"well the source of energy at the origin of life is the reaction between carbon dioxide and hydrogen and amazingly most of these reactions are exergonic which is to say they release energy this if you ..."

"lane let's start with perhaps the most mysterious the most interesting question that uh we little humans can ask of ourselves how did life originate on earth you could you could ask anybody working on..."

"cells well there is one there's a very obvious one it's basically created by whenever you have a wet rocky planet you get these hydrothermal vents which generate hydrogen gas in bucket loads and elect..."

"and i think then you have these other interesting dilemmas i mean i'm often accused of being too focused on life on earth too kind of narrow-minded and inward looking you might say i'm think i'm talki..."

"chemically what is the potion here how important is oxygen you wrote a book about this yeah and i actually just came straight here from a conference where i was sharing a session on whether oxygen mat..."

"troubling is that you if you do these experiments in the lab the molecules you get are exactly the molecules that we see at the heart of biochemistry in the heart of life is there something to be said..."

"head then you've got a minute or something before it's all over so some way of being able to leverage a source of energy well the source of energy at the origin of life is the reaction between carbon ..."

"first bits of prebiotic chemistry to say molecular machines like ribosomes is that the first thing that you would say is life like if i introduce you to the two of you at a party you would say that's ..."

"that keeps information and involves that information over time or changes that information over time yes exactly in response to that so it's always part of a cell system from the very beginning so is ..."

"disappeared um but there's a very interesting deep split in life between bacteria and what are called archaea which look just the same as bacteria and they're not quite as diverse but nearly and they ..."

"um that just pushes the question somewhere else that just even if it's true maybe life did start on earth by panspermia but but so what are the principles that govern the emergence of life on any plan..."

"you know it's a long hypothesis because as i say we're going from really simple prebiotic chemistry all the way through to genes and molecular machines that's a long long pathway and nobody in the fie..."

"if you were to show up on earth but to take that time machine and you said asking yourself the question is this a stepping stone towards life as you step along when you see the early bacteria how woul..."

"have to be a copy of itself right it just has to be you have to create something that's interesting the way evolution is so it is extremely powerful process of evolution which is basically make a copy..."

"abrupt changes in evolution i think it's time for a rebirth what about this idea that kind of trying to mathematize a definition of life and saying how many steps the shortest amount of steps it takes..."

"what do you put it in what kind of structure do we want to induce in this water because the last thing is likely to be is just kind of bulk bulk water how fundamental is water to life would you say i ..."

"million times up to this point maybe beyond to the end let's run it to the end uh what is it uh how much variety is there you kind of spoke to this trajectory that the environment dictates like chemic..."

"it can't be easy to get it right because you know the plants that we see around us they have chloroplasts those chloroplasts were cyanobacterial ones those cyanobacteria are the only group of bacteria..."

"so there's a lot of kind of circularity in that but with with without an oxygenated planet you couldn't really have um predation you you don't you can have animals but you can't really have animals th..."

"with so it kept always a handful of genes in our own case 37 genes um but there's a there's a few protists which are single cells things that have got as many as 70 or 80 genes so it's not always the ..."

"and the standard evolution explanation for that is that you've you you're restricting conflict you don't have a load of genetically different cells that are all fighting each other um and so it works ..."

"best of our knowledge so it looks as if it's genuinely difficult and if you think about it then from from from just an informational perspective you you think bacteria have got they they structure the..."

"larger populations and they never they never got around this problem so why can't they it seems as if you can't solve it with information alone so what's the what's what's the problem the problem is s..."

"ready to go and uh it works i mean it's a kind of step changing the possibilities of evolution but it doesn't happen overnight it's going to still require multiple multiple generations so it could tak..."

"that allows multicellularity yes because um it allows you it's it's a funny thing you to to have a to have a an animal where i have you know 70 of my genes switched on in my brain and i have different..."

"we have the data as far as we know i'm sure there's a few like special ones and they did off quickly i'd love to know some of the most fun things bacteria have done since oh there's a few i mean they ..."

"interested in sex of biologists is to make sex dull yes yeah that's a beautiful way to put it okay so when was it invented uh it was invented with eukaryotes about two billion years ago um all eukaryo..."

"they switch things around using the same machinery and they take up a bit of dna from the environment they take out this bit and stick in that bit and it's the same molecular machinery they're using t..."

"up large chunks and in the end you've got to align them you're forced into to kind of phrase um so yeah uh so it's it's so there is a kind of uh um incentive uh if you want to have a large genome you'..."

"the kind of standardize is not quite what i work on but the standard answer uh is that it's female mate choice she is looking for good genes um and and if you can have a tail that's like this and and ..."

"probably why i'm single okay uh what about if we can step back dna just mechanism of storing information rna dna yeah how big of an invention was that that seems to be you that seems to be fundamental..."

"seems to be very specific characteristics about the the programming language of dna yeah there's a lot of work going on what's called xenodna or rna can we replace the the bases themselves the the let..."

"the code and there's some suggestion for that uh i think it's weak actually but you could imagine you could come out with a million different codes and and this would be one of the best ones um well w..."

"and something changes oxygen definitely changes during this period other things may have changed as well but the next thing you really see in the fossil record is the cambrian explosion and what do we..."

"and that's somehow is a catalyst from an evolutionary perspective for creativity for creating more and more complex organisms that are better and better at survival i mean survival of the fittest if y..."

"who makes up these rules and how do we know it's it's a tough thing but it's basically trying to find a moral basis for avoiding the death of evolution and natural selection and keeping the the the in..."

"some kind of regulation that the bankers themselves will in an evolutionary manner exploit yeah it's we've been struggling with this kind of idea of capitalism the the the cold brutality of capitalism..."

"what would you say i mean i suppose a couple of things i'd say number one is you don't have to wind the clock back very far five six million years or so and and and and let it run forwards again and t..."

"going on between different groups the more transfer of information if you like between groups of people moving from one group to another group almost like lateral gene transfer in bacteria the more ex..."

"increases the number of interactions but then there must have been inventions uh forced by that number of interactions that actually led to humans so like richard wrangham talks about that it's basica..."

"and interactions between groups yes all this dynamic of if you're interacting between groups you can be certain that they're going to be burning each other and all kinds of interact physical violent i..."

"try to meet with everything yes pretty much there's some interesting the first sequences that came along were in mitochondrial dna and that was back to about 2002 or thereabouts what was found was tha..."

"um but the problem is because they go down only the maternal line from mother to daughter your mitochondrial dna and mine is going nowhere doesn't matter any kids we have they get their mother's mitoc..."

"it is to run the experiment in the lab yes and in some respects maybe it's best if we don't know yeah the truth might be very painful what about if we actually step back a couple of interesting things..."

"eye but once you have one then there's nowhere to hide and again we're back to predator prey relationships where back to all the benefits that being able to see brings you and if you think you know ph..."

"know if you know the work of donald hoffman who talks about who uses the argument um the mechanism of evolution to say that there's not necessarily a strong evolutionary value to seeing the world as i..."

"know how much how how strong that is as an argument but i do think that life can exist in the mind yes in the same way that you can do a virtual reality video game and you can have a vibrant life insi..."

"realized it's there it's a sharp edge and you've got the visual input and you put the three things together and think i don't want to walk into a table again so you're learning and and it's a limited ..."

"how good does the simulation need to be to be able to do that well it needs to convince you that all your sensory input is correct and accurate and and and joins up and makes sense now that sensory in..."

"um maybe the hunger for the simplicity is the thing that could be used to construct a pretty dumb simulation that that tricks us so maybe tricking humans doesn't require building a universe no i i don..."

"understand as we become more and more digital creatures it seems like the next step of evolution is us becoming partial all the same mechanisms we've talked about are becoming more and more plugged in..."

"and specifically consciousness uh as one of the great inventions and it was in part because i was just curious to know more and i read more for that chapter i never worked on it but i've always how ca..."

"to answer because i you know i certainly a an ai is capable of out thinking and it's only a matter of time maybe it's already happened in terms of just information processing and computational skill i..."

"such a supreme intelligence would experience joy or melancholy what is the quantum of solace i speaking to the question of emergence you know there's just technical um uh there's a there's an excellen..."

"of points to emergence that there there could be stages where a thing goes from being oh you're you're very intelligent toaster to a toaster that's feeling sad today and turns away and looks out um ou..."

"why would a nap make an ai being feel better the first of all we don't know that for a human either right but we do know that that's actually true for many people much of the time you may be depressed..."

"with changes in gene sequence over those generations so slight changes in the makeup of those individuals over generations but if you take it back to the level of single cells um which i do in in in t..."

"that sure as hell feels i mean is that psychologically different to having a dog no because i mean most people would dispute whether we can say a dog i would i would say dog is undoubtedly conscious b..."

"that's meaningful that is a skill that's learned and ai would need to solve that problem i mean in some sense what you're saying is a ai cannot become meaningfully emotional let's say until it experie..."

"um based on an emotion we can just think i don't care i can't resolve this complex situation i'm going to do that and that can be based on in effect a different currency which is the currency of feeli..."

"uh to build like a fake human human-like thing than to reverse engineer the entirety of the process the evolution of her i'm not sure if we are capable of reverse engineering the whole thing yeah if o..."

"is telling you a much simpler story and explains why it is rather than saying it could be this is one in a in a billion different possible conformational states that this protein could have you're say..."

"um data and the question is with biology you know we kind of go back and forth how we solve biology listen protein folding was thought to be impossible to solve and there's a lot of brilliant phd stud..."

"tenth of the known risk and there's two possible explanations and there's one which people tend to do which is to say ah well we don't have enough statistical power if we maybe there's maybe there's a..."

"rewire metabolism now the problem is that we've got all these interactions between mitochondrial dna and the genes in the nucleus that are overlooked completely because people throw away literally thr..."

"scientific revolution i'm giving up on saying hey i can't do something i've said it enough times about enough things i think there's been a lot of progress and uh instead i'm excited by the possibilit..."

"makes this whole system work our ability to interact with the environment to reason about the environment there's magic there and i i'm hopeful that ai can capture some of that same magic but that mag..."

"being human means to me um and maybe these are all things that that ai figures out for itself or maybe they're just aspects but i i just have the feeling sometimes that the people who are trying to un..."

"you take big risks that uh for us humans those risks are especially painful because you have a fog of uncertainty before you so to take a risk now based on the intuition of i think this is the right r..."

"i was um used to go running when i was a boy and fell running which is say running up and down mountains and i was never particularly great at it but there were some people who were amazingly fast esp..."

"inevitable march towards uh complexity and and um sentient life i don't think he's right doesn't not to say it's not going to happen but i think it's not going to happen often so if you think of earth..."

"totally agree in some deep fundamental way but it's just like a one cell going inside another it's not so difficult to get to work right like well again it happened once um and if you think about if y..."

"different ways of life different environments i'm in the ocean doing photosynthesis i'm on land running around as part of an animal uh i'm a fungus in a soil spending out long kind of shoots into what..."

"you know it wasn't that's not the only problem with uh with with complex life on earth i mentioned oxygen animals and so on as well and even humans we came along very late you go back five million yea..."

"whether it's chilling or not i don't think should force us to change our view about whether it's real or not and what i'm saying may or may not be true so how would you feel if we discovered life on m..."

"uh we have the bacteria have one one stereoisomer and the bacteria have the other the opposite stereoisomer so it's perfectly possible to use one or the other one uh and the same would almost certainl..."

"so the hard leap the hardest sleep the most important leap is from precarious to to eukaryotes eukaryotic what's the second if we're ranking what's what's the what's uh you gave a lot of emphasis on p..."

"precise balance you go through a tipping point and you don't know where the next stable state is going to be but it can be a long way from here and so if we change the world with global warming there ..."

"takeoff then we don't really know why but one of the reasons why that i discuss in the book um is about sulfate being washed into the oceans which sounds incredibly parochial but the the issue is i me..."

"getting too complex but well it's a good it's a good way to estimate the amount of oxygen if you calculate the amount of oxygen based on the assumption that all this carbon 12 that's being taken out i..."

"and then we wouldn't have had animals and and so on and so on so it's you know it's this kind of explanation of the cambrian explosion so uh let me actually say in several ways so you know folks who c..."

"seeing we're seeing uh modern ecosystems and we're seeing arms races and we're seeing um we're seeing the full creativity of evolution unleashed and the so i talked about the boring billion nothing ha..."

"filled in i mean the big mystery in in biology is consciousness the big mystery in biology is conscious well intelligence is kind of a mystery too i mean you said biology not psychology because from a..."

"solved by the engineer meaning anything the person builds it who tries keeps trying to build the thing uh versus biology is such a complicated system i feel like it's um i feel like the building block..."

"is going to have to be in the chemistry of a planet so but that's that's not a limiting factor right so i mean so there's let me ask the fermi paradox question let's say we live in this incredibly dar..."

"to work well as far as we know so natural selection evolution is really powerful tool here on earth but there could be other mechanisms so whenever i don't know if you're familiar with cellular automa..."

"that can work and we know it happens in biology if this nucleotide for example catalyzes co2 fixation then you're going to increase the rate of flux through the whole system and you're going to effect..."

"yeah i mean i don't know how to think about information um that's the kind of memory of the systems it's not yet at the local level it's propagation of copying yourself and changing and improving your..."

"selection and it can't because there's only one of it um and so it can change over time but it's not evolving all the evolution is happening in the parts of the system yeah but it's a self-sustaining ..."

"across the globe there are thousands of them varying in shape and detail but all of them gray angular inorganic spreading yet at night they light up going up the dark sky suddenly beautiful perhaps th..."

"and an interesting thing about cities is that they're not really exactly governed by anybody um there are regulations and systems and whatever else but it's pretty loose um they have their own life th..."

"on earth i don't i don't know i i think there is some deep fundamental way in which a city is a living being in the same way that huma it doesn't give rise to an offspring city it's so i mean it's not..."

"propagate themselves they propagate themselves through human societies and human societies only exist because humans as individuals propagate themselves so there's a kind of there is a hierarchy there..."

"yours the vital question why is life the way it is and the new book transformer the deep chemistry of life and death in uh power sex and suicide you write about writing or about a lot of things but i ..."

"both your students in the academic setting but also writing some of the most brilliant writings on science and humanity i've ever read what's the process of writing how how do you advise other humans ..."

"i i've wondered a lot i've about who who am i writing for and that was in the end the only answer i had was was myself at the age of 15 or 16. 16 because even if you're you know you can you just don't..."

"unit that i can kind of see how it interacts with the other units and you realize that well if this is like that and this is like this then then that can't be true um so you end up navigating your own..."

"formidable hurdle to the general reader go and do something about it yes and it was the last thing i really wanted your editor sounds very eloquent in speech yeah well this wasn't this was an email bu..."

"you've competed hard to get onto the phd then you have to compete hard to get a post-doc job and you have you know the next bond maybe on another continent and it's only two years anyway and and so an..."

"it's what you do yeah but i also mean the surrounding yourself with other people that are obsessed about the same thing because depending on that takes some work as well yeah you know and look finding..."

"from what you're doing on a daily basis and if what you're looking for is the the the world giving you the stamp of approval with a nobel prize or a fellowship or whatever it is then you know i've kno..."

"and ask why uh so your question defined the earth i'm not sure i can do that i mean the first word that comes to mind is living i wouldn't like to say mostly living but perhaps mostly well it's intere..."

"the universe at the moment at the moment which is why the mostly we don't know depends what elon is up to that's how many rockets i think uh it'll be still even then a while i think before uh before w..."

"i don't know i have optimism in humans being clever descendants oh i have no doubt that we can fix the problem but it's an urgent problem and we we need to fix it pretty sharpish and i i do have doubt..."