Life in a Barrel

12:05Matt Kielty:It never came. No line, no circle. In this nutshell of a small ecosystem, nature is chaos, chaos, chaos. What Reinhardt had discovered in this barrel was that this tiny ecosystem, when left to its own devices, was completely chaotic.

12:27Lulu Miller:So what does that mean mean? Like, is that saying it's just booming and busting at random or does that mean?

12:34Matt Kielty:Well, so.

12:35Lulu Miller:First of all, maybe I should tell you a little bit about chaos.

12:38Latif Nasser:Please. Because for most of the people, chaos is just total random, but it's not.

12:44Matt Kielty:This is Elisa Beninka.

12:45Latif Nasser:I'm Elisa Beninka and I'm a theoretical ecologist.

12:49Matt Kielty: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.

12:58Latif Nasser:So actually, 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.

13:15Matt Kielty:After that, they're no better than you or I trying to predict the weather. And in the case of this barrel...

13:21Latif Nasser:Species could be predictable for around 15, 30 days.

13:24Matt Kielty:After that, you couldn't know who is going to be in advantage. Huh. So it's not like, you know, things are just happening completely randomly for no reason whatsoever. It's just that we, 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.

14:07Matt Kielty:He told me, I never have seen a stable state. So when Hendrik, the student-turned-department chair, ran into Reinhardt and his barrel, Reinhardt told him about all of this data he collected.

14:19Latif Nasser: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.

14:28Matt Kielty:And then with, you know, the help of Elisa and others, Reinhardt gets his work published in Nature. And according to Hendrik, there was this immediate blowback from other, some other ecologists. Yes. Because it sort of thumbed its nose at this whole field of study. Like, if this is true, why should we do any research anymore? 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? Well, if there is chaos in nature, why do we do restoration or whatever? But, you know, Hendrik, he was also skeptical of the result for, you know, scientific reason.

15:07Matt Kielty:Because, you know, even if Reinhardt found chaos inside this one barrel.

15:11Latif Nasser:It doesn't mean that chaos is something mandatory. he showed that there might be chaos.

15:20Matt Kielty:Hendrik is like, I'm redoing this whole thing. Really? Let's see what happens. So this time he repeats the experiment. Similar setup and improved setup. Try to control for all possible variability. To get our best, let's say. And for a year, twice. With eight barrels this time. They scoop and measure, scoop and measure, scoop and measure. Et cetera. What did you and your colleagues find?

15:48Latif Nasser:We had signs of chaos in some of the vessels and in some of the compartments tested.

15:56Matt Kielty:So not all eight? Not all and not always the same. 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.

16:13Lulu Miller:Or is it just now like a multiverse of chaos where we can't even tell if it's going to be chaotic or when it's going to be chaotic? Like, I just see deeper, deeper, deeper chaos, which, you know, which, fine, I'm okay with.

16:27Matt Kielty:Really? Yeah. 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 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.

16:54Lulu Miller: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.

17:07Matt Kielty:Who cares about your choices if it's chaos anyway? If there are things that are beyond your control that are going to screw it all anyway.

17:16Lulu Miller: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 you have to fabricate a form of justice. And yeah, there's a pandemic.

17:28Matt Kielty:Wait, can I interrupt you? Yeah. Okay, write that version of The Lion King. See how many kids go to see that.

17:34Lulu Miller:Okay. Ready?

17:37Matt Kielty:Yeah, do it. Go, make the song. Elton John, go for it.

17:40Lulu Miller:Okay. Numenaya singing Numenaya. I'm very excited to hear what's coming next year. 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.

18:16Lulu Miller:And the song is not the circle of life. It's the giant abyss of no promises vortex of life.

18:22Matt Kielty:But then why are we going to 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 going to crumble and fall. And like, who cares?

18:35Lulu Miller: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 the short future. Sure. Yes.

18:54Matt Kielty:okay so that was round one of our chaos off yeah so we're going to take a quick break and you can

19:02Lulu Miller:use that time to really ruminate on whether you believe chaos is totally empowering and great

19:07Matt Kielty:or has let all the air out of your spiritual balloon um and then when we come back uh round

19:16Lulu Miller:too. We've got another Smackdown, Order vs. Chaos coming up from producer Matt Kilty.

19:37Matt Kielty:Radio Lab is supported by Planet Visionaries, the podcast created in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. If you're feeling overwhelmed by climate headlines, here's something different, a show about solutions. It's called Planet Visionaries, hosted by Alex Honnold, who you might recognize as the climber from Free Solo and Skyscraper Live. Now Alex is turning his focus to the biggest challenge of all, protecting our planet. Every episode brings you stories that aim to prove climate optimism isn't naive. It's a strategy. You'll hear from experts and storytellers who are reshaping the future in practical and inspiring ways.

20:14Matt Kielty:Upcoming guests include Gregoire Cortine and Jocelyn Bloch, the neuroscientist and neurosurgeon duo advancing spinal cord injury treatment with groundbreaking neural implants. Episodes span the globe, from Arctic scientists and Amazon forest guardians to entrepreneurs reimagining fashion and food systems. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you're listening to this podcast. Did you ever wonder what it's like to live alone?

20:49Latif Nasser:Hidden in the woods, not speaking to a single soul for 30 years. Or wander the desert, uncover a hidden well, and dive to the bottom of the deepest waterhole for 2 ,000 miles. The Snap Judgment podcast takes you bare with amazing stories told by the people who live them. With an original soundscape that drops you directly into their shoes. Snap Judgment. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

21:43Matt Kielty: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. Hi. Can you hear me, Heather? We can hear and see you. I reported this story out with our contributing editor, Heather Racky. Yes, yes, yes. And Heather actually first heard this story from this guy, Chris Hoff.

22:08Latif Nasser:Thank you, Heather. Who's a philosopher of science at Case Western Reserve University. Chris, how did we come to the story? You kind of, you wrote me an email and said, I have a great story for you. Yeah, you're like, I got a hell of a tale. Exactly. Crap in your seatbelt.

22:26Matt Kielty:Okay, so we're going back in time to some big collars, cool music. Back to late 60s, early 70s, and to this guy, Professor Gould, the floor is yours. Stephen Jay Gould.

22:38Latif Nasser:I want to start by presenting the basic argument in a somewhat abstract form. Maybe you've heard of him. Darwin, in fact, never said that.

22:45Matt Kielty:Oh, yeah. Oh, he's the greatest. He's one of the best science writers of all time. And his new book, Full House... Yeah, he wrote some big deal books. Mismeasure of Man is one. Right.

22:53Latif Nasser:Wrote a lot about evolution. The fundamental principles of Darwinian theory.

22:57Matt Kielty:A lot about the history of science. But before Gould was a public thinker, he was just a young man who really loved fossils.

23:07Latif Nasser:He had like the kind of classic moment. Where his dad took him to the American Museum of Natural History. When I was four or five. To haul dinosaurs. He sees the T-Rex. I remember standing under the Tyrannosaurus and a man sneezed. I thought the Tyrannosaurus had come to life. It was about to devour me, but at that moment of fear, I just let fascination creep in. He was like absolutely hooked.

23:35Matt Kielty:Oh, I didn't know that. That's cute. And Gould says, after that moment, this fascination with fossils just started to unlock all these questions.

23:44Latif Nasser: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? So Gould felt himself drawn to the field of paleontology. The study of fossils. But that actually became kind of a problem for him. because paleontology was not really seen as like a real science.

24:09Matt Kielty:You don't really get to answer big fun questions in paleontology. You kind of look at a lot of fossils.

24:13Latif Nasser: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.

24:29Matt Kielty:So in 1967, Gould gets his PhD.

24:31Latif Nasser:And he's immediately hired at Harvard. And then one day... This guy, Tom Schaaf, he's a paleontologist at the University of Chicago... ...called up Gould, said he'd read some of his research, and he'd been wondering... If they could do anything really cool, basically, with computers and the fossil record.

24:48Matt Kielty:And Gould's like, oh, that could be something.

24:52Latif Nasser:So the fossil record, it's like everything we humans know about what existed before us.

24:57Matt Kielty:It's what allowed us to start thinking about evolution. It kind of became the foundation for Darwin.

25:02Latif Nasser:And for this guy Schopf, 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. Why are we here on this earth? And so Gould was just like, yes. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so let's set the scene. It's like 1972, Schopf, Gould. Right. And they invite this guy, Dave Rout.

25:26Matt Kielty:Another paleontologist.

25:27Latif Nasser:who had done these really cool studies.

25:31Matt Kielty:Looking at seashells and geometry.

25:33Latif Nasser:And then there's this fourth guy, Dan Simberloff. An ecologist who was really into, you know, mathematical modeling.

25:39Matt Kielty:So we got three paleontologists and an ecologist. By the way, it sounds like a beautiful beginning to a joke. Three paleontologists and ecologists in a computer walk into a bar.

25:47Latif Nasser:Yeah. Okay.

25:49Matt Kielty:It's the winter of 1972. These four guys go up to Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

25:53Latif Nasser:Where there's this sort of holy grail of fossil records.

25:56Matt Kielty:This fossil record of marine life.

25:58Latif Nasser:Marine invertebrates. What are we even talking about? Like shellfish or what? Yeah. Mollusks. Yeah, mollusks, ammonites. Oh, sure. Trilobites. Trilobites. Yeah, I mean. Your various bites. Yeah, stuff on the seafloor. And in this book for each species, it basically has. Where this first appears in the fossil record. Where it disappears in the fossil record.

26:18Matt Kielty:So they grab this book. They go to a house somebody had. And then they go to the computer. Take their big book out. They start entering all the data. And then they're like, okay, what next?

26:32Latif Nasser:I mean, the problem, okay, like a computer needs, you can't just say computer make a cool thing. You have to ask a computer a question. 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.

26:54Matt Kielty:So, like, for five days, they don't know what to do.

26:57Latif Nasser:And then right before, it's like the last day, Ralph is like, what if we have the computer simulate evolution at random?

27:07Matt Kielty:And why would they do that? Well, because evolution, you know... Is not a random process. Right. Darwin established it's like it's small incremental change over long periods of time.

27:16Latif Nasser:But it's not just that, right?

27:18Matt Kielty:It favors certain things. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

27:21Latif Nasser:And it favors, like, adaptive traits.

27:23Matt Kielty:Right.

27:23Latif Nasser:The fittest survive.

27:24Matt Kielty:Yes.

27:25Latif Nasser:And if you're not fit...

27:26Matt Kielty:You just die. You get wiped off the face of the earth because the strongest push you off.

27:30Latif Nasser:Because they're better suited for the niche. Right.

27:32Matt Kielty:They're better than you.

27:32Latif Nasser:Yeah, right. What a bunch of jerks. Way of the world.

27:35Matt Kielty:But, so all they had was this really simple question.

27:39Latif Nasser:Right. If things were just happening by chance, what would we see?

27:44Matt Kielty: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 it helps me? Let's call it Bloop. Okay, Bloop. It's just this Bloop, blah, Bloop. And then they program the computer so that it's an arbitrary number. It's like, let's say, 100 years. 100 years of Bloop living. And 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.

28:25Matt Kielty: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 bleep.

28:39Latif Nasser:Bleep. Bleep, bleep, bleep.

28:42Matt Kielty:Bleep. Bleep. Bleep, bleep. Whole new species. So it's just bloops. Bloop, bloop. Bloop. Then it's bloops and bleeps. Yeah. And they could just, now they could go forward and they can go to the next stage.

28:53Latif Nasser:So number one is nothing happens. You move on. Number two, you can change, evolve, speciate. Or the third thing that can happen is...

29:01Matt Kielty:Bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop. Bye-bye, bloop. Dead. Extinct. Dead. Forever. Bye-bye, bloop. R.I.P. So that's it. One, two, three. Live, die, or speciate.

29:13Lulu Miller:Rock, paper, scissors, shoot.

29:14Matt Kielty:Yeah, exactly. And the computer's picking them at random. Okay.

29:17Latif Nasser:So they produced these simulations.

29:20Matt Kielty:Running bloop after bloop through this program. Over millions of years.

29:24Latif Nasser:And then they go to the computer, they like print it out, and all of a sudden they see something pretty bananas. Which is the simulations that they produced looked remarkably like the actual fossil record.

29:38Matt Kielty:Wait, what is that?

29:40Latif Nasser:I can share a screen.

29:42Matt Kielty:Chris showed us these graphs.

29:43Latif Nasser:Okay, so this is a graph of the actual fossil record.

29:47Matt Kielty:For the sake of this, just imagine tree of life sort of evolution, you know, image. And you can see, okay, mollusks, they start here, they die here. And trilobites, they start here, die there.

30:00Latif Nasser:And then Chris showed us the graphs of these simulations. You see this one over here? Oh, whoa. 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.

30:26Matt Kielty:So for me, it's like, I'm like, huh, wow. Yeah, these do look similar. But I'm like, so what? Yeah.

30:36Latif Nasser:So what? So I think 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.

30:58Lulu Miller:That is wild. So it's just like computer programming equals life itself.

31:03Matt Kielty:Computer programming of nothing but chance and randomness, which is totally counter to like the sort of order of natural selection.

31:10Latif Nasser: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.

31:56Latif Nasser:The weenie bird. equal chance of not necessarily thriving, but like existing.

32:08Matt Kielty: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. 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 out competing one another. It's just random.

32:32Lulu Miller:It's a little hard to get your mind around. But wait, but I have a question. Going back to that Maureen, you know, there in Woods Hole, what did they all, do we know what they thought at that moment? Yeah, we do.

32:43Latif Nasser:They were all totally shocked. Crystal, just the way he heard it is basically... When, you know, the printouts come out, they're like, oh my God.

32:56Matt Kielty:Also, like, we should say it's at this point that we got Chris a better microphone. This is a mic gain of eight.

33:02Lulu Miller:Yay, Chris, you sound great.

33:04Matt Kielty: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?

33:21Latif Nasser:And that question would send the three of them off in very different directions. So Gould, for Gould, he actually, this was mostly just like a big huzzah moment. Because paleontology had sort of knocked down a piece of Darwin and put forward this new question. Yeah, exactly. And as Chris put it. They put paleontology at the high table.

33:41Matt Kielty:But Gould, Gould kind of leaves extinction behind.

33:44Latif Nasser:Goes back to what I said at the very beginning that we want to know why we're here.

33:48Matt Kielty:And he starts using randomness and chance to look at things like diversity and adaptation.

33:53Latif Nasser: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.

34:01Matt Kielty: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.

34:12Latif Nasser:And stays on that track for the rest of his professional career.

34:17Matt Kielty:He ends up writing this book, which I have right here. Extinction, Bad Genes or Bad Luck?

34:22Lulu Miller:Oh, question.

34:23Matt Kielty:mark and to route 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 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. But then you have Tom Schopf,

34:51Latif Nasser:the guy who started the whole project, and he just goes full randomness. I mean, the impression that I get was like, pretty much from the word go, he was like, randomness is the order. Schopf developed this idea called species as particles. Species as particles in space and time. 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. 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. Schott began writing a book trying to flesh out this theory.

35:39Latif Nasser:But in 1984, at the age of 44, he was in Texas doing fieldwork with students and he died suddenly of a heart attack.

35:46Matt Kielty:While reporting this story, we talked to some paleontologists and we're like, well, like who, like do we know? Is it sort of like the route, bad genes, bad luck? Is it the shop, total randomness? Like what is, what drives extinction? And the answer we got is that we still don't know. Like we still haven't answered the question they sort of uncovered with this computer in Woods Hole.

36:14Lulu Miller:Well, I got to say I'm rooting for shop. 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 going to 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 all this, it returns all this possibility that gives me a sense of, like, thrill. Like, it makes me want to look at the things I'm discounting, you know? Totally.

36:59Matt Kielty:I don't know. I'm not sure. Because, okay, so to me, like, it's this, right? Let's say 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, this is like 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, 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.

37:38Matt Kielty:So it's not like, oh, now all the people who were picked last on the team, like they have the same chances of, but it's not like the people who were picked last, they don't, they aren't now brought up to the team of the people who were picked first. It's like the people who were picked first are now brought down to the level of the rest of us where any of us. But that's the same thing. No, no, no. This is what I, when Lulu was talking, I'm like, no, 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.

38:07Lulu Miller:It's pointless and defeated. Yeah.

38:09Matt Kielty:But that's kind of awesome. That's great. 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 want to bask in.

38:19Latif Nasser:Yeah. Did you want to reflect, Matt, about how it had changed you?

38:22Matt Kielty:No. Yeah, do it. Do it. I want that. Well, I mean, the thing, the only thing I would say is that, like, one of the things we learned when reporting the story is that 99.9 % of all things that have ever existed on Earth have gone extinct. 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, everything dies. And I 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.

39:10Matt Kielty: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. 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, it just feels deeply nihilistic. And I'm kind of like, well, what are we doing here?

39:52Lulu Miller: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. Who knows where and where. So I even try just eat some french fry.

40:28Matt Kielty:When we come back, we're going to take the chaos question all the way back to the beginning.

40:38Did you ever wonder what it's like to live alone?

40:42Latif Nasser:Hidden in the woods, not speaking to a single soul for 30 years. or wander the desert, uncover a hidden well, and dive to the bottom of the deepest water hole for 2 ,000 miles. The Snap Judgment podcast takes you there with amazing stories told by the people who live them with an original soundscape that drops you directly into their shoes. Snap Judgment. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

41:13Lulu Miller:For our final round of this Order vs. Chaos throwdown, just to stir the pot or the barrel a little bit, I have with me a special guest who is going to— In person, you have a special guest? Yep, they're going to 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 gaming!

41:37Latif Nasser:Hi, everyone.

41:38Lulu Miller:I'm back.

41:39Matt Kielty:And all is right in the world now.

41:41Lulu Miller:So Candice 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. Do you guys have a sort of thing you think about when you think of the origin of life? Sure.

41:58Matt Kielty:In the ocean?

42:00Lulu Miller:Primordial ooze?

42:01Matt Kielty:It's like cauldrons of heat.

42:03Lulu Miller:Heather, did you just say primordial ooze? Yeah, primordial ooze.

42:06Matt Kielty:Oh, isn't it soup? Is that? That's how I remember it.

42:10Latif Nasser:The primordial soup. Maybe that's right.

42:12Lulu Miller:So it's this idea that life somehow emerged out of this crazy chaotic soup of chemicals, which I remember learning about in the ninth grade. Yeah, me too. I even learned about it on this very show a few times. Yeah, I remember that. 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... Soup?

42:41Matt Kielty:Bowl of soup. Can of soup. Please tell me.

42:42Lulu Miller:Barrel of water? A cauldron. It involves a cauldron, but it's kind of barrel-esque. Or like a glass flask or something. Yeah. So, Candice, okay, tell us about the experiment and who our guy was.

42:52Latif Nasser:Okay, so our guy is Stanley Miller, this grad student in 1952 in Chicago. I'm looking at Stanley Miller.

43:00Matt Kielty:Oh, there's a picture. Should we look at it? Like what you see?

43:03Latif Nasser:Somebody took a sexy pic of him.

43:05Lulu Miller:I see Bill Nye, the science guy with no hair, fondling a globe full of lightning.

43:11Matt Kielty:This is the sexy photo you're talking about? Yeah, it's kind of...

43:15Lulu Miller: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 science swag. Anyway, Candace, sorry, please go on.

43:28Latif Nasser:Yeah, so he's looking for an experiment to do. And he thought of this old theory from 1920s, basically that primordial soup theory that we just talked about.

43:37Lulu Miller:The theory had been floating around, but it had never been tested. Yeah, and so Stanley was like, okay, I'm going to test this out. He took his little cauldron, filled it with all these gases. There's like ammonia, hydrogen, methane, all those things that people thought were in the early atmosphere.

43:53Latif Nasser:And then he was like, okay, I'm going to create a little storm. And he zapped it.

43:59Lulu Miller:Like a bolt of the early Earth's lightning.

44:02Latif Nasser: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.

44:18Matt Kielty:Like smoky red?

44:19Latif Nasser:Yeah, it's like rusty, blood-red water that's collecting at the bottom.

44:23Matt Kielty:Oh, the water's becoming red. I see, I see.

44:25Lulu Miller:Yeah.

44:26Latif Nasser:So it is kind of like a little red soup at the bottom.

44:29Lulu Miller:So he pulls this red borscht out of the cauldron, and he looks to see what's in there. And he finds amino acids. Amino-freaking-acids. Wow. The stuff of life.

44:45Lulu Miller:So, like, does anyone know what an amino acid is?

44:49Matt Kielty:The ingredients of DNA, right?

44:51Lulu Miller:Well, 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.

45:03Latif Nasser:Yes. Amino acids, the building blocks of life. So it was a kind of almost a meme as an experiment. It's a beautiful experiment.

45:12Lulu Miller:So this is Nick Lane.

45:13Latif Nasser:Professor of evolutionary biochemistry at University College London.

45:17Lulu Miller: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.

45:29Latif Nasser: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 lo 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?

45:51Lulu Miller:Well, Nick says, you know, amino acids are great and all, but...

45:53Latif Nasser:It's another 10 or 12 steps to make something living.

45:57Lulu Miller: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.

46:05Latif Nasser:This is asking a lot of spontaneous chemistry that all of these steps should just happen without anything to direct it.

46:14Lulu Miller: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. I mean, Miller himself worried about this during his lifetime. Yeah, but the most famous critic of this whole primordial soup idea was actually Francis Crick. as in the guy who helped discover a little thing called DNA.

46:37Latif Nasser: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.

46:49Lulu Miller: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.

46:59Latif Nasser:To cut a long story short, he suggested it was sent here by an alien civilization from the other side of the universe. 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. 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.

47:34Matt Kielty:Yeah, seems more feasible than a glass cauldron.

47:38Lulu Miller:Than a lightning ball.

47:38Matt Kielty:Than a lightning ball. I mean, my immediate reaction is that it's bonkers. But there's a kind of less extreme but more real version of that,

47:50Latif Nasser: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. What? Okay, wait, wait.

48:02Lulu Miller:We got to... Okay, the resident person who knows less here. I mean, what?

48:09Latif Nasser:Well, plenty of amino acids, the same amino acids that Stanley Miller had produced, all of those have been found and more. From space? In space, yes.

48:18Lulu Miller:How are they found?

48:20Latif Nasser:Because they arrive on meteorites or people have occasionally taken samples of things, but mostly from meteorites.

48:27Lulu Miller:And Nick says it's not just amino acids.

48:30Latif Nasser:Bits and pieces of building blocks of DNA have been found there as well.

48:34Lulu Miller:That's wild. Yes.

48:35Latif Nasser: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...

48:44Lulu Miller:For Nick, as a full way to explain the origin of life, that's still...

48:48Latif Nasser:You know, that's two steps too far.

48:50Lulu Miller:Even if amino acids or DNA apparently are always raining down from the sky, you still have those 12 other steps he mentioned.

48:57Latif Nasser:How do you get it to do the things that cells do, which is to say grow, divide, and copy itself?

49:03Lulu Miller: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.

49:18Latif Nasser: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.

49:28Lulu Miller: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.

49:39Latif Nasser: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.

49:52Lulu Miller: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.

50:11Latif Nasser:The amazing thing about these vents is they mimic the structure of cells in that it's kind of around 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.

50:28Lulu Miller:And because you've got the materials, the constant churning energy, and these rock walls that kind of force everything together.

50:37Latif Nasser: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 protocells. a little bit optimistically maybe, but effectively a membrane around a bag of water with some stuff inside.

50:57Lulu Miller:It's like the matter and magic you need to make life is lush there. It's like you got it all.

51:04Latif Nasser: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 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. 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.

51:39Latif Nasser:It's as if a living planet gives rise to living cells, which have the same structure. 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 like that. And there's a lovely, lovely sense of continuity that a planet gives rise to living cells.

52:05Matt Kielty:Wow, that is very cool. Well, but Lulu, like 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.

52:22Lulu Miller:Well, that's interesting. I mean, what I.

52:24Matt Kielty: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 those are pretty chaotic. 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, then it's a very orderly thing.

52:49Lulu Miller:And like the cell is a tiny planet. I guess. I mean, I was seeing Nick's explanation as yet another loss. 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 rips away the last shred of order that I thought the old soup version had, you know?

53:26Matt Kielty:Yeah, I don't know, because 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.

53:41Lulu Miller:You are making me think if I focus on the structure of the vent and the cell, there is a sense of belonging in that. Like every cell in our body looks a little like this planet. Maybe we don't matter and the fact that we're here is random, but we do belong. It's all chaos. Everything is chaos. It's all chaos. Everything is chaos. It's all chaos. Everything is chaos. It's all chaos. Everything is chaos. From the day we arrived on this planet, in darkness and far from the sun,

54:22Latif Nasser:There is more that we need Than just lightning can seed More chance that it would never be done

54:35Lulu Miller:And as we fight for our place here Competing through struggle and strife You can't anticipate

54:49Latif Nasser:Who gets to dominate in the contest for the greatest delight? It's the chaos of life that confounds the soul.

55:09Latif Nasser:Choose despair or hope. It matters not. Till we lose our place On this path that's grinding

55:33It's just cake

55:46Uh,

55:49Lulu Miller:guess that's it. This episode was reported by Latif Nasser, Matt Kielty, Heather Radke, Candice Wong, and me, Ulu Miller.

55:56Matt Kielty:It was produced by Matt Kielty and Simon Adler with sound and music from Matt Kielty, Simon Adler, and Jeremy Bloom. Bloom.

56:04Lulu Miller:Big thanks to Alan Gafinski for creating that song and Alita Gafinski for belting the heck out of it. Thanks also to Chuck Cheeseman, Sarah Luderman, Doug Irwin, Candace Wong.

56:15Matt Kielty:Thanks to David Sapkowski, whose book Rereading the Fossil we drew on for the story about Stephen Jay Gould and extinction. Thank you to Nick Haddad, Ayanna Johnson, Chris Klausmeyer, Laura Verhaeg, and Noelle Bolin.

56:29Lulu Miller:That'll do it. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.

56:36Lulu Miller: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. Soran 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 Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nainasambandan, Matt Keelty, Mona Modgauker, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Natalia Ramirez, Rebecca Rand, Anissa Vitsa, Arian Wack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santis. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Anjali Mercado, and Sophie Semayi.

57:30Lulu Miller:Hi, I'm Maddie, 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.

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57:59Matt Kielty:Learn how your organization can join in at sponsorship.wnyc.org.