Thank you both. One of the best podcasts in this series. Clarity, engagement (mutual respect shines through), insights and perspective. Thanks to Profs. Lane and Carroll.
Big fan of Nick Lane here!! His books read like investigative suspense novels! (Even the one written in 2002, "Oxygen: The Molecule that Made the World" is an epic tome, IMHO, about everything related to oxygen on Earth, and is hugely educational, even though some info had been updated since he wrote it - wish he would write a "new updated edition"!! 😍) Can't wait to get my hands on his new book!!
I’m very excited to hear about electron transfer and charge flow, as I’m a chemist who earned my doctorate studying electrochemical reactions and systems. This topic doesn’t come up much in popular culture except when disguised in discussions of batteries. Oxidation-reduction reactions are central to most processes in the cell & biochemists rely heavily on electrochemists, frequently without their awareness. I like that this guy knows what he’s talking about. Biology can be said to be applied chemistry.
Nick Lane "The Vital Question" is not an easy read if you're a biochemistry lamen such as I .. but it's interesting and packed with information on the processes of life formation
This is a very underrated episode. I feel the title is not selling the topic well. Stuff related to the origin of life seems to be much more clickbaity.... and it is an appropriate title here since it is giving a perspective different from the more pop-science-mainstream information perspective.
I am a little surprised that Mr. Lane didn't also mention not hydrogenation of nitrogen which is similarly important because without a geochemical mechanism for this reaction to form ammonia, the chances of forming amino acids in large quantities and concentrations is small. Man tried for 100's of years before being successful because the conditions required to force the reaction are found at extremely high pressures and temperatures which only occur naturally deep within the earth or in electrical discharges, lightning. Also once formed ammonia reacts easily with water to form a basic solution containing ammonium hydroxide which is probably the source of the alkaline solution which carries hydrogen to hydrothermal vents
I never went further than 7th grade in my education but when I listen to nick lane I seem to get it I couldn’t explain it to anyone else but the more I listen to him the more life makes sense on a subliminal level 🤔
That means you have quite a bit of smarts naturally so don’t worry..be a life time learner. It doesn’t matter how far you went in school because you are still growing. Edit: it never stops. Even when you are in your 90s keep learning. Doesn’t have to be physics. (But that is ok too) Follow what you love
Wonderful interview Sean. To add to so many. I do wonder though, when are you going to chat with Lee Cronin? Wouldn't that make a good follow up to this? I can only hope!
hey, you are talking here about life by considering it as a set of local biochemical processes taking place on a planet orbiting near a sun, but we can clearly see processes similar to biological life (as a irreversible growing complexity of baryonic matter structures) obeying the same fundamental laws of physics starting from the very beginning when the observable universe poped-up into existance about 14 billion years ago.. Sean, can you have a talk on the subj with a deeper view on life as a process which is deeply embedded into the fundamental nature of physical reality in the form of the observable universe? for instance, a cosmologist Valery Vanchurin has some fresh ideas which he published recently together with the team including known biologists. "Toward a theory of evolution as multilevel learning."
@@koalanights yeah, the idea is spreading in the air) life is a fundamental process in the basics of the observable universe. although the idea is not new its deeper serious development by physicists started not very long ago. i can add the recent paper by Stephon Alexander, Lee Smolin et all on The Autodidactic Universe. the problem in the book you've mentioned is that Bobby Azarian wrongly thinks that life is related with physical processes far from equilibrium which were under the research by Ilya Prigogine. life can be understood and described within the approach of classical thermodynamics as physics of complex systems in quasi-equilibrium states, whereas the idea of Bobby Azarian (and of many others who investigate the origin of life) is misleading. but fundamentally life is a quantum mechanical non-local phenomenon therefore classical physics isn't enough for its understanding.
I'm not sure I understood when Nick said that CO2 doesn't dissolve in alkaline fluids. Does it not readily dissolve to form bicarbonate: CO2 + OH- -> HCO3-? Edit: ah I think I know what he's getting at. It does indeed dissolve, but immediately precipitates as a metal carbonate.
Wonderful, but when you dove to Eukaryotes, you skipped the question that I was counting on a physicist to ask. What is that transition from a sphere of lipids in a pore of a rock to a free standing sphere of something? Is it like bubbles forming, and too much stuff gets pulled inside the sphere and somehow a child gets squeezed out of a crack in the pore? Does this happen for milennia, just floating around and degrading until they start having enough RNA to copy themselves?
at 30:00 he mentions being unable to imagine how a half ATPsynthase could possibly work, except for the fact that were pretty sure we know. it evolved from flagella that in turn evolved from a simply protein spike that happens to be rotationally symmetric. this little example really pulls down essentially everything he says on this topic...
But these non-traditional explanations of how RNA evolved is still pure natural selection, no? if the random RNA codes for proteins favorable to survival / replication, it survives, otherwise it doesn't..
physics is applied math... biology is applied chemistry... but don't tell this to physicists nor biologists the problem of vocabulary happens to anyone... at 11:41 nicholas says "things that make up life... which is basically turning gases into matter"; I guess he wanted to say "turning gases into solids"?... go figure 🙂; at 16:11 it gets better: "it's basically turning gases into 'core molecules of life' " then at 26:40 he feels more adventurous and says: "that's effectivelly what life is doing [...] drive this reaction between hydrogen and co2 to make the organic molecules and drive in effect 'growth' converting hydrogen and co2 in the environment into more of you" !!! Sean thinks he doesn't need more H & CO2... funny guy
