Nick Lane
Biochemist and Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry at University College London, author of The Vital Question and Transformer.
Nick Lane did not write this page.
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Their wordsIt’s possible it started multiple occasions. 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.
↗Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318youtube.com 1st of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsBut 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.
↗Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318youtube.com 2nd of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsSo, how did they do that? You may as well say that a miracle happened. I don’t believe in soup. I think what we have in a vent is a continuous conversion, a continuous growth, a continuous reaction, a continuous converting a flow of molecules into more of yourself, you might say, even if it’s a small bit.
↗Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318youtube.com 3rd of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsSo, there is no 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 the planet could be full of bacteria and nothing else.
↗Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318youtube.com 4th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsI would say pretty fundamental. I wouldn’t like to say it’s impossible for life to start any other way, but water is everywhere. Water’s extremely good at what it does, and carbon works in water especially well. And carbon is everywhere. So, those things together make me think probabilistically, if we found 1,000 life forms, 995 of them would be carbon-based and living in water.
↗Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318youtube.com 5th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsI think at the level of bacteria, not much variety. I think we would get how many times you say you want to run it a million times? I would say at least a few hundred thousand will get bacteria again.
↗Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318youtube.com 6th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsSo, 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, there’s some inevitability about the whole of the beginnings of life, in my view.
↗Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318youtube.com 7th of 22 in this recording
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Our reading
Oxygenic photosynthesis was the single greatest pollution event in the whole history of the Earth.
Their wordsSo you’re using the power of the sun to split water, take out the hydrogen, stick it onto CO2, and the oxygen is a waste product and you just throw it out, throw it away. So it’s the single greatest planetary pollution event in the whole history of the earth.
↗Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318youtube.com 8th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsI personally think that’s the single biggest invention in the whole history of life.
↗Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318youtube.com 9th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsSo 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 got much larger populations, and they never got around this problem. So why can’t they? It seems as if you can’t solve it with information alone. So what’s the problem? The problem is structure.
↗Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318youtube.com 10th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsIf 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 line them up, you’re forced into sex, to coin a phrase.
↗Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318youtube.com 11th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsIn some ways, maybe it does do good. I don’t want to make an argument for nuclear arms, but predation as a mechanism forces organisms to adapt, to change, to be better, to escape, or to kill. If you need to eat, then you’ve got to eat. A cheetah is not going to run at that speed unless it has to because the zebra is capable of escaping. So it leads to much greater feats of evolution would ever have been possible without it, and in the end, to a much more beautiful world.
↗Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318youtube.com 12th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsBut the thing is, you can’t have this if you don’t have an oxygenated planet because it’s all, in the end, it’s about how much energy can you extract from the food you eat? And if you don’t have an oxygenated planet, you can get about 10% out, not much more than that. And if you’ve got an oxygenated planet, you can get about 40% out.
↗Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318youtube.com 13th of 22 in this recording
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Our reading
Their wordsSurvival of the fittest, if you just go back to that old phrase, means death of the weakest. Now, what’s fit? What’s weak? These are terms that don’t have much intrinsic meaning, but the thing is, evolution only happens because of death.
↗Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318youtube.com 14th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsMorally, we cannot base society on the way that evolution works.
↗Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318youtube.com 15th of 22 in this recording
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Our reading
AI will out-think us, but it will not become conscious, because consciousness is a property of life.
Their wordsBut in terms of what we value the most as humans, which is to say our feelings, our emotions, our sense of what the world is 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.
↗Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318youtube.com 16th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd I had suggested that that’s linked to the electrical fields on the membranes themselves and that they give some indication of how am I doing in relation to my environment as a real-time feedback on the world.
↗Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318youtube.com 17th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsDo 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? That’s what consciousness is really doing in my view.
↗Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318youtube.com 18th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd 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.
↗Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318youtube.com 19th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsWell, the universe is very big, but not as many as most people would like to think is my view, because the idea that there is a trajectory going from simple cellular life like bacteria, all the way through to humans, seems to me there’s some big gaps along that way, that the eukaryotic cell, the complex cell that we have is the biggest of them.
↗Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318youtube.com 20th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsI don’t think there’s a big mystery. There’s lots of details that need to be filled in. The big mystery in biology is consciousness.
↗Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318youtube.com 21st of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd cities and all these other forms that look alive and could be described as alive, because they can’t propagate themselves can only exist as the product of something that did propagate itself.
↗Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318youtube.com 22nd of 22 in this recording