Life in a Barrel

This week, in an episode we first aired in 2022, we flip the Disney story of life on its head thanks to a barrel of seawater, a 1970s era computer, and underwater geysers. It’s the chaos of life. Latif, Lulu, and our Senior Producer Matt Kielty were all sitting on their own little stories until they got thrown into the studio, and had their cherished beliefs about the shape of life put on a collision course. From an accidental study of sea creatures, to the ambitions of Stephen J Gould, to an undercooked theory that captured the world’s imagination, we undo the seeming order of the living world and try to make some music out of the wreckage. (Bonus: Learn how Francis Crick really thought life got started on this planet). EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Latif Nasser, Matt Kielty, Heather Radke, Lulu Miller and Candice WangProduced by - Matt Kielty and Simon Adlerwith help from - Arianne WackOriginal music and sound design contributed by - Matt Kilety, Simon Adler, Alan Goffinski, and Jeremy Bloom EPISODE CITATIONS: Articles - Chaos in a long-term experiment with a plankton community (https://zpr.io/j6sYXKfDzPCG), by Benincà, E., Huisman, J., Heerkloss, R. et al. Nature Chaos theory discloses triggers and drivers of plankton dynamics in stable environment (https://zpr.io/qHKENA3SJ8ML), by Telesh IV, Schubert H, Joehnk KD, Heerkloss R, Schumann R, Feike M, Schoor A, Skarlato SO. Sci Rep. Books - Full House (https://zpr.io/pMQZfyPcRzD4), by Stephen Jay Gould Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? (https://zpr.io/pPVNugUKWpi4), by David M. Raup Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline (https://zpr.io/YBjJxuXjydPN), by David Sepkoski The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life (https://zpr.io/LzfueEqUWNHb), by Nick LaneLife Itself: Its Origin and Nature (https://zpr.io/KPZf57eEVMBX), by Francis Crick Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Hey, it's Molly. Before this episode starts, I want to let you in on a little secret, which is that Radiolab is doing an Ask Me Anything about our recent episode Snail Sex Tape. So the AMA is going to be with myself and our producer Mona Medgawker, who is like a snail expert, a sn-expert. And you can ask us anything, how the episode got made, how we came up with the idea, do snugs really exist? So come to the AMA on April 16. Now, the catch is, in order to come, you need to be a member of the lab. So if you're not a member of the lab, go sign up now, fools,

• 0:41Speaker 00

  so you can come see us. Go to radiolab.org/join, radiolab.org/join, use code SNAIL, so you get a discount on your first year of membership. And as a thank you for signing up right now, we will send you an enamel snail pin that we are about to drop. It's very cool. We all want it on our jean jackets. So I can't wait to see you April 16. And until then, we have a really great episode for you today. It is a story Lulu and Latif reported back in 2022, all about the chaos and messiness of life. And I'm talking life with a capital L, like the kind that evolution gets involved in. So let's go listen.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, wait, you're listening. Okay. All right.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  You're listening to Radiolab.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  Radiolab.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  From...

• 1:38Speaker 01

  WNYC.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Rewind.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  Okay, so let me just, because I also don't entirely know what's going on.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  I'm Lulu Miller.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  I'm Latif Nasser.

• 1:52Speaker 00

  And we also have with us...

• 1:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  Producer Matt Kilty.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  We have three different pitches.

• 1:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're gonna, you guys are the-

• 1:59Speaker 02

  Wow, we're doing three different things?

• 2:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, but mine's very little, but I need, you gotta leave me 15 minutes at the end.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  15 minutes, okay, and then- Okay, a little context, a while back, the three of us found ourselves in a studio together because our editor, Sorin, he knew that we were independently working on these three different stories.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  Okay, it's about like-

• 2:16Speaker 02

  Oh, so you don't know that, Lulu, you do know the stories or you don't?

• 2:19Speaker 03

  No, I don't know any of them. And unbeknownst to us at the time, he decided that each of our stories pitted chaos versus order in a way that could upend some of our deepest beliefs about how life works.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:34Speaker 03

  And so he wanted to just get us in the ring together.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  It's a cage match. It's a story cage match.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, and we'll get to all that, but uh-

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Should I start? Yeah.

• 2:42Speaker 03

  Uh, Latif has got story number one.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  All right, okay, so we're starting at the, the University of Rostock in Germany.

• 2:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, the story started here in Rostock.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  With this ecology professor named Hendrik Schubert. Did I pronounce that right?

• 2:57Speaker 04

  Absolutely, great. You got it.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  So back in the early 80s, Hendrik finishes his undergrad degree in ecology at Rostock, studies in a couple of different departments there, goes on to teach for a while at a different university.

• 3:08Speaker 04

  And then by chance, I got the professorship here in Rostock in my former department.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  He came back home.

• 3:14Speaker 04

  It was really by chance I never dreamed of.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  But the job was department chair, so basically now he was gonna be the boss of his former teachers.

• 3:23Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 3:24Speaker 03

  Awkward.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's kind of a funny dynamic, right? Anyway, one day, he walks into this temperature-controlled lab that they have there, and he sees one of his old professors.

• 3:33Speaker 04

  Uh, mentor of mine, Reinhard.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  Reinhard Herklos.

• 3:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, my name is Reinhard Herklos and-

• 3:40Speaker 02

  And right next to Reinhard, he also sees, much to his surprise-

• 3:44Speaker 04

  I saw this barrel.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  A bright blue 100-liter barrel.

• 3:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, my barrel for my experiments.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  And Hendrik, Hendrik knew this barrel.

• 3:54Speaker 04

  When I was still a student and we had a practical course where we-

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Because as an undergrad, he had done this experiment with Reinhard, where they had filled these barrels full of seawater.

• 4:03Speaker 05

  Recce Schwarter from a lagoon of the Baltic Sea called

• 4:07Speaker 02

  And they were tweaking the nutrient levels just to watch how it would affect the, you know, tiny microorganisms living in the water.

• 4:15Speaker 05

  Like copepods, zooplankton.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  But it was a simple little experiment that had only lasted for two weeks and, and now, more, you know, a decade later, Reinhardt still had that barrel, you know, just sitting there.

• 4:27Speaker 05

  So I asked Reinhardt, hey, what are you, what are you doing with this? And he told me.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  So Reinhardt then tells him the story.

• 4:34Speaker 05

  So I can go back to the late eighties.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  So a few months after the initial experiment in 1989, something unthinkable happened.

• 4:44Speaker 05

  The big jump in history.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  The Berlin Wall fell.

• 4:49Speaker 05

  The Berlin Wall fall.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  Rostock was in East Germany and all of a sudden just felt like overnight, everything changed. The currency changed, the head of state changed, the university changed its name, its curriculum. Like all these very specific things about Reinhardt's day to day life, all of a sudden just changed.

• 5:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's the cultural shock.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Cut to six months later, June 1990, in all the chaos, Reinhardt had totally forgotten about the barrels. Until one day, a colleague of his in his department, wanted to do a different experiment and so came to him and was like, hey, could you, it was bugging him, like, could you just get those barrels out of there?

• 5:27Speaker 05

  I was asked to, to remove this barrels for their own experiment.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  So he does it one by one. So he's like, takes the one, he like shimmies it over, he dumps it out.

• 5:36Speaker 05

  Empty the water and wash out the city.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Takes the other one. So he started doing that and then he gets to the control barrel, which is the one in the experiment that they, you know, they had done nothing to. It was just sitting there under a light source, right? As a comparison for the other barrels where they were tweaking things.

• 5:51Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  And like, for some reason, he's about to tip it over and then he stops himself. And he's like, you know what? Let me just like, take a little sample of this and look under a microscope and see what's, what's actually like in this barrel.

• 6:03Speaker 05

  Is there still life in it or is it not in it?

• 6:05Speaker 02

  And so he looks at it and he's totally dumbstruck by what he sees.

• 6:11Speaker 05

  Sample filled with many, many organisms with zooplankton and algae and so on.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  I mean, he hadn't even touched this thing in months. Nobody had.

• 6:20Speaker 05

  I, I thought that there will be nothing, just more or less dead.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  But when he looks, he sees that it's, it's not just alive, it's thriving. There's like tons of different species.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  So there are phytoplankton, these are like little plants and a lot of them are green. Zooplankton, which are basically like the animal-y type of plankton, some of which eat the phytoplankton, some of which eat the other zooplankton. And then there are bacteria, which are basically like the equivalent of the mushrooms or the whatever that are recycling the whole system. Unwittingly, he had created a little natural world.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Quick question and clarification. Did he create it or did he just preserve it? Yeah. I think it's like a semantic thing. That's what I love. Like, sure. So maybe he didn't create it, but he like- He sustained it. He didn't sustain it, because he didn't touch it. It just happened. It's like a thimble of ocean that he got, and somehow this thimble of ocean is continuing to live. Okay, cool. Okay. So also, when he sees that it's alive, part of the other reason that it excites him is that, at that time, in the 80s and 90s, there was this kind of open question in the field of ecology about the natural course of an ecosystem. And I'm kind of like bastardizing the question in a way that I understand it, but this is basically,

• 7:43Speaker 02

  I think, what it is. If you could just give an ecosystem the basic things it needs, right? Like sunlight and space and whatever, but there were no humans around to mess with it, you know, no comets, no earthquakes, no outside confounding factors, what would happen? What would that ecosystem do? Huh, cool. Okay. And there's sort of two options here. You know, like, it might be that all the creatures get, you know, to some certain population level and with a bit of eating one another and more being born over here, and then it basically stabilizes. You know, beyond the day-to-day up and downs, it basically is like a line in the end. Like a never-ending line of harmony? Yeah. Okay.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  Or maybe, would you see, like, more like a cycle? Like, there would be more of one thing for a while, and it would dominate for a while, but then it sort of crashes, and because there's not enough of another thing for it to eat, and then another thing takes over, and then instead of like, so in this case, instead of like a line, what you have is a circle.

• 8:43Speaker 03

  A circle of life.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  That's right. That's right. It's what Mufasa says in The Lion King. The circle of life. That's the song, right? So two options, line or circle, which are kind of just two flavors of balance.

• 8:57Speaker 05

  The prevailing view was that when they are left alone, the nature tend to get balanced.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  But here, in this barrel, Reinhardt thought, I have the perfect opportunity to answer this question. I've got an ecosystem that's totally untouched by humans. And the species in that ecosystem are born, reproduce and die at a super quick clip. So in just a few months' time, I'll be able to see like hundreds of generations' worth of transformation.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  And so he starts tracking how the various species are doing. Week after week, he's like interrupting Christmas with his family because he's like, I gotta go, sorry. Looking at and scrutinizing like a glass of water over and over and over again. And everyone's like, this is the most boring thing. Like even his colleagues who are like scientists who do boring other stuff.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  I gotta go check in on my stale water.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  Exactly. They are all like, this is like, they're like, what even is this experiment? But from another way, it's like, he is a god overseeing a tiny universe where he is watching it. And it's like generations are passing in effectively the blink of an eye for him. And he's watching this like very dramatic story unfolding. But he's trying to figure out like, what exactly is the shape of it? Like, what is the plot?

• 10:23Speaker 03

  He's like, am I in a suspense movie? Am I in an apocalypse?

• 10:27Speaker 02

  That's exactly what's happening. And he can't figure it out because what he is seeing? It's like a microbial Game of Thrones or something that he's like watching. Like the species that are there, they're booming, they're crashing. One type of creature could be the dominant species in the barrel for hundreds of generations. And then just, it's a blip from then on. Like it just crashes and then it never comes back.

• 10:51Speaker 07

  It's like Rome rises, things are gonna be on top of the world forever. And then the barbarians come in and they're like, oh, hell no, it's Germany now.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Right, right, right. And he watches this play out in this barrel for over six years, waiting for the harmony.

• 11:08Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  And he just never.

• 11:14Speaker 03

  It never came?

• 11:15Speaker 02

  It never came. No line, no circle.

• 11:21Speaker 05

  In this nutshell, often small ecosystem, nature is chaos, chaos, chaos.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  What Reinhardt had discovered in this barrel was that this tiny ecosystem, when left to its own devices, was completely chaotic.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  So what does that mean, mean? Like, is that saying it's just booming and busting at random? Or does that mean?

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Well, so.

• 11:44Speaker 08

  First of all, maybe I should tell you a little bit about chaos.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  Please.

• 11:48Speaker 08

  Because, because for most of the people, chaos is just total random, but it's not.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  This is Alisa Beninka.

• 11:55Speaker 08

  I'm Alisa Beninka, and I'm a theoretical ecologist.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  Reinhardt brought her in to analyze his data. And she says the way to think about chaos is not whether it's random or not, but to what extent we can predict what's going to happen.

• 12:08Speaker 08

  So actually, a chaos is a system which is high predictability on the short run, but cannot be predicted in the long term. And the weather is actually the best example for that. Meteorologists can do forecasts up to two weeks.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  After that, they're no better than you or I trying to predict the weather. And in the case of this barrel.

• 12:30Speaker 08

  Species could be predictable for around 15, 30 days. And after that, you couldn't know who is going to be in advantage.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Huh. So it's not like, you know, things are just happening completely randomly for no reason whatsoever. It's just that we, like, like it's beyond us to see why things are happening or what's going to happen, which to Reinhardt, you know, suggested there's no line, there's no circle. Like harmonious natural balance, that's all BS. Like, at any moment, the natural equivalent of the Berlin Wall could fall and just upend the whole system.

• 13:17Speaker 04

  He told me I never have seen a stable state.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  So when Hendrik, the student-turned-department-chair, ran into Reinhardt and his barrel, Reinhardt told him about all of this data he collected.

• 13:28Speaker 04

  Sometimes I had a stable state for some weeks or even months, but then suddenly the system shifted again and I decided to follow up.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  And then with the help of Elisa and others, Reinhardt gets his work published in Nature. And according to Hendrik, there was this immediate blowback from some other ecologists.

• 13:50Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Because it summed its nose at this whole field of study.

• 13:54Speaker 04

  If this is true, why should we do any research anymore?

• 13:58Speaker 02

  If we're trying to bring a system back to order and you're saying there's no such order to begin with, what the hell are we even doing?

• 14:06Speaker 04

  Well, if there is chaos in nature, why do we do restoration or whatever?

• 14:11Speaker 02

  But Hendrik, he was also skeptical of the result for scientific reason. Because even if Reinhardt found chaos inside this one barrel...

• 14:21Speaker 04

  It doesn't mean that chaos is something mandatory. He showed that there might be chaos.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Hendrik is like, "I'm redoing this whole thing."

• 14:33Speaker 09

  Ah, really?

• 14:34Speaker 02

  "Let's see what happens." So this time, he repeats the experiment.

• 14:38Speaker 04

  Similar setup and improved setup.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  Tried to control for all possible variability.

• 14:43Speaker 04

  To get our best, let's say.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  And...

• 14:46Speaker 04

  For a year, twice.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  With eight barrels this time. They scoop and measure, scoop and measure, scoop and measure.

• 14:54Speaker 04

  Et cetera.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  What did you and your colleagues find?

• 14:58Speaker 04

  We had signs of chaos in some of the vessels and in some of the compartments tested.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  So not all eight?

• 15:07Speaker 04

  Not all and not always the same.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  Like when there was chaos, it was playing out in different ways in the different barrels, which provides me at least with a little sigh of relief because in some ways it's saying, like, we still don't know.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  Is it just now like a multiverse of chaos where we can't even tell if it's gonna be chaotic or when it's gonna be chaotic? Like, I just see deeper, deeper, deeper chaos, which, you know, which, fine, I'm okay with.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  Really?

• 15:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  For me, it was, for me, reading about this study, I found it personally, I found it quite jarring. I think you really, I really wanted there to be like a hidden order to everything that is not about us, that has nothing to do with us, where things make sense. And, and for that not to be there, I think is very unsettling. Like, when we do conservation or restoration or whatever, it just feels like you'd be throwing your hands up.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  My thought was like, if the order is gone, if there is no guaranteed harmony, that actually makes conservation work even more important. It's like if we don't intervene and protect the order, it's not guaranteed.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  Who cares about your choices if it's chaos anyway? If it's, if there are things that are beyond your control that are gonna, that are gonna

• 16:24Speaker 03

  Happen.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  Screw it all anyway.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  It's like the idea of the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. I don't think it does, which is terrifying. So what you, you have to fabricate a form of justice. And yeah, there's a pandemic.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  Wait, can I interrupt you?

• 16:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  Okay, write that version of The Lion King. See how many kids go to see that.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  Okay. Ready?

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, do it. Go, make the song. Elton John, go for it.

• 16:50Speaker 03

  Okay. Numanaya, singing Numanaya.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  I'm very excited to hear what's going next here.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  Simba, based on the work, as confirmed by Reinhardt, there is no delicate harmony awaiting you. And if you don't choose wisely and show respect to your fellow creatures and plants and bacteria and fungi, everything will die. The balance is not delicate, the balance is not there at all.

• 17:25Speaker 03

  And the song is not the circle of life. It's the giant abyss of No Promise's vortex of life.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  But then why are we gonna watch any of the rest of the movie? Like, even if you're a Lion King, your lion kingdom is going to, like, the Roman Empire, it's gonna crumble and fall, and like, who cares?

• 17:45Speaker 03

  I for sure think that's coming. I think we're probably out of here pretty soon, but let's make it decent for the other humans and creatures that will get to live in this short future. Sure, yes.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Okay, so that was round one of our Chaos Off.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we're gonna take a quick break, and you can use that time to really ruminate on whether you believe chaos is totally empowering and great.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  Or has let all the air out of your spiritual balloon.

• 18:23Speaker 03

  And then when we come back, round two, we've got another SmackDown: Oriverse Chaos coming up from producer Matt Giltie.

• 18:47Speaker 10

  Holsters are gearing up to get a bad rap yet again, but they do more than sometimes miss on election outcomes.

• 18:53Speaker 11

  People want to raise taxes on the rich. I can tell you that definitively because we know it from polling. And if we lose trust in polls, we have no way to understand what Americans want to be done.

• 19:07Speaker 10

  On this week's On the Media from WNYC. Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts.

• 19:18Speaker 12

  Lulu.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  Latif, Radiolab.

• 19:20Speaker 12

  And we're back.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  With Matt.

• 19:22Speaker 07

  Okay, so, my turn?

• 19:23Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:24Speaker 07

  I think I see how these things go together. Because Latif has this little barrel ecosystem that was in chaos, which is not totally random, but is like a weird wildly fluctuating thing. But I have a story that kind of like steps that up. Because we found a part of life, you could argue the most important part, where it looks like things are actually fully, completely random. And I say "we" because... Hello.

• 19:53Speaker 12

  Hi, can you hear me?

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Hi, Heather, we can hear and see you.

• 19:56Speaker 07

  I reported this story out with our contributing editor, Heather Radke.

• 20:00Speaker 12

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 20:01Speaker 07

  And Heather actually first heard this story from this guy, Chris Hoff.

• 20:04Speaker 13

  Thank you, Heather.

• 20:05Speaker 12

  Who's a philosopher of science at Case Western Reserve University. Chris, how did we come to this story? You kind of, you wrote me an email and said...

• 20:14Speaker 13

  I have a great story for you.

• 20:16Speaker 12

  Yeah, you're like, "I got a hell of a tale."

• 20:18Speaker 13

  Exactly. Crap in your seatbelt.

• 20:22Speaker 07

  Okay, so we're going back in time...

• 20:24Speaker 12

  To some big collars, cool music.

• 20:26Speaker 07

  Back to late 60s, early 70s, and to this guy... Professor Golds, the floor is yours. Stephen J. Gould.

• 20:34Speaker 14

  I want to start by presenting the basic argument in a somewhat abstract form.

• 20:39Speaker 12

  Maybe you've heard of him.

• 20:40Speaker 14

  Darwin, in fact, never said that.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Oh, he's the greatest. He's one of the best science writers of all time. In his new book, Full House...

• 20:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, he wrote some big deal books. Mismeasure of Man is One.

• 20:49Speaker 12

  Wrote a lot about evolution.

• 20:50Speaker 14

  The fundamental principles of Darwinian theory.

• 20:53Speaker 12

  A lot about the history of science.

• 20:54Speaker 07

  But before Gould was a public thinker, he was just a young man who really loved fossils.

• 21:04Speaker 12

  He had like the kind of classic moment...

• 21:05Speaker 13

  Where his dad took him to the American Museum of Natural History.

• 21:08Speaker 14

  When I was four or five.

• 21:10Speaker 13

  To haul dinosaurs.

• 21:11Speaker 12

  He sees the T-Rex.

• 21:12Speaker 14

  I remember standing under the Tyrannosaurus, and a man sneezed. I thought the Tyrannosaurus had come to life and was about to devour me, but at that moment of fear, I just let fascination creep in.

• 21:30Speaker 13

  He was like absolutely hooked.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  Oh, I didn't know that. That's cute. That's.

• 21:33Speaker 07

  And Gould says, after that moment, this fascination with fossils just started to unlock all these questions.

• 21:39Speaker 14

  Questions like, why are we here on this earth? What are we related to? How is the earth built? What has its history been through time? What's been the pageant of change over this immense span of years?

• 21:53Speaker 12

  So Gould felt himself drawn to the field of paleontology.

• 21:56Speaker 07

  The study of fossils.

• 21:57Speaker 12

  But that actually became kind of a problem for him.

• 21:59Speaker 13

  Because paleontology was not really seen as like a real science.

• 22:04Speaker 07

  You don't really get to answer big fun questions in paleontology.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  You kind of look at a lot of fossils.

• 22:09Speaker 13

  Yeah, Heather, you described it as stamp collecting. Yeah, I mean, this is the problem that Gould was attempting to confront. You know, if we're going to survive as a science, we need to find a way of contributing answers to important questions.

• 22:25Speaker 07

  So in 1967, Gould gets his PhD.

• 22:27Speaker 13

  And he's immediately hired at Harvard.

• 22:30Speaker 12

  And then one day.

• 22:31Speaker 13

  This guy, Tom Shoff, the paleontologist at the University of Chicago.

• 22:34Speaker 12

  Called up Gould, said he'd read some of his research and he'd been wondering.

• 22:38Speaker 13

  If they could do anything really cool, basically, with computers and the fossil record.

• 22:44Speaker 07

  And Gould's like, oh, that could be something.

• 22:48Speaker 12

  So the fossil record is like everything we humans know about what existed before us.

• 22:53Speaker 07

  What allowed us to start thinking about evolution? It kind of became the foundation for Darwin.

• 22:57Speaker 12

  And for this guy, Shoff, he thought, well, maybe there's actually still something in there and we could use these new powerful machines to pull it out and start answering some big, important questions.

• 23:07Speaker 14

  Why are we here on this earth?

• 23:09Speaker 07

  And so Gould.

• 23:10Speaker 14

  What are we related to?

• 23:11Speaker 07

  Was just like, yes.

• 23:13Speaker 13

  Yeah, exactly.

• 23:14Speaker 12

  Okay, so let's set the scene. It's like 1972, Shoff, Gould.

• 23:19Speaker 13

  Right, and they invite this guy, Dave Raut.

• 23:21Speaker 07

  Another paleontologist.

• 23:23Speaker 13

  Who had done these really cool studies.

• 23:26Speaker 07

  Looking at seashells and geometry.

• 23:29Speaker 12

  And then there's this fourth guy, Dan Simberloff.

• 23:31Speaker 13

  An ecologist who was really into, you know, mathematical modeling.

• 23:35Speaker 12

  So we got three paleontologists and an ecologist.

• 23:38Speaker 07

  By the way, it sounds like a beautiful beginning to a joke. Three paleontologists and ecologists and a computer walk into a bar.

• 23:43Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 23:44Speaker 12

  Okay. The winter of 1972.

• 23:47Speaker 07

  These four guys go up to Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

• 23:49Speaker 12

  Where there's this sort of holy grail of fossil records.

• 23:52Speaker 07

  This fossil record of marine life.

• 23:54Speaker 13

  Marine invertebrates.

• 23:55Speaker 12

  What are we even talking about? Like shellfish or what?

• 23:57Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 23:58Speaker 07

  mollusks?

• 23:58Speaker 13

  Yeah, mollusks, ammonites.

• 24:00Speaker 12

  Oh, sure.

• 24:01Speaker 13

  Trilobites.

• 24:02Speaker 07

  Trilobites.

• 24:03Speaker 13

  Yeah, I mean.

• 24:04Speaker 07

  Your various bites.

• 24:05Speaker 13

  Yeah, stuff on the seafloor.

• 24:07Speaker 12

  And in this book, for each species, it basically has.

• 24:09Speaker 13

  Where this first appears in the fossil record, where it disappears in the fossil record.

• 24:14Speaker 07

  So they grab this book, they go to a house somebody had.

• 24:16Speaker 12

  And then they go to the computer.

• 24:18Speaker 07

  Take their big book out, they start entering all the data. Uh huh. And then they're like,

• 24:25Speaker 07

  okay.

• 24:27Speaker 07

  What next?

• 24:28Speaker 12

  I mean, the problem, okay, like, a computer needs, like, you can't just say, "Computer, make a cool thing." You have to ask a computer a question.

• 24:35Speaker 13

  And you get the sense that they just did not know what question to ask the computer. They didn't have a good question to answer that evolutionary theorists would care about.

• 24:50Speaker 07

  So, like, for five days, they don't know what to do.

• 24:53Speaker 12

  And then, right before, it's like, the last day, Ralph is like, "What if we have the computer simulate evolution at random?"

• 25:03Speaker 07

  And why would they do that? Well, because evolution, you know.

• 25:07Speaker 13

  Is not a random process.

• 25:08Speaker 07

  Right. Darwin established, it's like, it's small incremental change over long periods of time.

• 25:12Speaker 13

  But it's not just that, right?

• 25:13Speaker 07

  Oh.

• 25:13Speaker 13

  It favors certain things.

• 25:16Speaker 07

  Right, yeah, yeah.

• 25:17Speaker 12

  And it favors, like, adaptive traits.

• 25:19Speaker 07

  Right. The, the fittest survive.

• 25:20Speaker 13

  Yes.

• 25:21Speaker 12

  And if you're not fit.

• 25:22Speaker 13

  You just die.

• 25:23Speaker 07

  You get wiped off the face of the earth because the strongest push you off.

• 25:26Speaker 12

  Because they're better suited for the niche.

• 25:27Speaker 07

  Right, they're better than you.

• 25:28Speaker 13

  Yeah, right.

• 25:29Speaker 12

  What a bunch of jerks.

• 25:30Speaker 07

  Way of the world. But, so all they had was this really simple question.

• 25:35Speaker 13

  Right. If things were just happening by chance, what would we see?

• 25:40Speaker 07

  So what they do is they make a computer program. And they start with, let's say they start with a species in this program. They don't give that species any definable characteristics, anything like that. It's just this nondescript species. Can you just name the species just because? Yeah, let's call it, let's call it bloop. Okay, bloop.

• 26:02Speaker 07

  It's just this bloop, blah, bloop. And then they program the computer so that at just, it's an arbitrary number. It's like, let's say 100 years, 100 years of bloop living. The computer's like, okay, I now assign all of you bloops one of three things at random. So thing number one could be, nothing happens to the bloops. The bloops just get to keep on living, go through to the next round. So that's one option. Or the computer could pick number two, which is a little tweak to bloop. And from bloop, you get

• 26:38Speaker 07

  bleep. Bleep. Whole new species. So it's just bloops? Then it's bloops and bleeps? Yeah. And they could just, now they could go forward and they can go to the next stage.

• 26:49Speaker 12

  So number one is nothing happens, you move on. Number two, you can change, evolve, speciate. Or the third thing that can happen is

• 26:59Speaker 12

  bye bye bloop.

• 27:00Speaker 07

  Dead. Extinct, dead, forever.

• 27:03Speaker 12

  Bye bye bloop.

• 27:04Speaker 07

  R I P. So that's it. One, two, three.

• 27:07Speaker 12

  Live, die, or speciate.

• 27:09Speaker 03

  Rock, paper, scissors, shoot.

• 27:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly. And the computer's picking them at random.

• 27:13Speaker 13

  Okay, so they produce these simulations.

• 27:16Speaker 07

  Running bloop after bloop through this program.

• 27:18Speaker 13

  Over millions of years.

• 27:19Speaker 12

  And then they go to the computer, they like print it out and all of a sudden they see something pretty bananas.

• 27:26Speaker 13

  Which is the simulations that they produced looked remarkably like the actual fossil record.

• 27:33Speaker 07

  Wait, what is that?

• 27:36Speaker 13

  I can, I can share a screen.

• 27:37Speaker 07

  Chris showed us these graphs.

• 27:39Speaker 13

  Okay, so this is a graph of the actual fossil record.

• 27:43Speaker 07

  For the sake of this, just imagine. Tree of life sort of evolution, you know, image. And you could see, okay, mollusks, they start here, they die here. And trilobites, they start here, die there.

• 27:55Speaker 12

  And then Chris showed us the graphs of these simulations.

• 27:58Speaker 13

  You see this one over here?

• 27:59Speaker 12

  Oh.

• 28:00Speaker 07

  Whoa.

• 28:01Speaker 12

  Basically, if you were to zoom in on these branches, you'd see at the end of each of the branches, the extinction points of the species. And the ones from the computer are the exact same as the ones from the fossil record. So like, bloops and bleeps are going extinct, just like trilobites went extinct, just like ammonites went extinct.

• 28:22Speaker 07

  Hmm. So for me, it's like, I'm like, huh, wow. Yeah, these do look similar. But I'm like, so what?

• 28:32Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 28:32Speaker 07

  So what?

• 28:33Speaker 13

  So I think, well, the key here is kind of seeing the resemblance that these randomly simulated groups bear to real groups. And then remembering that these are just going extinct randomly. Whereas we thought these were going extinct through natural selection.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  That is wild. So it's like, it's just like computer programming equals life.

• 28:59Speaker 07

  Computer programming of, of nothing but chance and randomness, which is totally counter to like the sort of order of natural selection.

• 29:06Speaker 12

  So natural selection would be like, you've got a bird with a like awesome beak and cool eyes and it's like can fly like a baller. And then there's like a lesser bird that's kind of a weenie bird. And it's got like me, it can't see in three dimensions. And it's like, not good at sports. It's like, basically, this is Heather bird.

• 29:27Speaker 07

  Weenie bird.

• 29:28Speaker 12

  You're really projecting yourself onto weenie bird. But in this scenario, in like the Darwinian idea, it's like athlete bird with its great eyes, its great wings, wins the evolutionary battle. Heather bird goes extinct. Weenie birds, as a kind of bird, as a species, cease to exist. But what these computer simulations were showing is that extinction doesn't work that way. And that actually Heather weenie bird and super athlete bird have equal chance of not necessarily thriving, but like.

• 30:03Speaker 13

  Existing.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  So it's like if those two species were born at the same time, weenie bird and athlete bird. It's up to chance which one would survive longer than the other one.

• 30:16Speaker 07

  Right. So fitness might explain why one species does better than another. But what they saw suggests that when it comes to extinction, it's not fitness or outcompeting one another. It's just random.

• 30:28Speaker 13

  But it's.

• 30:28Speaker 12

  It's a little hard to get your mind around.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  But wait, but I have a question. Going back to that marine, you know, there in Woods Hole. What did they all, do we know what they thought at that moment?

• 30:38Speaker 12

  Yeah, we do.

• 30:38Speaker 07

  They were, they were all totally shocked.

• 30:42Speaker 13

  Chris will just, the way he heard it is basically. When, you know, the printouts come out, they're like, oh my God.

• 30:51Speaker 07

  Also, like, we should say it's at this point that we got Chris a better microphone.

• 30:56Speaker 13

  This is a mic gain of eight.

• 30:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, Chris, you sound great.

• 30:59Speaker 07

  Anyways, but basically like they were kind of freaked out because the idea is like, if Darwin can't explain why things go extinct, then the question is, why do things go extinct? Like, is it just chance and randomness?

• 31:17Speaker 12

  And that question would send the three of them off in very different directions.

• 31:22Speaker 07

  So Gould, for Gould, he actually, this was mostly just like a big huzzah moment.

• 31:28Speaker 12

  Cause paleontology had sort of knocked down a piece of Darwin and put forward this new question.

• 31:33Speaker 13

  Yeah, exactly.

• 31:34Speaker 07

  And as Chris put it.

• 31:35Speaker 13

  It put paleontology at the high table.

• 31:37Speaker 07

  But Gould, Gould kind of leaves extinction behind.

• 31:40Speaker 14

  It goes back to what I said at the very beginning, that we want to know why we're here.

• 31:44Speaker 07

  And he starts using randomness and chance to look at things like diversity and adaptation.

• 31:49Speaker 14

  And to a large extent, it is a grand scale accident that we're here. Evolution has oddly contingent pathways. It would never run the same way twice.

• 31:57Speaker 07

  And he starts writing all sorts of books. He becomes kind of like famous Stephen Jay Gould. But then Raup, the guy who came up with the question to ask Peter, he becomes obsessed with extinction.

• 32:08Speaker 13

  And stays on that track for the rest of his professional career.

• 32:12Speaker 07

  He ends up writing this book, which I have right here. Extinction, Bad Genes or Bad Luck?

• 32:18Speaker 03

  Oh, question mark.

• 32:20Speaker 07

  To Raupe, the answer was it's both. Like, you can't discount fitness. But when it comes to extinction, there's so much other stuff happening. The climate is changing, or an asteroid hits Earth. Sea levels can rise and fall drastically. Like, all of that stuff is outside of your control. You could sort of die at any moment. So he sort of charts this middle ground view, which is probably how Gould saw it, too.

• 32:45Speaker 12

  But then you have Tom Shopp, the guy who started the whole project. And he just goes full randomness.

• 32:52Speaker 13

  Yeah, I mean, the impression that I get was like, pretty much from the word "go", he was like, randomness is the order.

• 33:00Speaker 12

  Shopp developed this idea called species as particles.

• 33:03Speaker 13

  Species as particles in space and time.

• 33:07Speaker 12

  He believed that if extinction is truly random, then as a whole, species are sort of indistinct. Like, they have no real differences between one another.

• 33:17Speaker 13

  That there are no, like, better or worse. The way he puts it, there's no inferior or superior beings. There's just ones that survive and ones that don't.

• 33:32Speaker 12

  Shopp began writing a book, trying to flush out this theory. But in 1984, at the age of 44, he was in Texas doing fieldwork with students, and he died suddenly of a heart attack.

• 33:42Speaker 07

  While reporting this story, we would, we talked to some paleontologists. And we're like, well, like, who, like, do we know? Is it sort of like the Raupe, bad genes, bad luck? Is it the Shopp, total randomness? Like, what is, what drives extinction?

• 34:00Speaker 07

  And the answer we got is that we, we still don't know. Like, we still haven't answered the question they sort of uncovered with this computer in Woods Hole.

• 34:10Speaker 03

  Well, I gotta say, I'm rooting for Shopp. I mean, if it doesn't matter how quote unquote fit or muscly or well honed or sleek our model is, that doesn't relate to how long we're gonna like hang around on earth. It means in a very real way, like we're all equally good. And for me, it creaks open all this possibility that might be waiting behind things that we look at and deem unfit or deformed or weenie bird-esque. Like, it gives, it gives all this, it returns all this possibility that gives me a sense of like thrill. Like, it makes me wanna look at the things I'm discounting, you know?

• 34:55Speaker 12

  Totally.

• 34:55Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 34:55Speaker 02

  I don't know. I, I, I'm not sure. Cause, okay, so to me, like, it's like, it's, it's this, right? Like, let's say we, we used to have this idea of fitness, where it's like, okay, there are the cool kids who are fit and they, in the old mentality to be like, yeah, like, this is like, we're, we're team human. There's some people that get picked first for team human, who are the ones who are helping us survive, and some people who get picked last for team human, who are like us. But then this, it seems like this, if it's like, oh, okay, your survival, actually, even the fittest people, like, they're not necessarily helping you survive. Those fitting, those super fit characteristics, like, you could still get hit by a bus and like, that's the way they go. So it's not like, oh, now all the people who are picked last on the team, like, they have the same chances of survival.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  But it's not like, the, the people who are picked last, they don't, they aren't now brought up to the team of the people who are picked first. It's like, the people who are picked first are now brought down to the level of the rest of us, where any of us-

• 35:51Speaker 03

  But that's the same thing.

• 35:52Speaker 07

  No, no, no, this is what I, when Lulu was talking, I'm like, no, it's, it's just a matter of perspective, and it's like, everything has the same value, which means it's like wonderful and beautiful, or everything has the same value, which is, it has no value.

• 36:03Speaker 03

  It's pointless and defeat, yeah.

• 36:05Speaker 12

  But that's kind of awesome. That's great.

• 36:06Speaker 07

  It's great, yeah, and you can sit, you can sit in either reality and, and bask in that. It's just up to you which one you wanna bask in.

• 36:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:15Speaker 12

  Did you wanna reflect, Matt, about how it had changed you?

• 36:18Speaker 02

  No.

• 36:19Speaker 12

  Yeah, do it, do it.

• 36:20Speaker 03

  I want that.

• 36:21Speaker 07

  Well, I mean, the thing, the only thing I would say is that, like, one, one of the things we learn when reporting the story is that 99.9% of all things that have ever existed on earth have gone extinct.

• 36:35Speaker 07

  Basically, basically, everything that's ever lived has eventually died. Whether or not, like, and it seems like chance is a big part of that, but we don't fully know, but whatever, they, everything dies. And I've sort of maybe naively always existed with this thought that, like, we as species are progressing towards something, like some sort of better world eventually for us and, I don't know, other species. And kind of really believed in the idea that, like, in some way, your actions, the actions that you take, the things that you do are rewarded in some way to continue to strive towards something better.

• 37:18Speaker 07

  And instead, in doing this reporting, it's like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. You, your kind, and every other kind eventually just gets wiped off the face of the earth. You have no foresight, you don't know it's coming, it just happens. And not only does it just happen, but like, in the long run, it happens to almost everything. And I guess, in some way, I'm like, I, it just feels deeply nihilistic, and I'm kind of like, well, what are we doing here?

• 37:47Speaker 03

  I got a, this is making me think of a song for The Shape. A song with a shape? I was like, okay, if it's a circle, yours is telling us, it's like, it's the clip of life, and we're all gonna die.

• 38:06Speaker 07

  Who knows where and when?

• 38:08Speaker 03

  So I even try, just eat some french fry.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  When we come back, we're gonna take the chaos question all the way back to the beginning.

• 38:35Speaker 15

  This week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, will House Democrats try once again for impeachment?

• 38:39Speaker 16

  Let's not make a fetish out of impeachment, let's not make a taboo out of impeachment. We understand it's not a panacea, but it is an essential tool in the constitutional toolbox that's always there.

• 38:51Speaker 15

  Congressman Jamie Raskin joins us next time on The New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  For our final round of this order versus chaos throwdown, just to stir the pot or the barrel a little bit, I have with me a special guest who is going to-

• 39:15Speaker 02

  In person, you have a special guest?

• 39:17Speaker 03

  Yep, they're gonna beam in now. They're beaming in? They're beaming in, so just wait. They're coming. Oh my gosh. They're coming. Oh, it's getting it!

• 39:28Speaker 17

  Hi, everyone. I'm back.

• 39:30Speaker 02

  And all is right in the world now.

• 39:32Speaker 03

  So Candace Wong is our former intern, and she is the one who got us into this final mess when she told me that we should take a closer look at how it all began.

• 39:43Speaker 17

  Do you guys have a sort of thing you think about when you think of the origin of life?

• 39:48Speaker 02

  Sure. In the ocean?

• 39:51Speaker 03

  Primordial ooze?

• 39:52Speaker 02

  It's like cauldrons of heat.

• 39:54Speaker 03

  Heather, did you just say primordial ooze? Yeah, primordial ooze.

• 39:57Speaker 02

  Oh, isn't it soup? Is that? I don't know, that's how I remember it.

• 40:00Speaker 17

  The primordial soup.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  Maybe that's right.

• 40:03Speaker 17

  So it's this idea that life somehow emerged out of this crazy, chaotic soup of chemicals, which I remembered learning about in the ninth grade.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, me too. I even learned about it on this very show a few times.

• 40:16Speaker 17

  Yeah, I remember that.

• 40:17Speaker 03

  But apparently, the reason that the primordial soup theory is so widespread all goes back to one singular experiment done in 1952 that involves a-

• 40:31Speaker 02

  Soup? Bowl of soup, can of soup, please tell me.

• 40:33Speaker 03

  Barrel of water? A cauldron, it involves a cauldron, but it's kind of barrel-esque.

• 40:37Speaker 17

  Or like a glass flask or something.

• 40:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Candace, okay, tell us about the experiment and who our guy was.

• 40:43Speaker 17

  Okay, so our guy is Stanley Miller, this grad student in 1952, in Chicago. And-

• 40:49Speaker 03

  I'm looking at Stanley Miller.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  Oh, there's a picture? Should we look at it? Like what you see?

• 40:54Speaker 03

  Somebody took a sexy pic of him. They did, it's like they really- I see Bill Nye, the Science Guy with no hair, fondling a globe full of lightning.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  This is the sexy photo you're talking about?

• 41:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:07Speaker 03

  I kind of feel like, come on. I mean, I think sexy is too much. It's too much. But look at- He's got swagger. He's got, he's got science swag.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  Anyway, Candace, sorry. Please go on.

• 41:19Speaker 17

  Yeah, so he's looking for an experiment to do and thought of this old theory from 1920s. Basically that primordial soup theory that we just talked about.

• 41:28Speaker 03

  The theory had been floating around, but it'd never been tested.

• 41:30Speaker 17

  Yeah. And so Stanley was like, okay, I'm gonna test this out.

• 41:33Speaker 03

  He took his little cauldron, filled it with all these gases.

• 41:37Speaker 17

  There's like ammonia, hydrogen, methane, all those things that people thought were in the early atmosphere. And then he was like, okay, I'm gonna create a little storm. And he

• 41:49Speaker 17

  zapped it.

• 41:50Speaker 03

  Like a bolt of the early Earth's lightning.

• 41:53Speaker 17

  Yeah, lightning, basically. And he's watching the cauldron for only a day. And then he finds that it starts turning a little pinkish. And he's like, oh, my goodness. Like, is there something going on here? And then a week later, it turns deep red, turbid red.

• 42:09Speaker 07

  Like smoky red?

• 42:10Speaker 17

  Yeah, it's like rusty, blood red water that's collecting at the bottom.

• 42:14Speaker 07

  Oh, the water's becoming red. I see, I see.

• 42:16Speaker 17

  Yeah. So it is kind of like a little, like, red soup at the bottom.

• 42:20Speaker 03

  So he pulls this red borscht out of the cauldron and he looks to see what's in there. And he finds-

• 42:27Speaker 17

  amino acids.

• 42:28Speaker 03

  amino freaking acids.

• 42:31Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 42:32Speaker 17

  The stuff of life.

• 42:36Speaker 03

  So like, does anyone know what an amino acid is?

• 42:40Speaker 07

  The ingredients of DNA, right? Like, it's like, that's the-

• 42:43Speaker 03

  No, but it is the ingredients of pretty much everything else in the cell. So the little motors and enzymes and all the stuff that actually makes a cell work.

• 42:54Speaker 18

  Yes. Amino acids, the building blocks of life.

• 42:58Speaker 18

  So it was a kind of a, almost a meme as an experiment. It's a beautiful experiment.

• 43:03Speaker 03

  So this is Nick Lane.

• 43:04Speaker 18

  Professor of evolutionary biochemistry at University College London.

• 43:08Speaker 03

  And he says that as beautiful and scientifically fantastic as Miller's experiment was, the idea that it explains the origin of life is a bit of a leap.

• 43:20Speaker 18

  You know, going back to Frankenstein, the idea that you have electricity and lightning and you zap things and they come to life, they spring to life and all you need is another lightning strike and low and behold, you know, fast forward four billion years and we've got humans. You know, if that doesn't persuade a 13-year-old, well, good, because it doesn't persuade me either. Huh. Why not? Like, what's wrong with that?

• 43:42Speaker 03

  Well, Nick says, you know, amino acids are great and all, but...

• 43:44Speaker 18

  It's another 10 or 12 steps to make something living.

• 43:47Speaker 03

  To make an actual living thing that can make copies of itself, you need RNA and DNA and a cell membrane and all the intricate goodies inside.

• 43:56Speaker 18

  This is asking a lot of spontaneous chemistry, that all of these steps should just happen without anything to direct it.

• 44:05Speaker 17

  How do you get from just a bunch of ingredients in a soup to like very structured, complicated life? That's a very, very far gap to jump.

• 44:15Speaker 03

  I mean, Miller himself worried about this during his lifetime.

• 44:19Speaker 17

  Yeah, but the most famous critic of this whole primordial soup idea was actually Francis Crick.

• 44:25Speaker 03

  As in the guy who helped discover little thing called DNA?

• 44:28Speaker 19

  Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick published an extraordinary book called Life Itself, in which he argues from a scientific point of view that life could not have got started on this planet.

• 44:40Speaker 03

  So this is a snippet from a call-in radio show where they are discussing what Francis Crick saw as a far more logical explanation of how life began.

• 44:50Speaker 19

  But to cut a long story short, he suggested it was sent here by an alien civilization from the other side of the universe.

• 44:58Speaker 18

  Yes, Francis Crick proposed what he called directed panspermia, which is to say some alien civilization put some cells, some bacterial cells on a rocket and crashed it on the earth.

• 45:09Speaker 19

  One of those spaceships crashed into the early Earth. Its cargo of bacteria spilled out and eventually became us. And that's honestly how Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize winner, saw the beginning of life on this planet.

• 45:25Speaker 07

  Yeah, seems more feasible than than a glass cauldron.

• 45:29Speaker 03

  Than a lightning bolt.

• 45:29Speaker 07

  Than a lightning bolt.

• 45:30Speaker 18

  I mean, my immediate reaction is that it's bonkers. But there's a kind of less extreme, but more real version of that, which is that organic molecules can form in space and will be delivered to Earth on meteorites. And that's definitely true. That does happen. There's no question about that.

• 45:50Speaker 03

  What?

• 45:51Speaker 18

  But if it's meteorite.

• 45:52Speaker 03

  Wait, wait, we got us. Okay, the resident person who knows less here. I mean, what?

• 46:00Speaker 18

  Well, plenty of amino acids, the same amino acids that Stanley Miller had produced, that all of those have been found and more.

• 46:07Speaker 03

  From space?

• 46:08Speaker 18

  In space, yes.

• 46:09Speaker 03

  How do you? How are they found?

• 46:11Speaker 18

  Because they arrive on meteorites or people have occasionally taken samples of things, but mostly from from meteorites.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  And Nick says it's not just amino acids.

• 46:21Speaker 18

  Bits and pieces of building blocks of DNA have been found there as well.

• 46:25Speaker 03

  That's wild.

• 46:26Speaker 18

  It's amazing that this cosmic chemistry happens and is delivered to the Earth. And so maybe they had something to do with the origin of life. Yes, maybe, maybe, but.

• 46:35Speaker 03

  For Nick, as a full way to explain the origin of life, that's still.

• 46:39Speaker 18

  You know, that's two steps too far.

• 46:41Speaker 03

  Even if amino acids or DNA apparently are always raining down from the sky, you still have those 12 other steps he mentioned.

• 46:48Speaker 18

  How do you get it to do the things that cells do, which is to say grow, divide and copy itself?

• 46:54Speaker 03

  And so his best guess for how, or rather where, life began. And he's scientific. He's like, this is just my guess. I'm not saying it is. Is a particularly hellish spot that looks very not conducive to life.

• 47:09Speaker 18

  I personally think life started in deep sea hydrothermal vents. You can get these vents anywhere. Some of them can be very deep, five or six kilometers down.

• 47:19Speaker 03

  Way beneath the surface of the water, far from any sunlight, where the heat from inside the earth is churning up and creating these craggy rock structures.

• 47:30Speaker 18

  They can be beautiful spires, pinnacles of rock, 60 meters tall. I mean, I like to think of them as Gothic cathedrals or something. They're full of. Little details, little doodles of rock, they're beautiful things to look at.

• 47:43Speaker 03

  And according to Nick, they've got the goods. They've got the materials, the right chemicals, methane and carbon and hydrogen are swirling around in the water. They've got the energy source, not lightning, but this constant churn of the earth's heat. But finally, what he thinks make them really special is their structure.

• 48:02Speaker 18

  The amazing thing about these vents is they mimic the structure of cells in that it's kind of a round space with a wall around it. And you can think of a cell as a kind of a bag of solution with a membrane around it.

• 48:19Speaker 03

  And because you've got the materials, the constant churning energy and these rock walls that kind of force everything together.

• 48:28Speaker 18

  That's making these gases react together to form organic molecules which are forming inside the pores themselves. They will form spontaneously in this kind of environment into what we call proto-cells. A little bit optimistically maybe, but effectively a membrane around a bag of water with some stuff inside.

• 48:48Speaker 03

  It's like the matter and magic you need to make life is lush there. It's like you got it all.

• 48:55Speaker 18

  Yes, it's got the right materials and it's got the structure. And I think that's what's been missing from the chemistry and it's what's missing from the soup. And it's what's missing from, you know, delivery of organic molecules from space by panspermia. It ends up in a soup. How does that soup form structure? Well, the earth itself forms the structure for you in the first place in these hydrothermal vents.

• 49:16Speaker 18

  There is a beautiful link between the geology of the planet with active volcanic systems and active turnover of the surface of the planet and the bottom of the oceans. And the way that living cells work. It's as if a living planet gives rise to living cells which have the same structure. They're like, both the planet and the cell is a little bit like a battery. It's got a positive charge outside, a negative charge inside, a membrane surrounding it. And they're both, they're both like that. And there's a lovely, lovely sense of continuity that a planet gives rise to living cells.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Wow, that is very cool. But Lulu, like you've been, you've been championing chaos this whole time and now you're serving up a story that's like, this, to me, this is like, this is order. Like, you're putting order right back at the beginning of it all.

• 50:13Speaker 03

  Well, that's interesting. I mean, what I-

• 50:15Speaker 02

  Like, the, yeah, right. Like, the soup or the panspermia are both, like, very chaotic. Like, some random thing just fell to earth, or a random lightning bolt hit a random, you know, piece of gas at the right time. Like, like, those are pretty chaotic. But, but if it's like, oh, look, there's this chimney that was being built, and there were a whole bunch of them, and they have the exactly right gradient, and the right this, and the right that, like, and then it's a very orderly thing.

• 50:39Speaker 03

  And like, the cell is a tiny planet. Hmm, I guess, I mean, I was seeing Nick's explanation as yet another loss.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:46Speaker 03

  You know, he's pointing out that our beginning, even our scientific beginning, isn't as clean of a story as we thought. You know, there was no lightning strike, no clear moment where it all began, just this slow and, like, bad breath out of a vent, churning, clumsy mix of chemicals in a dark, dank pit. To me, that, that rips away the last shred of order that I thought the, the old soup version had, you know?

• 51:17Speaker 02

  Huh, yeah. I, I don't know, because it's, like, to me, it sounds like, maybe, at the very beginning of life, there was an orderliness built right on top of the orderliness of the planet itself.

• 51:33Speaker 03

  You are making me think, if I just, if I focus on the structure of the vent and the cell, there is a sense of belonging in that. Like, the, every cell in our body looks a little like this planet.

• 51:49Speaker 03

  Maybe we don't matter and the fact that we're here is random, but we do belong.

• 52:04Speaker 20

  From the day we arrived on this planet, In darkness and far from the sun, There is more that we need Than just lightning concede More chance that it would never be done And as we fight for our place here Competing through struggle and strife

• 52:39Speaker 20

  You can't anticipate Who gets to dominate In the contest for the greatest in life

• 52:49Speaker 01

  It's the chaos of life That could bound the soul Choose despair or hope It matters not Till we lose our place On this planet's grinding It's just chaos

• 53:40Speaker 03

  Guess that's it. This episode was reported by Latif Nasser, Matt Kielty, Heather Radke, Candace Wong, and me, Lulu Miller.

• 53:47Speaker 02

  It was produced by Matt Kielty and Simon Adler, with sound and music from Matt Kielty, Simon Adler,

• 53:53Speaker 03

  and Jeremy

• 53:54Speaker 02

  Bloom.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  Bloom. Big thanks to Alan Goffinski for creating that song and Alita Goffinski for belting the heck out of it. Thanks also to Chuck Cheeseman, Sarah Luderman, Doug Irwin, Candace Wong.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  Thanks to David Sepkoski, whose book, Rereading the Fossil, we drew on for the story about Stephen J. Gould and extinction. Thank you to Nick Haddad, Ayana Johnson, Chris Klausmeyer, Laura Verhaegh, and Noel Bowlen.

• 54:20Speaker 03

  That'll do it. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.

• 54:27Speaker 21

  Hi, I'm Gabby. I'm from the Bay Area, California, and here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Naina Sambandan, Matt Kielty, Mona Mardgauker, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Khari, Natalia Ramirez, Rebecca Rand, Anissa Witsa, Arianne Whack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santas.

• 55:10Speaker 21

  Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angelia Mercado, and Sophie Semai.

• 55:21Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Maddy, and I'm from Frederick, Maryland. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.