means and how it reacts and how

you should run away and where you should

stay put

actually on that point let me i don't

know if you know the work of donald

hoffman

who talks about

who uses the argument

um

the mechanism of evolution to say that

there's not necessarily a

strong evolutionary

value

to seeing the world as it is

so objective reality that our perception

actually

is very different from what's

objectively real

we're living inside an illusion and

we're basically the entire

uh the entire set of species on earth i

think i i guess are competing in a space

that's an illusion that's distinct from

this far away from physical reality as

it is as defined by physics i'm not sure

it's an illusion so much as a bubble i

mean we we have a sensory input which is

a fraction of what we could have a

sensory input on um and we interpret it

in terms of what's useful for us to know

to stay alive so yes it's an illusion in

that sense but

the tree is physically there and if you

walk into that tree you you know that

there is it's not purely a delusion

there's some physical reality to it so

it's a it's a uh

sensory slice into reality as it is but

because it's just a slice you're missing

a big picture but he says that that

slice doesn't necessarily need to be a

slice

it could be a complete fabrication

that's just consistent amongst the

species which is an interesting or at

least it's a humbling

realization that our perception

is limited and our cognitive abilities

are limited

and

at least to me

it's argument from evolution i don't

know

how much how how strong that is as an

argument

but

i do think that life can exist

in the mind

yes in the same way that you can do a

virtual reality video game and you can

have a vibrant life inside that place

and that place is not real in some sense

but you could still have a vibe all the

same forces of evolution all the same

competition the dynamics of uh between

humans you can have

but i don't know

if um

i don't know if there's evidence for

that being the thing that happened on

earth it seems that earth i think in

either environment i wouldn't deny that

you could have exactly the world that

you talk about and it would be very

difficult to uh you know the the idea um

in in matrix movies and so on that the

whole world is completely

a construction um

and we're fundamentally deluded it's

it's difficult to say that's impossible

or couldn't happen or

and certainly we construct in our minds

what the outside world is but we do it

on input and that input

i i would hesitate to say it's not real

um because it's precisely how we do

understand the world we you know we have

eyes but if you keep someone in

apparently this kind of thing happens

someone kept in a dark room for five

years or something like that and they

never see properly again because they've

the the the neural wiring that underpins

how we interpret vision never developed

you know you need when you watch a child

develop it walks right it walks into a

table it bangs its head on the table and

it hurts uh and

now you've got two inputs you've got one

pane from this sharp edge and number two

you probably you've touched it and

realized it's there it's a sharp edge

and you've got the visual input and you

put the three things together and think

i don't want to walk into a table again

so you're learning and and it's a

limited reality but it's a true reality

and if you don't learn that properly

then you will get eaten you will get hit

by a bus you will not survive

uh and same if you if you're in in in

some kind of uh

let's say computer construction of

reality i'm not in my ground here but if

if you construct the laws that this is

what reality is inside in inside this

then you play by those laws yeah well i

mean as long as the laws are consistent

so just like you said in the lab

the interesting thing about the

simulation question yes it's hard to

know if we're living inside a simulation

but also yes it's possible to do these

kinds of experiments in the lab now

more and more to me the interesting

question is

how

realistic does a virtual reality game

need to be for us to not be able to tell

the difference

a more interesting question to me is

how realistic

or

interesting does the virtual reality

world need to be in order for us to want

to stay there forever or much longer

than

physical reality prefer that place and

also prefer it not as we prefer

uh hard drugs but prefer in a deep

meaningful way in the way we

we enjoy

i mean i suppose the issue with the

matrix i i imagine that it's possible to

to delude the mind sufficiently that you

genuinely in that way do think that you

are

interacting with the real world when in

fact the whole thing is a simulation

how good does the simulation need to be

to be able to do that well it needs to

convince you that all your sensory input

is correct and accurate and and and

joins up and makes sense now that

sensory input is not something that

we're born with we're born with a sense

of touch we're born with eyes and so but

we don't know how to use them we don't

know what to make of them

we go around we bump into trees we cry a

lot we're in pain a lot we you know

we're we're basically booting up the

system so that it it can make head a

tail of the sensory input that it's

getting and that sensory input's not

just a one-way flux of things it's also

you have to walk into things you have to

hear things you have to put it together

now if you've got just babies

in in the matrix who are slotted into

this i don't think they have that kind

of sensory input i don't think they

would have any way to make sense of new

york

uh as a world that they're part of

the brain is just not developed in that

way so i can't make sense of new york in

this physical reality either but yeah i

mean but you said pain and walking into

things well you can create a pain signal

and as long as it's consistent

that certain things result in pain you

could start to construct a reality

there's some maybe maybe you disagree

with this but i think we are born

almost with a desire to be convinced by

our reality

like a

desire to make sense of our reality oh

i'm sure we are yes okay so there's an

imperative so whatever that reality is

given to us like the table hurts fire's

hot yeah i think

we want to be deluded

in a sense that we want to make a simple

like einstein simple theory of the thing

around us we want that simplicity and so

um maybe

the hunger for the simplicity is the

thing that could be used to construct a

pretty dumb simulation

that that tricks us so maybe tricking

humans doesn't require building a

universe

no i i don't i mean i this is not what i

work on so i don't know how close to it

we are anyone working but i i agree with

you but yeah i'm not sure that it's

a morally justifiable thing to do but

it's it's

is it possible in principle

um i think it'll be very difficult

but i don't see why in principle it

wouldn't be possible and i agree with

you that it's it's um that we try to

understand the world we try to integrate

the sensory inputs that we have and we

try to come up with a hypothesis that

explains what's going on

i think though

that we have

huge input from

the social context that we're in we

don't do it by ourselves we don't kind

of blunder around in a universe by

ourself and understand the whole thing

we're told by the people around us uh

what things are and what they do and

that you know language is coming in here

and so on so

it would have to be an extremely

impressive simulation to simulate all of

that

yeah simulate all of that including the

social construct this the the thing the

the spread of ideas and the the the

exchange of ideas i don't know and but

those questions are really important to

understand as we

become more and more digital creatures

it seems like the next step of evolution

is us becoming

partial all the same mechanisms we've

talked about

are becoming more and more plugged in

into the machine

we're becoming cyborgs

and there's an interesting interplay

between wires and biology

um

you know zeros and ones and the

biological systems and i don't think

you can just

i don't think we'll have the luxury to

see humans as disjoint from the

technology we've created for much longer

we are in organisms that's um

yeah

i mean i

agree with you

but

we come really with this to

consciousness yes and is there a

distinction there because what you're

saying the natural end point says we are

indistinguishable that if you are

capable of building

a

an ai

which is sufficiently close and similar

that we merge with it then then

to all intents and purposes that ai is

conscious as we know it

um

and i don't

i don't have a strong view but i have a

view

um

and i i wrote about it in the epilogue

to my last book because 10

years ago i i

wrote a chapter in in a book called life

ascending about consciousness

and the subtitle of life ascending was

was the ten great inventions of

evolution and i couldn't possibly write

a book with a subtitle like that that

did not include consciousness

and specifically consciousness uh

as one of the great inventions

and it was in part because i was just

curious to know more and i read more for

that chapter i never worked on it but

i've always how can anyone not be

interested in the question

um and i was left with the feeling that

hey nobody knows and b there are two

main

schools of thought out there

with a big kind of a skew in

distribution one of them says oh it's a

property of matter there's an unknown

law of physics

pan psychism everything is conscious the

sun is conscious it's just a matter or a

rock is conscious it's just a matter of

how much

and i find that very unpersuasive um i

can't say that it's wrong it's just that

i think we somehow can tell the

difference between something that's

living and something that's not

and then the other the other end is it's

a it's an emergent property of a very

complex central nervous system

um and

i am

i never quite understand what people

mean by words like emergence i mean

there are genuine examples but i think

we very often tend to

um use it to

to plaster over uh ignorance

as a biochemist the question for me then

was okay it's a it's a concoction of a

central nervous system

a depolarizing neuron gives rise to a

feeling to a feeling of pain or to a

feeling of love

or

anger or whatever it may be

so what is then a feeling in biophysical

terms in the central nervous system

which bit of the wiring gives rise to

and i i've never seen anyone answer that

question you know

in a way that makes sense to me and

that's an important question to answer

i think if we want to understand

consciousness that's the only question

to answer because i you know i certainly

a an ai is capable of out thinking and

it's only a matter of time maybe it's

already happened in terms of just

information processing and computational

skill i don't think we have any problem

in designing

a mind which is at least the equal of

the human mind

but in terms of what we value the most

as humans which is to say our feelings

our emotions our

our

sense of what the world is in a in a

very personal way

that i think means as much or more to

people than their information processing

and that's where i

don't think that ai necessarily will

become conscious because

i think it's the property of life well

let's talk about it more you're an

incredible writer one of my favorite

writers so let me read

from your latest book transformers what

you write about consciousness

i think therefore i am said descartes

is one of the most celebrated lines ever

written

but what am i exactly

and artificial intelligence can think

too by definition and therefore is

yet few of us could agree whether ai is

capable in principle of anything

resembling human emotions of love or

hate

fear and joy

of spiritual yearnings

for oneness or oblivion or corporeal

pangs of thirst and hunger

the problem is we don't know what

emotions are as you were saying

what is the feeling in physical terms

how does a discharging neuron give rise

to a feeling of anything at all

this is the heart problem of

consciousness

the seeming duality of mind and matter

the physical makeup of our innermost

self

we can understand in principle how an

extremely sophisticated parallel

processing system could be capable of

wonderous feasts of intelligence but

we can't answer in principle whether

such a supreme intelligence would

experience joy or melancholy what is the

quantum of solace

i

speaking to the question of emergence

you know there's just technical um

uh

there's a there's an excellent paper on

this uh recently about

the um this kind of face transition

emergence of performance in neural

networks on the

problem of nlp natural language

processing so language models there

seems to be

this question of size

at some point

there is a phase transition as you grow

the size of the neural network so the

question is

this is sort of somewhat of a technical

question that you can philosophize over

the technical question is is there a

size of a neural network that starts to

be able to form

the kind of representations that can

capture a language and therefore be able

to

um not just language but linguistically

capture knowledge that's sufficient to

solve a lot of problems

in language like be able to have a

conversation and there seems to be not a

gradual increase but a face transition

and we in the they're trying to

construct the science of where that is

like what is the good size of a neural

network and why does such a face

transition happen anyway that that sort

of points to emergence that there

there could be

stages where

a thing goes from being oh you're

you're very intelligent toaster

to a toaster

that's feeling sad today and turns away

and looks out

um out the window

sighing having an existential crisis

thinking you're marvin the paranoid

android is that well no marvin is

simplistic because marvin is just cranky

yes

uh it's so easily programmed yeah easily

programmed non-stop existential crisis

you're almost basically uh what is notes

from underground but dusty like just

just constantly complaining about life

no they're

capturing the full

rollercoaster of human emotion the

excitement the bliss the connection

um the empathy and all that kind of

stuff and then the selfishness

the the anger

the the depression all that kind of

stuff the capturing all of that

and be able to experience it deeply like

it's the most important

thing you could possibly experience

today the highest highs the lowest lows

this is it my life will be over this

i cannot possibly go on that feeling and

then like after a nap

you're feeling amazing

that might be something that emerges so

why would a nap

make

an ai being feel better

the

first of all we don't know that for a

human either right but we do know that

that's actually true for many people

much of the time you may be depressed

when you do in fact feel better so

oh you are actually asking the technical

question there is there uh so that's a

very there's a biological answer to that

and so the question is whether ai needs

to have the same kind of attachment to

its body and bodily function and

preservation

of the brain's successful function

of

self-preservation essentially in some

deep biological sense

i mean i to my mind it comes back round

to the problem we were talking about

before about simulations and sensory

input and learning what all of this

stuff means

and life and death

um

that that biology unlike society has a

death penalty over everything and

natural selection works on that death

penalty that if you make this

decision wrongly

you die

and

the next generation is represented by

beings that

made a slightly different decision

on balance

um

and that is something that's

intrinsically

difficult to simulate in all this

richness i i would say

um

so so what is

death in all its richness

yes the our relationship with death

or or or the whole of it so which when

you say richness of course

there's a lot in that yeah which is hard

to simulate

what what's the what's part of the

richness that's hard to simulate

uh i suppose the

complexity of the environment and your

position in that or the position of an

organism in that environment in the full

richness of that environment over its

entire life over multiple generations

with changes in gene

sequence over those generations so

slight changes in the makeup of those

individuals over generations but if you

take it back to the level of single

cells um which i do in in in the book

and and ask how do

how how does a single cell

in effect know it exists as an unit as

an entity i mean no in inverted commas

obviously it doesn't know

anything

but it acts as a unit and it acts with

astonishing

precision as a unit

and i had suggested that that's linked

to the electrical fields on on the

membranes themselves and that they give

some indication of how am i doing in

relation to my environment as a kind of

real-time feedback on the world

and

this is something physical

which can be

selected over generations that if you

are

if you get this wrong

um

it's linked with this set of

circumstances that i've just

as an individual

i have a moment of blind panic and run

um as a bacterium or something you have

a you know some electrical discharge

that says blind panic and it it runs

whatever it may be and you associate

over generations multiple generations

that this electrical phase that i'm in

now is associated with

a response like that and it's easy to

see how feelings come in through

through the back door almost with with

that that kind of

um

giving real-time feedback on your

position in the world in relation to how

how am i doing and then you you

complexify the system and yes i have no

problem with a with with phase

transition and i you know

can can all of this be done

um

purely by

the language by the the the issues with

how the system understands itself

maybe it can i honestly don't know

um but i i you know the philosophers for

a long time have talked about uh the

possibility that you can

have a zombie intelligence

uh and that there are no feelings there

but all everything else is the same um

is i mean i have to throw this back to

you really how do you deal with zombie

intelligence

so first of all i can see that from a

biologist's perspective

you think of all the complexities that

led up to the human being

the entirety of the history of four

billion years that in some deep sense

integrated the human being into this

environment and that

dance of the organism and the

environment

you could see how emotions arise from

that and their emotions are deeply

connected and creating a human

experience and from that you mix in

consciousness and

the fullness of it yeah uh but

from a perspective of an intelligent

organism that's already here

like a baby that learns

it doesn't need to learn how to

be a collection of cells or how to do

all the things he needs to do it's

the basic function of a baby as it

learns is to interact with its

environment to learn from its

environment to learn how to fit in to

this social society to like um and the

the basic uh

response of the baby is to cry a lot of

the time cry uh to uh well maybe

convince the humans to

to protect it

or to discipline it to teach it what if

i mean uh we've developed a bunch of

different tricks uh how to get our

parents or to take care of us to educate

us to teach us about the world also

we've constructed the world in such a

way that it's safe enough for us to

survive in and yet dangerous enough to

learn the valuable lessons like the

tables are still hard with corners so it

can still run into them it hurts like

how

so ai needs to solve that problem not

the problem of constructing this super

complex organism that leads up

uh

so you to run the whole

um

you know to make an apple pie to build

the whole universe you need to build the

whole universe i think the the zombie

question is uh

it's something

i would leave to the philosophers

because

uh and i will also leave to them the

definition of love and what is

what happens between two human beings

when there's a magic

that just grabs them

like uh nothing else matters in the

world and somehow you've been searching

for this feeling this moment this person

your whole life that feeling

um

the philosophers can have a lot of fun

with that one and also say that that's

just uh you could have a biological

explanation you can have all kinds of

it's all fake it's uh actually ein rand

will say it's all selfish there's a lot

of different interpretations i'll leave

it to the philosophers the point is the

feeling

surest health feels very real

and if my toaster

makes me feel

like it's the only toaster in the world

and when i leave

and i miss the toaster and when i come

back i'm excited to see the toaster and

my life is meaningful and joyful and the

friends i have around me

get it get a better version of me

because that toaster exists

that sure as hell feels i mean

is that psychologically different to

having a dog

no because i mean most people would

dispute whether we can say a dog i would

i would say dog is undoubtedly conscious

but

but but some people there's degrees of

consciousness and so on but people are

definitely much more uncomfortable

saying a toaster yeah conscious than a

dog

and

there's still a deep connection you

could say our relationship with the dog

has more to do with anthropomorphism

like we kind of project the human being

onto it maybe we can do the same damn

thing with a toaster yes but you can

look into the dog's eyes and you can see

that it's uh it's sad that it's it's

delighted to see you again i don't have

a dog by the way i don't know it's not

that i'm

incredibly good at using their eyes they

do just that

they are now i don't imagine that a dog

is remotely as close to being

intelligent as a as an ai

intelligence

but um

it's certainly capable of communicating

emotionally with us but here's what i

would venture to say we tend to think

because ad plays chess well yeah and is

able to fold proteins now well

that it's intelligent i would argue that

in order to communicate with humans in

order to have emotional intelligence it

actually requires another order of

magnitude of intelligence it's not easy

to be

flawed

solving a mathematical puzzle is not the

same as

the full complexity of human to human

interaction that's actually

we humans just

take for granted the things we're really

good at

non-stop people tell me how shitty

people are driving

no

humans are incredible at driving uh

bipedal walking walking object

manipulation we're incredible at this

and so people tend to

discount the things we all just take for

granted and one of those things that

they discount is our ability

the dance of conversation and

interaction with each other the the

ability to morph ideas together the

ability to get angry at each other

and then to miss each other like to

create attention that makes life fun and

difficult and challenging in a way

that's meaningful that is

a skill that's learned and ai would need

to solve that problem i mean in some

sense what you're saying is

a ai cannot become meaningfully

emotional let's say until it experiences

some kind of internal conflict that is

unable to reconcile these various

aspects of reality or its reality

with

with a decision to make

and then it feels sad necessarily

because

it doesn't know what to do

and i i certainly can't dispute that

that may very well be how it works i

think the only way to find out is to do

it and just build it yeah and leave it

to the philosophers if it actually feels

sad or not

the point is the robot will be sitting

there alone having an internal conflict

an existential crisis and that's

required for it to have a deep

meaningful connection with another human

being now does it actually feel that i

don't know but i'd like to throw

something else at you which which

troubles me uh on reading it um

uh noah harrari's book 21 lessons for

the 21st century and he's written about

this kind of thing on various occasions

and he sees biochemistry as an algorithm

and then ai will necessarily be able to

hack that algorithm and do it better

than humans so there will be a.i better

at writing music that we appreciate the

mozart ever called or writing better

than shakespeare ever did and so on

because

biochemistry is algorithmic and all you

need to do is figure out which bits of

the algorithm to play to make us feel

good or bad or appreciate things

and it's a as a biochemist i find that

argument

close to irrefutable and not very

enjoyable

i don't like the sound of it that's just

my reaction as a human being you might

like the sound of it because that says

that ai is is capable of the same kind

of

uh emotional feelings about the world as

as we are because the whole thing is an

algorithm and you can program an

algorithm

and and there you are

he then has a peculiar final chapter

where he talks about consciousness in

rather separate terms and he's talking

about meditating and so on and getting

in touch with his inner conscious i

don't meditate i don't know anything

about that

but he wrote in very different terms

about it

as if somehow it's a way out of the

algorithm

um now

it seems to me that consciousness in

that sense is capable of scuppering the

algorithm i think in terms of the

biochemical feedback loops and so on it

is undoubtedly algorithmic

but in terms of what we decide to do

it can be much more

um

based on an emotion we can just think i

don't care i can't resolve this complex

situation

i'm going to do that

and that can be based on in effect a

different currency which is the currency

of feelings and something where we don't

have very much personal control over and

then it comes back around to to to you

and what you what are you trying to get

at with ai do we need to have some

system which is capable of overriding

a rational decision which cannot be made

because there's too much conflicting

information

by

effectively an emotional judgmental

decision that just says do this and see

what happens yeah that's what

consciousness is really doing in my view

yeah and the question is whether it's a

different process or just a higher level

process

um i might you know

the idea that biochemistry is an

algorithm

is uh to me an over simplistic view

there's a lot of things that

the moment you say it

it's irrefutable but it simplifies

i'm sure it's an extreme and in the

process

loses something fundamental so for

example

calling a universe an information

processing system

sure yes

you could you could make that it's a

computer that's performing computations

but you're

missing

uh the

the process of

uh the entropy somehow leading to

pockets of complexity that creates these

beautiful artifacts that are incredibly

complex and they're like machines and

then those machines are through the

process of evolution are constructing

even further complexity

like

in calling universe information

processing machine

you're

you're missing those little local

pockets and how difficult it is to

create them so the question to me is if

biochemistry is an algorithm how

difficult is it to create in a software

system okay that runs the human body

which i think is incorrect i think we're

that is going to take so long

i can't i mean that's going to be

centuries from now to be able to

reconstruct a human now what i would

venture to say to get some of the magic

of a human being

with what we saying with the emotions

and the interactions and like like a dog

makes us smile and joyful and all those

kinds of things that will come much

sooner but that doesn't require us to

reverse engineer the algorithm of

biochemistry yes but

the toaster is making you happy yes

it's not about whether you make the

toast happy

um no it has to so

it has to be

it has to be the toaster has to be able

to leave me happy yeah because the

toaster is the ai in this case is a very

interesting the toaster has to be able

to be unhappy and leave me

that's essential

yeah that's essential for my being able

to miss the toaster if the toaster is

just my servant

that's not or a provider of like

services

like tells me the weather makes toast

that's not going to deep connection it

has to have internal conflict you write

about life and death it has to be able

to be conscious of its mortality

and the finiteness of its existence

and that life is for temporary and

therefore it needs to be more selective

what are those

hangs out moving moments in the movies

from when i was a boy was the the

unplugging of hal in 2001 where

that was the death of a sentient being

and

hal knew it

so i think we

we all kind of know

that

that a sufficiently

intelligent being is going to

have some form of consciousness but

whether

it would be back like biological

consciousness i just don't know and if

you're thinking about how do we bring

together i mean obviously we're going to

interact

um more closely with with ai

but

are we really

is is a is a dog really like a toaster

or is there really some kind of

difference there you were talking ab you

know biochemistry is algorithmic uh but

it's not single algorithm and it's very

complex of course it is so it may be

that there's there are again conflicts

in the circuits of biochemistry but i

have a feeling

that the level of complexity of

the total biochemical system at the

level of a single cell is less complex

than the the level of neural networking

in the human brain or in an ai

well i guess i assumed that we were

including the brain in the biochemistry

algorithm

because you have to

uh i would see that as a higher level of

organization of neural networks they're

all using the same biochemical wiring

within themselves

yeah but the human brain is not just

neurons

it's the immune system it's it's the

whole package

i mean to have a biochemical algorithm

that runs a

uh intelligent biological system you

have to include the whole damn thing and

it's pretty fascinating it comes from

like

from an embryo

like the whole i mean oh boy

i mean if you can um

what is a human being

because it's but if you look just some

code and then you build and then that so

it's dna doesn't just tell you what to

build but how to build it

is it

i mean the thing is impressive and the

question is how

uh

difficult is it to reverse engineer the

whole shebang

very difficult i i would say it's

don't want to say impossible but

it is

like it's much easier to build a human

than to reverse engineer

uh

to build like a fake human

human-like thing

than to reverse engineer the entirety of

the process the evolution of

her i'm not sure if we are capable of

reverse engineering the whole thing yeah

if our if the human mind is capable of

doing that i mean

i wouldn't be a biologist if i wasn't

trying yeah um but

i know i can't understand the whole

problem i'm just trying to understand

the rudimentary outlines of the problem

there's another aspect though you're

talking about developing from a single

cell to a to a to the human mind and all

the

part system subsystems that are part of

in the immune system and so on

um

this is something

that you'll talk about i imagine um with

uh with michael levin

but

the

so little is known

about you talk about reverse engineers

so little is known about the

developmental pathways that go from a

genome to going to a fully wired

organism

um and a lot of it seems to depend on

the same intellect

electrical interactions that i was

talking about happening at the level of

single cells and its interaction with

the environment there's there's a whole

electrical field side to biology

that is not yet written into any of the

textbooks

which is about how does an embryo

develop into our single cell develop

into into these complex systems what

defines the head what defines the immune

system what defines the brain and so on

that really is written in a language

that we're only just beginning to

understand and frankly biologists most

biologists are still very reluctant to

even

get themselves tangled up in questions

like electrical fields influencing

development it seems like mumbo jumbo to

a lot of biologists and it should not be

because this is the 21st century biology

this is where it's going uh but we're

not going to reverse engineer a human

being or the mind or any of these

subsystems until we understand how this

developmental process well how

electricity in biology really works and

and if it is

linked with

feelings of with consciousness and so on

that's the stamin in the meantime we

have to try but but i think that's where

the answer lies

so you think uh it's possible that the

key to things like consciousness

are some of the more

tricky aspects of cognition might lie in

that early development

the interaction of electricity and

biology

electrical fields

but we already know the eeg and so on is

telling us a lot about brain function

but we don't know which cells which

parts of a neural network is giving rise

to the eeg we don't know the basics the

assumption is

i mean we know it's neural networks we

know it's multiple cells hundreds or

thousands of cells involved in it and we

assume that it's to do with

depolarization

during action potentials and so on

but the mitochondria which are in there

have much more membranes than the plasma

membrane of the neuron and there's a

much greater membrane potential and it's

formed in

parallel very often parallel christie

which are capable of of um reinforcing a

field and generating fields over longer

distances

um

and nobody knows if that plays a role in

consciousness or not there's reasons to

argue that it could but frankly we we

simply do not know

and it's not taken into consideration

you look at the the structure of the

mitochondrial membranes

in the brains of you know simple things

like drosophila uh the fruit fly and

they have amazing structures you can see

lots of little rectangular things all

lined up uh

in in in in amazing patterns what are

they doing why are they like that we

haven't the first clue

what do you think about

organoids and brain organoids and like

so in a lab trying to uh study the

development of these

in the

uh in the petri dish

development of organs

do you think that's promising do you

have to look at whole systems i've never

done anything like that i don't know

much about it the people who i've talked

to who do work on it say amazing things

can happen and that you know a bit of a

brain grown in a in a dish is capable of

experiencing some kind of feelings or

even memories of its former brain

again i i have a feeling that until we

understand how to control the electrical

fields that that control development

we're not going to understand how to

turn an organoid into a real functional

system

but how do to get that understanding

it's so

it's so incredibly difficult i mean you

would have to

i mean one promising direction i'd love

to get your opinion on this um i don't

know if you're familiar with the work of

deep mind and alpha fold with protein

folding and so on do you think it's

possible

that that will give us some

breakthroughs in biology trying to

basically simulate

and model the behavior of

trivial biological systems

as they become complex biological

systems

i'm sure it will

the interesting thing to me about

protein folding

is that

for a long time my understanding is not

what i work on so i may have got this

wrong but my understanding is that you

you take the sequence the sequence of a

protein

and you try to fold it um in and there

are multiple ways in which you can fold

and to come up with the correct

conformation is not a very easy thing

because you're doing it from first

principles from a string of letters

which specify the string of amino acids

but what actually happens

is when a protein is coming out of a

ribosome

it's coming out of a charged tunnel and

it's in a very specific environment

which is going to force this to go there

now and then this one to go there and

this one to come like and so you're

forcing a specific conformational 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

on on on the immediate environment that

it was emerging into one letter as one

one one amino acid at a time

and i don't think that the field

was looking at it that way

and this is if 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 in biology is giving you a charged

electrical environment that forces you

to be this way now did

deep mind

come up through patterns with some

answer that was like that i've got

absolutely no idea it bought to be

possible to deduce that

from the shapes of proteins it would

require much greater

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 well they

can figure that out that's really

interesting about the exit tunnel but

like sometimes we get lucky and

our like just second science

the simplified view or the static view

uh will actually solve the problem for

us so in this case it's very possible

that the sequence of letters has a

unique mapping to our structure without

considering how

it unraveled so without considering the

tunnel and so and that seems to be the

case

in this situation with the the cool

thing about proteins all the different

shapes that can possibly take it

actually seems to take

very specific unique shapes given the

sequence 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 uh proteins that

uh which change the conformational state

uh chaperone proteins and they're only

used when

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

so

there's two ways of doing it either you

can 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 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 of course it's forced to come out

this way and then the question would be

well do different ribosomes have

different charged environments what

happens if a chaparral 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 in a billion different

possible conformational 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

well yeah i mean there's currently

humans are very good at that kind of

first principles thinking oh yeah

stepping back but i think ai is really

good at you know collect a huge amount

of data

and a huge amount of data of observation

of planets and figure out that earth is

not at the center of the universe that

there's actually a sun we're

orbiting the sun but then you can as a

human being ask well how did how do

solar systems come to be how do it

what are the different forces that are

required to make this kind of pattern

emerge and then you start to invent

things like gravity what i mean

obviously

i mixed up the ordering of of uh gravity

wasn't considered as a thing that

connects planets but

um

we are able to think about those big

picture things as human beings

ai is just very good to infer

simple models from a huge amount of

um data

and the question is with biology you

know we kind of go back and forth how we

solve biology listen protein folding was

thought to be impossible to solve and

there's a lot of brilliant phd students

that worked one protein at a time trying

to figure out the structure and the fact

that i was able to do that

oh i'm not i'm not

knocking it at all but uh but but i

think that people have been asking the

wrong question but then

as the people start to ask better

and bigger questions

the ai kind of enters the chat and says

i'll help you out with that

can i give you another example of my own

work

um

the the risk of getting a disease as we

get older

um

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 and we know a few genes that

increase your risk of certain things and

for for probably 20 years now people

have been doing what's called g wasps

which is um genome-wide association

studies so you you've effectively

scanned the entire genome for any

single nucleotide polymorphisms which is

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

and

if you add them all up

and try and say well so do they add up

to uh to explain the the known genetic

risk of this disease and the known

genetic risk often comes from twin

studies and you can say that you know

that if 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 percent uh and so the

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 maybe there's a million we've

only found a thousand of them but if we

found 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 i mean you know maybe

there's a billion of them for instance

so 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

uh it doesn't change very much

but a few

single letter changes in that

mitochondrial dna it 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 you

know

to to 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 in fruit flies that they interact and

produce

big differences in risk

so you can set

uh you can set ai onto this question of

exactly what

uh you know how many of these base

changes there are and this is one

possible solution that maybe

there are a million of them and it does

account for the great part of the risk

well the other one is they aren't it's

just not there that actually the risk

lies in something you weren't even

looking at and this is where human

intuition

is very important and just 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

can you get ai to do that to be

bloody-minded

and uh that that that hang on a minute

you might be missing a whole other

system here that's much bigger

that's that's huma that's

that's the moment of discovery of

scientific revolution

i'm

giving up on saying hey i can't do

something

i've said it enough times about enough

things i think there's been a lot of

progress

and uh instead i'm excited by the

possibility of ai helping humans but at

the same time just like i said we seem

to dismiss the power of humans yes yes

like we're so limited

in so many ways

uh

that kind of

in in what we feel like dumb ways like

we're not strong

we're uh we're kind of

um

our attention our memory is limited our

ability to focus on things is limited

in our own perception of what limited is

but that actually there's an incredible

computer behind the whole thing that

makes this whole system work our ability

to

interact with the environment to reason

about the environment there's magic

there and i i'm hopeful that ai can

capture some of that same magic but that

magic is not going to look like uh deep

blue playing chess no it's going to be

more interesting but i don't think it's

going to look like a 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 the hypothesis

is a story

it's a testable story but but you know a

new hypothesis is a leap into the

unknown and it's a new story basically

and it says uh this leads to this leads

to that it's a causal set of of of

storytelling

it's also possible that the leap into

the unknown has a pattern of its own yes

it is

possible let's learn learnable

i'm sure it is there's a nice uh book by

arthur cursler on um

on on the nature of creativity and 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 you know some

creative switch of direction to an

unexpected place is similar to to a

i'm not saying that's how it works but

it's a nice idea and there's must be

some truth in it

um

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 is finding a

new story that goes to an unexpected

place and these are all aspects of what

being human means to me

um and maybe these are all things that

that ai figures out for itself or maybe

they're just aspects

but i i just have the feeling sometimes

that the people who

are trying to

understand what to

what we are like what weird what we 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

but we uh get a better better

understanding of that i agree with you

completely we try to build the thing and

then we'll go

hang on in a minute yeah

there's another system here and that's

actually the attempt to build ai

that's human-like is getting us to a

deeper understanding of human beings

the funny thing i recently talked to

magnus carlson the widely considered to

be the greatest chess player of all time

and he talked about alpha zero which is

a system from deepmind that plays chess

and he had a funny comment

um he has a kind of dry sense of humor

but he was extremely impressed when he

first saw alpha zero play

and he said that it did a lot of things

that could easily be mistaken for

creativity

[Laughter]

uh so he like refute as a typical human

refused to give the system

sort of it's due because he came up with

a lot of things that a lot of people

are extremely impressed by not just the

sheer calculation but

the the brilliance of play so one of the

things that um

it does

in really interesting ways is it

sacrifices pieces

so in chess that means you you you

basically take a few steps back in order

to take a step forward you give away

pieces for some future reward

and that

for us humans is where art is in chess

you take big risks

that

uh for us humans

those risks are especially painful

because

you have a fog of uncertainty before you

so to take a risk now based on the

intuition of i think this is the right

risk to take but there's so many

possibilities that that's where it takes

guts that's where art is that's that

danger and then

the

alpha

alpha zero takes those same kind of

risks and does them even greater degree

but of course

it does it from a

well you could easily

uh reduce down to a

cold

calculation over patterns but

boy when you see the final result it

sure looks like the same kind of magic

that we see in creativity

uh when we see creative play on the

chessboard but the chessboard is very

limited and the question is as we get

better and better can we

do that same kind of creativity

in mathematics

in programming

and then adventuring biology psychology

and expand into more and more complex

systems

i was um

used to go running when i was a boy and

fell running which is say 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

uh and i i realized in trying to do this

that um there's

there's only really two two way there's

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 and you know it's slow it's

laborious you figure it out step by step

or 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 exactly

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 you do you crash

you can't you can you cannot think

consciously while running downhill

and so it's amazing

it's amazing how many calculations the

mind is able to make

and now the problem with playing chess

or something if you were able to make

all of those subconscious kind of

forward calculations about

what what is the likely outcome of this

move now

uh in the way that we can by running

down a hillside or something is it you

know 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 better be bloody good at otherwise

we're going to be eaten um

whereas whereas

trying to calculate

multiple multiple moves into the future

is not something we've ever been called

on to do two or three four moves into

the future is quite enough for most of

us most of the time

yeah

yeah so the yeah just solving chess may

not um

we may not be as far towards solving the

problem of uh downhill running

as we might think just because we solved

chess

still it's beautiful to see

creativity humans create machines

they're able to create art

and art on the chessboard and art

otherwise

who knows how far that takes us

so i mentioned andre carpathi earlier

him and i are big fans of yours if

you're taking votes his suggestion was

you should write your next book on the

fermi paradox

so let me ask you on the topic of uh

alien life

since we've been talking about life and

we're a kind of aliens

how many alien civilizations are out

there do you think

well the universe is very big

so some

but not as many as most people would

like to think is my view because the

idea that

that there is a trajectory going from

simple simple cellular life like

bacteria all the way through to humans

it seems to me there's some big gaps

along that way the the eukaryotic cell

the the complex cell that we have is is

the biggest of them but also

photosynthesis is another the other

another interesting gap is a long gap

from from the origin of the eukaryotic

cell to the first animals that was about

a billion years

uh maybe more than that

um a long delay in when oxygen began to

accumulate in the atmosphere so from the

first appearance of oxygen in the great

oxidation event who were enough for

animals to respire

it was close to two billion years

um

why so long it seems to be planetary

factors it seems to be geology as much

as in 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 uh

complexity and and um

sentient life i don't think he's right

doesn't not to say it's not going to

happen

but i think it's not going to happen

often

so if you think of earth given the

geological constraints and all that kind

of stuff

do you have a sense that life complex

life intelligent life happen really

quickly on earth over the long

so

just just to get a sense of

are you more sort of saying that it's

very unlikely to get the kind of

conditions required to create humans or

is it even if you have the condition

it's just statistically difficult 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

eukaryotic cell which happened once and

without eukaryotes nothing else would

have happened

and and that is something that

that's because you're saying it's super

important the eukaryotes but i'm saying

tantamount to saying that it is

impossible to build something as complex

as a human being from bacterial cells i

totally agree in some deep fundamental

way but it's just like a one cell going

inside another

it's not so difficult to get to work

right like

well again it happened once

um and

if you think about if you if you think

i mean i'm in a minority view in this

position most biologists probably

wouldn't agree with me anyway but if you

think about the the starting point we've

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 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 endo membrane it has it has a

little bit of stuff but not not that

much

and it takes up an endless inbound

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

but they all have really different ways

of living so a plant cell

it's photosynthetic

they started out as algae in the oceans

and so on so think of algal blooms

single cell things you know the the

basic

uh

the basic cell structure that it's built

from is exactly the same with a couple

of small differences it's got

chloroplasts 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

and yet the ways of life are completely

different so this these 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 uh i'm a

fungus in a soil

spending out long kind of shoots into

whatever it may be

mycelium so

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

forced all kinds of change on 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've got

endless imbalance 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 uh

and it simply doesn't 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 but you're

you're leaning towards

we just got really lucky in that one

leap

like we got so do you have a sense that

our galaxy for example has just

maybe millions of planets with bacteria

living on it i would expect billions

tens of billions of planets with

bacteria living on it practically i

would i would 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 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 that's so fast

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 uh with with

complex life on earth i mentioned oxygen

animals and so on as well and even

humans we came along very late you go

back five million years and you know

would we be that impressed if we came

across a planet full of giraffes

i mean you'd think hey there's life here

and there's a nice planet to colonize or

something we wouldn't think oh let's try

and have a conversation with this

giraffe

yeah i'm not sure what exactly we would

think

i'm not exactly sure what makes humans

so interesting from an alien perspective

or how they would notice i'll talk to

you about cities too because that's an

interesting perspective of uh how to

look at human civilization

but your sense i mean of course you

don't know but it's an interesting

world it's an interesting galaxy it's an

interesting universe to live in that's

just like

every sun

like 90 percent

of uh

solar systems

have bacteria in it

like imagine that world

and

the galaxy maybe has

just a handful if not one

intelligent civilization

that's a wild world and so wow i didn't

even even think about that world there's

a kind of

thought that

like one of the reasons it would be so

exciting to find life on mars or titan

or whatever it's like if it's life is

elsewhere then surely

statistically

that life no matter how unlikely your

query has multi-cell organisms

sex

violence

what what else is extremely difficult i

mean uh photosynthesis

is figuring out some machinery that

involves the chemistry and the

environment to allow the building up of

complex organisms surely that would

arise

but man i don't know how i would feel

about just bacteria everywhere well it

would be depressing if it was true

i suppose

i don't think natural i don't know

what's more depressing bacteria

everywhere nothing everywhere

yes either of them are chilling yeah 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

and what i'm saying may or may not be

true so how would you feel if we

discovered life on mars

absolutely it sounds like you would be

less excited than some others

because you're like well what 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

the likelihood of life having gone to

and fro between between mars and the

earth is

is quite i wouldn't say high but it's

not low it's quite feasible

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 they've

been transit one way or the other and

that it was a it was a common origin of

life on mars or on the earth and he went

one way the other way the other way to

see that question though would be to say

well actually though 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 uh 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

so we see subtle differences in the

genetic code what does it mean it could

be very difficult to interpret is it

possible you think to tell the

difference

or something that truly originated

i think if the stereochemistry was

different

we have sugars for example that are the

l form or the d form and and

we have

uh d sugars and l amino acids right

across all of life but lipids

uh we have the bacteria have one one

stereoisomer and the bacteria have the

other the opposite stereoisomer

so it's perfectly possible to use one or

the other one

uh and the same would almost certainly

go for 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 um

and if we were to find life on mars that

was using the opposite stereoisomer that

would be unequivocal evidence that life

had started independently there so

hopefully

the life we find will be on titan and

europa or something like that where it's

less likely that we shared and it's

harsher conditions so there's going to

be weirder kind of life

i wouldn't count on that because

life started in deep sea hydrothermal

vents it's 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

um as the early earth would have been

and it almost only 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 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

uh that we know on earth

so the hard leap the hardest sleep the

most important leap is from

precarious to to eukaryotes eukaryotic

what's the second

if we're ranking what's what's the

what's uh you gave a lot of emphasis on

photosynthesis yeah and that would be my

second one i think but it's 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

um

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 and then on land and

whatever else seems to suggest that

there's no

there's no problem with exploring

whether you know you could have a

separate origin that explored this whole

domain over there that the bacteria had

never gone into

um

so that kind of says that the reason

that it only happened once is probably

because it's difficult because the

wiring is difficult

yeah um but then it it happened at least

2.2 billion years ago right before the

goe maybe as long as three billion years

ago when there are some people say there

are whiffs of oxygen there's just kind

of traces in the fossil in the in the

geochemical record that say maybe

there's a bit of oxygen then that's

really disputed some people say he goes

all the way back four billion years ago

and and um it was the common ancestor of

life on earth was photosynthetic so

immediately you've got you know groups

of people who disagree over a two

billion year period of time about when

it started

um but well

let's take the latest date when it's

unequivocal that's 2.2 billion years ago

through to around about the time of the

cambrian explosion when oxygen levels

definitely got close to modern levels uh

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

um nothing much changed it's known as

the boring billion in fact

um uh probably stuff was that was when

you carries arose somewhere in there but

it's uh

so this idea that the world is

constantly changing that we're

constantly evolving that we're moving up

some ramp it's a very human idea but in

reality

though

there are

um

there there are kind of

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 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

go extinct and there's a five to ten

million year gap and then life recovers

but

without humans and the question

statistically well without humans but

statistically does that ultimately lead

to greater complexity more interesting

life

more intense 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 um but sulfurous lower down

um

and

and that was stable certainly around the

continental margins for more than a

billion years uh it was not a state that

led to progression in an obvious way

um

yeah i mean it's interesting to think

about evolution like what leads to

stable states

and uh

how often are

evolutionary pressures

emerging from the environment

so

maybe other planets are able to create

evolutionary pressures chemical

pressures whatever some kind of pressure

that say you're screwed unless you get

your together in the next

like

10 000 years like a lot of pressure

uh it seems like earth like the boring

building might be explained

in two ways one it's super difficult to

take any kind of next step

and uh the second way could be explained

is there's no reason to take the next

step no i think there is no reason but

at the end of it there was a there was a

snowball earth

um so there was a planetary catastrophe

on a huge scale where the the the

ice was the the sea was frozen at the

equator

um

and that forced change

in one way or another it's not long

after that 100 million years perhaps

after that so not short time but this is

when we begin to see animals there was a

shift again another tipping point that

led to catastrophic change that led to a

takeoff then

we don't really know why but one of the

reasons why that i discuss in the book

um

is about

sulfate being washed into the oceans

which sounds incredibly parochial

but

the

the issue is i mean that what the data

is showing we can we can track roughly

how oxygen was going into the atmosphere

from

um

from carbon isotopes so there's two

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 one percent of carbon is carbon-13

which is a stable isotope and then

there's carbon-14 which is a trivial

radioactive estrogen amount

so 13 is one percent

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 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

oil or whatever it may be

then it's no longer oxidized so some

oxygen remains left over in 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 in 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 they want 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

and what that seems to be saying is the

amount of carbon 12 in the oceans

um

was was disappearing

which is to say it was being oxidized

um and if it's being oxidized it's

consuming oxygen and that should so a

big carbon 13 signal says that the ratio

of carbon 12 to carbon 13 is is really

going down which means there's

there's much more carbon 12 being taken

out and being oxidized sorry this is

getting too complex but well it's a good

it's a good way to estimate the amount

of oxygen 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 yeah um

and yet the rest of the geological

indicators say no there's oxygen in the

atmosphere

so it's a kind of a paradox and 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 um is to assume that it what

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

anterior did yeah yeah so these are

these are these are bacteria so they're

oxidizing carbon organic carbon

with sulfate passing the electrons onto

sulfate that

reacts with iron to form iron pyrites 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 a some kind of

mineral

so calcium sulfate minerals for example

are evaporitic

um and and um because there happened to

be some continents some continental

collisions mountain building this

sulfate was pushed up the side of a

mountain and happened to get washed into

the ocean

yeah so

many happy accidents like that are

possible statistically it's really hard

you know maybe you can roll that in

statistically or but this is the course

of life on earth without all that

sulfate being raised up this cambrian

explosion almost certainly would not

have happened

and then we wouldn't have had animals

and and so on and so on so it's you know

it's

this kind of explanation of the cambrian

explosion

so

uh let me actually say in several ways

so

you know folks who challenge the

validity of the uh

theory of evolution

will give us an example now i'm not well

studied in this but we'll give us an

example the camera and explosion is like

this thing is weird

oh i just wait

so

by

the question i would have

is what's the biggest mystery

or gap in understanding about evolution

is it the cambrian explosion and if so

how do we what's our best understanding

of how to explain

uh first of all what is it

in my understanding in the short amount

of time maybe 10 million years 100

million years something like that a huge

number of animals a variety diversity of

animals were created

um

anyway there's like five questions in

there yeah is that the biggest mystery

no i don't think 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

um 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 we're seeing uh modern ecosystems

and we're seeing arms races and we're

seeing um

we're seeing the full creativity of

evolution unleashed

and the

so i talked about the boring billion

nothing happens for for you know one and

a half one billion years one and a half

billion years um

the assumption and this is completely

wrong this assumption is is that then

that you know evolution works really

slowly and that you need billions of

years to

affect some small change and then

another billion years to do something

else it's completely wrong

evolution gets stuck in a stasis and it

stays that way for tens of millions

hundreds of millions of years

uh and stephen j gould used to argue

this he called it punctuated equilibrium

but he was doing it to do with animals

and to do with the 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 some period of upheavals and

then another snowball earth and then

suddenly you see the cambrian explosion

this is long periods of stasis

where the world is in a stable state and

it's not lean is not geared towards

increasing complexity it's just

everything is in balance

and only when you have a catastrophic

level of 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 that

evolution is slow

is wrong it can be incredibly fast

and i mentioned earlier on you can you

know 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

uh you know

one one one kind of tube into a tube

with knobbles on it into a tube with

with with arms on it and then multiple

arms and and then at one end is the head

where that starts out as a swelling is

you know it's not

difficult consider intellectually to

understand how these things can happen

um

it boggles the mind 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

um and and then a million years is a

million generations and the amount of

change that you can do it can affect in

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

uh so again what as soon as you throw in

the competition of predators and prey

and you're ramping up the 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 in biology is

consciousness

the big mystery in biology is conscious

well intelligence is kind of a mystery

too

i mean you said biology not

psychology

because

from a biology perspective it seems like

intelligence and consciousness all are

the same like weird

like

all the brain stuff i don't see this

intelligence is necessarily that

difficult i suppose i mean i see it as a

form of computing and i don't know much

about computing so i

you don't know much about consciousness

either so i i mean i suppose

oh i see

i see i see acid

that consciousness you do know a lot

about as a human being no no i mean i i

think i i can understand the wiring of a

brain

as a series of in pretty much the same

way as a computer in in theory

um

in terms of um the circuitry of it

the mystery

to me is

how this system gives rise to feelings

as we were talking about earlier on yeah

i just i think

i think we oversimplify

intelligence i think the dance the magic

of reasoning

is as interesting as the magic of

feeling

we we tend to

think of reasoning as like

very uh

running a very simplistic algorithm

i think reasoning is re the interplay

between memory whatever the hell is

going on the unconscious mind

all of that

um

i'm not trying to

diminish it in any way at all obviously

it's extraordinarily exquisitely complex

and

but but i don't see a logical difficulty

with how it works

yeah no i i mean i agree with you but

sometimes

um yeah there's a big cloak of mystery

around consciousness

i mean let me compare it with with

classical versus quantum physics the

classical physics

is logical and you can understand

the the kind of language we're dealing

with it's almost at the human level

we're dealing with stars and things that

we can see and when you get to quantum

mechanics and things

it's practically impossible for the

human mind to compute what is what just

happened there yeah um i mean that that

is the same it's like

you understand mathematically the the

notes of a musical composition that's

intelligence yes but why makes you feel

a certain way

that is much harder to understand

yeah that's that's really um

but

it was it was interesting framing that

that's a mystery at this at the core of

biology i wonder

who solves consciousness

i tend to think consciousness will be

solved by the engineer

meaning anything the person builds it

who tries keeps trying to build the

thing

uh versus biology is such a complicated

system

i feel like it's

um i feel like the building blocks of

consciousness from a biological

perspective

are like

that's like the final creation of a

human being so you have to understand

the whole damn thing

you said electrical fields but like

electrical fields plus plus everything

whole shebang

i'm inclined to agree i mean my feeling

is from my meager knowledge of the

history of science is that the biggest

breakthroughs usually come through from

a field that was not related to so so if

anyone you know is not going to be a

biologist who solves consciousness uh

just because biologists are too embedded

in in in the nature of of the problem

and then nobody's going to believe you

when you've done it because nobody's

going to be able to prove that this this

ai is in fact conscious and and sad

in any case and any more than you can

prove that a dog is conscious and sad

so it tells you that it is in good

language and you must believe it

but i think most people will accept

if faced with that that

that's what it is

all of this uh probability though of

complex life

i in one way i think

why it matters

is that

my expectation i suppose is that we we

will be

over the next hundred years or so if we

survive at all that ai will increasingly

dominate and and pretty much anything

that we put out into space going looking

for other

well for the universe for what's out

there

will be ai won't be won't be us we won't

be doing that or when we do it'll be on

a much more limited scale

i i suppose the same would apply to any

alien civilization so perhaps rather

than looking for signs of life out there

we should be looking for ai out there

but then we face the problem

um

that's

i don't see how a planet is going to

give rise directly to ai

we can see how a planet can give rise

directly to organic life

and if the principles that govern the

evolution of life on earth apply to

other planets as well

and i think a lot of them would

um

then the likelihood of ending up with

a human-like civilization capable of

giving rise to ai in the first place

is massively limited

once you've done it once perhaps it

takes over the universe and maybe uh

maybe there's no issue but it it seems

to me that the the the two are

necessarily linked that are you you're

not going to just turn a sterile planet

into an ai life form without the

intermediary of the organics first so

you have to run the the the full compute

the evolutionary computation with the

organics to create ai how does ai

bootstrap itself up without the aid if

you like of an intelligent designer

the origin of ai

is going to have to be in the chemistry

of a planet

so

but that's that's not a limiting factor

right so i mean so there's let me ask

the fermi paradox question

let's say we live in this incredibly

dark and beautiful world of

just

billions of planets with bacteria on it

and very few intelligent civilizations

and yet there's a few out there

why haven't we at scale seen them

visit us

what's your sense

is it because they don't exist um

because don't exist in the right part of

the universe at the right time that's

the simplest answer for it

is that the one you find the most

compelling or is there some other

explanation

i find that you know it's not that i

find it more compelling it's that i find

more probable uh and i find all of them

i mean there's a lot of hand waving in

this we just don't know

uh so so i'm trying to read out from

what i know about life on earth to what

might happen somewhere else

and it gives to my mind a bit of a

pessimistic view of bacteria everywhere

and only occasional intelligent life

and you know running forward humans only

once on earth and nothing else that you

would necessarily be

any more excited about making contact

with than you would be making contact

with them on earth

so

so i think the chances are pretty

limited

and the chances of us surviving

is pretty limited too the way we're

going on at the moment the likelihood of

us not making ourselves extinct within

the next few hundred years

possibly within the next 50 or 100 years

seems

quite small

i hope we can do better than that

um

so maybe the only thing that will

survive from humanity will be ai and

maybe once it exists and once it's

capable of

of effectively copying itself and

cutting humans out of the loop

um then maybe that will take over the

universe

i mean there's a kind of inherent

sadness to the way you describe that but

isn't that

also potentially beautiful that that's

the next step of life

um

i suppose as

from your perspective as long as it

carries the flame of consciousness

somehow i think yes there can be some

beauty to it being the next step of life

and i don't know if consciousness

matters or not from that point of view

to be honest with you

um

yeah but there's

there's some sadness yes probably

because

um

because i think it comes down to the

selfishness that we were talking about

earlier on i i am

an individual

with a a desire not to be kind of

displaced from life i want to stay alive

i want to

be here

um

so i suppose the threat that a lot of

people would feel is that we will just

be wiped out so that we will be um that

there will be potential conflicts

between ai and humans and that that hey

i will win because it's a lot smarter

boy would that be a sad state of affairs

if

consciousness is just an intermediate

stage

between bacteria and a.i

so i would see bacteria as being

potentially a kind of primitive form of

consciousness right so maybe the whole

of life on earth to my mind is conscious

it's capable of some form of feelings in

response to the environment that's not

to say it's intelligent though he's

got his own

algorithms for intelligence but nothing

comparable with us

i think it's beautiful what a planet

what a sterile planet can come up with

and it's astonishing that it's come up

with all of this stuff that we see

around us and and that either we

or whatever we produce is capable of

destroying all of that

yeah is it is a sad thought

but it's also

it's hugely pessimistic

i'd like to think that we're capable of

giving rise to something which is at

least as good if not better than us as

ai

yeah i i have that same

[Music]

i have the same optimism

especially a thing that is able to

propagate throughout the universe more

efficiently than humans can

or extensions of humans

some merger with ai in humans

whether that comes from

bioengineering of the human body to

extend its life

somehow

to carry that flame of consciousness and

that personality and the beautiful

tension

that's within all of us carry that

through to multiple planets to multiple

solar systems

all out there in the universe i mean

that's a beautiful that's a beautiful

vision whether ai can do that or

uh bioengineered humans

uh can that's an exciting possibility

and especially meeting other

other alien civilizations in that same

kind of way do you think do you think

aliens have consciousness if they're

organic

so organic yes connected to caution i

mean i i think any any system which is

going to bootstrap itself up from

planetary origins i mean

let me finish this and then come onto

something else but uh from from

planetary origins is going to face

similar constraints and those

constraints are going to be addressed in

similar basic engineering ways and i

think it will be cellular and i think it

will have electrical charges and i think

it will have to

be selected in populations over time and

all of these things will tend to give

rise to the same processes as the

simplest fix to a difficult problem so i

would expect it to be conscious yes and

i would expect it to

resemble life on earth in

many ways

when i was about i guess 15 or 16 i

remember reading a book by fred hoyle

called the black cloud

which

i was a budding biologist at the time

and this was the first time i'd come

across someone really challenging the

heart of biology and saying

you're you are far too parochial you you

know you're thinking about life as

carbon based here's a here's a life form

which is kind of dust interstellar dust

that on a on a on a solar system scale

um

and i

you know it's a novel but i felt

enormously challenged by that novel

because i hadn't occurred to me

how limited my thinking was

uh how how

narrow-minded i was being and he was it

was a great physicist with a completely

different conception of what life could

be

and since then i've seen him attacked uh

in in various ways and i

i'm kind of reluctant to say the attacks

make more sense to me than than the

original story which is to say

even in terms of

information processing if you're on that

scale and there's a limit of the speed

of light how quickly can something think

if you're needing to

broadcast across the

the the solar system

is going to be slow it's not going to

hold a conversation with you on the kind

of timelines that fred hoyle was

imagining at least not by

any easy way of doing it assuming that

speed of light is a limit

um

and and then again you

you really can't this is something

richard dawkins argued long ago and i do

think he's right there is no other way

to generate this level of complexity

than natural selection nothing else can

do it you need populations

and you need selection in populations

and a kind of an isolated

um

interstellar

cloud

again it's unlimited time and maybe

there's no problems with distance but

you need to have

a certain frequency of generational time

to generate a serious level of

complexity

um and

i just have a feeling it's never going

to work

well

as far as we know so natural selection

evolution is really powerful tool here

on earth but there could be other

mechanisms so whenever

i don't know if you're familiar with

cellular automata

but complex systems that

have really simple components

and seemingly move based on simple rules

when they're taken as a whole

really interesting complexity emerges

i don't know what the pressures on that

are it's not really selection but

interesting complexity seems to emerge

and that's not well understood exactly

why is that the difference between

complexity and evolution

so some of the work we're doing on the

origin of life is is is thinking about

how does

uh well how do genes arise how does

information arise in biology

and thinking about it from the point of

view of reacting co2 with hydrogen what

do you get well what you're going to get

is

carboxylic acids then amino acids it's

quite hard to make nucleotides

um and

it's possible to make them and it's been

done and it's being done following this

pathway as well but you make trace

amounts

and so the next question assuming that

this is the right way of seeing the

question which maybe it's just not but

let's assume it is

is well how do you reliably make more

nucleotides and how do you become more

complex and better at

becoming a nucleotide generating machine

and the answer is well you need positive

feedback loops

some form of auto catalysis so

that can work and we know it happens in

biology if this nucleotide for example

catalyzes co2 fixation then you're going

to increase the rate of flux through the

whole system and you're going to

effectively steepen the driving force to

make more nucleotides

um

and this can be inherited because

there are forms of membrane heredity

that you can have and there are

effectively you can if a cell divides in

two and it's got a lot of stuff inside

it and that stuff is basically bound as

a

network which is capable of regenerating

itself

then it will

inevitably regenerate itself and so you

can develop greater complexity

but everything that i've said depends on

the underlying rules of thermodynamics

there is no evolvability about that it's

simply an inevitable

outcome of your starting point

assuming that you're able to

increase the driving force through the

system you will generate more of the

same you'll expand on what you can do

but you'll never get anything different

than that and it's only when you

introduce

information into that as a gene as a as

a kind of

small stretch of rna

which can be random stretch

then you get real evolvability then you

get biology as we know it but you also

have selection as we know it

yeah i mean i don't know how to think

about information

um that's the kind of memory of the

systems it's not

yet at the local level it's propagation

of copying yourself and changing and

improving your adaptability to the

environment

but if you look at earth

as a whole

it has a kind of memory that's the key

feature of it

in my way

it remembers the stuff it tries

like if you were to describe earth

i i think evolution is something that we

experience

uh as individual organisms

that's that's how the individual

organisms interact with each other

there's a natural selection

but when you look at earth as an

organism

in its entirety

um

how would you describe it i mean well

not as an organism

i mean the idea of gaia is is lovely

and james lovelock originally put gaia

out as a as an organism that had somehow

evolved uh and he was immediately

attacked by lots of people

and he's not wrong but he backpedaled

somewhat because that was more of a

poetic vision than than um than than the

science

the science is now called earth systems

science and it's really about how does

the the world kind of regulate itself so

it remains within the limits which are

hospitable to life and it does it

amazingly well and it is it is working

at a planetary level

of

um

of of kind of integration of regulation

but it's not evolving by natural

selection and it can't because there's

only one of it um and so it can change

over time but it's not evolving all the

evolution is happening in the parts of

the system

yeah but it's a self-sustaining organism

no it's stained by the

sun right so i mean the so you don't

think it it's possible to see

earth as its own organism

i think it's poetic and beautiful and i

often refer to the to the earth as

living planet

but it's not in in biological terms an

organism no

if aliens were to visit earth

would they what would they notice

what would be the basic unit of life

they would notice trees probably i mean

it's green it's green and blue i think

that's the first thing you'd notice is

it stands out from space as being

different to any of the other planets

they would notice the trees at first

because the ground i would i noticed the

green yes yeah

and then uh probably notice

figure out the photosynthesis and then

you notice cities second i suspect

first

they arrived at night they noticed it at

first that's for sure it depends depends

the time you uh you write quite

beautifully in uh transformers once

again i think you open the book in this

way i don't remember

from space

describing earth

it's such an interesting idea of what

earth is um you also

i mean uh hitchhiker's guide summarizing

it is harmless or mostly harmless it's a

beautifully poetic thing

you

open transformers with from space

it looks gray and crystalline

obliterating the blue green colors of

the living earth

it is crisscrossed by irregular patterns

and convergent striations

there's a central amorphous density

where these scratches seem lighter

this quote growth does not look alive

although it has extended out along some

lines and there is something grasping

and parasitic about it

across the globe there are thousands of

them

varying in shape and detail but all of

them gray angular inorganic

spreading

yet at night they light up

going up the dark sky suddenly beautiful

perhaps these cankers on the landscape

are in some sense living there's a

controlled flow of energy there must be

information and some form of metabolism

some turnover of materials are they

alive

no of course not they are cities

so is there some sense that cities are

living beings

you think aliens would think of them as

living beings well it would be easy to

see it that way wouldn't it

um

it uh wakes up at night they wake up

it's strictly nocturnal

yes

i imagine that any aliens that are smart

enough to get here would understand that

uh they're they're not living beings

my reason for

saying that is that

we

tend to think of

biology in terms of information and

forget about cells

and i was trying to draw a comparison

between the cell as a city and and the

energy flow through the city and the

energy flow through cells and the

turnover of materials

and an interesting thing about cities

is that they're not really

exactly governed by anybody

um there are

regulations and systems and whatever

else but it's pretty loose

um

they have their own life their own way

of developing over time they they

and in that sense they're quite

biological

they're not it's there was there was a

plan

after the great fire of london

christopher wren was uh was making plans

not only for saint paul's cathedral but

also to rebuild in in large parisian

type boulevards a large part of the area

of central london that was uh was was

was burned

and it never happened

because they didn't have enough money i

think but it's interesting what was in

the plan were all these boulevards um

but there were no pubs and no coffee

houses or anything like that

and the reality was london just kind of

grew up in a

set of jumbled streets and it was the

coffee houses and the pubs where all the

business of the city of london was being

done and that was where the real life of

the city was and no one had planned it

the whole thing was unplanned and works

much better that way and in that sense

the cell is completely unplanned it's

not controlled by the genes in the

nucleus in the way that we might like to

think that it is but it's it's kind of

evolved entity that uh has the same kind

of flux the same animation the same life

so i think it's it's a it's a beautiful

analogy

but i wouldn't get

too stuck with it as a as a matter of

fact see i disagree with you i i i

disagree with you i i think you're

you are so steeped

and actually the entirety of

science

the history of science is steeped

in a biological framework of thinking

about what is life and not just

biological is very human-centric too

that human

the human organism is the epitome of

life

on earth i don't i don't know i i think

there is some deep fundamental way in

which a city is a living being

in the same way that

huma

it doesn't give rise to an offspring

city

it's so i mean it's not it doesn't work

by natural selection it works by if

anything means it works by

um yeah but isn't it

itself conceptually as a

mode of being

so i mean maybe memes maybe ideas are

are the organisms that are really

essential to life on earth maybe it's

much more important about the collective

aspect of human nature the collective

intelligence than the individual

intelligence maybe

the collective humanity is the organism

and the the thing that that defines the

collective intelligence of humanity is

the ideas

and maybe the way that manifests itself

is cities

maybe uh or societies or geographically

constrained societies or nations and all

that kind of stuff i mean from an alien

perspective it's possible that that is

the more

deeply noticeable thing not from a place

of but what's noticeable doesn't tell

you how it works

i i think i mean i don't have any

problem with what you're saying really

except that

it's not possible

without the humans you know we we went

from a hunter-gatherer's type

economy if you like without cities

through to cities and as soon as we get

into human evolution and culture and

society and so on then then then yes

there are other forms of evolution

uh the forms of change

um but but cities don't don't directly

propagate themselves they propagate

themselves through human societies and

human societies only exist because

humans as individuals propagate

themselves

so there's a kind of there is a

hierarchy there and without the humans

in the first place none of the rest of

it exists it says you

life is primarily defined by the the

basic unit on which evolution can

operate and that's a really unknown

thing yes

yeah

uh and we don't know we don't have any

other better ideas than evolution for

how to create i never came across a

better idea than evolution but i mean

maybe maybe i'm just ignorant and i

don't know and there's

you know you mentioned that's automator

and so on and

i don't think specifically about that

but i have thought about it in terms of

selective units at the origin of life

and the difference between evolvability

and and complexity or just increasing

complexity but within very narrow

narrowly defined limits

the great thing about

about genes and about selection is it

just knocks down all those limits it

gives you a world of information in the

end which is limited only by

the the biophysical reality of what what

kind of an organism you are what kind of

a planet you live on and so on

and and cities and and all these other

forms that look alive and could be

described as alive

because they can't propagate themselves

can only exist in

as the product of something that did

propagate itself

yeah

i mean there's a deeply compelling truth

to that kind of way of looking at things

but i just hope that we don't miss

the uh giant cloud

among us i i kind of hope that i'm wrong

about a lot of this because i can't say

that

my world view is particularly uplifting

um but in some sense

it doesn't matter if it's uplifting or

not science is about what's what's

reality what's what's out there why is

it this way

uh and and i'm

i think there's beauty in that too

there's beauty in darkness

you write about life and death

uh sort of at the biological level is

does the question of suicide why live

does the question of why the human mind

is capable of depression are you able to

um introspect that from a place of

biology

why

our minds why we humans can go to such

dark places

why can we commit suicide

why can we

go

um you know suffer

suffer period but also suffer from

a feeling of meaninglessness of um going

to a dark place that depression can take

you is this a feature of life or is it a

bug

um i don't know i mean if it's a feature

of life then i suppose it would have to

be true of other organisms as well and i

don't know

we were talking about dogs earlier on

and they can certainly be

uh very

sad and upset and may mooch for days

after their owner died or something like

that so i suspect in some sense it's a

feature of biology

um

it's probably a feature of mortality

it's probably

but beyond all of that

i mean i guess there's two ways you

could come at it there's one of them

would be to say well

you can effectively do do the math and

come to the conclusion that it's all

pointless and there's really no point in

me being here any longer

um

and maybe that's true in the greater

scheme of things

you can justify yourself in terms of

society but society will be gone soon

enough as well and you end up with a

very bleak place just by

logic in some sense it's surprising that

we can find any meaning at all

well maybe this is where consciousness

comes in that we we have transient joy

but with transient joy we have transient

misery as well and and sometimes

with everything in biology

um

getting the regulation right is

practically impossible

you will always have a bell-shaped curve

where some people unfortunately are at

the joy end and some people are at the

misery end and

you know that's the way brains are wired

and

i i doubt there's ever an escape from

that it's the same with sex and

everything else as well we're dealing

with it whether whether you know you you

can't regulate it so

it's um

any anything goes it's all part of

biology

amen to that

let me uh

on writing

in uh

your book power sex and suicide first of

all can i just read off the books you've

written

if there's any better titles and topics

to be covered i don't know what they are

it makes me look forward to whatever

you're going to write next i hope

there's

things you write next so you first you

wrote oxygen the molecule that made the

world as we've talked about this

idea of the role of oxygen in life on

earth then wait for it

power sex suicide mitochondria and the

meaning of life

then life ascending the 10 great

inventions of evolution the vital

question the first book i've read of

yours the vital question why is life the

way it is and the new book transformer

the deep chemistry of life and death

in uh power sex and suicide

you write about writing or about a lot

of things but i i have a question about

writing

you write

in the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy

ford perfect spends 15 years researching

his revision to the guide's entry on the

earth which originally read

harmless

by the way i would also as a side quest

as a side question would like to ask you

what would be your summary of what earth

is

you're right his long essay on the

subject is edited down by the guide to

read

mostly harmless

i suspect that

too many new additions suffer similar

fate if not through absurd editing

decisions at least through a lack of

meaningful change in content as it

happens nearly 15 years have passed

since the first edition of power sex

suicide was published and i am resisting

the temptation to make any lame

revisions

some say that even darwin lessen the

power of his arguments in the origin of

species there's multiple revisions in

which he dealt with criticisms and

sometimes shifted his views in the wrong

direction

i prefer my original to speak for itself

even if it turns out to be wrong

let me ask the question about writing

both your students in the academic

setting but also writing some of the

most brilliant writings on science and

humanity i've ever read what's the

process of

writing how how do you advise

other humans

if you if you were to talk to young

darwin or the young young you

and uh just young anybody and give

advice about how to write and how to

write well about these big topics what

would you say

i said i mean i suppose there's a couple

there's a couple of

points one of them is um

what's the story

what do i want to know what do i want to

convey

why does it matter to anybody

and and very often the most

the biggest most interesting questions

um

the child-like

questions

are the

the one actually that everybody wants to

ask but don't quite do it in case they

look stupid um and one of the nice

things about being in science is you the

more the longer you're in the more you

realize that everybody doesn't know the

answer to these questions and it's not

so stupid to ask them after all yes um

so

so trying to ask the questions that

i would have been asking myself at the

age of 15 16 when i when i was really

hungry to know about the world and

didn't know very much about it and and

um

wanted to be

wanted to go to the edge of what we know

but

um

but be helped to get there i i don't

want to be you know

too much terminology and so i i want

someone to keep a clean eye on what the

question is

um

beyond that

i i've wondered a lot i've about who who

am i writing for

and that was in the end

the only answer i had was was myself at

the age of 15 or 16. 16

because

even if you're you know you can

you just don't know who who's reading

but also where are they reading it

are they reading it in the bath or in

bed or on the on the metro or or

are they listening to an audiobook

do you want to have a

you know a recapitulation

every few pages because you read three

pages at a time or or are you really

irritated by that you know you're going

to get criticism

from people who are irritated by what

you're doing and you don't know who they

are or what you're going to do that's

going to irritate people and in the end

all you can do is just try and

please yourself

and that means what are these big fun

fascinating in big questions

and what do we know about it

and and can i convey that and i kind of

learned in trying to write

um first of all

say what we know

and i was shocked in the first couple of

books how often i came up quickly

against all the stuff we don't know

uh and if you're trying to

i've realized later on in in in

in supervising various physicists and

mathematicians who are phd students and

i you know their math is way beyond what

i can do

but the process of trying to work out

what are we actually going to model here

what's going into this equation is a

very similar one to writing what am i

going to put on a page what's the

simplest possible way i can encapsulate

this idea so that i now have it as a

unit that i can kind of see how it

interacts with the other units

and you realize that well if this is

like that and this is like this then

then that can't be true

um

so you end up navigating your own path

through this landscape and that can be

thrilling because you don't know where

it's going

um

and i'd like to think that that's one of

the reasons my books have worked for

people because this sense of the

thrilling adventure ride i don't know

where it's going either

so the finding the simplest possible way

to explain the things we know and the

simplest possible way to explain the

things we don't know and the tension

between those two and that's where the

story emerges

what about the edit

do you find yourself

to the point of this

uh

you know editing dial to mostly harmless

to arrive at simplicity do you find

the edit as productive or does it

destroy the the magic that was

originally there

no i usually find i i think i'm perhaps

a better editor than i am a writer i i

write and rewrite and rewrite and

rewrite put a bunch of crap on the page

first and then see

the edit where it takes yeah

but then then there's the professional

editors who come along as well and um i

mean

in in transformer um

the editor came back to me uh after i

sent him two months after i sent the

first edition he'd read the whole thing

and he said

the first two chapters prevent a

formidable hurdle to the general reader

go and do something about it yes and

it was the last thing i really wanted

your editor sounds very eloquent in

speech yeah well this wasn't this was an

email but uh i i i i thought about it

and you know the bottom line is he was

right

and so i put the whole thing aside for

about two months

uh spent the summer this would have been

i guess last summer

uh and then turned to it with full

attention in about september or

something and rewrote those chapters

almost from scratch i kept some of the

material but

it took me a long time to process it to

work out what needs to change where does

it need to i wasn't writing in this time

how am i going to tell this story better

so it's more accessible and interesting

and in the end

i think it was still it's still

difficult it's still biochemistry but

but it has he ended up saying now he's

got a barreling energy to it and i was

you know because he'd been because he

told me the truth the first time i

decided to believe that he was telling

me the truth the second time as well and

was was

delighted

could you give advice to young people in

general

uh folks in high school folks in college

how to take on some of the big questions

you've taken on now you've done that in

the space of biology and expanded out

how can they

have a career they can be proud of or

have a life they can be proud of

gosh

that's a big question

i'm um i'm sure you've gathered some

wisdom

you can um impart

yeah just so the only advice that i

actually ever give to my students

um is

follow what you're interested in

because they they're often

worried that if they make this decision

now and and do this course instead of

that course then they're going to

restrict their career opportunities and

um

there isn't a career path in science

it's it's not i mean that there is but

there isn't um

there's a lot of competition there's a

lot of death

symbolically

um so who survives

the people who survive are the people

who

care

enough

to still do it and they're very often

the people who

don't worry too much about the future

and are able to live in the present

because if you you know you do a phd

you've competed hard to get onto the phd

then you have to compete hard to get a

post-doc job and

you have you know the next bond maybe on

another continent and it's only two

years anyway and and so and there's no

there's no uh guarantee you're going to

get a faculty position at the end of it

so and there's always the next step to

compete if you get a faculty position

you get a tenure and with 10 you go full

professor and full professor then you go

to some kind of whatever the discipline

is there's an award if you're in physics

you're always competing for the nobel

prize there's different awards yeah and

then eventually you're all competing to

i mean there's always a competition so

there is no happiness happiness does not

lie if you're looking into the future

yes and if what you're caring about is a

career then then

it's probably not the one for you

if though you can put that aside and you

know i've also worked in industry for a

brief period and uh and i was made

redundant twice so i i know that uh that

you know there's no guarantee she got a

career that way either yes

so

so

live in the moment

and try and enjoy what you're doing and

that means really

go to the

go to the themes that you're most

interested in and try and follow them as

well as you can and and that

tends to pay back in surprising ways i

don't know if you've found this as well

but i i found that

um

people will help you often if they

see some light shining in the eye

and you're excited about their subject

um

and and you know just want to talk about

it

and they know that their friend in

california's got a job coming up they'll

say go for this this guy's all right you

know

they'll they'll they'll use the network

to help you out if you really care and

you're not going to have a job two years

down the line but if you what you really

care about is what you're doing now

then it doesn't matter if you have a job

in two years time or not it'll work

itself out if you've got the light in

your eye

um and so

that's the only advice i can give and

most people

probably

drop out through that system because the

fight is just not worth it for them

yeah when you have the light in your eye

when you have the excitement for the

thing what happens is you start to

surround yourself with others they're

interested in that same thing that also

have the light if you really are

rigorous about this because i think it

does take it's it doesn't

it takes effort

to make oh you've got to be obsessive

but but if you're doing what you really

love doing then it's not work anymore

it's what you do yeah but i also mean

the surrounding yourself with other

people that are obsessed about the same

thing because

depending on that takes some work as

well yeah you know and look finding the

right yeah finding the right mentors the

collaborators because i think one of the

problem with

the phd processes

people are not careful enough in picking

their mentors those are people

mentors and colleagues and so on those

are people going to define

the the direction of your life

how much you love a thing how much i

mean the power of just like the few

little conversations you have

in the hallway

it's it's incredible so you have to be a

little bit careful in that

sometimes you just get randomly almost

assigned um

really

pursue

i suppose the subject

as much as you pursue the people that do

that subject so like both the whole

dance of it they kind of go together

really yeah they do they really do but

take that that

that part seriously and probably in the

way you're describing it

careful how you define success

because uh you'll never find happiness

in success and there's a lovely quote uh

from robert lewis stevenson i think who

said nothing in life is so disenchanting

as attainment

yeah so i mean in in some sense

the the the true definition of success

is

you're getting to do today

what you really enjoy doing just uh what

fills you with joy and that's ultimately

success so success isn't the thing

beyond the horizon the big stat the the

the big trophy the the financial i think

it's it's as close as we can get to

happiness that's not to say you're full

of joy all the time but it's it's as

close as we can get to a sustained human

happiness is by getting some fulfillment

from what you're doing on a daily basis

and if what you're looking for

is the

the the world giving you the stamp of

approval with a nobel prize or a

fellowship or whatever it is then

you know i've known people like this who

they

they're eaten away by the

by the anger kind of caustic

resentment that they've not been awarded

this prize that they deserve

and the other way if you put too much

value into those kinds of prizes and you

win them

i've got the chance to see

that it also

the more quote-unquote successful you

are in that sense the more you run the

danger of

um

growing ego so big that you don't get to

actually

enjoy the beauty of this life you start

to believe that you figured it all out

as opposed to

i think what the ultimately the most fun

thing is is being curious about

everything around you being constantly

surprised and uh these little moments of

discovery of enjoying enjoying beauty in

small and big ways all around you and i

think the bigger your ego grows the more

you start to take yourself seriously the

less you're able to enjoy that oh man i

couldn't agree more

um so you know the the summary from

harmless to mostly harmless

in hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy how

would you try to summarize

earth and um

you know if you were given

if you have to summarize the whole thing

in in a couple of sentences and maybe

throwing meaning of life in there like

what why why

why

maybe is that a defining thing about

humans that we care about the meaning

of the whole thing

i wonder i wonder if that should be part

of the the the these creatures seem to

be very lost

yes they're always asking why i mean

that's my defining question is why

it was uh

people used to made a joke i have a

small scar on my forehead from a

climbing accident years ago

uh and the guy i was climbing with had

dislodged a rock and he shouted

something he shot below i think meaning

that the rock was coming down

and uh and i hadn't caught what he said

so i looked up and smashed straight on

my forehead and um and everybody around

me

took the piss saying he he looked up to

ask why

yeah but that that's a human imperative

that's part of what it means to be human

look up to the sky and ask why

and ask why

uh so your question defined the earth

i'm not sure i can do that i mean the

first word that comes to mind is living

i wouldn't like to say mostly living but

perhaps

mostly well it's interesting because

like if you were to to write the

hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy

i suppose

say our idea

uh that we talked about the bacteria is

the most prominent form of life

throughout

the galaxy in the universe

i suppose the earth would be kind of

unique

and would require abundance in that case

yeah it's profligate it's rich it's

enormously enormously living

so how how would you describe that it's

not bacteria

it's

um

eukaryotic

yeah well i mean that's that's the

technical term but it is basically it's

uh

uh

yeah and then how would i describe that

i i've i've actually really struggled

with that term because

the word i mean there's a few words

quite as good as eukaryotic to put

everybody off immediately you start

using words like that and they'll leave

the room

a krebs cycle is another one that gets

people to leave the room

but

um

but i've tried to think is there another

word for eukaryotic that i can use and

really the only word that i've i've been

able to use is complex

complex cells

uh complex life and so on and that word

it it serves one immediate purpose which

is to convey

an impression

but then it it

it means so many different things just

everybody

that actually is lost immediately and so

it's kind of

well that's unnoticeable from the

perspective of other planets that is the

noticeable

face transition of complexity is the

eukaryotic

what about the harmless and the mostly

harmless is that kind of

probably accurate on a on a universal

kind of scale

i don't think that uh

humanity is in any danger of disturbing

the universe at the moment at the moment

which is why the mostly

we don't know depends what elon is up to

that's how many rockets i think uh it'll

be still even then a while

i think before uh before we disturb the

fabric of

time and space was the aforementioned

andrei carpathi i think he summarized

earth

as um

as a system

where you uh hammer it with a bunch of

photons

the input is like photons and the output

is rockets

see if you just

well that's a hell of a lot of photons

before it was a rocket launcher yeah

but like

you know maybe maybe in the span of the

universe it's not it's not that much

time

and so and i do wonder

you know what the future is whether

we're just in the early beginnings of

this earth

which is important when you try to

summarize it

or we're at the end

where humans have finally

gained the ability to destroy

the entirety of this beautiful project

we got going on

now with nuclear weapons with engineered

viruses with all those kinds of things

or just inadvertently through global

warming and pollution and so on

we're quite capable of i mean we just

need to slowly

i mean i think we're more likely to do

it inadvertently than than through a

nuclear war which could happen at any

time but um

my fear is

is we just don't know where the tipping

points are and we will

we we kind of think we're smart enough

to fix the problem quickly if we really

need to i think that's that's the

overriding assumption that

we're all right for now maybe in 20

years time it's going to be a calamitous

problem and then we'll really need to

put some serious mental power into

fixing it

without seriously worrying that perhaps

that is too late

and that

however brilliant we are

it's uh we missed the boat

and just walk off the cliff

i don't know i have optimism in humans

being clever

descendants oh i have no doubt that we

can fix the problem

but it's an urgent problem

and we we need to fix it pretty sharpish

and i i do have doubts about whether

politically we are capable of coming

together enough to uh

not just

in any one country but around the planet

to just i mean i know we can do it but

do we have the will do we have the the

the vision to uh to accomplish it that's

what makes this whole

ride fun i don't know

not only do we not know if we can handle

the crises before us

we don't even know all the crisis that

are going to be before us in the next 20

years the the ones i think that will

most likely challenge us

in the 21st century are the ones we

don't even expect people didn't expect

world war ii at the end of world war one

uh

well

yeah not at the end of world war one but

by the 19 late 1920s i think people were

beginning to worry about it yeah no

there's always people worrying about

everything yeah so if you focus on the

thing that people worry about yes

because there's a million things people

worry about it and

99.99 of them don't come to be of course

the people that turn out to be right

they'll say i knew all along but that's

not you know that's not an accurate way

of knowing what sean could have

predicted i think rationally speaking

you can worry about it but nobody

thought you could have another world war

the war to end all wars why would you

have another war and the idea of nuclear

weapons

just technologically is a very difficult

thing to anticipate to create a weapon

that just jumps orders the magnitude and

destructive capability

and of course we can intuit all the

things like engineered viruses

nanobots artificial intelligence

yes all the different

complicated global effects of global

warming so how that changes the

allocation of resources the flow of

energy the tension between countries the

military conflict between countries the

reallocation of power then looking at

the role of china in this whole thing

with with russia and growing influence

of africa and the weird dynamics of

europe and then america falling apart

through the political division fueled by

uh recommender systems through twitter

and facebook the whole beautiful mess

is just fun and i think there's a lot of

incredible engineers incredible

scientists incredible human beings

that while everyone is bickering and so

on online for the fun of it on the

weekends they're actually trying to

build solutions and those are the people

that will create something beautiful at

least i have

you know that's the process of evolution

it's uh

there was it all started with a chuck

norris

uh

single cell organism that went out from

the vents

and was the parent to all of us

and for for that guy or lady or both i

guess

is a big thank you and i can't wait to

what happens next and i'm glad there's

incredible humans writing and studying

it like you are nick it's a huge honor

that you would talk to me this was

fantastic this is really amazing i can't

wait

uh to read what you write next uh thank

you for existing

um

and um thank you for talking today

thank you

thanks for listening to this

conversation with nick lane to support

this podcast please check out our

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and now let me leave you with some words

from steve jobs

i think the biggest innovations of the

21st century will be at the intersection

of biology and technology

a new era is beginning

thank you for listening i hope to see

you next time