Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness
生物与进化音乐与艺术技术与编程哲学与宗教历史与文明
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dongotearthhumangoingcellbacteriahumansevolutionwholeinterestingcellscarbonoxygenenvironmentgenespossiblesinglednadoesn
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🎙️ 完整对话（4944 条）
Lex Fridman (00:00.000)
Well, the source of energy at the origin of life
那么，生命起源的能量之源
Lex Fridman (00:01.720)
is the reaction between carbon dioxide and hydrogen.
是二氧化碳和氢气之间的反应。
Lex Fridman (00:04.720)
And amazingly, most of these reactions are exergonic,
令人惊讶的是，大多数这些反应都是放能的，
Lex Fridman (00:08.320)
which is to say they release energy.
也就是说它们释放能量。
Lex Fridman (00:10.760)
If you have hydrogen and CO2,
如果有氢气和二氧化碳，
Lex Fridman (00:13.280)
and you put them together in a falcon tube
然后你把它们放在猎鹰管中
Lex Fridman (00:15.240)
and you warm it up to say 50 degrees centigrade,
然后你把它加热到50摄氏度，
Lex Fridman (00:17.320)
and you put in a couple of catalysts and you shake it,
然后你放入一些催化剂并摇动它，
Lex Fridman (00:19.980)
nothing's gonna happen.
什么都不会发生。
Lex Fridman (00:21.320)
But thermodynamically, that is less stable.
但从热力学角度来看，它不太稳定。
Lex Fridman (00:24.780)
Two gases, hydrogen and CO2, is less stable than cells.
氢气和二氧化碳这两种气体的稳定性不如电池。
Lex Fridman (00:28.240)
What should happen is you get cells coming out.
应该发生的是你的细胞出来了。
Lex Fridman (00:31.240)
Why doesn't that happen?
为什么没有发生这种情况？
Nick Lane (00:32.400)
It's because of the kinetic barriers.
这是因为动能障碍。
Lex Fridman (00:34.760)
That's where you need the spark.
这就是你需要火花的地方。
Nick Lane (00:38.200)
The following is a conversation with Nick Lane,
以下是与尼克·莱恩的对话，
Lex Fridman (00:40.680)
a biochemist at University College London
伦敦大学学院生物化学家
Lex Fridman (00:43.400)
and author of some of my favorite books
以及一些我最喜欢的书的作者
Lex Fridman (00:46.200)
on biology, science, and life ever written,
关于生物学、科学和生活的著作，
Nick Lane (00:49.640)
including his two most recent titled
包括他最近的两个标题
Lex Fridman (00:51.440)
"'Transformer,' The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death,"
Lex Fridman (00:54.520)
and the vital question, why is life the way it is?
Lex Fridman (01:00.280)
This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
Nick Lane (01:02.340)
To support it, please check out our sponsors
Lex Fridman (01:04.460)
in the description.
Lex Fridman (01:05.760)
And now, dear friends, here's Nick Lane.
Lex Fridman (01:09.880)
Let's start with perhaps the most mysterious,
Nick Lane (01:11.820)
the most interesting question that we little humans
Lex Fridman (01:16.620)
can ask of ourselves.
Lex Fridman (01:18.140)
How did life originate on Earth?
Lex Fridman (01:20.640)
You could ask anybody working on the subject,
Lex Fridman (01:24.020)
and you'll get a different answer from all of them.
Lex Fridman (01:26.920)
They will be pretty passionately held opinions,
Lex Fridman (01:30.620)
and their opinions grounded in science,
Lex Fridman (01:34.060)
but they're still really, at this point, their opinions,
Nick Lane (01:36.160)
because there's so much stuff to know
Lex Fridman (01:38.880)
that all we can ever do is get a small slice of it,
Lex Fridman (01:42.860)
and it's the context which matters.
Lex Fridman (01:44.940)
So I can give you my answer.
Nick Lane (01:46.600)
My answer is from a biologist's point of view.
Lex Fridman (01:50.680)
That has been missing from the equation over decades,
Lex Fridman (01:54.780)
which is, well, what does life do on Earth?
Lex Fridman (01:57.520)
Why is it this way?
Lex Fridman (01:58.640)
Why is it made of cells?
Lex Fridman (01:59.720)
Why is it made of carbon?
Lex Fridman (02:01.320)
Why is it powered by electrical charges on membranes?
Lex Fridman (02:06.020)
There's all these interesting questions about cells
Nick Lane (02:09.040)
that if you then look to see,
Lex Fridman (02:10.200)
well, is there an environment on Earth,
Nick Lane (02:12.020)
on the early Earth four billion years ago,
Lex Fridman (02:14.240)
that kind of matches the requirements of cells?
Nick Lane (02:16.720)
Well, there is one.
Lex Fridman (02:17.560)
There's a very obvious one.
Nick Lane (02:18.480)
It's basically created by whenever you have
Lex Fridman (02:21.040)
a wet, rocky planet, you get these hydrothermal vents,
Nick Lane (02:24.720)
which generate hydrogen gas in bucket loads,
Lex Fridman (02:28.620)
and electrical charges on kind of cell like pores
Nick Lane (02:32.480)
that can drive the kind of chemistry that life does.
Lex Fridman (02:35.560)
So it seems so beautiful and so obvious
Nick Lane (02:40.480)
that I've spent the last 10 years or more
Lex Fridman (02:43.960)
trying to do experiments.
Nick Lane (02:45.120)
It turns out to be difficult, of course.
Lex Fridman (02:47.160)
Everything's more difficult than you ever thought
Nick Lane (02:48.560)
it was gonna be, but it looks, I would say,
Lex Fridman (02:51.220)
more true rather than less true over that 10 year period.
Nick Lane (02:53.920)
I think I have to take a step back every now and then
Lex Fridman (02:56.320)
and think, hang on a minute, where's this going?
Nick Lane (02:59.020)
I'm happy it's going in a sensible direction.
Lex Fridman (03:02.000)
And I think then you have these other interesting dilemmas.
Nick Lane (03:06.580)
I mean, I'm often accused of being too focused
Lex Fridman (03:10.480)
on life on Earth, too kind of narrow minded
Lex Fridman (03:14.880)
and inward looking, you might say.
Lex Fridman (03:17.080)
I'm talking about carbon, I'm talking about cells,
Lex Fridman (03:18.880)
and maybe you or plenty of people can say to me,
Lex Fridman (03:21.600)
ah, yeah, but life can be anything.
Nick Lane (03:23.220)
I have no imagination.
Lex Fridman (03:24.800)
And maybe they're right.
Lex Fridman (03:26.120)
But unless we can say why life here is this way,
Lex Fridman (03:29.720)
and if those reasons are fundamental reasons,
Nick Lane (03:32.000)
or if they're just trivial reasons,
Lex Fridman (03:33.940)
then we can't answer that question.
Lex Fridman (03:36.160)
So I think they're fundamental reasons,
Lex Fridman (03:38.760)
and I think we need to worry about them.
Nick Lane (03:40.340)
Yeah, there might be some deep truth to the puzzle
Lex Fridman (03:42.480)
here on Earth that will resonate
Nick Lane (03:44.480)
with other puzzles elsewhere that will,
Lex Fridman (03:48.520)
solving this particular puzzle
Nick Lane (03:50.320)
will give us that deeper truth.
Lex Fridman (03:52.020)
So what, to this puzzle, you said vents, hydrogen,
Lex Fridman (03:58.600)
wet, so chemically, what is the potion here?
Lex Fridman (04:04.440)
How important is oxygen?
Nick Lane (04:06.020)
You wrote a book about this.
Lex Fridman (04:07.160)
Yeah, and I actually just came straight here
Nick Lane (04:09.300)
from a conference where I was chairing a session
Lex Fridman (04:11.080)
on whether oxygen matters or not in the history of life.
Nick Lane (04:13.880)
Of course it matters, but it matters most
Lex Fridman (04:16.480)
to the origin of life to be not there.
Nick Lane (04:20.140)
As I see it, we have this, I mean,
Lex Fridman (04:23.000)
life is made of carbon, basically, primarily,
Nick Lane (04:27.040)
organic molecules with carbon, carbon bonds.
Lex Fridman (04:30.280)
And the building block, the Lego brick
Nick Lane (04:32.880)
that we take out of the air or take out of the oceans
Lex Fridman (04:34.920)
is carbon dioxide.
Lex Fridman (04:36.500)
And to turn carbon dioxide into organic molecules,
Lex Fridman (04:39.620)
we need to strap on hydrogen.
Lex Fridman (04:42.000)
And so we need, and this is basically
Lex Fridman (04:43.760)
what life is doing, it's hydrogenating carbon dioxide.
Nick Lane (04:47.480)
It's taking the hydrogen, the bubbles out of the earth
Lex Fridman (04:49.480)
in these hydrothermal vents, and it sticks it on CO2.
Lex Fridman (04:53.000)
And it's kind of really as simple as that.
Lex Fridman (04:56.200)
And actually, thermodynamically,
Nick Lane (04:58.200)
there's the thing that I find most troubling
Lex Fridman (05:01.040)
is that if you do these experiments in the lab,
Nick Lane (05:03.840)
the molecules you get are exactly the molecules
Lex Fridman (05:06.040)
that we see at the heart of biochemistry
Nick Lane (05:07.920)
in the heart of life.
Lex Fridman (05:08.920)
Is there something to be said about the earliest origins
Lex Fridman (05:14.080)
of that little potion, that chemical process?
Lex Fridman (05:21.440)
What really is the spark there?
Nick Lane (05:24.600)
There isn't a spark.
Lex Fridman (05:28.280)
There is a continuous chemical reaction.
Lex Fridman (05:31.520)
And there is kind of a spark,
Lex Fridman (05:33.120)
but it's a continuous electrical charge
Nick Lane (05:35.080)
which helps drive that reaction.
Lex Fridman (05:37.440)
There's a literally spark.
Nick Lane (05:39.040)
Well, the charge at least, but yes.
Lex Fridman (05:41.560)
I mean, a spark in that sense is,
Nick Lane (05:43.960)
we tend to think of in terms of Frankenstein,
Lex Fridman (05:46.440)
we tend to think in terms of electricity
Lex Fridman (05:48.440)
and one moment you zap something and it comes alive.
Lex Fridman (05:52.080)
And what does that really mean?
Lex Fridman (05:53.560)
It's come alive and now what's sustaining it?
Lex Fridman (05:56.060)
Well, we are sustained by oxygen,
Nick Lane (05:59.360)
by this continuous chemical reaction.
Lex Fridman (06:02.140)
And if you put a plastic bag on your head,
Nick Lane (06:03.980)
then you've got a minute or something before it's all over.
Lex Fridman (06:07.080)
So some way of being able to leverage a source of energy.
Nick Lane (06:11.000)
Well, the source of energy at the origin of life
Lex Fridman (06:12.720)
is the reaction between carbon dioxide and hydrogen.
Lex Fridman (06:15.720)
And amazingly, most of these reactions are exergonic,
Lex Fridman (06:19.320)
which is to say they release energy.
Nick Lane (06:21.760)
If you have hydrogen and CO2
Lex Fridman (06:24.280)
and you put them together in a falcon tube
Lex Fridman (06:26.240)
and you warm it up to say 50 degrees centigrade
Lex Fridman (06:28.320)
and you put in a couple of catalysts and you shake it,
Nick Lane (06:31.000)
nothing's gonna happen.
Lex Fridman (06:32.320)
But thermodynamically, that is less stable.
Nick Lane (06:35.800)
Two gases, hydrogen and CO2, is less stable than cells.
Lex Fridman (06:39.240)
What should happen is you get cells coming out.
Lex Fridman (06:43.800)
So why doesn't that happen?
Lex Fridman (06:45.480)
It's because of the kinetic barriers.
Nick Lane (06:47.800)
That's where you need the spark.
Lex Fridman (06:49.960)
Is it possible that life originated
Lex Fridman (06:52.040)
multiple times on Earth?
Lex Fridman (06:54.080)
The way you describe it, you make it sound so easy.
Nick Lane (06:57.600)
There's a long distance to go from the first bits
Lex Fridman (07:01.240)
of prebiotic chemistry to, say, molecular machines
Nick Lane (07:04.160)
like ribosomes.
Lex Fridman (07:05.360)
Is that the first thing that you would say is life?
Nick Lane (07:09.440)
Like if I introduce you, the two of you at a party,
Lex Fridman (07:12.640)
you would say that's a living thing?
Nick Lane (07:15.040)
I would say as soon as we introduce genes, information,
Lex Fridman (07:19.920)
into systems that are growing anyway,
Lex Fridman (07:22.040)
so I would talk about growing protocells,
Lex Fridman (07:25.240)
as soon as we introduce even random bits of information
Nick Lane (07:30.080)
into there, I'm thinking about RNA molecules, for example,
Lex Fridman (07:35.040)
doesn't have to have any information in it.
Nick Lane (07:36.400)
It can be a completely random sequence.
Lex Fridman (07:38.200)
But if it's introduced into a system which is in any case
Nick Lane (07:41.120)
growing and doubling itself and reproducing itself,
Lex Fridman (07:43.600)
then any changes in that sequence that allow it
Nick Lane (07:46.320)
to do so better or worse are now selected
Lex Fridman (07:48.880)
by perfectly normal natural selection.
Lex Fridman (07:51.200)
But it's a system.
Lex Fridman (07:52.280)
So that's when it becomes alive to my mind.
Nick Lane (07:54.560)
That's encompassed into like an object
Lex Fridman (08:00.240)
that keeps information and evolves that information
Nick Lane (08:03.960)
over time or changes that information over time
Lex Fridman (08:06.440)
in response to the.
Lex Fridman (08:07.280)
So it's always part of a cell system
Lex Fridman (08:10.000)
from the very beginning.
Lex Fridman (08:11.160)
So is your sense that it started only once
Lex Fridman (08:14.320)
because it's difficult or is it possibly started
Lex Fridman (08:16.800)
in multiple locations on Earth?
Lex Fridman (08:18.680)
It's possible it started multiple occasions.
Nick Lane (08:22.240)
There's two provisos to that.
Lex Fridman (08:23.680)
One of them is oxygen makes it impossible really
Nick Lane (08:28.840)
for life to start.
Lex Fridman (08:29.840)
So as soon as we've got oxygen in the atmosphere,
Nick Lane (08:31.840)
then life isn't gonna keep starting over.
Lex Fridman (08:34.280)
So I often get asked by people,
Lex Fridman (08:36.360)
why can't we have life starting?
Lex Fridman (08:37.960)
If it's so easy, why can't life start in these vents now?
Lex Fridman (08:40.600)
And the answer is if you want hydrogen to react with CO2
Lex Fridman (08:43.720)
and there's oxygen there, hydrogen reacts
Nick Lane (08:45.240)
with oxygen instead.
Lex Fridman (08:46.120)
It's just, you get an explosive reaction that way.
Nick Lane (08:48.800)
It's rocket fuel.
Lex Fridman (08:50.040)
So it's never gonna happen.
Lex Fridman (08:51.240)
But for the origin of life earlier than that,
Lex Fridman (08:54.120)
all we know is that there's a single common ancestor
Nick Lane (08:57.280)
for all of life.
Lex Fridman (08:58.120)
There could have been multiple origins
Lex Fridman (09:00.120)
and they all just disappeared.
Lex Fridman (09:02.000)
But there's a very interesting deep split in life
Nick Lane (09:06.160)
between bacteria and what are called archaea,
Lex Fridman (09:09.000)
which look just the same as bacteria.
Lex Fridman (09:12.240)
And they're not quite as diverse, but nearly.
Lex Fridman (09:14.880)
And they are very different in their biochemistry.
Lex Fridman (09:18.120)
And so any explanation for the origin of life
Lex Fridman (09:19.800)
has to account as well for why they're so different
Lex Fridman (09:22.840)
and yet so similar.
Lex Fridman (09:24.160)
And that makes me think that life probably
Nick Lane (09:27.240)
did arise only once.
Lex Fridman (09:29.160)
Can you describe the difference that's interesting there?
Lex Fridman (09:31.960)
Well, how they're similar, how they're different?
Lex Fridman (09:34.000)
Well, they're different in their membranes primarily.
Nick Lane (09:38.120)
They're different in things like DNA replication.
Lex Fridman (09:40.360)
They use completely different enzymes
Lex Fridman (09:41.840)
and the genes behind it for replicating DNA.
Lex Fridman (09:44.640)
So they both have membranes, both have DNA replication.
Nick Lane (09:47.960)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (09:48.800)
The process of that is different.
Nick Lane (09:50.240)
They both have DNA.
Lex Fridman (09:52.040)
The genetic code is identical in them both.
Nick Lane (09:54.840)
The way in which it's transcribed into RNA,
Lex Fridman (09:58.560)
into the copy of a gene,
Lex Fridman (10:00.960)
and the way that that's then translated into a protein,
Lex Fridman (10:03.280)
that's all basically the same in both of these groups.
Lex Fridman (10:05.320)
So they clearly share a common ancestor.
Lex Fridman (10:08.560)
It's just that they're different
Nick Lane (10:09.640)
in fundamental ways as well.
Lex Fridman (10:10.960)
And if you think about, well,
Lex Fridman (10:11.800)
what kind of processes could drive that divergence
Lex Fridman (10:15.440)
very early on?
Nick Lane (10:18.040)
I can think about it in terms of membranes,
Lex Fridman (10:19.760)
in terms of the electrical charges on membranes.
Lex Fridman (10:22.640)
And it's that that makes me think that there was probably,
Lex Fridman (10:25.800)
there were probably many unsuccessful attempts
Lex Fridman (10:27.480)
but only one really successful attempt.
Lex Fridman (10:30.080)
Can you explain why that divergence
Lex Fridman (10:31.920)
makes you think there's one common ancestor?
Lex Fridman (10:36.240)
Okay, can you describe that intuition?
Nick Lane (10:38.040)
I'm a little bit unclear about why the divert,
Lex Fridman (10:40.440)
like the leap from the divergence means there's one.
Lex Fridman (10:43.840)
Do you mean like the divergence indicates
Lex Fridman (10:47.040)
that there was a big invention at that time from one source?
Nick Lane (10:52.280)
If you'd got, as I imagine it,
Lex Fridman (10:54.720)
you have a common ancestor living in a hydrothermal vent.
Nick Lane (10:59.160)
Let's say there are millions of vents
Lex Fridman (11:01.480)
and millions of potential common ancestors
Nick Lane (11:04.160)
living in all of those vents,
Lex Fridman (11:06.080)
but only one of them makes it out first.
Nick Lane (11:09.520)
Then you could imagine that that cell
Lex Fridman (11:11.200)
is then gonna kind of take over the world
Lex Fridman (11:12.720)
and wipe out everything else.
Lex Fridman (11:14.480)
And so what you would see would be
Nick Lane (11:16.600)
a single common ancestor for all of life.
Lex Fridman (11:18.960)
But with lots of different vent systems
Nick Lane (11:21.520)
all kind of vying to create the first life forms,
Lex Fridman (11:24.720)
you might say.
Lex Fridman (11:25.560)
So this thing is a cell, a single cell organism.
Lex Fridman (11:28.920)
We're always talking about populations of cells, but yes.
Nick Lane (11:32.000)
These are single celled organisms.
Lex Fridman (11:33.760)
But the fundamental life form is a single cell, right?
Lex Fridman (11:37.800)
So like, or, so they're always together
Lex Fridman (11:41.960)
but they're alone together.
Nick Lane (11:44.000)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (11:44.840)
There's a machinery in each one individual component
Lex Fridman (11:47.800)
that if left by itself would still work, right?
Lex Fridman (11:50.800)
Yes, yes, yes.
Nick Lane (11:51.680)
It's the unit of selection is a single cell.
Lex Fridman (11:54.560)
But selection operates over generations
Lex Fridman (11:56.680)
and changes over generations in populations of cells.
Lex Fridman (11:59.520)
So it would be impossible to say that a cell
Nick Lane (12:01.280)
is the unit of selection in the sense that
Lex Fridman (12:04.280)
unless you have a population, you can't evolve,
Nick Lane (12:06.000)
you can't change.
Lex Fridman (12:07.360)
Right, but there was one Chuck Norris,
Nick Lane (12:12.280)
it's an American reference cell
Lex Fridman (12:15.360)
that made it out of the vents, right?
Nick Lane (12:17.840)
Or like the first one.
Lex Fridman (12:19.760)
So imagine then that there's one cell gets out
Lex Fridman (12:22.080)
and it takes over the world.
Lex Fridman (12:23.640)
It gets out in the water, it's like floating around.
Nick Lane (12:25.600)
We're deep in the ocean somewhere.
Lex Fridman (12:27.200)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (12:28.040)
But actually two cells got out
Lex Fridman (12:31.240)
and they appear to have got out from the same vent
Nick Lane (12:35.480)
because they both share the same code and everything else.
Lex Fridman (12:38.720)
So unless all the, you know,
Nick Lane (12:40.160)
we've got a million different common ancestors
Lex Fridman (12:42.200)
in all these different vents.
Lex Fridman (12:44.160)
So either they all have the same code
Lex Fridman (12:47.000)
and two cells spontaneously merge from different places
Nick Lane (12:49.360)
or two different cells, fundamentally different cells
Lex Fridman (12:54.120)
came from the same place.
Lex Fridman (12:55.720)
So either way, what are the constraints that say,
Lex Fridman (12:59.280)
not just one came out or not half a million came out,
Lex Fridman (13:01.640)
but two came out.
Lex Fridman (13:03.320)
That's kind of a bit strange.
Lex Fridman (13:05.280)
So how did they come out?
Lex Fridman (13:06.520)
Well, they come out because what are you doing inside a vent
Nick Lane (13:09.760)
is you're relying on the electrical charges down there
Lex Fridman (13:12.680)
to power this reaction between hydrogen and CO2
Nick Lane (13:15.480)
to make yourself grow.
Lex Fridman (13:16.960)
And when you leave the vent, you've got to do that yourself.
Nick Lane (13:19.200)
You've got to power up your own membrane.
Lex Fridman (13:21.280)
And so the question is,
Lex Fridman (13:22.120)
well, how do you power up your own membrane?
Lex Fridman (13:24.800)
And the answer is, well, you need to pump.
Nick Lane (13:27.240)
You need to pump ions to give an electrical charge
Lex Fridman (13:29.920)
on the membrane.
Lex Fridman (13:30.800)
So what do the pumps look like?
Lex Fridman (13:32.160)
Well, the pumps look different in these two groups.
Nick Lane (13:35.320)
It's as if they both emerged from a common ancestor.
Lex Fridman (13:37.960)
As soon as you've got that ancestor,
Nick Lane (13:39.400)
things move very quickly and divergently.
Lex Fridman (13:43.800)
Why does the DNA replication look different?
Nick Lane (13:45.840)
Well, it's joined to the membrane.
Lex Fridman (13:47.280)
The membranes are different.
Nick Lane (13:48.280)
The DNA replication is different
Lex Fridman (13:49.680)
because it's joined to a different kind of membrane.
Lex Fridman (13:52.360)
So there's interesting, this is detail, you may say,
Lex Fridman (13:55.600)
but it's also fundamental
Nick Lane (13:57.080)
because it's about the two big divergent groups
Lex Fridman (13:59.680)
of life on Earth that seem to have diverged really early on.
Lex Fridman (14:02.960)
And it all started from one organism.
Lex Fridman (14:06.560)
And then that organism just start replicating
Nick Lane (14:09.600)
the heck out of itself with some mutation of the DNA.
Lex Fridman (14:14.320)
So like there's some, there's a competition
Nick Lane (14:17.480)
through the process of evolution.
Lex Fridman (14:19.400)
They're not like trying to beat each other up.
Nick Lane (14:21.400)
They're just, they're just trying to live.
Lex Fridman (14:24.160)
Just replicate us.
Nick Lane (14:25.680)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (14:26.520)
Well, you know, let's not minimize there.
Nick Lane (14:28.560)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (14:29.400)
They're just trying to chill.
Nick Lane (14:30.320)
They're trying to relax up.
Lex Fridman (14:32.240)
There's no, but there's no sense of trying to survive.
Nick Lane (14:35.120)
They're replicating.
Lex Fridman (14:36.440)
I mean, there's no sense
Nick Lane (14:37.360)
in which they're trying to do anything.
Lex Fridman (14:39.600)
They're just kind of an outgrowth of the Earth,
Nick Lane (14:42.000)
you might say.
Lex Fridman (14:42.840)
Of course, the aliens would describe us humans
Nick Lane (14:44.760)
in that same way.
Lex Fridman (14:45.680)
They might be right.
Nick Lane (14:47.280)
This primitive life.
Lex Fridman (14:48.640)
It's just ants that are hairless,
Nick Lane (14:52.440)
mostly hairless.
Lex Fridman (14:53.360)
Overgrown ants.
Nick Lane (14:54.360)
Overgrown ants.
Lex Fridman (14:55.600)
Okay.
Lex Fridman (14:56.800)
What do you think about the idea of panspermia
Lex Fridman (14:59.360)
that the theory that life did not originate on Earth
Lex Fridman (15:03.400)
and was planted here from outer space?
Lex Fridman (15:06.880)
Or pseudopanspermia, which is like the basic ingredients,
Nick Lane (15:10.640)
the magic that you mentioned was planted here
Lex Fridman (15:12.920)
from elsewhere in space?
Nick Lane (15:14.680)
I don't find them helpful.
Lex Fridman (15:16.360)
That's not to say they're wrong.
Nick Lane (15:18.800)
So, pseudotranspermia, the idea that the chemicals,
Lex Fridman (15:22.320)
the amino acids, the nucleotides
Nick Lane (15:23.880)
are being delivered from space.
Lex Fridman (15:24.800)
Well, we know that happens.
Nick Lane (15:25.800)
It's unequivocal.
Lex Fridman (15:27.080)
They're delivered on meteorites, comets, and so on.
Lex Fridman (15:30.840)
So what do they do next?
Lex Fridman (15:31.800)
That's, to me, the question.
Nick Lane (15:33.120)
Well, what do they do is they stock a soup.
Lex Fridman (15:35.120)
Presumably, they land in a pond or in an ocean
Nick Lane (15:37.440)
or wherever they land.
Lex Fridman (15:39.000)
And then you end up with a best possible case scenario
Nick Lane (15:42.120)
is you end up with a soup of nucleotides
Lex Fridman (15:43.880)
and amino acids.
Lex Fridman (15:44.720)
And then you have to say, so now what happens?
Lex Fridman (15:46.400)
And the answer is, oh, well, they have to go,
Nick Lane (15:48.200)
bloop, become alive.
Lex Fridman (15:50.760)
So how did they do that?
Lex Fridman (15:51.720)
And you may as well say then a miracle happened.
Lex Fridman (15:54.720)
I don't believe in soup.
Nick Lane (15:57.080)
I think what we have in event is a continuous conversion,
Lex Fridman (16:00.680)
a continuous growth, a continuous reaction,
Nick Lane (16:02.680)
a continuous converting a flow of molecules
Lex Fridman (16:05.880)
into more of yourself, you might say,
Nick Lane (16:07.880)
even if it's a small bit.
Lex Fridman (16:08.840)
So you've got a kind of continuous self organization
Lex Fridman (16:13.000)
and growth from the very beginning.
Lex Fridman (16:14.760)
You never have that in a soup.
Nick Lane (16:17.000)
Isn't the entire universe and living organisms
Lex Fridman (16:20.440)
in the universe, isn't it just soup all the way down?
Lex Fridman (16:25.000)
Isn't it all soup?
Lex Fridman (16:25.840)
No, no, I mean, soup almost by definition
Nick Lane (16:27.760)
doesn't have a structure.
Lex Fridman (16:29.560)
But soup is a collection of ingredients
Nick Lane (16:32.200)
that are like randomly interacting.
Lex Fridman (16:34.040)
Yeah, but they're not random.
Nick Lane (16:36.200)
They're not, I mean, we have chemistry going on here.
Lex Fridman (16:38.760)
We have metal grains forming, which are, you know,
Nick Lane (16:41.160)
effective oil water interactions.
Lex Fridman (16:43.400)
Okay, so it feels like there's a direction to a process,
Nick Lane (16:45.960)
like a directed process.
Lex Fridman (16:47.400)
There are directions to processes, yeah.
Lex Fridman (16:49.920)
And if you're starting with CO2
Lex Fridman (16:52.640)
and you've got two reactive fluids being brought together
Lex Fridman (16:55.600)
and they react, what are they gonna make?
Lex Fridman (16:57.720)
Well, they make carboxylic acids,
Nick Lane (16:59.880)
which include the fatty acids
Lex Fridman (17:01.720)
that make up the cell membranes.
Lex Fridman (17:03.040)
And they form directly into bilayer membranes.
Lex Fridman (17:06.520)
They form like soap bubbles.
Nick Lane (17:07.720)
It's spontaneous organization caused by the nature
Lex Fridman (17:11.240)
of the molecules.
Lex Fridman (17:12.080)
And those things are capable of growing
Lex Fridman (17:14.040)
and are capable in effect of being selected
Nick Lane (17:16.440)
even before there are genes.
Lex Fridman (17:18.320)
We have this, so we have a lot of order
Lex Fridman (17:20.080)
and that order is coming from thermodynamics.
Lex Fridman (17:22.560)
And the thermodynamics is always about increasing
Nick Lane (17:25.400)
the entropy of the universe.
Lex Fridman (17:27.040)
But if you have oil and water and they're separating,
Nick Lane (17:30.480)
you're increasing the entropy of the universe,
Lex Fridman (17:32.040)
even though you've got some order,
Nick Lane (17:33.160)
which is the soap and the water are not missable.
Lex Fridman (17:36.520)
Now, to come back to your first question
Nick Lane (17:39.480)
about panspermia properly,
Lex Fridman (17:43.840)
that just pushes the question somewhere else.
Nick Lane (17:45.440)
That just, even if it's true,
Lex Fridman (17:46.840)
maybe life did start on Earth by panspermia.
Lex Fridman (17:49.680)
So what are the principles
Lex Fridman (17:52.200)
that govern the emergence of life on any planet?
Nick Lane (17:55.200)
It's an assumption that life started here.
Lex Fridman (17:57.560)
And it's an assumption that it started
Nick Lane (18:01.000)
in a hydrothermal vent or it started
Lex Fridman (18:02.760)
in a terrestrial geothermal system.
Nick Lane (18:04.680)
The question is, can we work out a testable sequence
Lex Fridman (18:07.560)
of events that would lead from one to the other one
Lex Fridman (18:10.440)
and then test it and see if there's any truth in it or not?
Lex Fridman (18:12.640)
With panspermia, you can't do any of that.
Lex Fridman (18:14.880)
But the fundamental question of panspermia is,
Lex Fridman (18:17.680)
do we have the machine here on Earth to build life?
Lex Fridman (18:23.040)
Is the vents enough?
Lex Fridman (18:25.680)
Is oxygen and hydrogen and whatever the heck else we want
Lex Fridman (18:31.720)
and some source of energy and heat,
Lex Fridman (18:34.520)
is that enough to build life?
Nick Lane (18:36.320)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (18:37.280)
Well, that's, of course you would say that as a human.
Nick Lane (18:41.480)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (18:42.800)
But there could be aliens right now
Nick Lane (18:44.640)
chuckling at that idea.
Lex Fridman (18:46.160)
Maybe you need some special sauce,
Nick Lane (18:50.600)
special elsewhere sauce.
Lex Fridman (18:52.040)
So your sense is we have everything here.
Nick Lane (18:54.600)
I mean, this is precisely the question.
Lex Fridman (18:57.280)
I like to, when I'm talking in schools,
Nick Lane (18:59.600)
I like to start out with the idea
Lex Fridman (19:00.800)
of we can make a time machine.
Nick Lane (19:03.240)
We go back four billion years
Lex Fridman (19:05.120)
and we go to these environments that people talk about.
Nick Lane (19:07.400)
We go to a deep sea hydrothermal vent,
Lex Fridman (19:09.280)
we go to a kind of Yellowstone Park type place environment
Lex Fridman (19:14.120)
and we find some slime that looks like we can test it.
Lex Fridman (19:18.560)
It's made of organic molecules.
Nick Lane (19:20.240)
It's got a structure which is not obviously cells,
Lex Fridman (19:22.400)
but you know, is this a stepping stone
Lex Fridman (19:25.640)
on the way to life or not?
Lex Fridman (19:26.880)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (19:27.720)
How do we know?
Lex Fridman (19:29.080)
Unless we've got an intellectual framework
Nick Lane (19:31.600)
that says this is a stepping stone and that's not a step.
Lex Fridman (19:34.200)
You know, we'd never know.
Nick Lane (19:35.040)
We wouldn't know which environment to go to,
Lex Fridman (19:36.520)
what to look for, how to say this.
Lex Fridman (19:38.560)
So all we can ever hope for,
Lex Fridman (19:39.920)
because we're never gonna build that time machine,
Nick Lane (19:41.880)
is to have an intellectual framework
Lex Fridman (19:43.440)
that can explain step by step, experiment by experiment,
Lex Fridman (19:46.880)
how we go from a sterile inorganic planet
Lex Fridman (19:49.680)
to living cells as we know them.
Lex Fridman (19:52.480)
And in that framework, every time you have a choice,
Lex Fridman (19:55.280)
it could be this way or it could be that way,
Nick Lane (19:57.000)
or there's lots of possible forks down that road.
Lex Fridman (1:00:00.920)
And it's become super fast
Nick Lane (1:00:02.700)
with the different compilation engines that are running it.
Lex Fridman (1:00:06.560)
So it's like, it really took over the world.
Nick Lane (1:00:08.120)
It's very possible that this initially crappy derided language
Lex Fridman (1:00:13.760)
actually takes everything over.
Lex Fridman (1:00:14.880)
And then the question is,
Lex Fridman (1:00:17.280)
did human civilization always strive towards JavaScript?
Nick Lane (1:00:21.800)
Or was JavaScript just the first programming language
Lex Fridman (1:00:25.160)
that ran on the browser and still sticky?
Nick Lane (1:00:27.200)
The first is the sticky one.
Lex Fridman (1:00:29.880)
And so it wins over anything else because it was first.
Lex Fridman (1:00:32.680)
And I don't think that's answerable, right?
Lex Fridman (1:00:34.640)
But it's good to ask that.
Nick Lane (1:00:37.160)
I suppose in the lab,
Lex Fridman (1:00:38.920)
you can't run it with programming languages,
Lex Fridman (1:00:43.400)
but in biology you can probably do some kind of
Lex Fridman (1:00:47.440)
small scale evolutionary test to try to infer,
Nick Lane (1:00:53.520)
which is which.
Lex Fridman (1:00:54.760)
Yeah.
Nick Lane (1:00:55.600)
I mean, in a way we've got the hardware
Lex Fridman (1:00:57.040)
and the software here.
Lex Fridman (1:00:58.640)
And the hardware is maybe the DNA and the RNA itself.
Lex Fridman (1:01:02.880)
And then the software perhaps is more about the code.
Lex Fridman (1:01:06.200)
Did the code have to be this way?
Lex Fridman (1:01:07.440)
Could it have been a different way?
Nick Lane (1:01:09.360)
People talk about the optimization of the code
Lex Fridman (1:01:11.440)
and there's some suggestion for that.
Nick Lane (1:01:14.040)
I think it's weak actually.
Lex Fridman (1:01:16.080)
But you could imagine you could come out
Nick Lane (1:01:17.560)
with a million different codes
Lex Fridman (1:01:18.840)
and this would be one of the best ones.
Nick Lane (1:01:22.520)
Well, we don't know this.
Lex Fridman (1:01:24.320)
Well, I mean, people have tried to model it
Nick Lane (1:01:27.400)
based on the effect that mutations would have.
Lex Fridman (1:01:31.160)
So no, you're right.
Nick Lane (1:01:32.040)
We don't know because that's a single assumption
Lex Fridman (1:01:34.120)
that a mutation is what's being selected on there.
Lex Fridman (1:01:37.760)
And there's other possibilities too.
Lex Fridman (1:01:39.320)
I mean, there does seem to be a resilience
Lex Fridman (1:01:41.160)
and a redundancy to the whole thing.
Lex Fridman (1:01:43.200)
It's hard to mess up and the way you mess it up
Nick Lane (1:01:47.640)
often is likely to produce interesting results.
Lex Fridman (1:01:51.600)
So it's...
Lex Fridman (1:01:52.760)
Are you talking about JavaScript or the genetic code now?
Lex Fridman (1:01:55.480)
Yeah, well, I mean, it's almost,
Nick Lane (1:01:57.840)
biology is underpinned by this kind of mess as well.
Lex Fridman (1:02:00.640)
And you look at the human genome and it's full of stuff
Nick Lane (1:02:03.400)
that is really either broken or dysfunctional
Lex Fridman (1:02:06.160)
or was a virus once, whatever it may be.
Lex Fridman (1:02:08.080)
And somehow it works.
Lex Fridman (1:02:09.280)
And maybe we need a lot of this mess.
Nick Lane (1:02:11.640)
We know that some functional genes are taken from this mess.
Lex Fridman (1:02:15.400)
So what about, you mentioned the predatory behavior.
Nick Lane (1:02:19.560)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:02:20.400)
We talked about sex.
Lex Fridman (1:02:21.440)
What about violence, predator and prey dynamics?
Lex Fridman (1:02:26.840)
When was that invented?
Lex Fridman (1:02:29.600)
And poetic and biological ways of putting it,
Lex Fridman (1:02:33.920)
how do you describe predator prey relationship?
Lex Fridman (1:02:37.400)
Is it a beautiful dance or is it a violent atrocity?
Lex Fridman (1:02:43.000)
Well, I guess it's both, isn't it?
Lex Fridman (1:02:44.360)
I mean, when does it start?
Lex Fridman (1:02:45.360)
It starts in bacteria.
Nick Lane (1:02:46.920)
You see these amazing predators.
Lex Fridman (1:02:49.280)
Della Vibrio is one that Lynn Margulis
Nick Lane (1:02:51.640)
used to talk about a lot.
Lex Fridman (1:02:53.760)
It's got a kind of a drill piece
Nick Lane (1:02:55.600)
that drills through the wall
Lex Fridman (1:02:57.240)
and the membrane of the bacterium.
Lex Fridman (1:02:58.720)
And then it effectively eats the bacterium
Lex Fridman (1:03:00.560)
from just inside the periplasmic space
Lex Fridman (1:03:03.560)
and makes copies of itself that way.
Lex Fridman (1:03:04.960)
So that's straight predation.
Nick Lane (1:03:06.360)
There are predators among bacteria.
Lex Fridman (1:03:08.360)
So predation in that, sorry to interrupt,
Nick Lane (1:03:10.280)
means you murder somebody
Lex Fridman (1:03:12.560)
and use their body as a resource in some way.
Nick Lane (1:03:17.600)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:03:18.440)
But it's not parasitic in that
Nick Lane (1:03:21.440)
you need them to be still alive.
Lex Fridman (1:03:23.400)
No, no, I mean, predation is you kill them, really.
Nick Lane (1:03:26.360)
You murder.
Lex Fridman (1:03:27.200)
Parasites, so you kind of live on them.
Nick Lane (1:03:30.320)
Okay, so, but it seems the predator is the really popular.
Lex Fridman (1:03:34.080)
So what we see if we go back 560, 570 million years
Nick Lane (1:03:42.080)
before the Cambrian explosion,
Lex Fridman (1:03:44.200)
there is what's known as the Ediacaran fauna,
Nick Lane (1:03:48.600)
or sometimes they call Vendobionts,
Lex Fridman (1:03:50.200)
which is a lovely name.
Lex Fridman (1:03:51.760)
And it's not obvious that they're animals at all.
Lex Fridman (1:03:55.680)
They're stalked things.
Nick Lane (1:03:56.720)
They often have fronds that look a lot like leaves
Lex Fridman (1:03:59.200)
with kind of fractal branching patterns on them.
Lex Fridman (1:04:01.960)
And the thing is, they're found,
Lex Fridman (1:04:05.640)
sometimes geologists can figure out the environment
Nick Lane (1:04:09.480)
that they were in and say,
Lex Fridman (1:04:10.840)
this is more than 200 meters deep
Nick Lane (1:04:12.480)
because there's no sign of any waves.
Lex Fridman (1:04:14.560)
There's no storm damage down here, this kind of thing.
Nick Lane (1:04:18.600)
They were more than 200 meters deep,
Lex Fridman (1:04:19.760)
so they're definitely not photosynthetic.
Nick Lane (1:04:21.800)
These are animals and they're filter feeders.
Lex Fridman (1:04:25.400)
And we know sponges and corals and things
Nick Lane (1:04:27.720)
are filter feeding animals.
Lex Fridman (1:04:29.040)
They're stuck to the spot.
Lex Fridman (1:04:30.560)
And little bits of carbon that come their way,
Lex Fridman (1:04:32.920)
they filter it out and that's what they're eating.
Lex Fridman (1:04:36.720)
So no predation involved in this,
Lex Fridman (1:04:38.480)
beyond stuff just dies anyway.
Lex Fridman (1:04:40.680)
And it feels like a very gentle, rather beautiful,
Lex Fridman (1:04:43.360)
rather limited world, you might say.
Nick Lane (1:04:45.720)
There's not a lot going on there.
Lex Fridman (1:04:48.480)
And something changes.
Nick Lane (1:04:51.720)
Oxygen definitely changes during this period.
Lex Fridman (1:04:53.920)
Other things may have changed as well.
Lex Fridman (1:04:55.360)
But the next thing you really see in the fossil record
Lex Fridman (1:04:58.280)
is the Cambrian explosion.
Lex Fridman (1:05:00.600)
And what do we see there?
Lex Fridman (1:05:02.080)
We're now seeing animals that we would recognize.
Nick Lane (1:05:04.800)
They've got eyes, they've got claws, they've got shells.
Lex Fridman (1:05:07.760)
They're plainly killing things or running away and hiding.
Lex Fridman (1:05:14.440)
And so we've gone from a rather gentle but limited world
Lex Fridman (1:05:18.680)
to a rather vicious, unpleasant world that we recognize
Lex Fridman (1:05:23.080)
and which leads to kind of arms races,
Lex Fridman (1:05:27.520)
evolutionary arms races, which again is something
Nick Lane (1:05:31.160)
that when we think about a nuclear arms race,
Lex Fridman (1:05:32.920)
we think, Jesus, we don't want to go there.
Nick Lane (1:05:34.880)
It's not done anybody any good.
Lex Fridman (1:05:37.400)
In some ways, maybe it does do good.
Nick Lane (1:05:40.160)
I don't want to make an argument for nuclear arms.
Lex Fridman (1:05:42.760)
But predation as a mechanism forces organisms
Nick Lane (1:05:48.400)
to adapt to change to be better to escape or to kill.
Lex Fridman (1:05:52.320)
If you need to eat, then you've got to eat.
Lex Fridman (1:05:55.920)
And a cheetah's not going to run at that speed
Lex Fridman (1:05:57.840)
unless it has to because the zebra is capable of escaping.
Lex Fridman (1:06:03.640)
So it leads to much greater feats of evolution
Lex Fridman (1:06:07.840)
than would ever have been possible without it.
Lex Fridman (1:06:09.880)
And in the end, to a much more beautiful world.
Lex Fridman (1:06:12.680)
And so it's not all bad by any means.
Lex Fridman (1:06:17.840)
But the thing is you can't have this
Lex Fridman (1:06:19.320)
if you don't have an oxygenated planet.
Nick Lane (1:06:21.080)
Because it's all in the end, it's about how much energy
Lex Fridman (1:06:24.120)
can you extract from the food you eat.
Lex Fridman (1:06:26.640)
And if you don't have an oxygenated planet,
Lex Fridman (1:06:28.360)
you can get about 10% out, not much more than that.
Lex Fridman (1:06:32.240)
And if you've got an oxygenated planet,
Lex Fridman (1:06:34.120)
you can get about 40% out.
Lex Fridman (1:06:35.960)
And that means you can have,
Lex Fridman (1:06:37.040)
instead of having one or two trophic levels,
Nick Lane (1:06:40.440)
you can have five or six trophic levels.
Lex Fridman (1:06:42.760)
And that means things can eat things
Nick Lane (1:06:44.360)
that eat other things and so on.
Lex Fridman (1:06:45.720)
And you've gone to a level of ecological complexity,
Nick Lane (1:06:48.920)
which is completely impossible in the absence of oxygen.
Lex Fridman (1:06:51.720)
This reminds me of the Hunter S. Thompson quote,
Nick Lane (1:06:54.400)
that for every moment of triumph,
Lex Fridman (1:06:56.840)
for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.
Nick Lane (1:07:02.040)
The history of life on Earth, unfortunately,
Lex Fridman (1:07:05.120)
is that of violence.
Nick Lane (1:07:09.000)
Just the trillions and trillions of multi cell organisms
Lex Fridman (1:07:13.320)
that were murdered in the struggle for survival.
Nick Lane (1:07:17.040)
It's a sorry statement, but yes, it's basically true.
Lex Fridman (1:07:20.360)
And that somehow is a catalyst
Nick Lane (1:07:23.960)
from an evolutionary perspective for creativity,
Lex Fridman (1:07:26.220)
for creating more and more complex organisms
Nick Lane (1:07:28.880)
that are better and better at surviving.
Lex Fridman (1:07:30.160)
I mean, survival of the fittest,
Nick Lane (1:07:32.080)
if you just go back to that old phrase,
Lex Fridman (1:07:33.520)
means death of the weakest.
Nick Lane (1:07:36.280)
Now, what's fit, what's weak,
Lex Fridman (1:07:38.480)
these are terms that don't have much intrinsic meaning.
Lex Fridman (1:07:41.400)
But the thing is, evolution only happens because of death.
Lex Fridman (1:07:45.280)
One way to die is the constraints,
Nick Lane (1:07:49.000)
the scarcity of the resources in the environment,
Lex Fridman (1:07:52.160)
but that seems to be not nearly as good of a mechanism
Nick Lane (1:07:56.280)
for death than other creatures
Lex Fridman (1:07:59.480)
roaming about in the environment.
Nick Lane (1:08:01.480)
When I say environment, I mean like the static environment,
Lex Fridman (1:08:04.160)
but then there's the dynamic environment
Nick Lane (1:08:05.880)
of bigger things trying to eat you
Lex Fridman (1:08:08.360)
and use you for your energy.
Nick Lane (1:08:10.600)
It forces you to come up with a solution
Lex Fridman (1:08:13.280)
to your specific problem that is inventive
Lex Fridman (1:08:16.920)
and is new and hasn't been done before.
Lex Fridman (1:08:18.800)
And so it forces, I mean, literally change,
Nick Lane (1:08:22.560)
literally evolution on populations.
Lex Fridman (1:08:26.000)
They have to become different.
Lex Fridman (1:08:27.400)
And it's interesting that humans have channeled that
Lex Fridman (1:08:30.900)
into more, I mean, I guess what humans are doing
Nick Lane (1:08:34.220)
is they're inventing more productive
Lex Fridman (1:08:37.760)
and safe ways of doing that.
Nick Lane (1:08:39.880)
You know, this whole idea of morality
Lex Fridman (1:08:41.520)
and all those kinds of things,
Nick Lane (1:08:43.360)
I think they ultimately lead to competition
Lex Fridman (1:08:48.360)
versus violence, because I think violence
Nick Lane (1:08:51.600)
can have a cold, brutal, inefficient aspect to it.
Lex Fridman (1:08:56.560)
But if you channel that into more controlled competition
Nick Lane (1:09:01.280)
in the space of ideas, in the space of approaches to life,
Lex Fridman (1:09:05.480)
maybe you can be even more productive than evolution is.
Nick Lane (1:09:10.280)
Because evolution is very wasteful.
Lex Fridman (1:09:12.200)
Like the amount of murder required
Nick Lane (1:09:14.680)
to really test a good idea,
Lex Fridman (1:09:16.600)
genetically speaking, is just a lot.
Nick Lane (1:09:19.520)
Many, many, many generations.
Lex Fridman (1:09:21.120)
Morally, we cannot base society
Nick Lane (1:09:24.560)
on the way that evolution works.
Lex Fridman (1:09:26.280)
That's an invention, right?
Lex Fridman (1:09:27.280)
But actually, in some respects we do,
Lex Fridman (1:09:29.600)
which is to say, this is how science works.
Nick Lane (1:09:31.440)
We have competing hypotheses that have to get better,
Lex Fridman (1:09:34.000)
otherwise they die.
Nick Lane (1:09:35.360)
It's the way that society works.
Lex Fridman (1:09:36.640)
You know, in ancient Greece, we had the Athens
Lex Fridman (1:09:41.040)
and Sparta and city states,
Lex Fridman (1:09:42.520)
and then we had the Renaissance and nation states,
Lex Fridman (1:09:45.360)
and universities compete with each other.
Lex Fridman (1:09:48.400)
Tremendous amount of companies competing
Nick Lane (1:09:50.560)
with each other all the time.
Lex Fridman (1:09:51.680)
It drives innovation.
Lex Fridman (1:09:55.080)
And if we want to do it without all the death
Lex Fridman (1:09:57.400)
that we see in nature,
Nick Lane (1:09:59.040)
then we have to have some kind of societal level control
Lex Fridman (1:10:03.320)
that says, well, there's some limits, guys,
Lex Fridman (1:10:05.480)
and these are what the limits are gonna be.
Lex Fridman (1:10:07.240)
And society as a whole has to say,
Nick Lane (1:10:08.760)
right, we want to limit the amount of death here,
Lex Fridman (1:10:10.920)
so you can't do this and you can't do that.
Lex Fridman (1:10:12.720)
And you know, who makes up these rules,
Lex Fridman (1:10:14.280)
and how do we know?
Nick Lane (1:10:15.120)
It's a tough thing, but it's basically
Lex Fridman (1:10:16.960)
trying to find a moral basis
Nick Lane (1:10:19.440)
for avoiding the death of evolution and natural selection
Lex Fridman (1:10:22.960)
and keeping the innovation and the richness of it.
Lex Fridman (1:10:27.400)
And I forgot who said it, but that murder is illegal.
Lex Fridman (1:10:31.840)
Probably Kurt Vonnegut.
Nick Lane (1:10:33.200)
Murder is illegal except when it's done
Lex Fridman (1:10:35.440)
to the sound of trumpets and at a large scale.
Lex Fridman (1:10:38.240)
So we still have wars.
Lex Fridman (1:10:41.720)
But we are struggling with this idea
Nick Lane (1:10:44.160)
that murder is a bad thing.
Lex Fridman (1:10:47.280)
It's so interesting how we're channeling
Nick Lane (1:10:49.760)
the best of the evolutionary imperative
Lex Fridman (1:10:53.240)
and trying to get rid of the stuff that's not productive.
Nick Lane (1:10:58.360)
Trying to almost accelerate evolution.
Lex Fridman (1:11:00.600)
The same kind of thing that makes evolution creative.
Nick Lane (1:11:05.840)
We're trying to use that.
Lex Fridman (1:11:07.360)
I think we naturally do it.
Nick Lane (1:11:08.640)
I mean, I don't think we can help ourselves do it.
Lex Fridman (1:11:10.640)
And you know, capitalism as a form
Nick Lane (1:11:13.280)
is basically about competition and differential rewards.
Lex Fridman (1:11:17.200)
But we, society, and you know, we have a,
Nick Lane (1:11:22.960)
I keep using this word moral obligation,
Lex Fridman (1:11:25.200)
but you know, we cannot operate as a society
Nick Lane (1:11:28.680)
if we go that way.
Lex Fridman (1:11:29.800)
It's interesting that we've had problems achieving balance.
Lex Fridman (1:11:35.160)
So for example, in the financial crash in 2009,
Lex Fridman (1:11:39.320)
do you let banks go to the wall or not?
Nick Lane (1:11:41.240)
This kind of question.
Lex Fridman (1:11:42.960)
In evolution, certainly you let them go to the wall.
Lex Fridman (1:11:45.040)
And in that sense, you don't need the regulation
Lex Fridman (1:11:47.840)
because they just die.
Nick Lane (1:11:51.320)
Whereas if we, as a society,
Lex Fridman (1:11:53.840)
think about what's required for society as a whole,
Nick Lane (1:11:56.320)
then you don't necessarily let them go to the wall.
Lex Fridman (1:11:59.440)
In which case you then have to impose
Nick Lane (1:12:01.480)
some kind of regulation that the bankers themselves will,
Lex Fridman (1:12:05.440)
in an evolutionary manner, exploit.
Nick Lane (1:12:08.160)
Yeah, we've been struggling with this kind of idea
Lex Fridman (1:12:11.360)
of capitalism, the cold brutality of capitalism
Nick Lane (1:12:16.120)
that seems to create so much beautiful things
Lex Fridman (1:12:18.920)
in this world.
Lex Fridman (1:12:20.320)
And then the ideals of communism
Lex Fridman (1:12:23.200)
that seem to create so much brutal destruction in history.
Nick Lane (1:12:26.640)
We struggle with ideas of,
Lex Fridman (1:12:28.720)
well, maybe we didn't do it right.
Lex Fridman (1:12:30.560)
How can we do things better?
Lex Fridman (1:12:31.760)
And then the ideas are the things
Nick Lane (1:12:33.480)
where we're playing with as opposed to people.
Lex Fridman (1:12:35.960)
If a PhD student has a bad idea,
Nick Lane (1:12:37.720)
we don't shoot the PhD student.
Lex Fridman (1:12:39.600)
We just criticize their idea and hope they improve.
Nick Lane (1:12:42.080)
You have a very humane lab.
Lex Fridman (1:12:44.040)
Yeah, I don't know how you guys do it.
Nick Lane (1:12:46.560)
The way I run things, it's always life and death.
Lex Fridman (1:12:49.360)
Okay, so it is interesting about humans
Nick Lane (1:12:52.480)
that there is an inner sense of morality
Lex Fridman (1:12:54.760)
which begs the question of how did homo sapiens evolve?
Nick Lane (1:13:02.440)
If we think about the invention of,
Lex Fridman (1:13:05.560)
early invention of sex and early invention of predation,
Lex Fridman (1:13:10.520)
what was the thing invented to make humans?
Lex Fridman (1:13:15.440)
What would you say?
Nick Lane (1:13:17.160)
I mean, I suppose a couple of things I'd say.
Lex Fridman (1:13:19.120)
Number one is you don't have to wind the clock back
Nick Lane (1:13:21.360)
very far, five, six million years or so,
Lex Fridman (1:13:24.160)
and let it run forwards again.
Lex Fridman (1:13:26.640)
And the chances of humans as we know them
Lex Fridman (1:13:29.000)
is not necessarily that high.
Nick Lane (1:13:31.040)
You know, imagine as an alien, you find planet Earth
Lex Fridman (1:13:34.560)
and it's got everything apart from humans on it.
Nick Lane (1:13:36.280)
It's an amazing, wonderful, marvelous planet,
Lex Fridman (1:13:39.360)
but nothing that we would recognize
Nick Lane (1:13:41.320)
as extremely intelligent life,
Lex Fridman (1:13:43.640)
kind of space faring civilization.
Lex Fridman (1:13:45.840)
So when we think about aliens,
Lex Fridman (1:13:46.960)
we're kind of after something like ourselves.
Nick Lane (1:13:49.760)
We're after a space faring civilization.
Lex Fridman (1:13:51.800)
We're not after zebras and giraffes and lions and things,
Nick Lane (1:13:55.840)
amazing though they are.
Lex Fridman (1:13:57.720)
But the additional kind of evolutionary steps
Nick Lane (1:14:01.280)
to go from large, complex mammals, monkeys, let's say,
Lex Fridman (1:14:06.120)
to humans doesn't strike me as that long a distance.
Nick Lane (1:14:12.960)
It's all about the brain.
Lex Fridman (1:14:14.440)
And where's the brain and morality coming from?
Nick Lane (1:14:17.040)
It seems to me to be all about groups,
Lex Fridman (1:14:19.880)
human groups and interactions between groups.
Nick Lane (1:14:22.440)
The collective intelligence of it.
Lex Fridman (1:14:24.480)
Yes, the interactions really.
Lex Fridman (1:14:26.680)
And there's a guy at UCL called Mark Thomas,
Lex Fridman (1:14:30.080)
who's done a lot of really beautiful work,
Nick Lane (1:14:32.000)
I think, on this kind of question.
Lex Fridman (1:14:33.560)
So I talk to him every now and then,
Lex Fridman (1:14:34.920)
so my views are influenced by him.
Lex Fridman (1:14:38.920)
But a lot seems to depend on population density,
Nick Lane (1:14:43.080)
that the more interactions you have going on
Lex Fridman (1:14:45.520)
between different groups, the more transfer of information,
Nick Lane (1:14:49.200)
if you like, between groups,
Lex Fridman (1:14:51.040)
people moving from one group to another group,
Nick Lane (1:14:53.600)
almost like lateral gene transfer in bacteria,
Lex Fridman (1:14:57.160)
the more expertise you're able to develop and maintain,
Nick Lane (1:15:01.000)
the more culturally complex your society can become.
Lex Fridman (1:15:04.480)
And groups that have become detached,
Nick Lane (1:15:07.760)
like on Easter Island, for example,
Lex Fridman (1:15:09.240)
very often degenerate in terms of the complexity
Nick Lane (1:15:12.480)
of their civilization.
Lex Fridman (1:15:13.560)
Is that true for complex organisms in general?
Nick Lane (1:15:16.080)
Population density is often productive.
Lex Fridman (1:15:19.160)
Really matters, but in human terms,
Nick Lane (1:15:23.080)
I don't know what the actual factors were
Lex Fridman (1:15:26.000)
that were driving a large brain,
Lex Fridman (1:15:28.600)
but you can talk about fire, you can talk about tool use,
Lex Fridman (1:15:32.880)
you can talk about language,
Lex Fridman (1:15:34.120)
and none of them seem to correlate especially well
Lex Fridman (1:15:36.720)
with the actual known trajectory of human evolution
Nick Lane (1:15:39.480)
in terms of cave art and these kind of things.
Lex Fridman (1:15:42.760)
That seems to work much better
Nick Lane (1:15:45.080)
just with population density
Lex Fridman (1:15:47.520)
and number of interactions between different groups,
Nick Lane (1:15:51.200)
all of which is really about human interactions,
Lex Fridman (1:15:55.840)
human human interactions and the complexity of those.
Lex Fridman (1:15:58.600)
But population density is the thing
Lex Fridman (1:16:02.040)
that increases the number of interactions,
Lex Fridman (1:16:04.280)
but then there must have been inventions
Lex Fridman (1:16:09.280)
forced by that number of interactions
Nick Lane (1:16:12.920)
that actually led to humans.
Lex Fridman (1:16:14.680)
So like Richard Wrangham talks about that
Nick Lane (1:16:18.600)
it's basically the beta males had to beat up the alpha male.
Lex Fridman (1:16:22.040)
So that's what collaboration looks like,
Nick Lane (1:16:23.760)
is they, when you're living together,
Lex Fridman (1:16:28.480)
our early ancestors don't like the dictatorial aspect
Nick Lane (1:16:33.680)
of a single individual at the top of a tribe.
Lex Fridman (1:16:36.040)
So they learned to collaborate
Lex Fridman (1:16:38.520)
how to basically create a democracy of sorts,
Lex Fridman (1:16:42.800)
a democracy that prevents, minimizes,
Nick Lane (1:16:45.200)
or lessens the amount of violence,
Lex Fridman (1:16:47.320)
which essentially gives strength to the tribe
Lex Fridman (1:16:50.640)
and make the war between tribes versus the dictator.
Lex Fridman (1:16:55.040)
I mean, I think one of the most wonderful things
Nick Lane (1:16:57.280)
about humans is we're all of those things.
Lex Fridman (1:17:00.360)
I mean, we are deeply social as a species
Lex Fridman (1:17:03.720)
and we're also deeply selfish.
Lex Fridman (1:17:05.360)
And it seems to me the conflict
Nick Lane (1:17:06.440)
between capitalism and communism,
Lex Fridman (1:17:08.400)
it's really just two aspects of human nature,
Nick Lane (1:17:10.400)
both of which are.
Lex Fridman (1:17:11.240)
We have both and we have a constant kind of vying
Nick Lane (1:17:15.120)
between the two sides.
Lex Fridman (1:17:16.080)
We really do care about other people beyond our families,
Nick Lane (1:17:19.440)
beyond our immediate people.
Lex Fridman (1:17:21.120)
We care about society and the society that we live in.
Lex Fridman (1:17:24.600)
And you could say that's a drawing
Lex Fridman (1:17:27.120)
towards socialism or communism.
Nick Lane (1:17:28.520)
On the other side, we really do care about ourselves.
Lex Fridman (1:17:30.720)
We really do care about our families,
Nick Lane (1:17:32.120)
about working for something that we gain from.
Lex Fridman (1:17:34.760)
And that's the capitalist side of it.
Nick Lane (1:17:35.960)
They're both really deeply ingrained in human nature.
Lex Fridman (1:17:38.880)
In terms of violence and interactions between groups,
Nick Lane (1:17:43.040)
yes, all this dynamic of,
Lex Fridman (1:17:45.960)
if you're interacting between groups,
Nick Lane (1:17:47.160)
you can be certain that they're gonna be burning each other
Lex Fridman (1:17:50.240)
and all kinds of physical violent interactions as well,
Nick Lane (1:17:53.360)
which will drive the kind of cleverness
Lex Fridman (1:17:56.600)
of how do you resist this?
Nick Lane (1:17:57.840)
Let's build a tower.
Lex Fridman (1:17:59.360)
What are we gonna do to prevent being overrun
Lex Fridman (1:18:02.640)
by those marauding gangs from over there?
Lex Fridman (1:18:06.240)
And you look outside humans
Lex Fridman (1:18:08.280)
and you look at chimps and bonobos and so on,
Lex Fridman (1:18:10.640)
and they're very, very different structures to society.
Nick Lane (1:18:13.280)
Chimps tend to have an aggressive alpha male type structure
Lex Fridman (1:18:16.640)
and bonobos, there's basically a female society
Nick Lane (1:18:21.000)
where the males are predominantly excluded
Lex Fridman (1:18:22.880)
and only brought in at the behest of the female.
Nick Lane (1:18:25.600)
We have a lot in common with both of those groups.
Lex Fridman (1:18:29.280)
And there's, again, tension there.
Lex Fridman (1:18:31.080)
And probably chimps, more violence,
Lex Fridman (1:18:33.360)
the bonobos, probably more sex.
Nick Lane (1:18:35.440)
That's another tension.
Lex Fridman (1:18:36.760)
How serious do we wanna be?
Lex Fridman (1:18:42.240)
How much fun we wanna be?
Lex Fridman (1:18:44.160)
Asking for a friend again,
Lex Fridman (1:18:45.960)
what do you think happened to Neanderthals?
Lex Fridman (1:18:47.920)
What did we cheeky humans do to the Neanderthals,
Lex Fridman (1:18:52.000)
Homo sapiens?
Lex Fridman (1:18:53.040)
Do you think we murdered them?
Lex Fridman (1:18:54.320)
Was it, how do we murder them?
Lex Fridman (1:18:56.760)
How do we outcompete them?
Lex Fridman (1:18:59.360)
Or do we mate them?
Lex Fridman (1:19:01.240)
I don't know.
Nick Lane (1:19:02.120)
I mean, I think there's unequivocal evidence
Lex Fridman (1:19:04.400)
that we mated with them.
Nick Lane (1:19:05.980)
We always try to mate with everything.
Lex Fridman (1:19:07.720)
Yes, pretty much.
Nick Lane (1:19:09.460)
There's some interesting,
Lex Fridman (1:19:10.320)
the first sequences that came along
Nick Lane (1:19:12.060)
were in mitochondrial DNA.
Lex Fridman (1:19:14.060)
And that was back to about 2002 or thereabouts.
Lex Fridman (1:19:18.520)
What was found was that Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA
Lex Fridman (1:19:21.240)
was very different to human mitochondria.
Nick Lane (1:19:23.360)
Oh, that's so interesting.
Lex Fridman (1:19:24.200)
You could do a clock on it
Lex Fridman (1:19:25.040)
and it said the divergent state
Lex Fridman (1:19:26.600)
was about 600,000 years ago or something like that.
Lex Fridman (1:19:29.200)
So not so long ago.
Lex Fridman (1:19:31.040)
And then the first full genomes were sequenced
Nick Lane (1:19:33.960)
maybe 10 years after that.
Lex Fridman (1:19:36.240)
And they showed plenty of signs of mating between.
Lex Fridman (1:19:39.600)
So the mitochondrial DNA effectively says no mating.
Lex Fridman (1:19:43.080)
And the nuclear genes say, yeah, lots of mating.
Lex Fridman (1:19:47.920)
But we don't know.
Lex Fridman (1:19:48.740)
How's that possible?
Lex Fridman (1:19:49.580)
So can you explain the difference
Lex Fridman (1:19:50.400)
between mitochondrial DNA and nucleus?
Nick Lane (1:19:53.840)
I've talked before about the mitochondria,
Lex Fridman (1:19:55.580)
which are the power packs in cells.
Nick Lane (1:19:57.400)
These are the paired down control units is their DNA.
Lex Fridman (1:20:01.400)
So it's passed on by the mother only.
Lex Fridman (1:20:05.000)
And in the egg cell,
Lex Fridman (1:20:07.140)
we might have half a million copies of mitochondrial DNA.
Nick Lane (1:20:10.600)
There's only 37 genes left and they do a,
Lex Fridman (1:20:15.080)
it's basically the control unit of energy production.
Nick Lane (1:20:17.200)
That's what it's doing.
Lex Fridman (1:20:18.480)
It's a basic old school machine that does.
Lex Fridman (1:20:21.720)
And it's got genes that were considered
Lex Fridman (1:20:23.300)
to be effectively trivial
Nick Lane (1:20:24.880)
because they did a very narrowly defined job,
Lex Fridman (1:20:28.740)
but they're not trivial in the sense
Nick Lane (1:20:30.360)
that that narrowly defined job
Lex Fridman (1:20:31.640)
is about everything that is being alive.
Lex Fridman (1:20:35.800)
So they're much easier to sequence.
Lex Fridman (1:20:38.160)
You've got many more copies of these things
Lex Fridman (1:20:39.760)
and you can sequence them very quickly.
Lex Fridman (1:20:42.120)
But the problem is because they go down
Nick Lane (1:20:43.800)
only the maternal line from mother to daughter,
Lex Fridman (1:20:46.320)
your mitochondrial DNA and mine is going nowhere.
Nick Lane (1:20:49.560)
It doesn't matter.
Lex Fridman (1:20:50.960)
Any kids we have, they get their mother's mitochondrial DNA
Nick Lane (1:20:53.840)
except in very, very rare and strange circumstances.
Lex Fridman (1:20:59.520)
And so it tells a different story
Lex Fridman (1:21:02.280)
and it's not a story which is easy to reconcile always.
Lex Fridman (1:21:06.280)
And what it seems to suggest to my mind at least
Nick Lane (1:21:10.040)
is that there was one way traffic of genes
Lex Fridman (1:21:13.840)
probably going from humans into Neanderthals
Nick Lane (1:21:16.520)
rather than the other way around.
Lex Fridman (1:21:18.040)
Why did the Neanderthals disappear?
Nick Lane (1:21:19.800)
I don't know.
Lex Fridman (1:21:20.800)
I mean, I suspect that they were,
Nick Lane (1:21:23.640)
I suspect they were probably less violent,
Lex Fridman (1:21:25.600)
less clever, less populous, less willing to fight.
Nick Lane (1:21:31.560)
I don't know.
Lex Fridman (1:21:32.520)
I mean, I think it probably drove them to extinction
Nick Lane (1:21:34.760)
at the margins of Europe.
Lex Fridman (1:21:37.160)
And it's interesting how much,
Nick Lane (1:21:39.080)
if we ran Earth over and over again,
Lex Fridman (1:21:41.440)
how many of these branches of intelligent beings
Nick Lane (1:21:45.360)
that have figured out some kind of
Lex Fridman (1:21:49.640)
how to leverage collective intelligence,
Lex Fridman (1:21:52.560)
which ones of them emerge?
Lex Fridman (1:21:53.760)
Which ones of them succeed?
Lex Fridman (1:21:55.640)
Is it the more violent ones?
Lex Fridman (1:21:57.760)
Is it the more isolated ones?
Lex Fridman (1:22:01.320)
Like what dynamics result in more productivity?
Lex Fridman (1:22:03.760)
And I suppose we'll never know.
Nick Lane (1:22:06.400)
The more complex the organism,
Lex Fridman (1:22:07.840)
the harder it is to run the experiment in the lab.
Nick Lane (1:22:10.600)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (1:22:12.120)
And in some respects, maybe it's best if we don't know.
Nick Lane (1:22:15.160)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:22:16.000)
The truth might be very painful.
Lex Fridman (1:22:18.120)
What about if we actually step back
Lex Fridman (1:22:20.640)
a couple of interesting things that we humans do?
Nick Lane (1:22:24.920)
One is object manipulation and movement.
Lex Fridman (1:22:28.840)
And of course, movement was something that was done,
Nick Lane (1:22:32.080)
that was another big invention,
Lex Fridman (1:22:33.760)
being able to move around the environment.
Lex Fridman (1:22:36.080)
And the other one is this sensory mechanism,
Lex Fridman (1:22:39.400)
how we sense the environment.
Nick Lane (1:22:41.040)
One of the coolest high definition ones is vision.
Lex Fridman (1:22:45.320)
How big are those inventions
Lex Fridman (1:22:47.120)
in the history of life on Earth?
Lex Fridman (1:22:50.840)
Vision, movement, I mean, again, extremely important,
Nick Lane (1:22:55.040)
going back to the origin of animals,
Lex Fridman (1:22:56.760)
the Cambrian explosion where suddenly you're seeing eyes
Nick Lane (1:22:59.560)
in the fossil record.
Lex Fridman (1:23:01.080)
And you can, it's not necessarily, again,
Nick Lane (1:23:03.720)
lots of people historically have said
Lex Fridman (1:23:05.800)
what use is half an eye?
Lex Fridman (1:23:06.920)
And you can go in a series of steps
Lex Fridman (1:23:10.640)
from a light sensitive spot on a flat piece of tissue
Nick Lane (1:23:17.240)
to an eyeball with a lens and so on.
Lex Fridman (1:23:20.360)
If you assume no more than, I don't remember,
Nick Lane (1:23:23.080)
this was a specific model that I have in mind,
Lex Fridman (1:23:25.120)
but it was 1% change or half a percent change
Nick Lane (1:23:28.480)
for each generation.
Lex Fridman (1:23:29.440)
How long would it take to evolve an eye as we know it?
Lex Fridman (1:23:31.560)
And the answer is half a million years.
Lex Fridman (1:23:34.000)
It doesn't have to take long.
Nick Lane (1:23:35.560)
That's not how evolution works.
Lex Fridman (1:23:36.840)
That's not an answer to the question.
Nick Lane (1:23:38.640)
It just shows you can reconstruct the steps
Lex Fridman (1:23:41.680)
and you can work out roughly how it can work.
Lex Fridman (1:23:44.600)
So it's not that big a deal to evolve an eye,
Lex Fridman (1:23:49.280)
but once you have one, then there's nowhere to hide.
Lex Fridman (1:23:51.960)
And again, we're back to predator prey relationships.
Lex Fridman (1:23:55.120)
We're back to all the benefits
Nick Lane (1:23:56.360)
that being able to see brings you.
Lex Fridman (1:23:58.320)
And if you think philosophically what bats are doing
Nick Lane (1:24:00.760)
with eco location and so on, I have no idea,
Lex Fridman (1:24:04.240)
but I suspect that they form an image of the world
Nick Lane (1:24:06.440)
in pretty much the same way that we do.
Lex Fridman (1:24:07.960)
It's just a matter of mental reconstruction.
Lex Fridman (1:24:10.160)
So I suppose the other thing about sight,
Lex Fridman (1:24:11.880)
there are single celled organisms that have got a lens
Lex Fridman (1:24:17.320)
and a retina and a cornea and so on.
Lex Fridman (1:24:21.600)
Basically they've got a camera type eye in a single cell.
Nick Lane (1:24:24.840)
They don't have a brain.
Lex Fridman (1:24:27.440)
What they understand about their world
Nick Lane (1:24:29.680)
is impossible to say, but they're capable of coming up
Lex Fridman (1:24:32.680)
with the same structures to do so.
Lex Fridman (1:24:34.960)
So I suppose then is that once you've got things like eyes,
Lex Fridman (1:24:39.160)
then you have a big driving pressure
Nick Lane (1:24:41.100)
on the central nervous system
Lex Fridman (1:24:42.440)
to figure out what it all means.
Lex Fridman (1:24:44.480)
And then we come around to your other point
Lex Fridman (1:24:45.720)
about manipulation, sensory input, and so on
Nick Lane (1:24:48.000)
about now you have a huge requirement
Lex Fridman (1:24:52.800)
to understand what your environment is and what it means
Lex Fridman (1:24:55.080)
and how it reacts and how you should run away
Lex Fridman (1:24:57.120)
and where you should stay put.
Nick Lane (1:24:59.200)
Actually on that point, let me,
Lex Fridman (1:25:00.480)
I don't know if you know the work of Donald Hoffman,
Nick Lane (1:25:03.800)
who uses the argument, the mechanism of evolution
Lex Fridman (1:25:11.640)
to say that there's not necessarily
Nick Lane (1:25:14.800)
a strong evolutionary value to seeing the world as it is.
Lex Fridman (1:25:23.280)
So objective reality, that our perception actually
Nick Lane (1:25:26.880)
is very different from what's objectively real.
Lex Fridman (1:25:29.840)
We're living inside an illusion
Lex Fridman (1:25:32.240)
and we're basically the entire set of species on earth,
Lex Fridman (1:25:37.560)
I think, I guess, are competing in a space
Nick Lane (1:25:40.200)
that's an illusion that's distinct from,
Lex Fridman (1:25:41.980)
that's far away from physical reality as it is,
Nick Lane (1:25:45.360)
as defined by physics.
Lex Fridman (1:25:46.280)
I'm not sure it's an illusion so much as a bubble.
Nick Lane (1:25:48.720)
I mean, we have a sensory input,
Lex Fridman (1:25:50.520)
which is a fraction of what we could have
Nick Lane (1:25:51.960)
a sensory input on, and we interpret it
Lex Fridman (1:25:55.280)
in terms of what's useful for us to know to stay alive.
Lex Fridman (1:25:58.240)
So yes, it's an illusion in that sense,
Lex Fridman (1:26:00.720)
but the tree is physically there.
Lex Fridman (1:26:03.640)
And if you walk into that tree, you know,
Lex Fridman (1:26:06.320)
that there is, it's not purely a delusion,
Nick Lane (1:26:08.240)
there's some physical reality to it.
Lex Fridman (1:26:10.360)
So it's a sensory slice into reality as it is,
Lex Fridman (1:26:15.140)
but because it's just a slice,
Lex Fridman (1:26:17.160)
you're missing a big picture.
Lex Fridman (1:26:18.840)
But he says that that slice doesn't necessarily
Lex Fridman (1:26:21.400)
need to be a slice.
Nick Lane (1:26:23.080)
It could be a complete fabrication
Lex Fridman (1:26:25.800)
that's just consistent amongst the species,
Nick Lane (1:26:28.440)
which is an interesting, or at least it's a humbling
Lex Fridman (1:26:32.780)
realization that our perception is limited
Lex Fridman (1:26:37.160)
and our cognitive abilities are limited.
Lex Fridman (1:26:40.520)
And at least to me, it's argument from evolution,
Nick Lane (1:26:44.920)
I don't know how much, how strong that is as an argument,
Lex Fridman (1:26:49.380)
but I do think that life can exist in the mind.
Nick Lane (1:26:54.380)
In the same way that you can do a virtual reality video game
Lex Fridman (1:26:59.580)
and you can have a vibrant life inside that place
Lex Fridman (1:27:02.300)
and that place is not real in some sense,
Lex Fridman (1:27:05.860)
but you could still have a vibrant,
Nick Lane (1:27:07.180)
all the same forces of evolution,
Lex Fridman (1:27:08.860)
all the same competition, the dynamics of between humans
Nick Lane (1:27:12.860)
you can have, but I don't know if,
Lex Fridman (1:27:19.500)
I don't know if there's evidence for that being
Nick Lane (1:27:21.980)
the thing that happened on earth.
Lex Fridman (1:27:23.660)
It seems that earth.
Nick Lane (1:27:25.100)
I think in either environment, I wouldn't deny
Lex Fridman (1:27:27.100)
that you could have exactly the world that you talk about
Lex Fridman (1:27:29.820)
and it would be very difficult to,
Lex Fridman (1:27:33.420)
the idea in matrix movies and so on
Nick Lane (1:27:36.540)
that the whole world is completely a construction
Lex Fridman (1:27:42.180)
and we're fundamentally deluded.
Nick Lane (1:27:43.900)
It's difficult to say that's impossible or couldn't happen
Lex Fridman (1:27:47.260)
or, and certainly we construct in our minds
Lex Fridman (1:27:51.160)
what the outside world is, but we do it on input
Lex Fridman (1:27:53.220)
and that input, I would hesitate to say it's not real
Nick Lane (1:27:57.780)
because it's precisely how we do understand the world.
Lex Fridman (1:28:00.340)
We have eyes, but if you keep someone in,
Nick Lane (1:28:04.100)
apparently this kind of thing happens,
Lex Fridman (1:28:06.060)
someone kept in a dark room for five years
Nick Lane (1:28:08.560)
or something like that, they never see properly again
Lex Fridman (1:28:10.940)
because the neural wiring that underpins
Lex Fridman (1:28:15.220)
how we interpret vision never developed.
Lex Fridman (1:28:18.840)
You need, when you watch a child develop,
Nick Lane (1:28:21.260)
it walks into a table, it bangs his head on the table
Lex Fridman (1:28:23.780)
and it hurts and now you've got two inputs.
Nick Lane (1:28:28.100)
You've got one pain from this sharp edge
Lex Fridman (1:28:30.060)
and number two, you probably, you've touched it
Lex Fridman (1:28:32.300)
and realized it's there, it's a sharp edge
Lex Fridman (1:28:33.900)
and you've got the visual input
Lex Fridman (1:28:34.940)
and you put the three things together and think,
Lex Fridman (1:28:36.500)
I don't wanna walk into a table again.
Lex Fridman (1:28:38.360)
So you're learning and it's a limited reality,
Lex Fridman (1:28:42.420)
but it's a true reality and if you don't learn
Nick Lane (1:28:44.260)
that properly, then you will get eaten,
Lex Fridman (1:28:45.740)
you will get hit by a bus, you will not survive.
Lex Fridman (1:28:48.740)
And same, if you're in some kind of,
Lex Fridman (1:28:53.420)
let's say, computer construction of reality,
Nick Lane (1:28:55.940)
I'm not in my ground here, but if you construct the laws
Lex Fridman (1:28:59.180)
that this is what reality is inside this,
Nick Lane (1:29:03.620)
then you play by those laws.
Lex Fridman (1:29:05.180)
Yeah, I mean, as long as the laws are consistent.
Lex Fridman (1:29:07.580)
So just like you said in the lab,
Lex Fridman (1:29:09.620)
the interesting thing about the simulation question,
Nick Lane (1:29:12.540)
yes, it's hard to know if we're living inside a simulation,
Lex Fridman (1:29:15.480)
but also, yes, it's possible to do these kinds
Nick Lane (1:29:18.580)
of experiments in the lab now more and more.
Lex Fridman (1:29:21.700)
To me, the interesting question is,
Lex Fridman (1:29:23.740)
how realistic does a virtual reality game need to be
Lex Fridman (1:29:28.140)
for us to not be able to tell the difference?
Nick Lane (1:29:30.620)
A more interesting question to me is,
Lex Fridman (1:29:33.300)
how realistic or interesting
Nick Lane (1:29:38.460)
does a virtual reality world need to be
Lex Fridman (1:29:40.660)
in order for us to want to stay there forever
Lex Fridman (1:29:43.460)
or much longer than physical reality, prefer that place?
Lex Fridman (1:29:47.900)
And also prefer it not as we prefer hard drugs,
Lex Fridman (1:29:52.140)
but prefer it in a deep, meaningful way
Lex Fridman (1:29:55.100)
in the way we enjoy life.
Nick Lane (1:29:57.820)
I mean, I suppose the issue with the matrix,
Lex Fridman (1:30:00.460)
I imagine that it's possible to dilute the mind sufficiently
Nick Lane (1:30:05.020)
that you genuinely, in that way,
Lex Fridman (1:30:07.000)
do think that you are interacting with the real world
Nick Lane (1:30:10.780)
when in fact the whole thing's a simulation.
Lex Fridman (1:30:14.340)
How good does a simulation need to be to be able to do that?
Nick Lane (1:30:17.260)
Well, it needs to convince you
Lex Fridman (1:30:21.380)
that all your sensory input is correct and accurate
Lex Fridman (1:30:24.140)
and joins up and makes sense.
Lex Fridman (1:30:26.620)
Now, that sensory input is not something
Nick Lane (1:30:28.380)
that we're born with.
Lex Fridman (1:30:29.740)
We're born with a sense of touch.
Nick Lane (1:30:31.660)
We're born with eyes and so on,
Lex Fridman (1:30:33.020)
but we don't know how to use them.
Nick Lane (1:30:34.120)
We don't know what to make of them.
Lex Fridman (1:30:35.740)
We go around, we bump into trees.
Nick Lane (1:30:37.460)
We cry a lot.
Lex Fridman (1:30:38.660)
We're in pain a lot.
Nick Lane (1:30:39.620)
We're basically booting up the system
Lex Fridman (1:30:43.080)
so that it can make head or tail
Nick Lane (1:30:45.340)
of the sensory input that it's getting.
Lex Fridman (1:30:47.580)
And that sensory input's not just a one way flux of things.
Nick Lane (1:30:49.980)
It's also, you have to walk into things.
Lex Fridman (1:30:51.580)
You have to hear things.
Nick Lane (1:30:52.420)
You have to put it together.
Lex Fridman (1:30:53.700)
Now, if you've got just babies in the matrix
Nick Lane (1:30:58.140)
who are slotted into this,
Lex Fridman (1:30:59.940)
I don't think they have that kind of sensory input.
Nick Lane (1:31:02.540)
I don't think they would have any way
Lex Fridman (1:31:03.740)
to make sense of New York as a world that they're part of.
Nick Lane (1:31:08.420)
The brain is just not developed in that way.
Lex Fridman (1:31:10.740)
Well, I can't make sense of New York
Nick Lane (1:31:12.380)
in this physical reality either.
Lex Fridman (1:31:13.920)
But yeah, I mean, but you said pain
Lex Fridman (1:31:16.300)
and the walking into things.
Lex Fridman (1:31:17.840)
Well, you can create a pain signal.
Lex Fridman (1:31:19.760)
And as long as it's consistent,
Lex Fridman (1:31:21.900)
that certain things result in pain,
Nick Lane (1:31:23.860)
you can start to construct a reality.
Lex Fridman (1:31:25.860)
There's some, maybe you disagree with this,
Lex Fridman (1:31:28.460)
but I think we are born almost with a desire
Lex Fridman (1:31:33.300)
to be convinced by our reality,
Nick Lane (1:31:35.820)
like a desire to make sense of our reality.
Lex Fridman (1:31:38.860)
Oh, I'm sure we are, yes.
Lex Fridman (1:31:40.240)
So there's an imperative.
Lex Fridman (1:31:41.140)
So whatever that reality is given to us,
Nick Lane (1:31:43.980)
like the table hurts, fire is hot.
Lex Fridman (1:31:46.580)
I think we wanna be diluted
Nick Lane (1:31:49.900)
in the sense that we want to make a simple,
Lex Fridman (1:31:53.100)
like Einstein's simple theory of the thing around us.
Nick Lane (1:31:56.440)
We want that simplicity.
Lex Fridman (1:31:58.020)
And so maybe the hunger for the simplicity
Nick Lane (1:32:02.220)
is the thing that could be used
Lex Fridman (1:32:03.860)
to construct a pretty dumb simulation that tricks us.
Lex Fridman (1:32:07.820)
So maybe tricking humans
Lex Fridman (1:32:09.100)
doesn't require building a universe.
Nick Lane (1:32:11.500)
No, I don't.
Lex Fridman (1:32:12.580)
I mean, this is not what I work on,
Lex Fridman (1:32:14.500)
so I don't know how close to it we are.
Lex Fridman (1:32:15.900)
I don't think anyone works on it.
Lex Fridman (1:32:16.740)
But I agree with you that, yeah,
Lex Fridman (1:32:18.740)
I'm not sure that it's a morally justifiable thing to do,
Lex Fridman (1:32:21.980)
but is it possible in principle?
Lex Fridman (1:32:26.500)
I think it would be very difficult,
Lex Fridman (1:32:28.420)
but I don't see why in principle it wouldn't be possible.
Lex Fridman (1:32:31.540)
And I agree with you that we try to understand the world.
Nick Lane (1:32:35.860)
We try to integrate the sensory inputs that we have,
Lex Fridman (1:32:38.060)
and we try to come up with a hypothesis
Nick Lane (1:32:40.180)
that explains what's going on.
Lex Fridman (1:32:41.980)
I think though that we have huge input
Nick Lane (1:32:46.260)
from the social context that we're in.
Lex Fridman (1:32:49.140)
We don't do it by ourselves.
Nick Lane (1:32:50.500)
We don't kind of blunder around in a universe by ourself
Lex Fridman (1:32:53.500)
and understand the whole thing.
Nick Lane (1:32:55.980)
We're told by the people around us
Lex Fridman (1:32:58.060)
what things are and what they do,
Lex Fridman (1:32:59.420)
and language is coming in here and so on.
Lex Fridman (1:33:01.680)
So it would have to be an extremely impressive simulation
Nick Lane (1:33:05.300)
to simulate all of that.
Lex Fridman (1:33:08.240)
Yeah, simulate all of that,
Nick Lane (1:33:10.340)
including the social construct,
Lex Fridman (1:33:12.100)
the spread of ideas and the exchange of ideas.
Nick Lane (1:33:15.940)
I don't know.
Lex Fridman (1:33:16.780)
But those questions are really important to understand
Nick Lane (1:33:18.660)
as we become more and more digital creatures.
Lex Fridman (1:33:22.060)
It seems like the next step of evolution
Nick Lane (1:33:23.780)
is us becoming all the same mechanisms we've talked about
Lex Fridman (1:33:28.300)
are becoming more and more plugged into the machine.
Nick Lane (1:33:31.860)
We're becoming cyborgs.
Lex Fridman (1:33:34.100)
And there's an interesting interplay
Nick Lane (1:33:36.660)
between wires and biology.
Lex Fridman (1:33:40.420)
Zeros and ones and the biological systems.
Lex Fridman (1:33:43.500)
And I don't think we'll have the luxury
Lex Fridman (1:33:48.700)
to see humans as disjoint from the technology
Nick Lane (1:33:51.180)
we've created for much longer.
Lex Fridman (1:33:53.500)
We are an organism that's.
Nick Lane (1:33:56.540)
Yeah, I mean, I agree with you.
Lex Fridman (1:34:00.300)
But we come really with this to consciousness.
Nick Lane (1:34:06.100)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (1:34:06.940)
And is there a distinction there?
Nick Lane (1:34:08.180)
Because what you're saying,
Lex Fridman (1:34:09.620)
the natural end point says we are indistinguishable,
Nick Lane (1:34:12.020)
that if you are capable of building an AI,
Lex Fridman (1:34:17.100)
which is sufficiently close and similar
Nick Lane (1:34:19.700)
that we merge with it,
Lex Fridman (1:34:20.660)
then to all intents and purposes,
Nick Lane (1:34:23.620)
that AI is conscious as we know it.
Lex Fridman (1:34:26.220)
And I don't have a strong view, but I have a view.
Lex Fridman (1:34:35.100)
And I wrote about it in the epilogue to my last book,
Lex Fridman (1:34:37.780)
because 10 years ago,
Nick Lane (1:34:39.580)
I wrote a chapter in a book called Life Ascending
Lex Fridman (1:34:44.420)
about consciousness.
Lex Fridman (1:34:45.900)
And the subtitle of Life Ascending
Lex Fridman (1:34:47.380)
was The 10 Great Inventions of Evolution.
Lex Fridman (1:34:49.940)
And I couldn't possibly write a book
Lex Fridman (1:34:51.340)
with a subtitle like that that did not include consciousness.
Lex Fridman (1:34:54.540)
And specifically consciousness
Lex Fridman (1:34:56.820)
as one of the great inventions.
Lex Fridman (1:34:59.420)
And it was in part because I was just curious to know more
Lex Fridman (1:35:02.540)
and I read more for that chapter.
Nick Lane (1:35:04.380)
I never worked on it, but I've always,
Lex Fridman (1:35:06.340)
how can anyone not be interested in the question?
Lex Fridman (1:35:09.220)
And I was left with the feeling that A, nobody knows,
Lex Fridman (1:35:13.220)
and B, there are two main schools of thought out there
Nick Lane (1:35:18.260)
with a big kind of skew in distribution.
Lex Fridman (1:35:21.180)
One of them says, oh, it's a property of matter.
Nick Lane (1:35:23.780)
It's an unknown law of physics.
Lex Fridman (1:35:26.300)
Panpsychism, everything is conscious.
Nick Lane (1:35:28.180)
The sun is conscious.
Lex Fridman (1:35:29.100)
It's just a matter of, or a rock is conscious.
Nick Lane (1:35:31.380)
It's just a matter of how much.
Lex Fridman (1:35:33.700)
And I find that very unpersuasive.
Nick Lane (1:35:36.460)
I can't say that it's wrong.
Lex Fridman (1:35:37.740)
It's just that I think we somehow can tell the difference
Nick Lane (1:35:41.380)
between something that's living and something that's not.
Lex Fridman (1:35:45.060)
And then the other end is it's an emergent property
Nick Lane (1:35:48.820)
of a very complex central nervous system.
Lex Fridman (1:35:51.340)
And I never quite understand what people mean
Nick Lane (1:35:56.340)
by words like emergence.
Lex Fridman (1:35:57.820)
I mean, there are genuine examples,
Lex Fridman (1:35:59.580)
but I think we very often tend to use it
Lex Fridman (1:36:03.740)
to plaster over ignorance.
Nick Lane (1:36:08.020)
As a biochemist, the question for me then was,
Lex Fridman (1:36:10.580)
okay, it's a concoction of a central nervous system.
Nick Lane (1:36:16.140)
A depolarizing neuron gives rise to a feeling,
Lex Fridman (1:36:20.260)
to a feeling of pain, or to a feeling of love,
Nick Lane (1:36:24.660)
or anger, or whatever it may be.
Lex Fridman (1:36:27.700)
So what is then a feeling in biophysical terms
Lex Fridman (1:36:30.580)
in the central nervous system?
Lex Fridman (1:36:31.820)
Which bit of the wiring gives rise to,
Lex Fridman (1:36:34.780)
and I've never seen anyone answer that question
Lex Fridman (1:36:38.060)
in a way that makes sense to me.
Lex Fridman (1:36:41.220)
And that's an important question to answer.
Lex Fridman (1:36:43.700)
I think if we want to understand consciousness,
Nick Lane (1:36:45.380)
that's the only question to answer.
Lex Fridman (1:36:47.180)
Because certainly an AI is capable of out thinking,
Lex Fridman (1:36:51.780)
and it's only a matter of time.
Lex Fridman (1:36:53.460)
Maybe it's already happened.
Nick Lane (1:36:54.940)
In terms of just information processing
Lex Fridman (1:36:58.260)
and computational skill,
Nick Lane (1:37:00.020)
I don't think we have any problem in designing a mind
Lex Fridman (1:37:04.220)
which is at least the equal of the human mind.
Lex Fridman (1:37:07.300)
But in terms of what we value the most as humans,
Lex Fridman (1:37:11.180)
which is to say our feelings, our emotions,
Nick Lane (1:37:13.300)
our sense of what the world is in a very personal way,
Lex Fridman (1:37:20.140)
that I think means as much or more to people
Nick Lane (1:37:23.540)
than their information processing.
Lex Fridman (1:37:24.900)
And that's where I don't think that AI necessarily
Nick Lane (1:37:28.700)
will become conscious, because I think
Lex Fridman (1:37:31.460)
it's the property of life.
Nick Lane (1:37:33.060)
Well, let's talk about it more.
Lex Fridman (1:37:34.220)
You're an incredible writer, one of my favorite writers.
Lex Fridman (1:37:36.820)
So let me read from your latest book, Transformers,
Lex Fridman (1:37:40.420)
what you write about consciousness.
Nick Lane (1:37:42.760)
I think therefore I am, said Descartes,
Lex Fridman (1:37:46.180)
is one of the most celebrated lines ever written.
Lex Fridman (1:37:49.300)
But what am I exactly?
Lex Fridman (1:37:51.580)
An artificial intelligence can think too, by definition,
Lex Fridman (1:37:54.660)
and therefore is, yet few of us could agree
Lex Fridman (1:37:58.140)
whether AI is capable in principle
Nick Lane (1:38:00.760)
of anything resembling human emotions,
Lex Fridman (1:38:03.180)
of love or hate, fear and joy, of spiritual yearnings,
Nick Lane (1:38:08.500)
for oneness or oblivion,
Lex Fridman (1:38:10.660)
or corporeal pangs of thirst and hunger.
Nick Lane (1:38:14.220)
The problem is we don't know what emotions are,
Lex Fridman (1:38:18.100)
as you were saying.
Lex Fridman (1:38:19.380)
What is the feeling in physical terms?
Lex Fridman (1:38:21.780)
How does a discharging neuron give rise
Lex Fridman (1:38:23.800)
to a feeling of anything at all?
Lex Fridman (1:38:25.680)
This is the hard problem of consciousness,
Nick Lane (1:38:28.620)
the seeming duality of mind and matter,
Lex Fridman (1:38:31.180)
the physical makeup of our innermost self.
Nick Lane (1:38:34.260)
We can understand in principle
Lex Fridman (1:38:35.640)
how an extremely sophisticated parallel processing system
Nick Lane (1:38:38.780)
could be capable of wondrous feats of intelligence,
Lex Fridman (1:38:41.500)
but we can't answer in principle
Nick Lane (1:38:44.140)
whether such a supreme intelligence
Lex Fridman (1:38:46.200)
would experience joy or melancholy.
Lex Fridman (1:38:49.160)
What is the quantum of solace?
Lex Fridman (1:38:52.980)
I, speaking to the question of emergence,
Nick Lane (1:38:57.060)
you know, there's just technical,
Lex Fridman (1:39:00.900)
there's an excellent paper on this recently
Nick Lane (1:39:03.820)
about this kind of phase transition,
Lex Fridman (1:39:08.140)
emergence of performance in neural networks
Nick Lane (1:39:10.800)
on the problem of NLP, natural language processing.
Lex Fridman (1:39:14.980)
So language models, there seems to be this question of size.
Nick Lane (1:39:19.460)
At some point, there is a phase transition
Lex Fridman (1:39:23.940)
as you grow the size of the neural network.
Lex Fridman (1:39:25.940)
So the question is,
Lex Fridman (1:39:27.300)
that's sort of somewhat of a technical question
Nick Lane (1:39:29.980)
that you can philosophize over.
Lex Fridman (1:39:32.060)
The technical question is,
Nick Lane (1:39:33.300)
is there a size of a neural network
Lex Fridman (1:39:35.740)
that starts to be able to form the kind of representations
Nick Lane (1:39:39.140)
that can capture a language,
Lex Fridman (1:39:40.740)
and therefore be able to, not just language,
Lex Fridman (1:39:44.740)
but linguistically capture knowledge
Lex Fridman (1:39:47.120)
that's sufficient to solve a lot of problems in language,
Nick Lane (1:39:50.940)
like be able to have a conversation.
Lex Fridman (1:39:52.580)
And there seems to be not a gradual increase,
Lex Fridman (1:39:55.780)
but a phase transition.
Lex Fridman (1:39:57.100)
And they're trying to construct the science of where that is,
Nick Lane (1:40:01.200)
like what is a good size of a neural network,
Lex Fridman (1:40:03.620)
and why does such a phase transition happen?
Nick Lane (1:40:05.900)
Anyway, that sort of points to emergence,
Lex Fridman (1:40:08.660)
that there could be stages where a thing goes
Nick Lane (1:40:15.100)
from being, oh, you're very intelligent toaster,
Lex Fridman (1:40:20.180)
to a toaster that's feeling sad today and turns away
Lex Fridman (1:40:25.020)
and looks out the window, sighing,
Lex Fridman (1:40:29.180)
having an existential crisis.
Nick Lane (1:40:30.660)
Thinking of Marvin, the paranoid android.
Lex Fridman (1:40:33.700)
Marvin is simplistic because Marvin is just cranky.
Nick Lane (1:40:38.260)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (1:40:40.100)
So easily programmed.
Nick Lane (1:40:41.580)
Yeah, easily programmed, nonstop existential crisis.
Lex Fridman (1:40:45.220)
You're almost basically, what is it?
Nick Lane (1:40:47.300)
Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky,
Lex Fridman (1:40:48.820)
like just constantly complaining about life.
Nick Lane (1:40:53.040)
No, they're capturing the full rollercoaster
Lex Fridman (1:40:57.140)
of human emotion, the excitement, the bliss,
Nick Lane (1:41:00.140)
the connection, the empathy and all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman (1:41:03.940)
And then the selfishness, the anger, the depression,
Nick Lane (1:41:09.100)
all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman (1:41:09.940)
They're capturing all of that
Lex Fridman (1:41:11.860)
and be able to experience it deeply.
Lex Fridman (1:41:14.420)
Like it's the most important thing
Nick Lane (1:41:16.580)
you could possibly experience today.
Lex Fridman (1:41:18.540)
The highest highs, the lowest lows, this is it.
Nick Lane (1:41:21.300)
My life will be over.
Lex Fridman (1:41:24.460)
I cannot possibly go on that feeling.
Lex Fridman (1:41:26.740)
And then like after a nap, you're feeling amazing.
Lex Fridman (1:41:30.580)
That might be something that emerges.
Lex Fridman (1:41:33.620)
So why would a nap make an AI being feel better?
Lex Fridman (1:41:42.580)
First of all, we don't know that for a human either, right?
Lex Fridman (1:41:45.220)
But we do know that that's actually true
Lex Fridman (1:41:47.620)
for many people much of the time.
Nick Lane (1:41:48.980)
You may be utterly depressed and you have a nap
Lex Fridman (1:41:50.820)
and you do in fact feel better, so.
Nick Lane (1:41:53.460)
Oh, you are actually asking the technical question there,
Lex Fridman (1:41:55.660)
is there, so that's a very,
Nick Lane (1:41:57.940)
there's a biological answer to that.
Lex Fridman (1:41:59.980)
And so the question is whether AI needs to have
Nick Lane (1:42:01.980)
the same kind of attachments to its body,
Lex Fridman (1:42:04.860)
bodily function and preservation
Nick Lane (1:42:08.540)
of the brain's successful function,
Lex Fridman (1:42:13.180)
self preservation essentially in some deep biological sense.
Nick Lane (1:42:17.060)
I mean, to my mind, it comes back round
Lex Fridman (1:42:19.940)
to the problem we were talking about before
Nick Lane (1:42:21.660)
about simulations and sensory input
Lex Fridman (1:42:24.100)
and learning what all of this stuff means
Lex Fridman (1:42:28.580)
and life and death,
Lex Fridman (1:42:31.420)
that biology unlike society has a death penalty
Nick Lane (1:42:35.100)
over everything and natural selection works
Lex Fridman (1:42:37.820)
on that death penalty.
Nick Lane (1:42:38.980)
That if you make this decision wrongly, you die.
Lex Fridman (1:42:47.340)
And the next generation is represented by beings
Nick Lane (1:42:50.780)
that made a slightly different decision on balance.
Lex Fridman (1:42:56.380)
And that is something that's intrinsically
Nick Lane (1:43:00.980)
difficult to simulate in all this richness, I would say.
Lex Fridman (1:43:06.020)
So what is?
Nick Lane (1:43:09.060)
Death in all its richness.
Lex Fridman (1:43:11.100)
Yeah.
Nick Lane (1:43:12.060)
Our relationship with death or the whole of it.
Lex Fridman (1:43:16.580)
So which when you say richness, of course,
Nick Lane (1:43:20.140)
there's a lot in that.
Lex Fridman (1:43:21.380)
Yeah.
Nick Lane (1:43:22.220)
Which is hard to simulate.
Lex Fridman (1:43:23.860)
What's part of the richness that's hard to simulate?
Nick Lane (1:43:27.660)
I suppose the complexity of the environment
Lex Fridman (1:43:31.020)
and your position in that or the position
Nick Lane (1:43:33.340)
of an organism in that environment,
Lex Fridman (1:43:35.460)
in the full richness of that environment
Nick Lane (1:43:37.540)
over its entire life, over multiple generations
Lex Fridman (1:43:40.620)
with changes in gene sequence over those generations.
Lex Fridman (1:43:44.220)
So slight changes in the makeup of those individuals
Lex Fridman (1:43:46.860)
over generations.
Lex Fridman (1:43:48.300)
But if you take it back to the level of single cells,
Lex Fridman (1:43:52.460)
which I do in the book and ask how does a single cell
Lex Fridman (1:43:59.340)
in effect know it exists as a unit, as an entity?
Lex Fridman (1:44:02.340)
I mean, no, in inverted commas,
Nick Lane (1:44:03.980)
obviously it doesn't know anything,
Lex Fridman (1:44:07.100)
but it acts as a unit and it acts
Nick Lane (1:44:09.060)
with astonishing precision as a unit.
Lex Fridman (1:44:14.660)
And I had suggested that that's linked
Nick Lane (1:44:17.300)
to the electrical fields on the membranes themselves
Lex Fridman (1:44:19.860)
and that they give some indication
Nick Lane (1:44:21.900)
of how am I doing in relation to my environment
Lex Fridman (1:44:24.340)
as a kind of real time feedback on the world.
Lex Fridman (1:44:28.340)
And this is something physical,
Lex Fridman (1:44:32.020)
which can be selected over generations
Nick Lane (1:44:34.940)
that if you get this wrong,
Lex Fridman (1:44:39.180)
it's linked with this set of circumstances
Nick Lane (1:44:42.300)
that I've just, as an individual,
Lex Fridman (1:44:45.500)
I have a moment of blind panic and run
Nick Lane (1:44:49.140)
as a bacterium or something.
Lex Fridman (1:44:50.620)
You have some electrical discharge that says blind panic
Lex Fridman (1:44:54.180)
and it runs whatever it may be.
Lex Fridman (1:44:56.580)
And you associate over generations, multiple generations
Nick Lane (1:44:59.820)
that this electrical phase that I'm in now
Lex Fridman (1:45:03.660)
is associated with a response like that.
Lex Fridman (1:45:07.100)
And it's easy to see how feelings come in
Lex Fridman (1:45:09.860)
through the back door almost with that kind of giving real time
Nick Lane (1:45:17.700)
feedback on your position in the world
Lex Fridman (1:45:19.500)
in relation to how am I doing.
Lex Fridman (1:45:22.060)
And then you complexify the system
Lex Fridman (1:45:23.900)
and yes, I have no problem with phase transition.
Lex Fridman (1:45:27.780)
And can all of this be done purely by the language,
Lex Fridman (1:45:36.420)
by the issues with how the system understands itself?
Nick Lane (1:45:42.620)
Maybe it can, I honestly don't know.
Lex Fridman (1:45:45.260)
But the philosophers for a long time
Nick Lane (1:45:47.580)
have talked about the possibility
Lex Fridman (1:45:49.700)
that you can have a zombie intelligence
Lex Fridman (1:45:54.100)
and that there are no feelings there,
Lex Fridman (1:45:55.660)
but everything else is the same.
Nick Lane (1:45:59.460)
I mean, I have to throw this back to you really.
Lex Fridman (1:46:01.460)
How do you deal with the zombie intelligence?
Lex Fridman (1:46:03.980)
So first of all, I can see that from a biologist perspective,
Lex Fridman (1:46:08.620)
you think of all the complexities
Nick Lane (1:46:10.740)
that led up to the human being.
Lex Fridman (1:46:12.860)
The entirety of the history of four billion years
Nick Lane (1:46:15.780)
that in some deep sense integrated the human being
Lex Fridman (1:46:18.860)
into this environment.
Lex Fridman (1:46:20.180)
And that dance of the organism and the environment,
Lex Fridman (1:46:25.020)
you could see how emotions arise from that.
Lex Fridman (1:46:27.380)
And then emotions are deeply connected
Lex Fridman (1:46:29.740)
and creating a human experience.
Lex Fridman (1:46:32.020)
And from that, you mix in consciousness
Lex Fridman (1:46:34.180)
and the full mess of it, yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:46:37.260)
But from a perspective of an intelligent organism
Lex Fridman (1:46:40.900)
that's already here, like a baby that learns,
Nick Lane (1:46:45.220)
it doesn't need to learn how to be a collection of cells
Lex Fridman (1:46:49.420)
or how to do all the things it needs to do.
Nick Lane (1:46:52.260)
The basic function of a baby as it learns
Lex Fridman (1:46:55.340)
is to interact with its environment,
Nick Lane (1:46:57.380)
to learn from its environment,
Lex Fridman (1:46:58.620)
to learn how to fit in to the social society,
Nick Lane (1:47:01.820)
to like...
Lex Fridman (1:47:03.180)
And the basic response of the baby
Nick Lane (1:47:05.940)
is to cry a lot of the time.
Lex Fridman (1:47:07.100)
To cry, well, to convince the humans to protect it
Nick Lane (1:47:12.540)
or to discipline it, to teach it.
Lex Fridman (1:47:14.940)
I mean, we've developed a bunch of different tricks,
Lex Fridman (1:47:18.780)
how to get our parents to take care of us,
Lex Fridman (1:47:22.100)
to educate us, to teach us about the world.
Nick Lane (1:47:24.860)
Also, we've constructed the world in such a way
Lex Fridman (1:47:27.900)
that it's safe enough for us to survive in
Lex Fridman (1:47:30.380)
and yet dangerous enough for learning the valuable lessons.
Lex Fridman (1:47:32.780)
Like the tables are still hard with corners,
Lex Fridman (1:47:35.580)
so it can still run into them.
Lex Fridman (1:47:36.820)
It hurts like how...
Lex Fridman (1:47:38.740)
So AI needs to solve that problem,
Lex Fridman (1:47:41.660)
not the problem of constructing
Nick Lane (1:47:43.060)
this super complex organism that leads up...
Lex Fridman (1:47:47.980)
To run the whole...
Nick Lane (1:47:51.660)
To make an apple pie, to build the whole universe,
Lex Fridman (1:47:53.940)
you need to build a whole universe.
Nick Lane (1:47:55.900)
I think the zombie question is something
Lex Fridman (1:48:01.780)
I would leave to the philosophers.
Nick Lane (1:48:04.020)
Because...
Lex Fridman (1:48:08.260)
And I will also leave to them the definition of love
Lex Fridman (1:48:11.180)
and what happens between two human beings
Lex Fridman (1:48:14.900)
when there's a magic that just grabs them.
Nick Lane (1:48:18.540)
Like nothing else matters in the world
Lex Fridman (1:48:20.700)
and somehow you've been searching for this feeling,
Nick Lane (1:48:22.980)
this moment, this person your whole life.
Lex Fridman (1:48:25.260)
That feeling, the philosophers can have a lot of fun
Nick Lane (1:48:29.540)
with that one and also say that that's just...
Lex Fridman (1:48:32.820)
You can have a biological explanation,
Nick Lane (1:48:34.700)
you can have all kinds of...
Lex Fridman (1:48:35.740)
It's all fake, it's actually...
Nick Lane (1:48:38.300)
Ayn Rand will say it's all selfish.
Lex Fridman (1:48:40.700)
There's a lot of different interpretations.
Nick Lane (1:48:42.420)
I'll leave it to the philosophers.
Lex Fridman (1:48:43.620)
The point is the feeling sure as hell feels very real.
Lex Fridman (1:48:48.020)
And if my toaster makes me feel
Lex Fridman (1:48:51.860)
like it's the only toaster in the world.
Lex Fridman (1:48:55.740)
And when I leave and I miss the toaster
Lex Fridman (1:48:58.420)
and when I come back, I'm excited to see the toaster
Lex Fridman (1:49:01.420)
and my life is meaningful and joyful
Lex Fridman (1:49:03.980)
and the friends I have around me get a better version of me
Nick Lane (1:49:08.100)
because that toaster exists.
Lex Fridman (1:49:10.740)
That sure as hell feels like a conscious toaster.
Lex Fridman (1:49:13.340)
Is that psychologically different to having a dog?
Lex Fridman (1:49:16.020)
No.
Nick Lane (1:49:16.860)
Because I mean most people would dispute
Lex Fridman (1:49:19.260)
whether we can say a dog...
Nick Lane (1:49:20.540)
I would say a dog is undoubtedly conscious,
Lex Fridman (1:49:22.220)
but some people say it doesn't.
Lex Fridman (1:49:24.060)
But there's degrees of consciousness and so on,
Lex Fridman (1:49:26.260)
but people are definitely much more uncomfortable
Nick Lane (1:49:28.780)
saying a toaster can be conscious than a dog.
Lex Fridman (1:49:32.620)
And there's still a deep connection.
Nick Lane (1:49:35.060)
You could say our relationship with the dog
Lex Fridman (1:49:37.860)
has more to do with anthropomorphism.
Nick Lane (1:49:40.100)
Like we kind of project the human being onto it.
Lex Fridman (1:49:42.380)
Maybe.
Nick Lane (1:49:43.220)
We can do the same damn thing with a toaster.
Lex Fridman (1:49:45.780)
Yes, but you can look into the dog's eyes
Lex Fridman (1:49:48.100)
and you can see that it's sad,
Lex Fridman (1:49:50.460)
that it's delighted to see you again.
Nick Lane (1:49:52.500)
I don't have a dog, by the way.
Lex Fridman (1:49:53.900)
It's not that I'm a dog person or a cat person.
Lex Fridman (1:49:54.740)
And dogs are actually incredibly good
Lex Fridman (1:49:56.380)
at using their eyes to do just that.
Nick Lane (1:49:59.460)
They are.
Lex Fridman (1:50:00.300)
Now, I don't imagine that a dog is remotely
Nick Lane (1:50:02.660)
as close to being intelligent as an AI intelligence,
Lex Fridman (1:50:07.060)
but it's certainly capable
Nick Lane (1:50:09.540)
of communicating emotionally with us.
Lex Fridman (1:50:11.980)
But here's what I would venture to say.
Nick Lane (1:50:13.860)
We tend to think because AI plays chess well
Lex Fridman (1:50:17.140)
and is able to fold proteins now well,
Nick Lane (1:50:19.700)
that it's intelligent.
Lex Fridman (1:50:21.020)
I would argue that in order to communicate with humans,
Nick Lane (1:50:23.860)
in order to have emotional intelligence,
Lex Fridman (1:50:25.900)
it actually requires another order
Nick Lane (1:50:27.420)
of magnitude of intelligence.
Lex Fridman (1:50:28.900)
It's not easy to be flawed.
Nick Lane (1:50:34.100)
Solving a mathematical puzzle is not the same
Lex Fridman (1:50:38.380)
as the full complexity of human to human interaction.
Nick Lane (1:50:42.060)
That's actually, we humans just take for granted
Lex Fridman (1:50:46.980)
the things we're really good at.
Nick Lane (1:50:49.180)
Nonstop, people tell me how shitty people are driving.
Lex Fridman (1:50:52.700)
No, humans are incredible at driving.
Nick Lane (1:50:56.580)
Bipedal walking, walking, object manipulation.
Lex Fridman (1:51:00.260)
We're incredible at this.
Lex Fridman (1:51:01.860)
And so people tend to discount the things
Lex Fridman (1:51:05.820)
we all just take for granted.
Lex Fridman (1:51:07.380)
And one of those things that they discount
Lex Fridman (1:51:10.180)
is our ability, the dance of conversation
Lex Fridman (1:51:13.580)
and interaction with each other.
Lex Fridman (1:51:15.340)
The ability to morph ideas together.
Nick Lane (1:51:18.460)
The ability to get angry at each other
Lex Fridman (1:51:20.380)
and then to miss each other.
Nick Lane (1:51:21.940)
Like to create a tension that makes life fun
Lex Fridman (1:51:24.980)
and difficult and challenging in a way that's meaningful.
Nick Lane (1:51:28.300)
That is a skill that's learned
Lex Fridman (1:51:31.660)
and AI would need to solve that problem.
Nick Lane (1:51:33.460)
I mean, in some sense, what you're saying is
Lex Fridman (1:51:37.020)
AI cannot become meaningfully emotional, let's say,
Nick Lane (1:51:42.380)
until it experiences some kind of internal conflict
Lex Fridman (1:51:45.220)
that is unable to reconcile these various aspects
Nick Lane (1:51:48.500)
of reality or its reality with a decision to make.
Lex Fridman (1:51:54.700)
And then it feels sad, necessarily,
Nick Lane (1:51:56.820)
because it doesn't know what to do.
Lex Fridman (1:51:59.460)
And I certainly can't dispute that.
Nick Lane (1:52:01.740)
That may very well be how it works.
Lex Fridman (1:52:03.700)
I think the only way to find out is to do it.
Lex Fridman (1:52:05.780)
And to build it.
Lex Fridman (1:52:06.700)
Yeah, and leave it to the philosophers
Nick Lane (1:52:08.460)
if it actually feels sad or not.
Lex Fridman (1:52:11.220)
The point is the robot will be sitting there alone
Nick Lane (1:52:13.860)
having an internal conflict, an existential crisis,
Lex Fridman (1:52:16.940)
and that's required for it to have a deep,
Nick Lane (1:52:19.300)
meaningful connection with another human being.
Lex Fridman (1:52:21.560)
Now, does it actually feel that?
Nick Lane (1:52:23.300)
I don't know.
Lex Fridman (1:52:24.140)
But I'd like to throw something else at you,
Nick Lane (1:52:26.060)
which troubles me on reading it.
Lex Fridman (1:52:31.140)
Noah Harari's book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.
Lex Fridman (1:52:35.140)
And he's written about this kind of thing
Lex Fridman (1:52:36.520)
on various occasions.
Lex Fridman (1:52:38.440)
And he sees biochemistry as an algorithm.
Lex Fridman (1:52:40.740)
And then AI will necessarily be able to hack that algorithm
Lex Fridman (1:52:45.160)
and do it better than humans.
Lex Fridman (1:52:46.320)
So there will be AI better at writing music
Nick Lane (1:52:48.800)
that we appreciate than Mozart ever could,
Lex Fridman (1:52:50.720)
or writing better than Shakespeare ever did, and so on.
Nick Lane (1:52:53.040)
Because biochemistry is algorithmic,
Lex Fridman (1:52:55.560)
and all you need to do is figure out
Nick Lane (1:52:56.880)
which bits of the algorithm to play
Lex Fridman (1:52:58.720)
to make us feel good or bad or appreciate things.
Lex Fridman (1:53:02.360)
And as a biochemist, I find that argument
Lex Fridman (1:53:05.680)
an argument close to irrefutable and not very enjoyable.
Nick Lane (1:53:13.320)
I don't like the sound of it.
Lex Fridman (1:53:14.840)
That's just my reaction as a human being.
Nick Lane (1:53:16.480)
You might like the sound of it because that says
Lex Fridman (1:53:18.160)
that AI is capable of the same kind of emotional feelings
Nick Lane (1:53:23.440)
about the world as we are,
Lex Fridman (1:53:25.540)
because the whole thing is an algorithm
Lex Fridman (1:53:27.080)
and you can program an algorithm, and there you are.
Lex Fridman (1:53:31.160)
He then has a peculiar final chapter
Nick Lane (1:53:33.520)
where he talks about consciousness
Lex Fridman (1:53:36.080)
in rather separate terms.
Lex Fridman (1:53:37.640)
And he's talking about meditating and so on
Lex Fridman (1:53:39.800)
and getting in touch with his inner conscious.
Nick Lane (1:53:41.460)
I don't meditate, I don't know anything about that.
Lex Fridman (1:53:44.620)
But he wrote in very different terms about it,
Nick Lane (1:53:48.160)
as if somehow it's a way out of the algorithm.
Lex Fridman (1:53:52.240)
Now, it seems to me that consciousness in that sense
Nick Lane (1:53:56.100)
is capable of scuppering the algorithm.
Lex Fridman (1:53:58.740)
I think in terms of the biochemical feedback loops
Lex Fridman (1:54:01.880)
and so on, it is undoubtedly algorithmic.
Lex Fridman (1:54:04.840)
But in terms of what we decide to do,
Nick Lane (1:54:07.880)
it can be much more based on an emotion.
Lex Fridman (1:54:14.840)
We can just think, I don't care.
Nick Lane (1:54:16.960)
I can't resolve this complex situation.
Lex Fridman (1:54:20.280)
I'm gonna do that.
Lex Fridman (1:54:21.540)
And that can be based on, in effect, a different currency,
Lex Fridman (1:54:24.760)
which is the currency of feelings and something
Nick Lane (1:54:27.040)
where we don't have very much personal control over.
Lex Fridman (1:54:29.980)
And then it comes back around to you
Lex Fridman (1:54:32.040)
and what are you trying to get at with AI?
Lex Fridman (1:54:35.360)
Do we need to have some system
Nick Lane (1:54:38.060)
which is capable of overriding a rational decision
Lex Fridman (1:54:41.840)
which cannot be made
Nick Lane (1:54:42.680)
because there's too much conflicting information
Lex Fridman (1:54:45.080)
by effectively an emotional judgmental decision
Nick Lane (1:54:48.500)
that just says, do this and see what happens.
Lex Fridman (1:54:50.960)
That's what consciousness is really doing in my view.
Nick Lane (1:54:53.400)
Yeah, and the question is whether it's a different process
Lex Fridman (1:54:56.480)
or just a higher level process.
Nick Lane (1:54:59.020)
I might, you know, the idea that biochemistry
Lex Fridman (1:55:02.360)
is an algorithm is, to me, an oversimplistic view.
Nick Lane (1:55:07.480)
There's a lot of things that the moment you say it,
Lex Fridman (1:55:13.320)
it's irrefutable, but it simplifies.
Nick Lane (1:55:17.040)
Of course.
Lex Fridman (1:55:17.880)
And in the process loses something fundamental.
Lex Fridman (1:55:21.000)
So for example, calling a universe
Lex Fridman (1:55:23.480)
and an information processing system, sure, yes.
Nick Lane (1:55:27.360)
You could make that.
Lex Fridman (1:55:29.720)
It's a computer that's performing computations,
Lex Fridman (1:55:32.160)
but you're missing the process of the entropy
Lex Fridman (1:55:40.720)
somehow leading to pockets of complexity
Nick Lane (1:55:42.760)
that creates these beautiful artifacts
Lex Fridman (1:55:45.360)
that are incredibly complex and they're like machines.
Lex Fridman (1:55:48.880)
And then those machines are through the process of evolution
Lex Fridman (1:55:52.000)
are constructing even further complexity.
Nick Lane (1:55:54.560)
Like in calling universe information processing machine,
Lex Fridman (1:55:59.860)
you're missing those little local pockets
Lex Fridman (1:56:03.000)
and how difficult it is to create them.
Lex Fridman (1:56:05.100)
So the question to me is if biochemistry is an algorithm,
Lex Fridman (1:56:07.880)
how difficult is it to create a software system
Lex Fridman (1:56:11.980)
that runs the human body, which I think is incorrect.
Nick Lane (1:56:16.240)
I think that is going to take so long.
Lex Fridman (1:56:21.160)
I mean, that's going to be centuries from now
Nick Lane (1:56:23.500)
to be able to reconstruct the human.
Lex Fridman (1:56:25.600)
Now, what I would venture to say
Nick Lane (1:56:27.600)
to get some of the magic of a human being
Lex Fridman (1:56:30.400)
with what we're saying with the emotions
Lex Fridman (1:56:32.880)
and the interactions and like a dog makes a smile
Lex Fridman (1:56:36.400)
and joyful and all those kinds of things
Nick Lane (1:56:38.200)
that will come much sooner,
Lex Fridman (1:56:39.640)
but that doesn't require us to reverse engineer
Nick Lane (1:56:42.280)
the algorithm of biochemistry.
Lex Fridman (1:56:44.080)
Yes, but the toaster is making you happy.
Nick Lane (1:56:47.680)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (1:56:48.640)
It's not about whether you make the toaster happy.
Nick Lane (1:56:51.840)
No, it has to be.
Lex Fridman (1:56:52.680)
It has to be.
Nick Lane (1:56:55.120)
It has to be.
Lex Fridman (1:56:56.160)
The toaster has to be able to leave me happy.
Nick Lane (1:56:58.060)
Yeah, but it's the toaster is the AI in this case
Lex Fridman (1:57:00.080)
is very intelligent.
Nick Lane (1:57:00.920)
Yeah, the toaster has to be able to be unhappy and leave me.
Lex Fridman (1:57:03.980)
That's essential.
Nick Lane (1:57:06.360)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:57:07.200)
That's essential for my being able to miss the toaster.
Nick Lane (1:57:09.780)
If the toaster is just my servant,
Lex Fridman (1:57:12.240)
that's not, or a provider of like services,
Nick Lane (1:57:17.720)
like tells me the weather makes toast,
Lex Fridman (1:57:20.440)
that's not going to deep connection.
Nick Lane (1:57:22.760)
It has to have internal conflict.
Lex Fridman (1:57:24.900)
You write about life and death.
Nick Lane (1:57:26.740)
It has to be able to be conscious of its mortality
Lex Fridman (1:57:30.940)
and the finiteness of its existence.
Lex Fridman (1:57:33.760)
And that life is for temporary
Lex Fridman (1:57:35.880)
and therefore it needs to be more selective.
Nick Lane (1:57:38.000)
One of the most moving moments in the movies
Lex Fridman (1:57:41.040)
from when I was a boy was the unplugging of Hal in 2001,
Nick Lane (1:57:45.080)
where that was the death of a sentient being
Lex Fridman (1:57:48.620)
and Hal knew it.
Lex Fridman (1:57:51.000)
So I think we all kind of know
Lex Fridman (1:57:55.260)
that a sufficiently intelligent being
Nick Lane (1:58:00.140)
is going to have some form of consciousness,
Lex Fridman (1:58:02.760)
but whether it would be like biological consciousness,
Nick Lane (1:58:06.820)
I just don't know.
Lex Fridman (1:58:07.660)
And if you're thinking about how do we bring together,
Nick Lane (1:58:10.220)
I mean, obviously we're going to interact
Lex Fridman (1:58:13.320)
more closely with AI,
Lex Fridman (1:58:16.240)
but is a dog really like a toaster
Lex Fridman (1:58:21.640)
or is there really some kind of difference there?
Nick Lane (1:58:25.680)
You were talking about biochemistry is algorithmic,
Lex Fridman (1:58:29.480)
but it's not single algorithm
Lex Fridman (1:58:31.400)
and it's very complex, of course it is.
Lex Fridman (1:58:33.180)
So it may be that there are again conflicts
Nick Lane (1:58:35.840)
in the circuits of biochemistry,
Lex Fridman (1:58:37.160)
but I have a feeling that the level of complexity
Nick Lane (1:58:40.980)
of the total biochemical system
Lex Fridman (1:58:43.280)
at the level of a single cell is less complex
Nick Lane (1:58:45.560)
than the level of neural networking in the human brain
Lex Fridman (1:58:48.800)
or in an AI.
Nick Lane (1:58:52.320)
Well, I guess I assumed that we were including the brain
Lex Fridman (1:58:55.760)
in the biochemistry algorithm, because you have to...
Nick Lane (1:58:59.880)
I would see that as a higher level of organization
Lex Fridman (1:59:02.040)
of neural networks.
Nick Lane (1:59:02.900)
They're all using the same biochemical wiring
Lex Fridman (1:59:04.880)
within themselves.
Nick Lane (1:59:06.400)
Yeah, but the human brain is not just neurons.
Lex Fridman (1:59:09.740)
It's the immune system.
Nick Lane (1:59:11.640)
It's the whole package.
Lex Fridman (1:59:13.840)
I mean, to have a biochemical algorithm
Nick Lane (1:59:16.280)
that runs an intelligent biological system,
Lex Fridman (1:59:20.060)
you have to include the whole damn thing.
Lex Fridman (1:59:21.680)
And it's pretty fascinating that it comes from like,
Lex Fridman (1:59:24.440)
from an embryo, like the whole, I mean, oh boy.
Lex Fridman (1:59:29.080)
I mean, if you can, what is a human being?
Lex Fridman (1:59:33.220)
Because it's just some code and then you built,
Lex Fridman (1:59:36.320)
and then that says DNA doesn't just tell you what to build,
Lex Fridman (1:59:39.880)
but how to build it.
Nick Lane (1:59:40.880)
I mean, the thing is impressive.
Lex Fridman (1:59:44.640)
And the question is how difficult is it
Lex Fridman (1:59:49.480)
to reverse engineer the whole shebang?
Lex Fridman (1:59:52.940)
Very difficult.
Nick Lane (1:59:54.400)
I would say it's,
Lex Fridman (1:59:59.680)
don't want to say impossible,
Lex Fridman (20:02.320)
Did it have to be that way?
Lex Fridman (20:03.640)
Could it have been the other way?
Lex Fridman (20:05.240)
And would that have given you life
Lex Fridman (20:06.560)
with very different properties?
Lex Fridman (20:08.840)
And so if you come up with a, you know,
Lex Fridman (20:11.080)
it's a long hypothesis, because as I say,
Nick Lane (20:12.720)
we're going from really simple prebiotic chemistry
Lex Fridman (20:15.560)
all the way through to genes and molecular machines.
Nick Lane (20:17.840)
That's a long, long pathway.
Lex Fridman (20:20.160)
And nobody in the field would agree on the order
Nick Lane (20:22.320)
in which these things happened,
Lex Fridman (20:23.760)
which is not a bad thing,
Nick Lane (20:24.600)
because it means that you have to go out
Lex Fridman (20:25.800)
and do some experiments and try and demonstrate
Nick Lane (20:27.840)
that it's possible or not possible.
Lex Fridman (20:29.840)
It's so freaking amazing that it happened though.
Nick Lane (20:37.440)
It feels like there's a direction to the thing.
Lex Fridman (20:41.920)
Can you try to answer from a framework perspective
Lex Fridman (20:47.600)
of what is life?
Lex Fridman (20:49.640)
So you said there's some order and yet there's complexity.
Lex Fridman (20:57.240)
So it's not perfectly ordered.
Lex Fridman (20:59.160)
It's not boring.
Nick Lane (21:00.360)
There's still some fun in it.
Lex Fridman (21:02.040)
And it also feels like the processes have a direction
Nick Lane (21:06.280)
through the selection mechanism.
Lex Fridman (21:07.920)
They seem to be building something,
Nick Lane (21:10.640)
always better, always improving.
Lex Fridman (21:14.280)
I mean, maybe it's...
Nick Lane (21:15.120)
I mean, that's a perception.
Lex Fridman (21:16.280)
That's our romanticization of things are always better.
Nick Lane (21:20.720)
Things are getting better, we'd like to believe that.
Lex Fridman (21:22.920)
I mean, you think about the world
Nick Lane (21:24.120)
from the point of view of bacteria
Lex Fridman (21:25.680)
and bacteria are the first things to emerge
Nick Lane (21:28.000)
from whatever environment they came from.
Lex Fridman (21:30.080)
And they dominated the planet very, very quickly.
Lex Fridman (21:32.760)
And they haven't really changed.
Lex Fridman (21:34.480)
Four billion years later, they look exactly the same.
Lex Fridman (21:36.680)
So about four billion years ago,
Lex Fridman (21:38.800)
bacteria started to really run the show.
Lex Fridman (21:42.440)
And then nothing happened for a while.
Lex Fridman (21:44.720)
Nothing happened for two billion years.
Nick Lane (21:47.000)
Then after two billion years,
Lex Fridman (21:48.160)
we see another single event origin, if you like,
Nick Lane (21:51.440)
of our own type of cell, the eukaryotic cells.
Lex Fridman (21:53.960)
So cells with a nucleus and lots of stuff going on inside.
Nick Lane (21:57.280)
Another singular origin.
Lex Fridman (21:58.480)
It only happened once in the history of life on earth.
Nick Lane (22:01.120)
Maybe it happened multiple times and there's no evidence.
Lex Fridman (22:03.360)
Everything just disappeared,
Lex Fridman (22:04.360)
but we have to at least take it seriously
Lex Fridman (22:07.520)
that there's something that stops bacteria
Nick Lane (22:10.040)
from becoming more complex because they didn't.
Lex Fridman (22:13.600)
That's a fact that they emerged four billion years ago.
Lex Fridman (22:17.520)
And something happened two billion years ago,
Lex Fridman (22:19.400)
but the bacteria themselves didn't change.
Nick Lane (22:21.320)
They remain bacterial.
Lex Fridman (22:22.560)
So there is no trajectory, necessary trajectory
Nick Lane (22:26.120)
towards great complexity in human beings at the end of it.
Lex Fridman (22:28.640)
It's very easy to imagine that without photosynthesis
Nick Lane (22:31.360)
arising or without eukaryotes arising,
Lex Fridman (22:33.060)
that a planet could be full of bacteria and nothing else.
Nick Lane (22:36.400)
We'll get to that because that's a brilliant invention.
Lex Fridman (22:39.360)
And there's a few brilliant invention along the way.
Lex Fridman (22:41.560)
But what is life?
Lex Fridman (22:44.040)
If you were to show up on earth,
Lex Fridman (22:46.000)
but to take that time machine,
Lex Fridman (22:47.840)
and you said, asking yourself the question,
Lex Fridman (22:50.300)
is this a stepping stone towards life?
Lex Fridman (22:52.760)
As you step along, when you see the early bacteria,
Lex Fridman (22:57.040)
how would you know it's life?
Lex Fridman (22:59.640)
And then this is really important question
Nick Lane (23:01.800)
when you go to other planets and look for life.
Lex Fridman (23:04.640)
Like what is the framework of telling a difference
Lex Fridman (23:08.280)
between a rock and a bacteria?
Lex Fridman (23:12.280)
I mean, the question's kind of both impossible to answer
Lex Fridman (23:15.280)
and trivial at the same time.
Lex Fridman (23:16.540)
And I don't like to answer it
Nick Lane (23:18.140)
because I don't think there is an answer.
Lex Fridman (23:19.680)
I think we're trying to describe the process of time.
Nick Lane (23:22.080)
Those are the most fun questions.
Lex Fridman (23:22.920)
What do you mean there's no answer?
Nick Lane (23:23.760)
No, there is no answer.
Lex Fridman (23:24.580)
I mean, there's lots of,
Nick Lane (23:25.420)
there are at least 40 or 50 different definitions
Lex Fridman (23:27.860)
of life out there.
Lex Fridman (23:29.000)
And most of them are, well, obviously bad
Lex Fridman (23:33.040)
in one way or another.
Nick Lane (23:34.080)
I mean, there's freaks.
Lex Fridman (23:37.120)
I can never remember the exact words that people use,
Lex Fridman (23:39.920)
but there's a NASA working definition of life,
Lex Fridman (23:43.720)
which more or less says a system,
Nick Lane (23:46.000)
which is capable of self sustaining system,
Lex Fridman (23:49.560)
capable of evolution or something along those lines.
Lex Fridman (23:52.680)
And I immediately have a problem
Lex Fridman (23:54.600)
with the word self sustaining
Nick Lane (23:56.200)
because it's sustained by the environment.
Lex Fridman (23:58.240)
And I know what they're getting at.
Nick Lane (24:00.120)
I know what they're trying to say,
Lex Fridman (24:01.000)
but I pick a hole in that.
Lex Fridman (24:03.120)
And there's always wags who say,
Lex Fridman (24:04.720)
but you know, by that definition, a rabbit is not alive.
Nick Lane (24:07.360)
Only a pair of rabbits would be alive
Lex Fridman (24:09.800)
because a single rabbit is incapable of copying itself.
Nick Lane (24:12.880)
There's all kinds of pedantic, silly,
Lex Fridman (24:16.080)
but also important objections to any hypothesis.
Nick Lane (24:19.280)
The real question is what is, you know,
Lex Fridman (24:22.280)
we can argue all day or people do argue all day
Lex Fridman (24:24.920)
about is a virus alive or not?
Lex Fridman (24:27.440)
And it depends on the content.
Nick Lane (24:29.120)
Most biologists could not agree about that.
Lex Fridman (24:31.360)
So then what about a jumping gene,
Nick Lane (24:32.720)
a retro element or something that is even simpler
Lex Fridman (24:34.920)
than a virus, but it's capable of converting
Nick Lane (24:39.600)
its environment into a copy of itself.
Lex Fridman (24:42.920)
And that's about as close, this is not a definition,
Lex Fridman (24:45.200)
but this is a kind of a description of life
Lex Fridman (24:47.440)
is that it's able to parasitize the environment.
Lex Fridman (24:52.080)
And that goes for plants as well as animals
Lex Fridman (24:53.920)
and bacteria and viruses to make a relatively exact copy
Nick Lane (24:58.920)
of themselves, informationally exact copy of themselves.
Lex Fridman (25:04.120)
By the way, it doesn't really have to be
Lex Fridman (25:06.160)
a copy of itself, right?
Lex Fridman (25:07.680)
It just has to be, you have to create something
Nick Lane (25:11.480)
that's interesting, the way evolution is.
Lex Fridman (25:16.400)
So it is extremely powerful process of evolution,
Nick Lane (25:19.920)
which is basically make a copy of yourself
Lex Fridman (25:22.360)
and sometimes mess up a little bit.
Nick Lane (25:25.080)
That seems to work really well.
Lex Fridman (25:26.440)
I wonder if it's possible to mess up big time
Nick Lane (25:30.360)
as a standard, as a default.
Lex Fridman (25:32.360)
It's called a hopeful monster and in principle it can.
Nick Lane (25:36.880)
Actually, it turns out, I would say that this is due
Lex Fridman (25:40.520)
a reemergence, this is some amazing work
Nick Lane (25:43.200)
from Michael Levin, I don't know if you came across him,
Lex Fridman (25:45.320)
but if you haven't interviewed him,
Nick Lane (25:47.360)
you should interview him about, yeah.
Lex Fridman (25:50.800)
I'm talking to him in a few days.
Nick Lane (25:53.640)
Oh, fantastic.
Lex Fridman (25:54.480)
So I mentioned, there's two people that Andre,
Nick Lane (25:59.320)
if I may mention, Andre Kapathe is a friend
Lex Fridman (26:02.360)
who's really admired in the AI community,
Nick Lane (26:04.600)
said you absolutely must talk to Michael and to Nick.
Lex Fridman (26:09.680)
So of course, I'm a huge fan of yours,
Lex Fridman (26:11.800)
so I'm really fortunate that we can actually
Lex Fridman (26:14.120)
make this happen.
Lex Fridman (26:14.960)
Anyway, you were saying?
Lex Fridman (26:16.080)
Well, Michael Levin is doing amazing work,
Nick Lane (26:19.280)
basically about the way in which electrical fields
Lex Fridman (26:22.160)
control development and he's done some work
Nick Lane (26:25.640)
with planarian worms, so flat worms,
Lex Fridman (26:27.880)
where he'll tell you all about this,
Lex Fridman (26:29.400)
so I won't say any more than the minimum,
Lex Fridman (26:30.800)
but basically you can cut their head off
Lex Fridman (26:32.440)
and they'll redevelop a different, a new head.
Lex Fridman (26:35.640)
But the head that they develop depends,
Nick Lane (26:37.680)
if you knock out just one iron pump in a membrane,
Lex Fridman (26:42.520)
so you change the electrical circuitry just a little bit,
Nick Lane (26:45.240)
you can come up with a completely different head.
Lex Fridman (26:47.000)
It can be a head which is similar to those
Nick Lane (26:49.600)
that diverged 150 million years ago
Lex Fridman (26:52.080)
or it can be a head which no one's ever seen before,
Nick Lane (26:54.200)
a different kind of head.
Lex Fridman (26:56.760)
Now that is really, you might say, a hopeful monster.
Nick Lane (26:59.320)
This is a kind of leap into a different direction.
Lex Fridman (27:02.000)
The only question for natural selection is does it work?
Lex Fridman (27:05.040)
Is the change itself feasible as a single change?
Lex Fridman (27:08.200)
And the answer is yes, it's just a small change
Nick Lane (27:09.880)
to a single gene.
Lex Fridman (27:11.080)
And the second thing is it gives rise
Nick Lane (27:12.900)
to a completely different morphology.
Lex Fridman (27:14.880)
Does it work?
Lex Fridman (27:16.000)
And if it works, that can easily be a shift.
Lex Fridman (27:21.000)
But for it to be a speciation, for it to continue,
Nick Lane (27:25.400)
for it to give rise to a different morphology over time,
Lex Fridman (27:29.720)
then it has to be perpetuated.
Lex Fridman (27:32.000)
So that shift, that change in that one gene
Lex Fridman (27:37.200)
has to work well enough that it is selected and it goes on.
Lex Fridman (27:41.100)
And copied enough times to where you can really test it.
Lex Fridman (27:44.320)
So the likelihood, it would be lost,
Lex Fridman (27:46.040)
but there will be some occasions where it survives.
Lex Fridman (27:48.780)
And yes, the idea that we can have sudden, fairly abrupt
Nick Lane (27:51.920)
changes in evolution, I think it's time for a rebirth.
Lex Fridman (27:54.940)
What about this idea that kind of trying to
Nick Lane (27:58.640)
mathematize a definition of life and saying how many steps,
Lex Fridman (28:04.500)
the shortest amount of steps it takes to build the thing,
Lex Fridman (28:07.100)
almost like an engineering view of it?
Lex Fridman (28:09.660)
Ah, I like that view.
Nick Lane (28:11.880)
Because I think that in a sense, that's not very far away
Lex Fridman (28:14.560)
from what a hypothesis needs to do
Nick Lane (28:17.340)
to be a testable hypothesis for the origin of life.
Lex Fridman (28:19.520)
You need to spell out, here's each step,
Lex Fridman (28:22.440)
and here's the experiment to do for each step.
Lex Fridman (28:24.960)
The idea that we can do it in the lab,
Nick Lane (28:26.960)
some people say, oh, we'll have created life
Lex Fridman (28:29.820)
within five years, but ask them what they mean by life.
Nick Lane (28:34.560)
We have a planet four billion years ago
Lex Fridman (28:36.680)
with these vent systems across the entire surface
Nick Lane (28:39.280)
of the planet, and we have millions of years if we wanted.
Lex Fridman (28:41.880)
I have a feeling that we're not talking about
Nick Lane (28:43.400)
millions of years.
Lex Fridman (28:44.240)
I have a feeling we're talking about maybe millions
Nick Lane (28:47.880)
of nanoseconds or picoseconds.
Lex Fridman (28:49.520)
We're talking about chemistry, which is happening quickly.
Lex Fridman (28:53.880)
But we still need to constrain those steps,
Lex Fridman (28:56.780)
but we've got a planet doing similar chemistry.
Nick Lane (29:00.880)
You asked about a trajectory.
Lex Fridman (29:02.660)
The trajectory is the planetary trajectory.
Nick Lane (29:05.260)
The planet has properties.
Lex Fridman (29:06.760)
Basically, it's got a lot of iron at the center of it.
Nick Lane (29:08.680)
It's got a lot of electrons at the center of it.
Lex Fridman (29:10.480)
It's more oxidized on the outside,
Nick Lane (29:12.040)
partly because of the sun and partly because the heat
Lex Fridman (29:15.200)
of volcanoes puts out oxidized gases.
Lex Fridman (29:17.720)
So the planet is a battery.
Lex Fridman (29:19.640)
It's a giant battery, and we have a flow of electrons
Nick Lane (29:23.400)
going from inside to outside in these hydrothermal vents,
Lex Fridman (29:26.200)
and that's the same topology that a cell has.
Nick Lane (29:29.120)
A cell is basically just a micro version of the planet,
Lex Fridman (29:34.160)
and there is a trajectory in all of that,
Lex Fridman (29:37.000)
and there's an inevitability that certain types
Lex Fridman (29:39.360)
of chemical reaction are going to be favored over others,
Lex Fridman (29:42.360)
and there's an inevitability in what happens in water,
Lex Fridman (29:46.240)
the chemistry that happens in water.
Nick Lane (29:47.880)
Some will be immiscible with water and will form membranes
Lex Fridman (29:51.840)
and will form insoluble structures,
Lex Fridman (29:53.320)
and nobody really understands water very well,
Lex Fridman (29:58.280)
and it's another big question.
Lex Fridman (2:00:01.200)
but it's like, it's much easier to build a human
Lex Fridman (2:00:05.380)
than to reverse engineer, to build like a fake human,
Nick Lane (2:00:09.760)
human like thing than to reverse engineer
Lex Fridman (2:00:12.960)
the entirety of the process of the evolution.
Nick Lane (2:00:15.960)
I'm not sure if we are capable
Lex Fridman (2:00:18.560)
of reverse engineering the whole thing.
Nick Lane (2:00:21.160)
If the human mind is capable of doing that.
Lex Fridman (2:00:23.720)
I mean, I wouldn't be a biologist if I wasn't trying,
Lex Fridman (2:00:27.960)
but I know I can't understand the whole problem.
Lex Fridman (2:00:31.160)
I'm just trying to understand the rudimentary outlines
Nick Lane (2:00:33.300)
of the problem.
Lex Fridman (2:00:35.700)
There's another aspect though,
Nick Lane (2:00:37.280)
you're talking about developing from a single cell
Lex Fridman (2:00:39.200)
to the human mind and all the part system,
Nick Lane (2:00:43.920)
subsystems that are part of the immune system and so on.
Lex Fridman (2:00:48.960)
This is something that you'll talk about, I imagine,
Nick Lane (2:00:53.240)
with Michael Levin, but so little is known about,
Lex Fridman (2:01:00.720)
you talk about reverse engineering,
Lex Fridman (2:01:02.200)
so little is known about the developmental pathways
Lex Fridman (2:01:04.640)
that go from a genome to going to a fully wired organism.
Lex Fridman (2:01:09.160)
And a lot of it seems to depend on the same
Lex Fridman (2:01:11.360)
in electrical interactions that I was talking about
Nick Lane (2:01:16.040)
happening at the level of single cells
Lex Fridman (2:01:17.720)
and its interaction with the environment.
Nick Lane (2:01:19.200)
There's a whole electrical field side to biology
Lex Fridman (2:01:23.600)
that is not yet written into any of the textbooks,
Nick Lane (2:01:27.040)
which is about how does an embryo develop into
Lex Fridman (2:01:29.600)
or a single cell develop into these complex systems?
Lex Fridman (2:01:32.520)
What defines the head, what defines the immune system,
Lex Fridman (2:01:35.040)
what defines the brain and so on?
Nick Lane (2:01:37.160)
That really is written in a language
Lex Fridman (2:01:38.680)
that we're only just beginning to understand
Lex Fridman (2:01:40.360)
and frankly, biologists, most biologists
Lex Fridman (2:01:42.840)
are still very reluctant to even get themselves tangled up
Nick Lane (2:01:47.280)
in questions like electrical fields influencing development.
Lex Fridman (2:01:51.680)
It seems like mumbo jumbo to a lot of biologists
Lex Fridman (2:01:54.520)
and it should not be because this is
Lex Fridman (2:01:55.800)
the 21st century biology, this is where it's going.
Lex Fridman (2:01:59.700)
But we're not gonna reverse engineer a human being
Lex Fridman (2:02:02.080)
or the mind or any of these subsystems
Nick Lane (2:02:04.360)
until we understand how this developmental process
Lex Fridman (2:02:06.920)
or how electricity in biology really works.
Lex Fridman (2:02:10.000)
And if it is linked with feelings
Lex Fridman (2:02:13.640)
and with consciousness and so on,
Nick Lane (2:02:15.920)
that's the, I mean, in the meantime, we have to try,
Lex Fridman (2:02:18.680)
but I think that's where the answer lies.
Lex Fridman (2:02:22.680)
So you think it's possible that the key to things
Lex Fridman (2:02:27.040)
like consciousness are some of the more tricky aspects
Nick Lane (2:02:31.500)
of cognition might lie in that early development,
Lex Fridman (2:02:34.680)
the interaction of electricity and biology.
Nick Lane (2:02:39.300)
Electrical fields.
Lex Fridman (2:02:40.840)
But we already know the EEG and so on
Nick Lane (2:02:43.100)
is telling us a lot about brain function,
Lex Fridman (2:02:44.820)
but we don't know which cells, which parts
Nick Lane (2:02:46.700)
of a neural network is giving rise to the EEG.
Lex Fridman (2:02:48.860)
We don't know the basics.
Nick Lane (2:02:50.520)
The assumption is, I mean, we know it's neural networks,
Lex Fridman (2:02:53.640)
we know it's multiple cells, hundreds or thousands
Nick Lane (2:02:55.740)
of cells involved in it and we assume
Lex Fridman (2:02:57.980)
that it has to do with depolarization during action
Nick Lane (2:03:01.560)
potentials and so on.
Lex Fridman (2:03:03.480)
But the mitochondria which are in there
Nick Lane (2:03:05.360)
have much more membranes than the plasma membrane
Lex Fridman (2:03:08.060)
of the neuron and there's a much greater membrane potential
Lex Fridman (2:03:10.760)
and it's formed in parallel, very often parallel cristae,
Lex Fridman (2:03:14.420)
which are capable of reinforcing a field
Lex Fridman (2:03:17.600)
and generating fields over longer distances.
Lex Fridman (2:03:21.120)
And nobody knows if that plays a role
Nick Lane (2:03:23.300)
in consciousness or not.
Lex Fridman (2:03:24.600)
There's reasons to argue that it could,
Lex Fridman (2:03:26.400)
but frankly we simply do not know
Lex Fridman (2:03:28.900)
and it's not taken into consideration.
Nick Lane (2:03:31.000)
You look at the structure of the mitochondrial membranes
Lex Fridman (2:03:35.260)
in the brains of simple things like Drosophila,
Nick Lane (2:03:39.440)
the fruit fly, and they have amazing structures.
Lex Fridman (2:03:42.160)
You can see lots of little rectangular things
Nick Lane (2:03:44.200)
all lined up in amazing patterns.
Lex Fridman (2:03:48.040)
What are they doing?
Lex Fridman (2:03:49.040)
Why are they like that?
Lex Fridman (2:03:49.920)
We haven't the first clue.
Lex Fridman (2:03:52.460)
What do you think about organoids and brain organoids
Lex Fridman (2:03:55.340)
and so in a lab trying to study the development
Nick Lane (2:03:59.560)
of these in the Petri dish development of organs.
Lex Fridman (2:04:05.840)
Do you think that's promising?
Lex Fridman (2:04:06.860)
Do you have to look at whole systems?
Lex Fridman (2:04:08.640)
I've never done anything like that.
Nick Lane (2:04:10.320)
I don't know much about it.
Lex Fridman (2:04:11.440)
The people who I've talked to who do work on it
Nick Lane (2:04:13.640)
say amazing things can happen
Lex Fridman (2:04:15.160)
and a bit of a brain grown in a dish
Nick Lane (2:04:18.480)
is capable of experiencing some kind of feelings
Lex Fridman (2:04:21.400)
or even memories of its former brain.
Nick Lane (2:04:23.480)
Again, I have a feeling that until we understand
Lex Fridman (2:04:27.420)
how to control the electrical fields
Nick Lane (2:04:29.540)
that control development, we're not going to understand
Lex Fridman (2:04:32.340)
how to turn an organoid into a real functional system.
Lex Fridman (2:04:36.620)
But how do we get that understanding?
Lex Fridman (2:04:38.500)
It's so incredibly difficult.
Nick Lane (2:04:41.940)
I mean, you would have to, I mean, one promising direction,
Lex Fridman (2:04:44.700)
I'd love to get your opinion on this.
Nick Lane (2:04:46.820)
I don't know if you're familiar with the work of DeepMind
Lex Fridman (2:04:49.020)
and AlphaFold with protein folding and so on.
Lex Fridman (2:04:52.180)
Do you think it's possible
Lex Fridman (2:04:54.060)
that that will give us some breakthroughs in biology
Nick Lane (2:04:57.980)
trying to basically simulate and model the behavior
Lex Fridman (2:05:03.700)
of trivial biological systems
Lex Fridman (2:05:07.180)
as they become complex biological systems?
Lex Fridman (2:05:11.420)
I'm sure it will.
Nick Lane (2:05:12.780)
The interesting thing to me about protein folding
Lex Fridman (2:05:16.340)
is that for a long time, my understanding,
Nick Lane (2:05:19.780)
this is not what I work on, so I may have got this wrong,
Lex Fridman (2:05:21.580)
but my understanding is that you take the sequence
Nick Lane (2:05:24.460)
of a protein and you try to fold it.
Lex Fridman (2:05:28.980)
And there are multiple ways in which it can fold.
Lex Fridman (2:05:31.020)
And to come up with the correct conformation
Lex Fridman (2:05:33.180)
is not a very easy thing because you're doing it
Nick Lane (2:05:35.100)
from first principles from a string of letters,
Lex Fridman (2:05:37.420)
which specify the string of amino acids.
Lex Fridman (2:05:39.900)
But what actually happens is when a protein
Lex Fridman (2:05:43.460)
is coming out of a ribosome,
Nick Lane (2:05:45.740)
it's coming out of a charged tunnel
Lex Fridman (2:05:47.940)
and it's in a very specific environment,
Nick Lane (2:05:49.620)
which is going to force this to go there now
Lex Fridman (2:05:51.460)
and then this one to go there and this one to come like that.
Lex Fridman (2:05:53.340)
And so you're forcing a specific conformational set
Lex Fridman (2:05:55.900)
of changes onto it as it comes out of the ribosome.
Lex Fridman (2:05:58.420)
So by the time it's fully emerged,
Lex Fridman (2:06:00.060)
it's already got its shape.
Lex Fridman (2:06:01.860)
And that shape depended on the immediate environment
Lex Fridman (2:06:06.540)
that it was emerging into one letter,
Nick Lane (2:06:09.100)
one amino acid at a time.
Lex Fridman (2:06:11.900)
And I don't think that the field was looking at it that way.
Lex Fridman (2:06:16.980)
And if that's correct,
Lex Fridman (2:06:18.740)
then that's very characteristic of science,
Nick Lane (2:06:20.540)
which is to say it asks very often the wrong question
Lex Fridman (2:06:23.100)
and then does really amazingly sophisticated analyses
Nick Lane (2:06:25.820)
on something having never thought to actually think,
Lex Fridman (2:06:27.860)
well, what is biology doing?
Lex Fridman (2:06:29.060)
And biology is giving you a charged electrical environment
Lex Fridman (2:06:31.860)
that forces you to be this way.
Nick Lane (2:06:33.380)
Now, did DeepMind come up through patterns
Lex Fridman (2:06:37.940)
with some answer that was like that?
Nick Lane (2:06:39.780)
I've got absolutely no idea.
Lex Fridman (2:06:41.820)
It ought to be possible to deduce that
Nick Lane (2:06:44.420)
from the shapes of proteins.
Lex Fridman (2:06:46.500)
It would require a much greater skill
Nick Lane (2:06:50.780)
than the human mind has.
Lex Fridman (2:06:52.820)
But the human mind is capable of saying, well, hang on,
Nick Lane (2:06:55.140)
let's look at this exit tunnel and try and work out
Lex Fridman (2:06:57.080)
what shape is this protein going to take?
Lex Fridman (2:06:58.940)
And we can figure that out.
Lex Fridman (2:07:00.140)
That's really interesting about the exit tunnel,
Lex Fridman (2:07:01.580)
but like sometimes we get lucky
Lex Fridman (2:07:03.060)
and just like in science, the simplified view
Nick Lane (2:07:08.540)
or the static view will actually solve the problem for us.
Lex Fridman (2:07:12.140)
So in this case, it's very possible
Nick Lane (2:07:14.380)
that the sequence of letters has a unique mapping
Lex Fridman (2:07:17.220)
to our structure without considering how it unraveled.
Lex Fridman (2:07:21.440)
So without considering the tunnel.
Lex Fridman (2:07:23.740)
And so that seems to be the case in this situation
Nick Lane (2:07:27.700)
where the cool thing about proteins,
Lex Fridman (2:07:29.700)
all the different shapes they can possibly take,
Nick Lane (2:07:31.580)
it actually seems to take very specific unique shapes
Lex Fridman (2:07:35.300)
given the sequence.
Nick Lane (2:07:36.660)
That's forced on you by an exit tunnel.
Lex Fridman (2:07:38.260)
So the problem is actually much simpler than you thought.
Lex Fridman (2:07:40.780)
And then there's a whole army of proteins
Lex Fridman (2:07:44.200)
which change the conformational state, chaperone proteins.
Lex Fridman (2:07:49.780)
And they're only used when there's some presumably issue
Lex Fridman (2:07:54.900)
with how it came out of the exit tunnel
Lex Fridman (2:07:56.500)
and you wanna do it differently to that.
Lex Fridman (2:07:58.020)
So very often the chaperone proteins will go there
Lex Fridman (2:08:00.780)
and will influence the way in which it falls.
Lex Fridman (2:08:03.520)
So there's two ways of doing it.
Nick Lane (2:08:06.620)
Either you can look at the structures
Lex Fridman (2:08:09.280)
and the sequences of all the proteins
Lex Fridman (2:08:11.020)
and you can apply an immense mind to it
Lex Fridman (2:08:13.220)
and figure out what the patterns are
Lex Fridman (2:08:14.620)
and figure out what happened.
Lex Fridman (2:08:15.660)
Or you can look at the actual situation where it is
Lex Fridman (2:08:17.940)
and say, well, hang on, it was actually quite simple.
Lex Fridman (2:08:20.100)
It's got a charged environment
Lex Fridman (2:08:21.220)
and then it's forced to come out this way.
Lex Fridman (2:08:23.140)
And then the question will be,
Nick Lane (2:08:24.040)
well, do different ribosomes
Lex Fridman (2:08:25.460)
have different charged environments?
Lex Fridman (2:08:27.060)
What happens if a chaperone?
Lex Fridman (2:08:28.780)
You're asking a different set of questions
Nick Lane (2:08:30.460)
to come to the same answer in a way
Lex Fridman (2:08:31.780)
which is telling you a much simpler story
Lex Fridman (2:08:34.260)
and explains why it is rather than saying it could be,
Lex Fridman (2:08:37.800)
this is one in a billion different possible conformational
Nick Lane (2:08:41.060)
states that this protein could have.
Lex Fridman (2:08:42.340)
You're saying, well, it has this one
Nick Lane (2:08:43.460)
because that was the only one it could take
Lex Fridman (2:08:46.060)
given its setting.
Nick Lane (2:08:48.340)
Well, yeah, I mean, currently humans are very good
Lex Fridman (2:08:51.100)
at that kind of first principles thinking.
Nick Lane (2:08:52.940)
I was stepping back, but I think AI is really good
Lex Fridman (2:08:56.060)
at collecting a huge amount of data
Lex Fridman (2:08:58.980)
and a huge amount of data of observation of planets
Lex Fridman (2:09:01.980)
and figure out that Earth is not at the center
Nick Lane (2:09:04.520)
of the universe, that there's actually a sun,
Lex Fridman (2:09:06.480)
we're orbiting the sun.
Lex Fridman (2:09:08.020)
But then you can, as a human being, ask,
Lex Fridman (2:09:10.060)
well, how do solar systems come to be?
Lex Fridman (2:09:15.240)
What are the different forces that are required
Lex Fridman (2:09:17.540)
to make this kind of pattern emerge?
Lex Fridman (2:09:19.940)
And then you start to invent things like gravity.
Lex Fridman (2:09:26.600)
I mixed up the ordering of gravity,
Nick Lane (2:09:29.820)
wasn't considered as a thing that connects planets,
Lex Fridman (2:09:32.640)
but we are able to think about those big picture things
Nick Lane (2:09:36.900)
as human beings.
Lex Fridman (2:09:38.300)
AI is just very good to infer simple models
Nick Lane (2:09:42.260)
from a huge amount of data.
Lex Fridman (2:09:45.820)
And the question is with biology,
Nick Lane (2:09:47.980)
we kind of go back and forth at how we solve biology.
Lex Fridman (2:09:50.980)
Listen, protein folding was thought to be impossible
Nick Lane (2:09:54.500)
to solve, and there's a lot of brilliant PhD students
Lex Fridman (2:09:57.580)
that worked one protein at a time
Nick Lane (2:09:59.460)
trying to figure out the structure.
Lex Fridman (2:10:00.900)
And the fact that I was able to do that.
Nick Lane (2:10:03.540)
Oh, I'm not knocking it at all,
Lex Fridman (2:10:06.340)
but I think that people have been asking
Nick Lane (2:10:08.940)
the wrong question.
Lex Fridman (2:10:09.780)
But then, as the people start to ask
Nick Lane (2:10:13.500)
better and bigger questions,
Lex Fridman (2:10:17.220)
the AI kind of enters the chat and says,
Nick Lane (2:10:20.980)
I'll help you out with that.
Lex Fridman (2:10:22.700)
Can I give you another example for my own work?
Nick Lane (2:10:27.580)
The risk of getting a disease as we get older,
Lex Fridman (2:10:32.260)
there are genetic aspects to it.
Nick Lane (2:10:35.260)
If you spend your whole life overeating and smoking
Lex Fridman (2:10:38.500)
and whatever, that's a whole separate question.
Lex Fridman (2:10:41.580)
But there's a genetic side to the risk.
Lex Fridman (2:10:43.260)
And we know a few genes that increase your risk
Nick Lane (2:10:46.540)
of certain things.
Lex Fridman (2:10:47.380)
And for probably 20 years now,
Nick Lane (2:10:49.660)
people have been doing what's called GWAS,
Lex Fridman (2:10:51.660)
which is genome wide association studies.
Lex Fridman (2:10:55.300)
So you've effectively scanned the entire genome
Lex Fridman (2:10:58.820)
for any single nucleotide polymorphisms,
Nick Lane (2:11:02.220)
which is to say a single letter change in one place,
Lex Fridman (2:11:04.980)
that has a higher association of being linked
Nick Lane (2:11:07.460)
with a particular disease or not.
Lex Fridman (2:11:09.260)
And you can come up with thousands of these things
Nick Lane (2:11:10.940)
across the genome.
Lex Fridman (2:11:13.260)
And if you add them all up and try and say,
Nick Lane (2:11:17.180)
well, so do they add up to explain
Lex Fridman (2:11:20.820)
the known genetic risk of this disease?
Lex Fridman (2:11:23.700)
And the known genetic risk often comes from twin studies.
Lex Fridman (2:11:26.180)
And you can say that if this twin gets epilepsy,
Nick Lane (2:11:30.620)
there's a 40 or 50% risk that the other twin,
Lex Fridman (2:11:33.620)
identical twin will also get epilepsy.
Nick Lane (2:11:35.820)
Therefore, the genetic factor is about 50%.
Lex Fridman (2:11:39.100)
And so the gene similarities that you see
Nick Lane (2:11:43.020)
should account for 50% of that known risk.
Lex Fridman (2:11:46.420)
Very often it accounts for less than a 10th
Nick Lane (2:11:49.220)
of the known risk.
Lex Fridman (2:11:50.820)
And there's two possible explanations.
Lex Fridman (2:11:52.980)
And there's one which people tend to do,
Lex Fridman (2:11:54.460)
which is to say,
Nick Lane (2:11:55.300)
ah, well, we don't have enough statistical power.
Lex Fridman (2:11:58.180)
If we, maybe there's a million,
Nick Lane (2:12:00.260)
we've only found a thousand of them.
Lex Fridman (2:12:01.620)
But if we find the other million,
Nick Lane (2:12:02.860)
they're weakly related,
Lex Fridman (2:12:03.820)
but there's a huge number of them.
Lex Fridman (2:12:05.140)
And so we'll account for that whole risk.
Lex Fridman (2:12:07.420)
Maybe there's a billion of them.
Lex Fridman (2:12:11.500)
So that's one way.
Lex Fridman (2:12:12.780)
The other way is to say,
Nick Lane (2:12:15.260)
well, hang on a minute, you're missing a system here.
Lex Fridman (2:12:17.020)
That system is the mitochondrial DNA,
Nick Lane (2:12:19.140)
which people tend to dismiss because it's small
Lex Fridman (2:12:21.860)
and it doesn't change very much.
Lex Fridman (2:12:27.020)
But a few single letter changes in that mitochondrial DNA,
Lex Fridman (2:12:30.860)
it controls some really basic processes.
Nick Lane (2:12:33.620)
It controls not only all the energy
Lex Fridman (2:12:36.540)
that we need to live and to move around
Lex Fridman (2:12:38.780)
and do everything we do,
Lex Fridman (2:12:39.700)
but also biosynthesis to make the new building blocks
Nick Lane (2:12:44.380)
to make new cells.
Lex Fridman (2:12:47.420)
And cancer cells very often kind of take over
Nick Lane (2:12:49.780)
the mitochondria and rewire them
Lex Fridman (2:12:52.100)
so that instead of using them for making energy,
Nick Lane (2:12:54.620)
they're effectively using them as precursors
Lex Fridman (2:12:56.500)
for the building blocks for biosynthesis.
Nick Lane (2:12:58.460)
You need to make new amino acids,
Lex Fridman (2:12:59.940)
new nucleotides for DNA.
Nick Lane (2:13:01.380)
You wanna make new lipids to make your membranes and so on.
Lex Fridman (2:13:04.700)
So they kind of rewire metabolism.
Nick Lane (2:13:06.940)
Now, the problem is that we've got all these interactions
Lex Fridman (2:13:10.220)
between mitochondrial DNA and the genes in the nucleus
Nick Lane (2:13:13.420)
that are overlooked completely
Lex Fridman (2:13:15.380)
because people throw away,
Nick Lane (2:13:16.660)
literally throw away the mitochondrial genes.
Lex Fridman (2:13:18.740)
And we can see in fruit flies that they interact
Lex Fridman (2:13:21.060)
and produce big differences in risk.
Lex Fridman (2:13:24.500)
So you can set AI onto this question
Nick Lane (2:13:29.500)
of exactly how many of these base changes there are.
Lex Fridman (2:13:35.100)
And this is one possible solution
Nick Lane (2:13:36.940)
that maybe there are a million of them
Lex Fridman (2:13:39.100)
and it does account for the greatest part of the risk.
Nick Lane (2:13:41.220)
Or the other one is they aren't, it's just not there.
Lex Fridman (2:13:43.660)
That actually the risk lies in something
Nick Lane (2:13:45.300)
you weren't even looking at.
Lex Fridman (2:13:47.140)
And this is where human intuition is very important.
Lex Fridman (2:13:50.860)
And just this feeling that, well, I'm working on this
Lex Fridman (2:13:53.580)
and I think it's important and I'm bloody minded about it.
Lex Fridman (2:13:56.220)
And in the end, some people are right.
Lex Fridman (2:13:57.580)
It turns out that it was important.
Lex Fridman (2:14:00.180)
Can you get AI to do that, to be bloody minded?
Lex Fridman (2:14:03.180)
And that, hang on a minute,
Nick Lane (2:14:06.620)
you might be missing a whole other system here
Lex Fridman (2:14:09.340)
that's much bigger.
Nick Lane (2:14:11.140)
That's the moment of discovery of scientific revolution.
Lex Fridman (2:14:17.500)
I'm giving up on saying AI can't do something.
Nick Lane (2:14:22.260)
I've said it enough times about enough things.
Lex Fridman (2:14:25.220)
I think there's been a lot of progress.
Lex Fridman (2:14:27.460)
And instead I'm excited by the possibility
Lex Fridman (2:14:30.220)
of AI helping humans.
Lex Fridman (2:14:31.420)
But at the same time, just like I said,
Lex Fridman (2:14:34.420)
we seem to dismiss the power of humans.
Nick Lane (2:14:37.380)
Yes, yes.
Lex Fridman (2:14:38.460)
Like we're so limited in so many ways
Nick Lane (2:14:43.900)
that we kind of, in what we feel like dumb ways,
Lex Fridman (2:14:48.540)
like we're not strong, we're kind of our attention,
Nick Lane (2:14:53.540)
our attention, our memory is limited.
Lex Fridman (2:14:57.060)
Our ability to focus on things is limited
Nick Lane (2:15:00.260)
in our own perception of what limited is.
Lex Fridman (2:15:02.740)
But that actually, there's an incredible computer
Nick Lane (2:15:05.460)
behind the whole thing that makes this whole system work.
Lex Fridman (2:15:08.900)
Our ability to interact with the environment,
Nick Lane (2:15:11.860)
to reason about the environment.
Lex Fridman (2:15:13.300)
There's magic there.
Lex Fridman (2:15:14.940)
And I'm hopeful that AI can capture
Lex Fridman (2:15:17.340)
some of that same magic.
Lex Fridman (2:15:18.740)
But that magic is not gonna look like
Lex Fridman (2:15:20.820)
Deep Blue playing chess.
Nick Lane (2:15:22.460)
No, it's going to be more interesting.
Lex Fridman (2:15:24.740)
But I don't think it's gonna look
Nick Lane (2:15:25.940)
like pattern finding either.
Lex Fridman (2:15:27.980)
I mean, that's essentially what you're telling me.
Nick Lane (2:15:29.620)
It does very well at the moment.
Lex Fridman (2:15:30.740)
And my point is it works very well
Nick Lane (2:15:33.020)
where you're looking for the right pattern.
Lex Fridman (2:15:36.180)
But we are storytelling animals
Lex Fridman (2:15:38.540)
and the hypothesis is a story.
Lex Fridman (2:15:40.860)
It's a testable story.
Lex Fridman (2:15:42.500)
But a new hypothesis is a leap into the unknown
Lex Fridman (2:15:47.180)
and it's a new story basically.
Lex Fridman (2:15:48.460)
And it says this leads to this leads to that.
Lex Fridman (2:15:51.020)
It's a causal set of storytelling.
Nick Lane (2:15:54.940)
It's also possible that the leap into the unknown
Lex Fridman (2:15:57.420)
has a pattern of its own.
Nick Lane (2:15:58.660)
Yes, it is.
Lex Fridman (2:15:59.740)
And it's possible that it's learnable.
Nick Lane (2:16:02.500)
I'm sure it is.
Lex Fridman (2:16:04.260)
There's a nice book by Arthur Kessler
Nick Lane (2:16:06.820)
on the nature of creativity.
Lex Fridman (2:16:11.260)
And he likens it to a joke where the punchline goes off
Nick Lane (2:16:13.980)
in a completely unexpected direction
Lex Fridman (2:16:15.580)
and says that this is the basis of human creativity.
Nick Lane (2:16:18.500)
That some creative switch of direction
Lex Fridman (2:16:21.500)
to an unexpected place is similar to a joke.
Nick Lane (2:16:25.020)
I'm not saying that's how it works,
Lex Fridman (2:16:26.300)
but it's a nice idea and there must be some truth in it.
Lex Fridman (2:16:30.740)
And it's one of these,
Lex Fridman (2:16:32.340)
most of the stories we tell are probably the wrong story
Lex Fridman (2:16:34.900)
and probably going nowhere and probably not helpful.
Lex Fridman (2:16:37.580)
And we definitely don't do as well
Nick Lane (2:16:39.820)
at seeing patterns in things.
Lex Fridman (2:16:41.700)
But some of the most enjoyable human aspects
Nick Lane (2:16:44.380)
is finding a new story that goes to an unexpected place.
Lex Fridman (2:16:47.660)
And again, these are all aspects
Nick Lane (2:16:48.940)
of what being human means to me.
Lex Fridman (2:16:52.580)
And maybe these are all things
Nick Lane (2:16:53.820)
that AI figures out for itself,
Lex Fridman (2:16:55.780)
or maybe they're just aspects.
Lex Fridman (2:16:58.020)
But I just have the feeling sometimes
Lex Fridman (2:17:00.300)
that the people who are trying to understand
Lex Fridman (2:17:04.860)
what we are like,
Lex Fridman (2:17:08.780)
if we wish to craft an AI system
Nick Lane (2:17:10.620)
which is somehow human like,
Lex Fridman (2:17:12.740)
that we don't have a firm enough grasp
Nick Lane (2:17:16.500)
of what humans really are like in terms of how we are built.
Lex Fridman (2:17:21.460)
But we get a better, better understanding of that.
Nick Lane (2:17:25.020)
I agree with you completely.
Lex Fridman (2:17:26.620)
We try to build a thing and then we go,
Nick Lane (2:17:29.300)
hang on a minute, there's another system here.
Lex Fridman (2:17:33.060)
And that's actually the attempt to build AI
Nick Lane (2:17:35.900)
that's human like,
Lex Fridman (2:17:36.980)
is getting us to a deeper understanding of human beings.
Nick Lane (2:17:39.940)
The funny thing that I recently talked to Magnus Carlsen,
Lex Fridman (2:17:42.900)
why they consider to be the greatest chess player
Nick Lane (2:17:44.700)
of all time.
Lex Fridman (2:17:46.620)
And he talked about AlphaZero,
Nick Lane (2:17:48.540)
which is a system from DeepMind that plays chess.
Lex Fridman (2:17:51.620)
And he had a funny comment.
Nick Lane (2:17:55.260)
He has a kind of dry sense of humor.
Lex Fridman (2:17:57.620)
But he was extremely impressed
Nick Lane (2:17:59.460)
when he first saw AlphaZero play.
Lex Fridman (2:18:02.100)
And he said that it did a lot of things
Nick Lane (2:18:04.620)
that could easily be mistaken for creativity.
Lex Fridman (2:18:07.460)
So he like, as a typical human,
Nick Lane (2:18:12.140)
refused to give the system sort of its due.
Lex Fridman (2:18:16.860)
Because he came up with a lot of things
Nick Lane (2:18:18.540)
that a lot of people are extremely impressed by.
Lex Fridman (2:18:22.620)
Not just the sheer calculation,
Lex Fridman (2:18:24.220)
but the brilliance of play.
Lex Fridman (2:18:26.820)
So one of the things that it does
Nick Lane (2:18:31.940)
in really interesting ways is it sacrifices pieces.
Lex Fridman (2:18:35.460)
So in chess, that means you basically take a few steps back
Lex Fridman (2:18:39.980)
and then take a step forward.
Lex Fridman (2:18:41.700)
You give away pieces for some future reward.
Lex Fridman (2:18:46.140)
And that, for us humans, is where art is in chess.
Lex Fridman (2:18:50.740)
You take big risks.
Nick Lane (2:18:52.540)
That for us humans, those risks are especially painful
Lex Fridman (2:18:58.620)
because you have a fog of uncertainty before you.
Lex Fridman (2:19:02.260)
So to take a risk now based on intuition
Lex Fridman (2:19:05.100)
of I think this is the right risk to take,
Lex Fridman (2:19:07.460)
but there's so many possibilities,
Lex Fridman (2:19:09.620)
that that's where it takes guts.
Nick Lane (2:19:11.300)
That's where art is, that's that danger.
Lex Fridman (2:19:14.060)
And then the alpha,
Nick Lane (2:19:17.860)
alpha zero takes those same kind of risks
Lex Fridman (2:19:20.460)
and does them even greater degree.
Lex Fridman (2:19:22.380)
But of course, it does it from a,
Lex Fridman (2:19:26.780)
well, you could easily reduce down
Nick Lane (2:19:30.340)
to a cold calculation over patterns.
Lex Fridman (2:19:34.580)
But boy, when you see the final result,
Nick Lane (2:19:37.820)
it sure looks like the same kind of magic
Lex Fridman (2:19:39.980)
that we see in creativity.
Nick Lane (2:19:41.900)
When we see creative play on the chessboard,
Lex Fridman (2:19:45.140)
but the chessboard is very limited.
Lex Fridman (2:19:46.820)
And the question is, as we get better and better,
Lex Fridman (2:19:49.060)
can we do that same kind of creativity in mathematics,
Nick Lane (2:19:54.140)
in programming, and then eventually in biology, psychology,
Lex Fridman (2:19:59.580)
and expand into more and more complex systems?
Nick Lane (2:20:04.020)
I was, I used to go running when I was a boy,
Lex Fridman (2:20:07.180)
and fell running, which is to say, running up and down mountains.
Lex Fridman (2:20:10.460)
And I was never particularly great at it,
Lex Fridman (2:20:12.740)
but there were some people who were amazingly fast,
Nick Lane (2:20:16.780)
especially at running down.
Lex Fridman (2:20:18.580)
And I realized in trying to do this,
Nick Lane (2:20:21.100)
that there's only really two ways,
Lex Fridman (2:20:25.020)
there's three possible ways of doing it,
Lex Fridman (2:20:26.500)
and there's only two that work.
Lex Fridman (2:20:27.700)
Either you go extremely slowly and carefully,
Lex Fridman (2:20:30.460)
and you figure out, okay, there's a stone,
Lex Fridman (2:20:32.460)
I'll put my foot on this stone,
Lex Fridman (2:20:33.820)
and then there's another,
Lex Fridman (2:20:35.580)
there's a muddy puddle I'm going to avoid.
Lex Fridman (2:20:37.100)
And you know, it's slow, it's laborious.
Lex Fridman (2:20:39.580)
You figure it out step by step.
Nick Lane (2:20:42.420)
Or you can just go incredibly fast,
Lex Fridman (2:20:44.340)
and you don't think about it at all.
Nick Lane (2:20:45.660)
The entire conscious mind is shut out of it,
Lex Fridman (2:20:47.700)
and it's probably the same playing table tennis
Nick Lane (2:20:49.780)
or something, there's something in the mind,
Lex Fridman (2:20:51.340)
which is doing a whole lot of subconscious calculations
Nick Lane (2:20:54.260)
about exact, and it's amazing.
Lex Fridman (2:20:55.580)
You can run at astonishing speed down a hillside
Nick Lane (2:20:58.260)
with no idea how you did it at all.
Lex Fridman (2:21:00.500)
And then you panic, and you think,
Nick Lane (2:21:01.900)
I'm going to break my leg if I keep doing this,
Lex Fridman (2:21:03.580)
I've got to think about where I'm going to put my foot.
Lex Fridman (2:21:05.700)
So you slow down a bit and try to bring
Lex Fridman (2:21:07.140)
those conscious mind in, and then you do, you crash.
Nick Lane (2:21:09.820)
You cannot think consciously while running downhill.
Lex Fridman (2:21:14.460)
So it's amazing how many calculations
Nick Lane (2:21:18.500)
the mind is able to make.
Lex Fridman (2:21:21.380)
And now the problem with playing chess or something,
Nick Lane (2:21:23.740)
if you're able to make all of those subconscious
Lex Fridman (2:21:25.620)
kind of forward calculations about
Lex Fridman (2:21:28.620)
what is the likely outcome of this move now
Lex Fridman (2:21:32.420)
in the way that we can by running down a hillside
Nick Lane (2:21:34.740)
or something, it's partly about what we have adapted to do.
Lex Fridman (2:21:38.260)
It's partly about the reality of the world that we're in.
Nick Lane (2:21:40.500)
Running fast downhill is something
Lex Fridman (2:21:42.100)
that we better be bloody good at,
Nick Lane (2:21:43.180)
otherwise we're going to be eaten.
Lex Fridman (2:21:46.180)
Whereas trying to calculate multiple, multiple moves
Nick Lane (2:21:51.100)
into the future is not something
Lex Fridman (2:21:52.620)
we've ever been called on to do.
Nick Lane (2:21:54.180)
Two or three, four moves into the future
Lex Fridman (2:21:55.860)
is quite enough for most of us most of the time.
Nick Lane (2:21:58.700)
Yeah, yeah, so yeah, just solving chess may not,
Lex Fridman (2:22:05.700)
we may not be as far towards solving the problem
Nick Lane (2:22:10.180)
of downhill running as we might think
Lex Fridman (2:22:14.700)
just because we solve chess.
Nick Lane (2:22:17.300)
Still, it's beautiful to see creativity.
Lex Fridman (2:22:20.860)
Humans create machines.
Nick Lane (2:22:23.380)
They're able to create art and art on a chessboard
Lex Fridman (2:22:27.780)
and art otherwise.
Nick Lane (2:22:29.420)
Who knows how far that takes us.
Lex Fridman (2:22:31.780)
So I mentioned Andrej Karpathy earlier.
Nick Lane (2:22:35.300)
Him and I are big fans of yours.
Lex Fridman (2:22:37.340)
If you're taking votes, his suggestion was
Nick Lane (2:22:39.700)
you should write your next book on the Fermi Paradox.
Lex Fridman (2:22:43.540)
So let me ask you on the topic of alien life.
Nick Lane (2:22:49.020)
Since we've been talking about life
Lex Fridman (2:22:50.420)
and we're a kind of aliens,
Lex Fridman (2:22:51.980)
how many alien civilizations are out there, do you think?
Lex Fridman (2:22:58.220)
Well, the universe is very big, so some,
Lex Fridman (2:23:01.500)
but not as many as most people would like to think
Lex Fridman (2:23:04.220)
is my view because the idea that there is a trajectory
Nick Lane (2:23:09.140)
going from simple, simple cellular life like bacteria
Lex Fridman (2:23:14.660)
all the way through to humans.
Nick Lane (2:23:17.260)
It seems to me there's some big gaps along that way
Lex Fridman (2:23:19.980)
that the eukaryotic cell, the complex cell that we have
Nick Lane (2:23:23.380)
is the biggest of them, but also photosynthesis is another.
Lex Fridman (2:23:27.260)
The other, another interesting gap is a long gap
Nick Lane (2:23:30.260)
from the origin of the eukaryotic cell
Lex Fridman (2:23:33.140)
to the first animals.
Nick Lane (2:23:34.260)
That was about a billion years, maybe more than that.
Lex Fridman (2:23:38.980)
A long delay in when oxygen began
Nick Lane (2:23:41.380)
to accumulate in the atmosphere.
Lex Fridman (2:23:42.980)
So from the first appearance of oxygen
Nick Lane (2:23:44.740)
in the Great Oxidation Event to enough for animals
Lex Fridman (2:23:47.420)
to respire, it was close to two billion years.
Lex Fridman (2:23:52.220)
Why so long?
Lex Fridman (2:23:53.300)
It seems to be planetary factors.
Nick Lane (2:23:54.980)
It seems to be geology as much as in anything else.
Lex Fridman (2:23:57.220)
And we don't really know what was going on.
Lex Fridman (2:24:00.700)
So the idea that there's a kind of an inevitable march
Lex Fridman (2:24:04.820)
towards complexity and sentient life,
Nick Lane (2:24:10.580)
I don't think is right.
Lex Fridman (2:24:12.220)
Doesn't, not to say it's not gonna happen,
Lex Fridman (2:24:14.620)
but I think it's not gonna happen often.
Lex Fridman (2:24:17.700)
So if you think of Earth,
Nick Lane (2:24:19.180)
given the geological constraints and all that kind of stuff,
Lex Fridman (2:24:25.260)
do you have a sense that life, complex life,
Nick Lane (2:24:28.260)
intelligent life happened really quickly on Earth
Lex Fridman (2:24:30.420)
or really long?
Lex Fridman (2:24:31.740)
So just to get a sense of,
Lex Fridman (2:24:35.180)
are you more sort of saying that it's very unlikely
Lex Fridman (2:24:38.740)
to get the kind of conditions required to create humans?
Lex Fridman (2:24:42.300)
Or is it, even if you have the condition,
Lex Fridman (2:24:44.900)
it's just statistically difficult?
Lex Fridman (2:24:46.820)
I think the, I mean, the problem,
Nick Lane (2:24:48.860)
the single great problem at the center of all of that,
Lex Fridman (2:24:51.220)
to my mind, is the origin of the eukaryotic cell,
Nick Lane (2:24:53.340)
which happened once and without eukaryotes,
Lex Fridman (2:24:55.100)
nothing else would have happened.
Lex Fridman (2:24:56.780)
And that is something that.
Lex Fridman (2:24:58.900)
That's because you're saying it's super important,
Nick Lane (2:25:01.060)
the eukaryotes, but.
Lex Fridman (2:25:02.420)
I'm saying a tantamount to saying that it is impossible
Nick Lane (2:25:05.700)
to build something as complex as a human being
Lex Fridman (2:25:07.740)
from bacterial cells.
Nick Lane (2:25:09.300)
Totally agree in some deep fundamental way.
Lex Fridman (2:25:11.900)
But it's just like a one cell going inside another.
Lex Fridman (2:25:14.780)
Is that so difficult to get to work right?
Lex Fridman (2:25:17.140)
That like.
Nick Lane (2:25:18.340)
Well, again, it happened once.
Lex Fridman (2:25:21.660)
And if you think about, if you think,
Nick Lane (2:25:25.260)
I mean, I'm in a minority view in this position.
Lex Fridman (2:25:27.940)
Most biologists probably wouldn't agree with me anyway.
Lex Fridman (2:25:30.580)
But if you think about the starting point,
Lex Fridman (2:25:32.860)
we've got a simple cell, it's an alkyl cell,
Nick Lane (2:25:35.740)
we can be fairly sure about that.
Lex Fridman (2:25:36.860)
So it looks a lot like a bacterium,
Lex Fridman (2:25:39.220)
but is in fact from this other domain of life.
Lex Fridman (2:25:42.420)
So it looks a lot like a bacterial cell.
Nick Lane (2:25:44.300)
That means it doesn't have anything.
Lex Fridman (2:25:46.220)
It doesn't have a nucleus.
Nick Lane (2:25:47.460)
It doesn't really have complex endomembrane.
Lex Fridman (2:25:50.220)
It has a little bit of stuff, but not that much.
Lex Fridman (2:25:53.700)
And it takes up an endosymbiont.
Lex Fridman (2:25:56.220)
So what happens next?
Lex Fridman (2:25:58.940)
And the answer is basically everything
Lex Fridman (2:26:00.980)
to do with complexity.
Nick Lane (2:26:02.780)
To me, there's a beautiful paradox here.
Lex Fridman (2:26:04.940)
Plants and animals and fungi
Nick Lane (2:26:08.420)
all have exactly the same type of cell.
Lex Fridman (2:26:11.900)
But they all have really different ways of living.
Lex Fridman (2:26:14.820)
So a plant cell, it's photosynthetic.
Lex Fridman (2:26:19.180)
They started out as algae in the oceans and so on.
Lex Fridman (2:26:22.180)
So think of algal blooms, single cell things.
Lex Fridman (2:26:24.700)
The basic cell structure that it's built from
Nick Lane (2:26:30.260)
is exactly the same with a couple of small differences.
Lex Fridman (2:26:33.780)
It's got chloroplasts as well.
Nick Lane (2:26:35.140)
It's got a vacuole.
Lex Fridman (2:26:35.980)
It's got a cell wall.
Lex Fridman (2:26:36.820)
But that's about it.
Lex Fridman (2:26:37.660)
Pretty much everything else is exactly the same
Nick Lane (2:26:39.580)
in a plant cell and an animal cell.
Lex Fridman (2:26:42.260)
And yet the ways of life are completely different.
Lex Fridman (2:26:44.340)
So this cell structure did not evolve
Lex Fridman (2:26:47.700)
in response to different ways of life,
Nick Lane (2:26:49.460)
different environments.
Lex Fridman (2:26:50.300)
I'm in the ocean doing photosynthesis.
Nick Lane (2:26:51.900)
I'm on land running around as part of an animal.
Lex Fridman (2:26:54.780)
I'm a fungus in a soil,
Nick Lane (2:26:57.660)
spreading out long shoots into whatever it may be, mycelium.
Lex Fridman (2:27:02.220)
So they all have the same underlying cell structure.
Lex Fridman (2:27:05.660)
Why?
Lex Fridman (2:27:06.980)
Almost certainly it was driven by adaptation
Nick Lane (2:27:10.380)
to the internal environment,
Lex Fridman (2:27:11.740)
to having these pesky endosymbionts
Nick Lane (2:27:13.780)
that forced all kinds of change on the host cell.
Lex Fridman (2:27:16.900)
Now, in one way you could see that as a really good thing
Nick Lane (2:27:18.700)
because it may be that there's some inevitability
Lex Fridman (2:27:21.140)
to this process that as soon as you got endosymbionts,
Nick Lane (2:27:23.260)
you're more or less bound to go in that direction.
Lex Fridman (2:27:25.100)
Or it could be that there's a huge fluke about it
Lex Fridman (2:27:27.700)
and it's almost certain to go wrong
Lex Fridman (2:27:29.140)
in just about every case possible.
Nick Lane (2:27:31.380)
That the conflict will lead to effectively war
Lex Fridman (2:27:34.180)
leading to death and extinction.
Lex Fridman (2:27:36.260)
And it simply doesn't work out.
Lex Fridman (2:27:37.980)
So maybe it happened millions of times
Lex Fridman (2:27:39.420)
and it went wrong every time.
Lex Fridman (2:27:40.620)
Or maybe it only happened once and it worked out
Nick Lane (2:27:43.540)
because it was inevitable.
Lex Fridman (2:27:44.780)
And actually we simply do not know enough now
Nick Lane (2:27:47.300)
to say which of those two possibilities is true.
Lex Fridman (2:27:49.180)
But both of them are a bit grim.
Lex Fridman (2:27:50.900)
But you're leaning towards,
Lex Fridman (2:27:54.100)
we just got really lucky in that one leap.
Nick Lane (2:27:56.740)
Like we got, so do you have a sense
Lex Fridman (2:27:59.580)
that our galaxy, for example, has just maybe millions
Lex Fridman (2:28:04.580)
of planets with bacteria living on it?
Lex Fridman (2:28:06.540)
I would expect billions, tens of billions of planets
Nick Lane (2:28:09.700)
with bacteria living on it practically.
Lex Fridman (2:28:11.460)
I mean, there's probably what, five to 10 planets per star
Nick Lane (2:28:16.460)
of which I would hope that at least one
Lex Fridman (2:28:18.380)
would have bacteria on.
Lex Fridman (2:28:20.740)
So I expect bacteria to be very common.
Lex Fridman (2:28:23.380)
I simply can't put a number otherwise.
Nick Lane (2:28:25.620)
I mean, I expect it will happen elsewhere.
Lex Fridman (2:28:27.620)
It's not that I think we're living
Nick Lane (2:28:29.660)
in a completely empty universe.
Lex Fridman (2:28:31.380)
But I think that it's not gonna happen inevitably.
Lex Fridman (2:28:35.620)
And there's something, it wasn't,
Lex Fridman (2:28:37.580)
that's not the only problem with complex life on earth.
Nick Lane (2:28:41.660)
I mentioned oxygen and animals and so on as well.
Lex Fridman (2:28:44.060)
And even humans, we came along very late.
Nick Lane (2:28:46.100)
You go back 5 million years and would we be that impressed
Lex Fridman (2:28:49.260)
if we came across a planet full of giraffes?
Nick Lane (2:28:52.100)
I mean, you'd think, hey, there's life here
Lex Fridman (2:28:53.940)
and it's a nice planet to colonize or something.
Nick Lane (2:28:56.140)
We wouldn't think, oh, let's try and have a conversation
Lex Fridman (2:28:58.700)
with this giraffe.
Nick Lane (2:29:00.420)
Yeah, I'm not sure what exactly we would think.
Lex Fridman (2:29:04.220)
I'm not exactly sure what makes humans so interesting
Nick Lane (2:29:07.940)
from an alien perspective or how they would notice.
Lex Fridman (2:29:11.700)
I'll talk to you about cities too
Nick Lane (2:29:12.940)
because that's an interesting perspective
Lex Fridman (2:29:14.260)
of how to look at human civilization.
Lex Fridman (2:29:18.180)
But your sense, I mean, of course you don't know,
Lex Fridman (2:29:20.500)
but it's an interesting world, it's an interesting galaxy,
Nick Lane (2:29:25.420)
it's an interesting universe to live in
Lex Fridman (2:29:27.540)
that's just like every sun,
Nick Lane (2:29:31.260)
like 90% of solar systems have bacteria in it.
Lex Fridman (2:29:39.940)
Imagine that world and the galaxy maybe has
Nick Lane (2:29:46.220)
just a handful if not one intelligent civilization.
Lex Fridman (2:29:51.260)
That's a wild world.
Nick Lane (2:29:53.020)
I didn't even think about that world.
Lex Fridman (2:29:55.820)
There's a kind of thought that,
Nick Lane (2:29:58.820)
like one of the reasons it would be so exciting
Lex Fridman (2:30:00.860)
to find life on Mars or Titan or whatever
Nick Lane (2:30:04.180)
is like if its life is elsewhere,
Lex Fridman (2:30:05.860)
then surely, statistically, that life,
Nick Lane (2:30:10.980)
no matter how unlikely you query as multicellular organisms,
Lex Fridman (2:30:14.740)
sex, violence, what else is extremely difficult?
Nick Lane (2:30:19.740)
I mean, photosynthesis, figuring out some machinery
Lex Fridman (2:30:25.140)
that involves the chemistry and the environment
Nick Lane (2:30:27.500)
to allow the building up of complex organisms,
Lex Fridman (2:30:30.620)
surely that would arise.
Lex Fridman (2:30:32.900)
But man, I don't know how I would feel
Lex Fridman (2:30:35.180)
about just bacteria everywhere.
Nick Lane (2:30:38.100)
Well, it would be depressing if it was true.
Lex Fridman (2:30:40.700)
I suppose depressing, I don't think, I don't.
Nick Lane (2:30:42.820)
I don't know what's more depressing,
Lex Fridman (2:30:43.940)
bacteria everywhere or nothing everywhere.
Nick Lane (2:30:46.580)
Yes, either of them are chilling.
Lex Fridman (2:30:48.660)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (2:30:49.980)
But whether it's chilling or not,
Lex Fridman (2:30:51.860)
I don't think should force us to change our view
Nick Lane (2:30:55.900)
about whether it's real or not.
Lex Fridman (2:30:57.700)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (2:30:58.540)
And what I'm saying may or may not be true.
Lex Fridman (2:31:00.340)
So how would you feel if we discovered life on Mars?
Nick Lane (2:31:03.820)
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman (2:31:04.660)
It sounds like you would be less excited than some others
Nick Lane (2:31:07.700)
because you're like, well.
Lex Fridman (2:31:08.940)
What I would be most interested in
Nick Lane (2:31:10.420)
is how similar to life on Earth it would be.
Lex Fridman (2:31:12.100)
It would actually turn into quite a subtle problem
Nick Lane (2:31:13.900)
because the likelihood of life having gone to and fro
Lex Fridman (2:31:20.140)
between Mars and the Earth is quite,
Nick Lane (2:31:23.980)
I wouldn't say high, but it's not low, it's quite feasible.
Lex Fridman (2:31:27.340)
And so if we found life on Mars
Lex Fridman (2:31:29.420)
and it had very similar genetic code,
Lex Fridman (2:31:32.420)
but it was slightly different,
Nick Lane (2:31:34.380)
most people would interpret that immediately
Lex Fridman (2:31:36.380)
as evidence that they've been transit one way or the other
Lex Fridman (2:31:38.860)
and that it was a common origin of life on Mars
Lex Fridman (2:31:41.380)
or on the Earth and it went one way or the other way.
Nick Lane (2:31:43.460)
The other way to see that question though would be to say,
Lex Fridman (2:31:45.620)
well, actually the beginnings of life
Nick Lane (2:31:47.860)
lie in deterministic chemistry and thermodynamics,
Lex Fridman (2:31:50.700)
starting with the most likely abundant materials,
Nick Lane (2:31:53.860)
CO2 and water and a wet rocky planet.
Lex Fridman (2:31:57.580)
And Mars was wet and rocky at the beginning.
Lex Fridman (2:31:59.980)
And will, I won't say inevitably,
Lex Fridman (2:32:02.100)
but potentially almost inevitably come up
Nick Lane (2:32:04.060)
with a genetic code which is not very far away
Lex Fridman (2:32:06.100)
from the genetic code that we already have.
Lex Fridman (2:32:09.540)
So we see subtle differences in the genetic code.
Lex Fridman (2:32:11.820)
What does it mean?
Nick Lane (2:32:12.660)
Could be very difficult to interpret.
Lex Fridman (2:32:14.820)
Is it possible, do you think, to tell the difference
Lex Fridman (2:32:17.380)
of something that truly originated?
Lex Fridman (2:32:19.980)
I think if the stereochemistry was different,
Nick Lane (2:32:23.180)
we have sugars, for example, that are the L form
Lex Fridman (2:32:25.500)
or the D form and we have D sugars and L amino acids
Nick Lane (2:32:31.460)
right across all of life.
Lex Fridman (2:32:32.940)
But lipids, the bacteria have one stereoisomer
Lex Fridman (2:32:38.820)
and the bacteria have the other, the opposite stereoisomer.
Lex Fridman (2:32:42.420)
So it's perfectly possible to use one or the other one.
Lex Fridman (2:32:46.460)
And the same would almost certainly go for,
Lex Fridman (2:32:48.540)
and I think George Church has been trying to make life
Nick Lane (2:32:53.780)
based on the opposite stereoisomer.
Lex Fridman (2:32:56.820)
So it's perfectly possible to do and it will work.
Lex Fridman (2:33:00.660)
And if we were to find life on Mars
Lex Fridman (2:33:02.380)
that was using the opposite stereoisomer,
Nick Lane (2:33:03.940)
that would be unequivocal evidence
Lex Fridman (2:33:06.180)
that life had started independently there.
Lex Fridman (2:33:08.980)
So hopefully the life we find will be on Titan and Europa
Lex Fridman (2:33:13.340)
or something like that where it's less likely
Nick Lane (2:33:15.660)
that we shared and it's harsher conditions
Lex Fridman (2:33:18.220)
so there's gonna be weirder kind of life.
Nick Lane (2:33:20.820)
I wouldn't count on that because if life started
Lex Fridman (2:33:23.820)
in deep sea hydrothermal vents here, that's pretty harsh.
Lex Fridman (2:33:28.660)
So Titan is different.
Lex Fridman (2:33:29.940)
Europa is probably quite similar to Earth
Nick Lane (2:33:32.060)
in the sense that we're dealing with an ocean,
Lex Fridman (2:33:34.500)
some acidic ocean there, as the early Earth would have been.
Lex Fridman (2:33:38.820)
And it almost certainly has hydrothermal systems.
Lex Fridman (2:33:41.380)
Same with Enceladus.
Nick Lane (2:33:43.060)
We can tell that from these plumes
Lex Fridman (2:33:44.940)
coming from the surface through the ice.
Nick Lane (2:33:46.940)
We know there's a liquid ocean
Lex Fridman (2:33:48.060)
and we can tell roughly what the chemistry is.
Nick Lane (2:33:51.420)
For Titan, we're dealing with liquid methane
Lex Fridman (2:33:53.660)
and things like that.
Lex Fridman (2:33:54.500)
So that would really, if there really is life there,
Lex Fridman (2:33:56.220)
it would really have to be very, very different
Nick Lane (2:33:58.020)
to anything that we know on Earth.
Lex Fridman (2:34:00.980)
So the hard leap, the hardest leap,
Nick Lane (2:34:02.980)
the most important leap is from prokaryotes to eukaryotes.
Lex Fridman (2:34:07.980)
It's eukaryotic.
Lex Fridman (2:34:09.500)
What's the second, if we're ranking?
Lex Fridman (2:34:12.260)
What's the, you gave a lot of emphasis on photosynthesis.
Nick Lane (2:34:17.460)
Yeah, and that would be my second one, I think.
Lex Fridman (2:34:20.500)
But it's not so much, I mean,
Nick Lane (2:34:22.620)
photosynthesis is part of the problem.
Lex Fridman (2:34:25.220)
It's a difficult thing to do.
Nick Lane (2:34:26.820)
Again, we know it happened once.
Lex Fridman (2:34:29.980)
We don't know why it happened once.
Lex Fridman (2:34:31.740)
But the fact that it was kind of taken on board completely
Lex Fridman (2:34:39.820)
by plants and algae and so on as chloroplasts
Lex Fridman (2:34:44.020)
and did very well in completely different environments
Lex Fridman (2:34:47.260)
and then on land and whatever else seems to suggest
Nick Lane (2:34:50.020)
that there's no problem with exploring,
Lex Fridman (2:34:53.540)
whether you could have a separate origin
Nick Lane (2:34:55.060)
that explored this whole domain over there
Lex Fridman (2:34:56.780)
that the bacteria had never gone into.
Lex Fridman (2:34:58.580)
So that kind of says that the reason
Lex Fridman (2:35:00.900)
that it only happened once is probably
Nick Lane (2:35:02.220)
because it's difficult, because the wiring is difficult.
Lex Fridman (2:35:05.980)
But then it happened at least 2.2 billion years ago,
Nick Lane (2:35:10.380)
right before the GOE, maybe as long as 3 billion years ago,
Lex Fridman (2:35:14.380)
when there are, some people say there are whiffs of oxygen,
Nick Lane (2:35:16.780)
there's just kind of traces in the fossil
Lex Fridman (2:35:18.580)
in the geochemical record that say,
Nick Lane (2:35:20.500)
maybe there was a bit of oxygen then.
Lex Fridman (2:35:22.260)
That's really disputed.
Nick Lane (2:35:23.740)
Some people say it goes all the way back
Lex Fridman (2:35:25.380)
four billion years ago and then it's gone.
Lex Fridman (2:35:28.340)
And the common ancestor of life on Earth was photosynthetic.
Lex Fridman (2:35:32.460)
So immediately you've got groups of people
Nick Lane (2:35:34.780)
who disagree over a two billion year period of time
Lex Fridman (2:35:37.460)
about when it started.
Lex Fridman (2:35:41.020)
But let's take the latest date when it's unequivocal,
Lex Fridman (2:35:45.620)
that's 2.2 billion years ago,
Nick Lane (2:35:47.380)
through to around about the time of the Cambrian explosion
Lex Fridman (2:35:49.980)
when oxygen levels definitely got close to modern levels,
Nick Lane (2:35:54.060)
which was around about 550 million years ago.
Lex Fridman (2:35:56.660)
So we've gone more than one and a half billion years
Nick Lane (2:36:00.060)
where the Earth was in stasis.
Lex Fridman (2:36:03.060)
Nothing much changed.
Nick Lane (2:36:04.860)
It's known as the boring billion, in fact.
Lex Fridman (2:36:08.580)
Probably stuff was, that was when eukaryotes arose
Nick Lane (2:36:10.740)
somewhere in there, but it's...
Lex Fridman (2:36:15.420)
So this idea that the world is constantly changing,
Nick Lane (2:36:17.940)
that we're constantly evolving,
Lex Fridman (2:36:19.420)
that we're moving up some ramp is a very human idea.
Lex Fridman (2:36:22.020)
But in reality, there are kind of tipping points
Lex Fridman (2:36:30.500)
to a new stable equilibrium where the cells
Nick Lane (2:36:35.020)
that are producing oxygen are precisely counterbalanced
Lex Fridman (2:36:37.540)
by the cells that are consuming that oxygen,
Nick Lane (2:36:39.700)
which is why it's 21% now and has been that way
Lex Fridman (2:36:42.820)
for hundreds of millions of years.
Nick Lane (2:36:44.420)
We have a very precise balance.
Lex Fridman (2:36:46.660)
You go through a tipping point and you don't know
Nick Lane (2:36:48.820)
where the next stable state's gonna be,
Lex Fridman (2:36:51.580)
but it can be a long way from here.
Lex Fridman (2:36:54.140)
And so if we change the world with global warming,
Lex Fridman (2:36:57.180)
there will be a tipping point.
Nick Lane (2:36:58.340)
The question is where and when,
Lex Fridman (2:37:00.020)
and what's the next stable state?
Nick Lane (2:37:01.820)
It may be uninhabitable to us.
Lex Fridman (2:37:03.660)
It'll be habitable to life, for sure.
Lex Fridman (2:37:07.020)
But there may be something like the Permian extinction
Lex Fridman (2:37:08.940)
where 95% of species go extinct
Lex Fridman (2:37:11.420)
and there's a five to 10 million year gap
Lex Fridman (2:37:13.900)
and then life recovers, but without humans.
Lex Fridman (2:37:16.780)
And the question statistically, well, without humans,
Lex Fridman (2:37:18.980)
but statistically does that ultimately lead
Nick Lane (2:37:21.980)
to greater complexity, more interesting life,
Lex Fridman (2:37:24.940)
more intelligent life?
Nick Lane (2:37:25.780)
Well, after the first appearance of oxygen with the GOE,
Lex Fridman (2:37:29.700)
there was a tipping point which led
Nick Lane (2:37:31.300)
to a longterm stable state that was equivalent
Lex Fridman (2:37:33.420)
to the Black Sea today, which is to say oxygenated
Nick Lane (2:37:36.260)
at the very surface and stagnant, sterile,
Lex Fridman (2:37:38.740)
not sterile, but sulfurous, lower down.
Lex Fridman (2:37:43.660)
And that was stable certainly around the continental margins
Lex Fridman (2:37:47.940)
for more than a billion years.
Nick Lane (2:37:50.180)
It was not a state that led to progression
Lex Fridman (2:37:52.260)
in an obvious way.
Nick Lane (2:37:55.500)
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to think about evolution,
Lex Fridman (2:37:58.220)
like what leads to stable states
Lex Fridman (2:38:01.300)
and how often are
Lex Fridman (2:38:05.740)
evolutionary pressures emerging from the environment.
Lex Fridman (2:38:11.260)
So maybe other planets are able
Lex Fridman (2:38:13.660)
to create evolutionary pressures, chemical pressures,
Nick Lane (2:38:16.340)
whatever, some kind of pressure that say,
Lex Fridman (2:38:18.460)
you're screwed unless you get your shit together
Nick Lane (2:38:20.260)
in the next like 10,000 years, like a lot of pressure.
Lex Fridman (2:38:26.180)
It seems like Earth, like the boring building
Nick Lane (2:38:29.100)
might be explained in two ways.
Lex Fridman (2:38:31.300)
One is super difficult to take any kind of next step.
Lex Fridman (2:38:34.860)
And the second way it could be explained
Lex Fridman (2:38:37.260)
is there's no reason to take the next step.
Nick Lane (2:38:39.140)
No, I think there is no reason, but at the end of it,
Lex Fridman (2:38:41.860)
there was a snowball Earth.
Lex Fridman (2:38:44.100)
So there was a planetary catastrophe on a huge scale
Lex Fridman (2:38:46.940)
where the ice was, the sea was frozen at the equator.
Lex Fridman (2:38:54.220)
And that forced change in one way or another.
Lex Fridman (2:38:58.420)
It's not long after that, 100 million years,
Nick Lane (2:39:00.380)
perhaps after that, so not a short time,
Lex Fridman (2:39:02.220)
but this is when we begin to see animals.
Nick Lane (2:39:03.740)
There was a shift again, another tipping point
Lex Fridman (2:39:06.620)
that led to catastrophic change
Nick Lane (2:39:08.020)
that led to a takeoff then.
Lex Fridman (2:39:10.580)
We don't really know why, but one of the reasons
Lex Fridman (2:39:13.420)
why that I discuss in the book is about sulfate
Lex Fridman (2:39:19.020)
being washed into the oceans,
Nick Lane (2:39:20.420)
which sounds incredibly parochial.
Lex Fridman (2:39:22.980)
But the issue is, I mean, what the data is showing,
Nick Lane (2:39:27.500)
we can track roughly how oxygen was going
Lex Fridman (2:39:30.180)
into the atmosphere from carbon isotopes.
Lex Fridman (2:39:35.180)
So there's two main isotopes of carbon
Lex Fridman (2:39:37.420)
that we need to think about here.
Nick Lane (2:39:38.780)
One is carbon 12, 99% of carbon is carbon 12.
Lex Fridman (2:39:41.980)
And then 1% of carbon is carbon 13,
Nick Lane (2:39:44.820)
which is a stable isotope.
Lex Fridman (2:39:46.060)
And then there's carbon 14, which is a trivial radioactive,
Nick Lane (2:39:48.980)
it's trivial in amount.
Lex Fridman (2:39:50.820)
So carbon 13 is 1%.
Lex Fridman (2:39:53.180)
And life and enzymes generally,
Lex Fridman (2:39:56.460)
you can think of carbon atoms as little balls
Nick Lane (2:40:00.020)
bouncing around, ping pong balls bouncing around.
Lex Fridman (2:40:01.860)
Carbon 12 moves a little bit faster than carbon 13
Nick Lane (2:40:04.340)
because it's lighter and it's more likely
Lex Fridman (2:40:06.700)
to encounter an enzyme.
Lex Fridman (2:40:08.620)
And so it's more likely to be fixed into organic matter.
Lex Fridman (2:40:11.900)
And so organic matter is enriched.
Lex Fridman (2:40:13.380)
And this is just an observation.
Lex Fridman (2:40:14.500)
It's enriched in carbon 12 by a few percent
Nick Lane (2:40:17.660)
compared to carbon 13,
Lex Fridman (2:40:19.060)
relative to what you would expect if it was just equal.
Lex Fridman (2:40:21.660)
And if you then bury organic matter as coal
Lex Fridman (2:40:26.780)
or oil or whatever it may be,
Nick Lane (2:40:30.260)
then it's no longer oxidized.
Lex Fridman (2:40:31.580)
So some oxygen remains leftover in the atmosphere.
Lex Fridman (2:40:35.180)
And that's how oxygen accumulates in the atmosphere.
Lex Fridman (2:40:37.460)
And you can work out historically
Lex Fridman (2:40:39.100)
how much oxygen there must've been in the atmosphere
Lex Fridman (2:40:40.980)
by how much carbon was being buried.
Lex Fridman (2:40:43.620)
And you think, well, how can we possibly know
Lex Fridman (2:40:45.100)
how much carbon was being buried?
Lex Fridman (2:40:46.540)
And the answer is, well, if you're burying carbon 12,
Lex Fridman (2:40:49.340)
what you're leaving behind is more carbon 13 in the oceans
Lex Fridman (2:40:52.100)
and that precipitates out into limestone.
Lex Fridman (2:40:54.380)
So you can look at limestones over these ages
Lex Fridman (2:40:56.420)
and work out what's the carbon 13 signal.
Lex Fridman (2:40:59.140)
And that gives you a kind of a feedback
Nick Lane (2:41:00.980)
on what the oxygen content.
Lex Fridman (2:41:03.540)
Right before the Cambrian explosion,
Nick Lane (2:41:05.180)
there was what's called a negative isotope anomaly excursion,
Lex Fridman (2:41:08.780)
which is basically the carbon 13 goes down
Nick Lane (2:41:10.860)
by a massive amount and then back up again
Lex Fridman (2:41:12.740)
10 million years later.
Lex Fridman (2:41:15.500)
And what that seems to be saying is the amount
Lex Fridman (2:41:18.980)
of carbon 12 in the oceans was disappearing,
Nick Lane (2:41:26.140)
which is to say it was being oxidized.
Lex Fridman (2:41:30.380)
And if it's being oxidized, it's consuming oxygen.
Lex Fridman (2:41:33.180)
And that should, so a big carbon 13 signal says
Lex Fridman (2:41:36.340)
the ratio of carbon 12 to carbon 13 is really going down,
Nick Lane (2:41:39.940)
which means there's much more carbon 12
Lex Fridman (2:41:42.900)
being taken out and being oxidized.
Nick Lane (2:41:44.300)
Sorry, this is getting too complex, but.
Lex Fridman (2:41:46.260)
Well, it's a good way to estimate the amount of oxygen.
Nick Lane (2:41:49.740)
If you calculate the amount of oxygen
Lex Fridman (2:41:51.580)
based on the assumption that all this carbon 12
Nick Lane (2:41:53.940)
that's being taken out is being oxidized by oxygen,
Lex Fridman (2:41:56.180)
the answer is all the oxygen in the atmosphere
Nick Lane (2:41:58.060)
gets stripped out, there is none left.
Lex Fridman (2:42:01.100)
And yet the rest of the geological indicators say,
Nick Lane (2:42:03.420)
no, there's oxygen in the atmosphere.
Lex Fridman (2:42:06.180)
So it's a kind of a paradox.
Lex Fridman (2:42:07.620)
And the only way to explain this paradox
Lex Fridman (2:42:09.860)
just on mass balance of how much stuff is in the air,
Lex Fridman (2:42:12.580)
how much stuff is in the oceans and so on,
Lex Fridman (2:42:15.300)
is to assume that oxygen was not the oxygen,
Nick Lane (2:42:18.580)
it was sulfate.
Lex Fridman (2:42:19.700)
Sulfate was being washed into the oceans.
Nick Lane (2:42:22.500)
It's used as an electron acceptor
Lex Fridman (2:42:24.740)
by sulfate reducing bacteria,
Nick Lane (2:42:26.020)
just as we use oxygen as an electron acceptor.
Lex Fridman (2:42:28.300)
So they pass their electrons to sulfate instead of oxygen.
Nick Lane (2:42:31.780)
And. Bacteria did.
Lex Fridman (2:42:32.780)
Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman (2:42:34.020)
So these are bacteria.
Lex Fridman (2:42:36.540)
So they're oxidizing carbon, organic carbon with sulfate,
Nick Lane (2:42:41.300)
passing the electrons onto sulfate,
Lex Fridman (2:42:43.340)
that reacts with iron to form iron pyrite or fool's gold,
Nick Lane (2:42:47.580)
sinks down to the bottom, gets buried out of the system.
Lex Fridman (2:42:51.020)
And this can account for the mass balance.
Lex Fridman (2:42:53.940)
So why does it matter?
Lex Fridman (2:42:55.620)
It matters because what it says is
Nick Lane (2:42:58.020)
there was a chance event,
Lex Fridman (2:43:00.020)
tectonically there was a lot of sulfate sitting on land
Nick Lane (2:43:03.220)
as some kind of mineral.
Lex Fridman (2:43:06.580)
So calcium sulfate minerals, for example, are evaporitic.
Lex Fridman (2:43:11.300)
And because there happened to be
Lex Fridman (2:43:13.860)
some continental collisions, mountain building,
Nick Lane (2:43:18.340)
the sulfate was pushed up the side of a mountain
Lex Fridman (2:43:20.820)
and happened to get washed into the ocean.
Nick Lane (2:43:24.140)
Yeah, so I wonder how many happy accidents
Lex Fridman (2:43:26.460)
like that are possible.
Nick Lane (2:43:27.420)
Statistically, it's really hard.
Lex Fridman (2:43:28.780)
Maybe you can rule that in statistically,
Lex Fridman (2:43:30.820)
but this is the course of life on earth.
Lex Fridman (2:43:34.100)
Without all that sulfate being raised up,
Nick Lane (2:43:36.460)
this Cambrian explosion almost certainly
Lex Fridman (2:43:38.140)
would not have happened.
Lex Fridman (2:43:39.820)
And then we wouldn't have had animals and so on and so on.
Lex Fridman (2:43:42.300)
So it's this kind of explanation of the Cambrian explosion.
Lex Fridman (2:43:48.100)
So let me actually say in several ways.
Lex Fridman (2:43:51.900)
So folks who challenge the validity
Nick Lane (2:43:55.900)
of the theory of evolution will give us an example.
Lex Fridman (2:44:00.940)
Now I'm not well studied in this,
Lex Fridman (2:44:02.620)
but will give us an example of the Cambrian explosion
Lex Fridman (2:44:04.820)
as like, this thing is weird.
Nick Lane (2:44:07.460)
Oh, it is weird, yeah.
Lex Fridman (2:44:08.900)
So the question I would have is
Nick Lane (2:44:13.740)
what's the biggest mystery or gap in understanding
Lex Fridman (2:44:17.260)
about evolution?
Lex Fridman (2:44:19.420)
Is it the Cambrian explosion?
Lex Fridman (2:44:21.140)
And if so, what's our best understanding
Lex Fridman (2:44:23.580)
of how to explain, first of all, what is it?
Lex Fridman (2:44:28.340)
In my understanding, in the short amount of time,
Nick Lane (2:44:30.940)
maybe 10 million years, 100 million years,
Lex Fridman (2:44:32.660)
something like that, a huge number of animals,
Nick Lane (2:44:35.780)
a variety, diversity of animals were created.
Lex Fridman (2:44:39.820)
Anyway, there's like five questions in there.
Lex Fridman (2:44:41.980)
Is that the biggest mystery?
Lex Fridman (2:44:43.220)
No, I don't think it's a particularly big mystery
Nick Lane (2:44:45.380)
really anymore.
Lex Fridman (2:44:48.660)
There are still mysteries about why then.
Lex Fridman (2:44:51.220)
And I've just said sulfate being washed
Lex Fridman (2:44:52.860)
into the oceans is one.
Nick Lane (2:44:54.060)
It needs oxygen and oxygen levels rose around that time.
Lex Fridman (2:44:59.180)
So probably before that, they weren't high enough
Nick Lane (2:45:01.660)
for animals.
Lex Fridman (2:45:02.940)
What we're seeing with the Cambrian explosion
Nick Lane (2:45:04.660)
is the beginning of predators and prey relationships.
Lex Fridman (2:45:07.860)
We're seeing modern ecosystems and we're seeing arms races
Lex Fridman (2:45:12.820)
and we're seeing the full creativity of evolution unleashed.
Lex Fridman (2:45:20.380)
So I talked about the boring billion,
Nick Lane (2:45:22.540)
nothing happens for one and a half billion years,
Lex Fridman (2:45:26.340)
one and a half billion years.
Nick Lane (2:45:29.500)
The assumption, and this is completely wrong,
Lex Fridman (2:45:31.780)
this assumption, is then that evolution works really slowly
Lex Fridman (2:45:36.180)
and that you need billions of years
Lex Fridman (2:45:37.980)
to affect some small change
Lex Fridman (2:45:40.660)
and then another billion years to do something else.
Lex Fridman (2:45:42.900)
It's completely wrong.
Nick Lane (2:45:44.660)
Evolution gets stuck in a stasis and it stays that way
Lex Fridman (2:45:47.180)
for tens of millions, hundreds of millions of years.
Lex Fridman (2:45:50.140)
And Steven Jay Gould used to argue this,
Lex Fridman (2:45:52.500)
he called it punctuated equilibrium,
Lex Fridman (2:45:53.940)
but he was doing it to do with animals
Lex Fridman (2:45:55.500)
and to do with the last 500 million years or so,
Nick Lane (2:45:58.660)
where it's much less obvious
Lex Fridman (2:46:00.020)
than if you think about the entire planetary history.
Lex Fridman (2:46:02.740)
And then you realize that the first two billion years
Lex Fridman (2:46:04.780)
was bacteria only.
Nick Lane (2:46:06.540)
You have the origin of life,
Lex Fridman (2:46:07.780)
two billion years of just bacteria,
Nick Lane (2:46:09.780)
oxygen photosynthesis arising here.
Lex Fridman (2:46:11.900)
Then you have a global catastrophe,
Nick Lane (2:46:14.300)
snowball earths and great oxidation event
Lex Fridman (2:46:16.420)
and then another billion years of nothing happening
Lex Fridman (2:46:18.220)
and then some period of upheavals
Lex Fridman (2:46:20.420)
and then another snowball earth
Lex Fridman (2:46:21.660)
and then suddenly you see the Cambrian explosion.
Lex Fridman (2:46:23.540)
This is long periods of stasis
Nick Lane (2:46:25.860)
where the world is in a stable state
Lex Fridman (2:46:27.700)
and is not geared towards increasing complexity.
Nick Lane (2:46:31.060)
It's just everything is in balance.
Lex Fridman (2:46:33.460)
And only when you have a catastrophic level,
Nick Lane (2:46:35.580)
global level problem like a snowball earth,
Lex Fridman (2:46:38.660)
it forces everything out of balance
Lex Fridman (2:46:40.300)
and there's a tipping point and you end up somewhere else.
Lex Fridman (2:46:42.620)
Now, the idea that evolution is slow is wrong.
Nick Lane (2:46:48.420)
It can be incredibly fast.
Lex Fridman (2:46:50.340)
And I mentioned earlier on that you can,
Nick Lane (2:46:52.980)
in theory, it would take half a million years
Lex Fridman (2:46:54.980)
to invent an eye, for example, from a light sensitive spot.
Nick Lane (2:46:57.940)
It doesn't take long to convert
Lex Fridman (2:47:01.980)
one kind of tube into a tube with nobbles on it
Nick Lane (2:47:05.540)
into a tube with arms on it and then multiple arms
Lex Fridman (2:47:08.700)
and then at one end is the head
Nick Lane (2:47:10.340)
where it starts out as a swelling.
Lex Fridman (2:47:11.700)
It's not difficult intellectually to understand
Lex Fridman (2:47:15.220)
how these things can happen.
Lex Fridman (2:47:18.300)
It boggles the mind that it can happen so quickly,
Lex Fridman (2:47:20.980)
but we're used to human timescales.
Lex Fridman (2:47:24.780)
And what we need to talk about is generations of things
Nick Lane (2:47:27.300)
that live for a year in the ocean.
Lex Fridman (2:47:30.500)
And then a million years is a million generations.
Lex Fridman (2:47:33.300)
And the amount of change that you can do,
Lex Fridman (2:47:35.940)
it can affect in that period of time is enormous.
Lex Fridman (2:47:38.980)
And we're dealing with large populations of things
Lex Fridman (2:47:41.020)
where selection is sensitive to pretty small changes
Lex Fridman (2:47:44.060)
and can, so again, as soon as you throw in
Lex Fridman (2:47:48.380)
the competition of predators and prey
Lex Fridman (2:47:50.860)
and you're ramping up the scale of evolution,
Lex Fridman (2:47:53.820)
it's not very surprising that it happens very quickly
Nick Lane (2:47:56.180)
when the environment allows it to happen.
Lex Fridman (2:47:58.700)
So I don't think there's a big mystery.
Nick Lane (2:47:59.940)
There's lots of details that need to be filled in.
Lex Fridman (2:48:03.460)
I mean, the big mystery in biology is consciousness.
Nick Lane (2:48:11.340)
The big mystery in biology is consciousness.
Lex Fridman (2:48:13.380)
Well, intelligence is kind of a mystery too.
Nick Lane (2:48:21.420)
I mean, you said biology, not psychology.
Lex Fridman (2:48:28.100)
Because from a biology perspective,
Nick Lane (2:48:30.580)
it seems like intelligence and consciousness
Lex Fridman (2:48:32.380)
all are the same, like weird, like all the brain stuff.
Nick Lane (2:48:37.660)
I don't see intelligence as necessarily that difficult,
Lex Fridman (2:48:41.780)
I suppose.
Nick Lane (2:48:42.620)
I mean, I see it as a form of computing
Lex Fridman (2:48:44.740)
and I don't know much about computing, so I...
Nick Lane (2:48:48.460)
You don't know much about consciousness either.
Lex Fridman (2:48:50.220)
So I mean, I suppose, oh, I see.
Nick Lane (2:48:54.340)
I see, I see, I see, I see.
Lex Fridman (2:48:57.500)
That consciousness you do know a lot about as a human being.
Nick Lane (2:49:00.300)
No, no, I mean, I think I can understand the wiring
Lex Fridman (2:49:04.580)
of a brain as a series of, in pretty much the same way
Nick Lane (2:49:08.300)
as a computer in theory, in terms of the circuitry of it.
Lex Fridman (2:49:16.700)
The mystery to me is how this system gives rise to feelings,
Nick Lane (2:49:21.780)
as we were talking about earlier on.
Lex Fridman (2:49:23.140)
Yeah, I just, I think we oversimplify intelligence.
Nick Lane (2:49:27.820)
I think the dance, the magic of reasoning
Lex Fridman (2:49:31.860)
is as interesting as the magic of feeling.
Nick Lane (2:49:36.140)
We tend to think of reasoning as like very,
Lex Fridman (2:49:42.500)
running a very simplistic algorithm.
Nick Lane (2:49:45.380)
I think reasoning is the interplay between memory,
Lex Fridman (2:49:48.780)
whatever the hell is going on, the unconscious mind,
Nick Lane (2:49:51.900)
all of that.
Lex Fridman (2:49:55.100)
I'm not trying to diminish it in any way at all.
Nick Lane (2:49:58.460)
Obviously, it's extraordinarily exquisitely complex,
Lex Fridman (2:50:01.900)
but I don't see a logical difficulty with how it works.
Nick Lane (2:50:06.860)
Yeah, no, I mean, I agree with you, but sometimes, yeah,
Lex Fridman (2:50:11.540)
there's a big cloak of mystery around consciousness.
Nick Lane (2:50:16.340)
Let me compare it with classical versus quantum physics.
Lex Fridman (2:50:20.020)
Classical physics is logical, and you can understand the kind
Nick Lane (2:50:26.580)
of language we're dealing with.
Lex Fridman (2:50:27.860)
It's almost at the human level, we're
Nick Lane (2:50:29.540)
dealing with stars and things that we can see.
Lex Fridman (2:50:31.460)
And when you get to quantum mechanics and things,
Nick Lane (2:50:34.500)
it's practically impossible for the human mind
Lex Fridman (2:50:36.820)
to compute what just happened there.
Nick Lane (2:50:39.580)
Yeah, I mean, that is the same.
Lex Fridman (2:50:41.940)
It's like, you understand mathematically
Nick Lane (2:50:44.940)
that the notes of a musical composition, that's intelligence.
Lex Fridman (2:50:49.060)
But why it makes you feel a certain way,
Nick Lane (2:50:54.900)
that is much harder to understand.
Lex Fridman (2:50:57.620)
Yeah, that's really, but it was interesting framing
Nick Lane (2:51:02.660)
that that's a mystery at the core of biology.
Lex Fridman (2:51:05.580)
I wonder who solves consciousness.
Nick Lane (2:51:09.740)
I tend to think consciousness will
Lex Fridman (2:51:11.340)
be solved by the engineer, meaning the person who builds
Nick Lane (2:51:15.780)
it, who keeps trying to build the thing,
Lex Fridman (2:51:20.260)
versus biology, such a complicated system.
Nick Lane (2:51:24.900)
I feel like the building blocks of consciousness
Lex Fridman (2:51:29.900)
from a biological perspective are like,
Nick Lane (2:51:34.140)
that's like the final creation of a human being.
Lex Fridman (2:51:36.900)
So you have to understand the whole damn thing.
Nick Lane (2:51:38.980)
You said the electrical field, but like,
Lex Fridman (2:51:42.220)
electrical field is plus plus.
Nick Lane (2:51:43.820)
Everything, the whole shebang.
Lex Fridman (2:51:47.220)
I'm inclined to agree.
Nick Lane (2:51:48.340)
I mean, my feeling is from my meager knowledge
Lex Fridman (2:51:51.860)
of the history of science is that the biggest breakthrough
Nick Lane (2:51:53.900)
has usually come through from a field that was not related.
Lex Fridman (2:51:57.780)
So if anyone is not going to be a biologist who
Nick Lane (2:52:00.060)
solves consciousness, just because biologists
Lex Fridman (2:52:03.020)
are too embedded in the nature of the problem.
Lex Fridman (2:52:06.740)
And then nobody's going to believe you when you've done it,
Lex Fridman (2:52:09.020)
because nobody's going to be able to prove that this AI is
Nick Lane (2:52:12.220)
in fact conscious and sad in any case,
Lex Fridman (2:52:16.140)
and any more than you can prove that a dog is
Nick Lane (2:52:18.260)
conscious and sad.
Lex Fridman (2:52:20.140)
So it tells you that it is in good language,
Lex Fridman (2:52:23.220)
and you must believe it.
Lex Fridman (2:52:24.820)
But I think most people will accept,
Nick Lane (2:52:27.460)
if faced with that, that that's what it is.
Lex Fridman (2:52:30.820)
All of this probability of complex life,
Nick Lane (2:52:38.980)
in one way, I think why it matters is that my expectation,
Lex Fridman (2:52:45.620)
I suppose, is that we will be over the next 100 years
Nick Lane (2:52:49.540)
or so, if we survive at all, that AI will increasingly
Lex Fridman (2:52:53.340)
dominate.
Lex Fridman (2:52:53.980)
And pretty much anything that we put out
Lex Fridman (2:52:56.020)
into space looking for other, well, for the universe,
Nick Lane (2:53:00.220)
for what's out there, will be AI, won't be us.
Lex Fridman (2:53:03.700)
We won't be doing that.
Nick Lane (2:53:04.700)
Or when we do, it'll be on a much more limited scale.
Lex Fridman (2:53:07.420)
I suppose the same would apply to any alien civilization.
Lex Fridman (2:53:12.500)
So perhaps rather than looking for signs of life out there,
Lex Fridman (2:53:15.380)
we should be looking for AI out there.
Lex Fridman (2:53:19.100)
But then we face the problem that I
Lex Fridman (2:53:25.060)
don't see how a planet is going to give rise directly to AI.
Nick Lane (2:53:29.980)
I can see how a planet can give rise directly to organic life.
Lex Fridman (2:53:34.140)
And if the principles that govern the evolution of life
Nick Lane (2:53:36.900)
on Earth apply to other planets as well,
Lex Fridman (2:53:40.020)
and I think a lot of them would, then
Nick Lane (2:53:43.780)
the likelihood of ending up with a humanlike civilization
Lex Fridman (2:53:47.660)
capable of giving rise to AI in the first place
Nick Lane (2:53:50.500)
is massively limited.
Lex Fridman (2:53:52.100)
Once you've done it once, perhaps it takes over
Nick Lane (2:53:54.100)
the universe, and maybe there's no issue.
Lex Fridman (2:53:57.300)
But it seems to me that the two are necessarily linked,
Nick Lane (2:54:01.060)
that you're not going to just turn a sterile planet
Lex Fridman (2:54:03.980)
into an AI life form without the intermediary of the organics
Nick Lane (2:54:07.740)
first.
Lex Fridman (2:54:08.380)
So you have to run the full evolutionary computation
Nick Lane (2:54:13.180)
with the organics to create AI.
Lex Fridman (2:54:15.420)
How does AI bootstrap itself up without the aid, if you like,
Lex Fridman (2:54:18.820)
of an intelligent designer?
Lex Fridman (2:54:20.540)
The origin of AI is going to have
Nick Lane (2:54:23.620)
to be in the chemistry of a planet.
Lex Fridman (2:54:27.700)
But that's not a limiting factor, right?
Lex Fridman (2:54:29.980)
So let me ask the Fermi paradox question.
Lex Fridman (2:54:35.500)
Let's say we live in this incredibly dark and beautiful
Nick Lane (2:54:40.420)
world of just billions of planets with bacteria on it
Lex Fridman (2:54:47.020)
and very few intelligent civilizations,
Lex Fridman (2:54:49.220)
and yet there's a few out there.
Lex Fridman (2:54:52.620)
Why haven't we, at scale, seen them visit us?
Lex Fridman (2:54:58.060)
What's your sense?
Lex Fridman (2:54:59.860)
Is it because they don't exist?
Nick Lane (2:55:02.460)
Well, don't exist in the right part of the universe
Lex Fridman (2:55:04.700)
at the right time.
Nick Lane (2:55:05.420)
That's the simplest answer for it.
Lex Fridman (2:55:08.260)
Is that the one you find the most compelling,
Lex Fridman (2:55:10.380)
or is there some other explanation?
Lex Fridman (2:55:13.860)
I find that, no, it's not that I find it more compelling.
Nick Lane (2:55:16.820)
It's that I find more probable.
Lex Fridman (2:55:19.380)
And I find all of them, I mean, there's
Nick Lane (2:55:21.580)
a lot of handwaving in this.
Lex Fridman (2:55:22.580)
We just don't know.
Lex Fridman (2:55:24.300)
So I'm trying to read out from what I know about life on Earth
Lex Fridman (2:55:27.900)
to what might happen somewhere else.
Lex Fridman (2:55:30.420)
And it gives, to my mind, a bit of a pessimistic view
Lex Fridman (2:55:33.540)
of bacteria everywhere and only occasional intelligent life
Lex Fridman (2:55:37.380)
and running forward humans only once on Earth and nothing else
Lex Fridman (2:55:41.580)
that you would necessarily be any more excited about making
Nick Lane (2:55:44.740)
contact with than you would be making contact with them
Lex Fridman (2:55:47.020)
on Earth.
Lex Fridman (2:55:49.140)
So I think the chances are pretty limited.
Lex Fridman (2:55:52.460)
And the chances of us surviving are pretty limited, too,
Nick Lane (2:55:56.700)
in the way we're going on at the moment.
Lex Fridman (2:55:58.460)
The likelihood of us not making ourselves extinct
Nick Lane (2:56:01.020)
within the next few hundred years,
Lex Fridman (2:56:03.900)
possibly within the next 50 or 100 years, seems quite small.
Nick Lane (2:56:08.140)
I hope we can do better than that.
Lex Fridman (2:56:11.180)
So maybe the only thing that will survive from humanity
Nick Lane (2:56:13.340)
will be AI.
Lex Fridman (2:56:14.140)
And maybe AI, once it exists and once
Nick Lane (2:56:15.900)
it's capable of effectively copying itself and cutting
Lex Fridman (2:56:19.780)
humans out of the loop, then maybe that
Nick Lane (2:56:22.740)
will take over the universe.
Lex Fridman (2:56:24.500)
I mean, there's a kind of inherent sadness
Nick Lane (2:56:26.500)
to the way you described that.
Lex Fridman (2:56:28.020)
But isn't that also potentially beautiful,
Nick Lane (2:56:31.820)
that that's the next step of life, I suppose,
Lex Fridman (2:56:37.940)
from your perspective, as long as it carries the flame
Lex Fridman (2:56:39.940)
of consciousness somehow?
Lex Fridman (2:56:41.340)
No, I think, yes, there can be some beauty to it
Nick Lane (2:56:43.180)
being the next step of life.
Lex Fridman (2:56:44.500)
And I don't know if consciousness matters or not,
Nick Lane (2:56:46.500)
from that point of view, to be honest with you.
Lex Fridman (2:56:49.660)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (2:56:50.380)
But there's some sadness, yes, probably,
Lex Fridman (2:56:53.180)
because I think it comes down to the selfishness
Nick Lane (2:56:58.140)
that we were talking about earlier on.
Lex Fridman (2:56:59.740)
I am an individual with a desire not
Nick Lane (2:57:03.860)
to be displaced from life.
Lex Fridman (2:57:06.460)
I want to stay alive.
Nick Lane (2:57:07.620)
I want to be here.
Lex Fridman (2:57:11.540)
So I suppose the threat that a lot of people would feel
Nick Lane (2:57:13.700)
is that we will just be wiped out,
Lex Fridman (2:57:15.300)
so that there will be potential conflict between AI and humans
Lex Fridman (2:57:20.180)
and that AI will win because it's a lot smarter.
Lex Fridman (2:57:25.340)
Boy, would that be a sad state of affairs
Nick Lane (2:57:27.900)
if consciousness is just an intermediate stage
Lex Fridman (2:57:32.500)
between bacteria and AI, right?
Nick Lane (2:57:36.740)
Well, I would see bacteria as being potentially
Lex Fridman (2:57:38.820)
a kind of primitive form of consciousness anyway.
Lex Fridman (2:57:41.020)
So the whole of life on Earth, to my mind,
Lex Fridman (2:57:43.940)
is capable of some form of feelings
Nick Lane (2:57:46.580)
in response to the environment.
Lex Fridman (2:57:47.860)
That's not to say it's intelligent,
Nick Lane (2:57:49.320)
it's got its own algorithms for intelligence,
Lex Fridman (2:57:52.580)
but nothing comparable with us.
Nick Lane (2:57:55.220)
I think it's beautiful what a planet, what a sterile planet,
Lex Fridman (2:57:57.740)
can come up with.
Nick Lane (2:57:59.180)
It's astonishing that it's come up with all of this stuff
Lex Fridman (2:58:01.820)
that we see around us and that either we or whatever we
Nick Lane (2:58:06.740)
produce is capable of destroying all of that is a sad thought.
Lex Fridman (2:58:12.340)
But it's also hugely pessimistic.
Nick Lane (2:58:17.540)
I'd like to think that we're capable of giving rise
Lex Fridman (2:58:19.780)
to something which is at least as good,
Nick Lane (2:58:21.620)
if not better than us, as AI.
Lex Fridman (2:58:24.140)
Yeah, I have that same optimism, especially a thing
Nick Lane (2:58:29.860)
that is able to propagate throughout the universe
Lex Fridman (2:58:31.860)
more efficiently than humans can.
Nick Lane (2:58:33.820)
Or extensions of humans, some merger with AI and humans,
Lex Fridman (2:58:39.140)
whether that comes from bioengineering of the human body
Nick Lane (2:58:43.900)
to extend its life somehow, to carry
Lex Fridman (2:58:47.860)
that flame of consciousness and that personality
Lex Fridman (2:58:50.180)
and the beautiful tension that's within all of us,
Lex Fridman (2:58:54.500)
carry that through to multiple planets,
Nick Lane (2:58:56.620)
to multiple solar systems, all out there in the universe.
Lex Fridman (2:58:59.620)
I mean, that's a beautiful vision.
Nick Lane (2:59:02.100)
Whether AI can do that or bioengineered humans can,
Lex Fridman (2:59:07.700)
that's an exciting possibility.
Lex Fridman (2:59:09.100)
And especially meeting other alien civilizations
Lex Fridman (2:59:13.300)
in that same kind of way.
Lex Fridman (2:59:14.620)
Do you think aliens have consciousness?
Lex Fridman (2:59:16.780)
If they're organic.
Lex Fridman (2:59:18.300)
So organic is connected to consciousness.
Lex Fridman (2:59:20.500)
I mean, I think any system which is going to bootstrap itself
Nick Lane (2:59:24.340)
up from planetary origins, I mean, let me finish this
Lex Fridman (2:59:30.260)
and then come on to something else.
Lex Fridman (2:59:31.620)
But from planetary origins is going
Lex Fridman (2:59:34.260)
to face similar constraints.
Lex Fridman (2:59:36.020)
And those constraints are going to be addressed
Lex Fridman (2:59:37.940)
in similar basic engineering ways.
Lex Fridman (2:59:40.260)
And I think it will be cellular.
Lex Fridman (2:59:41.740)
And I think it will have electrical charges.
Lex Fridman (2:59:43.860)
And I think it will have to be selected
Lex Fridman (2:59:46.340)
in populations over time.
Lex Fridman (2:59:47.620)
And all of these things will tend
Lex Fridman (2:59:48.820)
to give rise to the same processes
Nick Lane (2:59:50.340)
as the simplest fix to a difficult problem.
Lex Fridman (2:59:53.260)
So I would expect it to be conscious, yes.
Lex Fridman (2:59:54.940)
And I would expect it to resemble life
Lex Fridman (2:59:57.660)
on Earth in many ways.
Lex Fridman (30:00.680)
For experiments on the origin of life, what do you put it in?
Lex Fridman (30:04.440)
What kind of structure do we want to induce in this water?
Nick Lane (30:07.200)
Because the last thing it's likely to be
Lex Fridman (30:08.840)
is just kind of bulk water.
Lex Fridman (30:11.640)
How fundamental is water to life, would you say?
Lex Fridman (30:14.240)
I would say pretty fundamental.
Nick Lane (30:17.800)
I wouldn't like to say it's impossible for life
Lex Fridman (30:20.040)
to start any other way, but water is everywhere.
Nick Lane (30:26.060)
Water's extremely good at what it does,
Lex Fridman (30:27.760)
and carbon works in water especially well.
Lex Fridman (30:31.160)
So those things, and carbon is everywhere.
Lex Fridman (30:33.240)
So those things together make me think probabilistically,
Nick Lane (30:35.660)
if we found a thousand life forms, 995 of them
Lex Fridman (30:39.160)
would be carbon based and living in water.
Nick Lane (30:41.920)
Now the reverse question, if you found a puddle of water
Lex Fridman (30:45.400)
elsewhere and some carbon, no, just a puddle of water.
Nick Lane (30:50.200)
Is a puddle of water a pretty damn good indication
Lex Fridman (30:53.240)
that life either exists here or has once existed here?
Nick Lane (31:00.960)
No.
Lex Fridman (31:02.340)
So it doesn't work the other way.
Nick Lane (31:04.040)
I think you need a living planet.
Lex Fridman (31:07.580)
You need a planet which is capable
Nick Lane (31:09.100)
of turning over its surface.
Lex Fridman (31:10.740)
It needs to be a planet with water.
Nick Lane (31:12.860)
It needs to be capable of bringing those electrons
Lex Fridman (31:16.880)
from inside to the outside.
Nick Lane (31:18.140)
It needs to turn over its surface.
Lex Fridman (31:19.660)
It needs to make that water work and turn it into hydrogen.
Lex Fridman (31:22.920)
So I think you need a living planet.
Lex Fridman (31:24.740)
But once you've got the living planet,
Nick Lane (31:25.940)
I think the rest of it is kind of thermodynamics all the way.
Lex Fridman (31:29.420)
So if you were to run Earth over a million times up
Nick Lane (31:34.500)
to this point, maybe beyond, to the end,
Lex Fridman (31:37.820)
let's run it to the end, what is it?
Lex Fridman (31:41.420)
How much variety is there?
Lex Fridman (31:42.980)
You kind of spoke to this trajectory
Nick Lane (31:45.060)
that the environment dictates chemically,
Lex Fridman (31:49.900)
I don't know in which other way, spiritually,
Nick Lane (31:53.560)
I don't know, like dictates kind of the direction
Lex Fridman (31:57.100)
of this giant machine that seems chaotic,
Lex Fridman (32:01.900)
but it does seem to have order in the steps it's taking.
Lex Fridman (32:06.180)
How often will life, how often will bacteria emerge?
Lex Fridman (32:11.420)
How often will something like humans emerge?
Lex Fridman (32:13.420)
How much variety do you think there would be?
Nick Lane (32:15.320)
I think at the level of bacteria, not much variety.
Lex Fridman (32:19.400)
I think we would get, that's how many times
Nick Lane (32:22.120)
you say you want to run it, a million times.
Lex Fridman (32:24.620)
I would say at least a few hundred thousand will get bacteria again.
Nick Lane (32:28.020)
Oh, wow, nice.
Lex Fridman (32:29.460)
Because I think there's some level of inevitability
Nick Lane (32:31.860)
that a wet rocky planet will give rise
Lex Fridman (32:33.980)
through the same processes to something very close.
Nick Lane (32:38.260)
I think this is not something I'd have thought
Lex Fridman (32:40.460)
a few years ago, but working with a PhD student
Nick Lane (32:43.380)
of mine, Stuart Harrison, he's been thinking
Lex Fridman (32:45.060)
about the genetic code, and we've just been publishing
Nick Lane (32:47.580)
on that, there are patterns that you can discern in the code,
Lex Fridman (32:51.580)
or he has discerned in the code,
Nick Lane (32:53.440)
that if you think about them in terms of,
Lex Fridman (32:56.100)
we start with CO2 and hydrogen,
Lex Fridman (32:57.780)
and these are the first steps of biochemistry,
Lex Fridman (32:59.780)
you come up with a code which is very similar
Nick Lane (33:01.660)
to the code that we see.
Lex Fridman (33:03.660)
So it wouldn't surprise me any longer
Nick Lane (33:05.580)
if we found life on Mars and it had a genetic code
Lex Fridman (33:07.800)
that was not very different to the genetic code
Nick Lane (33:09.780)
that we have here, without it just being transferred across.
Lex Fridman (33:13.340)
There's some inevitability about the whole
Nick Lane (33:16.180)
of the beginnings of life, in my view.
Lex Fridman (33:18.580)
That's really promising, because if the basic chemistry
Nick Lane (33:21.540)
is tightly linked to the genetic code,
Lex Fridman (33:25.940)
that means we can interact with other life
Nick Lane (33:29.540)
if it exists out there.
Lex Fridman (33:30.500)
Well, that's potentially.
Nick Lane (33:32.140)
That's really exciting, if that's the case.
Lex Fridman (33:34.620)
Okay, but then bacteria.
Nick Lane (33:36.060)
We've got bacteria.
Lex Fridman (33:37.800)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (33:39.180)
How easy is photosynthesis?
Lex Fridman (33:42.920)
Much harder, I would say.
Nick Lane (33:44.880)
Let's actually go there.
Lex Fridman (33:46.060)
Let's go through the inventions.
Nick Lane (33:47.620)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (33:49.160)
What is photosynthesis?
Lex Fridman (33:51.240)
And why is it hard?
Lex Fridman (33:52.420)
Well, there are different forms.
Nick Lane (33:55.340)
I mean, basically, you're taking hydrogen
Lex Fridman (33:57.500)
and you're sticking it onto CO2,
Lex Fridman (33:59.000)
and it's powered by the sun.
Lex Fridman (34:00.340)
Question is, where are you taking the hydrogen from?
Lex Fridman (34:02.860)
And in photosynthesis that we know in plants,
Lex Fridman (34:05.340)
it's coming from water.
Lex Fridman (34:06.760)
So you're using the power of the sun to split water,
Lex Fridman (34:08.840)
take out the hydrogen, stick it onto CO2,
Lex Fridman (34:11.480)
and the oxygen is a waste product,
Lex Fridman (34:13.100)
and you just throw it out, throw it away.
Lex Fridman (34:15.660)
So it's the single greatest planetary pollution event
Lex Fridman (34:19.100)
in the whole history of the Earth.
Nick Lane (34:21.340)
The pollutant being oxygen.
Lex Fridman (34:22.460)
Yes, yeah.
Nick Lane (34:24.000)
It also made possible animals.
Lex Fridman (34:26.200)
You can't have large, active animals
Nick Lane (34:28.460)
without an oxygenated atmosphere,
Lex Fridman (34:30.020)
at least not in the sense that we know on Earth.
Lex Fridman (34:33.700)
So that's a really big invention
Lex Fridman (34:35.540)
in the history of Earth. Huge invention, yes.
Lex Fridman (34:37.540)
And it happened once.
Lex Fridman (34:38.460)
There's a few things that happen once on Earth,
Lex Fridman (34:40.380)
and you're always stuck with this problem.
Lex Fridman (34:42.680)
Once it happened, did it become so good so quickly
Lex Fridman (34:44.780)
that it precluded the same thing happening ever again?
Lex Fridman (34:48.300)
Or are there other reasons?
Lex Fridman (34:49.500)
And we really have to look at each one in turn
Lex Fridman (34:51.220)
and think, why did it only happen once?
Nick Lane (34:53.980)
In this case, it's really difficult to split water.
Lex Fridman (34:57.980)
It requires a lot of power,
Lex Fridman (34:59.140)
and that power, you're effectively separating charge
Lex Fridman (35:01.800)
across a membrane, and the way in which you do it,
Nick Lane (35:04.040)
if it doesn't all rush back
Lex Fridman (35:05.340)
and kind of cause an explosion right at the site,
Nick Lane (35:08.260)
requires really careful wiring.
Lex Fridman (35:10.700)
And that wiring, it can't be easy to get it right
Nick Lane (35:14.740)
because the plants that we see around us,
Lex Fridman (35:18.700)
they have chloroplasts.
Nick Lane (35:19.540)
Those chloroplasts were cyanobacteria ones.
Lex Fridman (35:21.340)
Those cyanobacteria are the only group of bacteria
Nick Lane (35:23.620)
that can do that type of photosynthesis.
Lex Fridman (35:25.740)
So there's plenty of opportunity.
Lex Fridman (35:28.220)
So not even many bacteria.
Lex Fridman (35:29.520)
So who invented photosynthesis?
Nick Lane (35:32.180)
The cyanobacteria, or their ancestors.
Lex Fridman (35:34.180)
And there's not many?
Nick Lane (35:36.020)
No other bacteria can do
Lex Fridman (35:37.740)
what's called oxygenic photosynthesis.
Nick Lane (35:39.740)
Lots of other bacteria can split.
Lex Fridman (35:42.100)
I mean, you can take your hydrogen from somewhere else.
Nick Lane (35:44.080)
You can take it from hydrogen sulfide
Lex Fridman (35:45.500)
bubbling out of a hydrothermal vent.
Nick Lane (35:47.220)
Grab your two hydrogens.
Lex Fridman (35:49.460)
The sulfur is the waste now.
Nick Lane (35:52.100)
You can do it from iron.
Lex Fridman (35:53.300)
You can take electrons.
Lex Fridman (35:54.220)
So the early oceans were probably full of iron.
Lex Fridman (35:56.060)
You can take an electron from ferrous iron,
Lex Fridman (35:59.020)
so iron two plus and make it iron three plus,
Lex Fridman (36:01.620)
which now precipitates as rust,
Lex Fridman (36:03.960)
and you take a proton from the acidic early ocean,
Lex Fridman (36:07.620)
stick it there.
Nick Lane (36:08.440)
Now you've got a hydrogen atom.
Lex Fridman (36:09.300)
Stick it onto CO2.
Nick Lane (36:10.720)
You've just done the trick.
Lex Fridman (36:12.380)
The trouble is you bury yourself in rusty iron.
Lex Fridman (36:16.460)
And with sulfur, you can bury yourself in sulfur.
Lex Fridman (36:18.540)
One of the reasons oxygenic photosynthesis
Nick Lane (36:20.700)
is so much better is that the waste product is oxygen,
Lex Fridman (36:23.340)
which just bubbles away.
Nick Lane (36:26.420)
That seems like extremely unlikely,
Lex Fridman (36:29.220)
and it's extremely essential
Nick Lane (36:30.740)
for the evolution of complex organisms
Lex Fridman (36:33.720)
because of all the oxygen.
Nick Lane (36:36.120)
Yeah, and that didn't accumulate quickly either.
Lex Fridman (36:39.420)
So it's converting, what is it?
Nick Lane (36:42.060)
It's converting energy from the sun
Lex Fridman (36:44.820)
and the resource of water
Nick Lane (36:46.960)
into the resource needed for animals.
Lex Fridman (36:50.820)
Both resources needed for animals.
Nick Lane (36:52.400)
We need to eat, and we need to burn the food,
Lex Fridman (36:54.540)
and we're eating plants,
Nick Lane (36:57.780)
which are getting their energy from the sun,
Lex Fridman (36:59.300)
and we're burning it with their waste product,
Nick Lane (37:01.260)
which is the oxygen.
Lex Fridman (37:02.540)
So there's a lot of kind of circularity in that,
Lex Fridman (37:04.620)
but without an oxygenated planet,
Lex Fridman (37:07.880)
you couldn't really have predation.
Nick Lane (37:12.560)
You can have animals,
Lex Fridman (37:14.980)
but you can't really have animals
Nick Lane (37:16.240)
that go around and eat each other.
Lex Fridman (37:17.440)
You can't have ecosystems as we know them.
Nick Lane (37:19.900)
Well, let's actually step back.
Lex Fridman (37:21.120)
What about eukaryotic versus prokaryotic cells, prokaryotes?
Lex Fridman (37:25.620)
What are each of those,
Lex Fridman (37:28.420)
and how big of an invention is that?
Nick Lane (37:31.060)
I personally think that's the single biggest invention
Lex Fridman (37:33.380)
in the whole history of life.
Nick Lane (37:34.820)
Exciting.
Lex Fridman (37:35.900)
So what are they?
Lex Fridman (37:36.900)
Can you explain?
Lex Fridman (37:37.740)
Yeah, so I mentioned bacteria and archaea.
Nick Lane (37:40.780)
These are both prokaryotes.
Lex Fridman (37:43.020)
They're basically small cells that don't have a nucleus.
Nick Lane (37:45.740)
If you look at them under a microscope,
Lex Fridman (37:47.060)
you don't see much going on.
Nick Lane (37:48.140)
If you look at them under a super resolution microscope,
Lex Fridman (37:50.640)
then they're fantastically complex.
Nick Lane (37:53.220)
In terms of their molecular machinery, they're amazing.
Lex Fridman (37:55.460)
In terms of their morphological appearance
Nick Lane (37:58.360)
under a microscope, they're really small and really simple.
Lex Fridman (38:03.060)
The earliest life that we can physically see
Nick Lane (38:04.900)
on the planet are stromatolites,
Lex Fridman (38:06.380)
which are made by things like cyanobacteria,
Lex Fridman (38:08.500)
and they're large superstructures.
Lex Fridman (38:11.020)
Effectively, biofilms plated on top of each other,
Lex Fridman (38:14.420)
and you end up with quite large structures
Lex Fridman (38:17.360)
that you can see in the fossil record.
Lex Fridman (38:19.780)
But they never came up with animals.
Lex Fridman (38:23.100)
They never came up with plants.
Nick Lane (38:24.320)
They came up with multicellular things,
Lex Fridman (38:26.660)
filamentous cyanobacteria, for example.
Nick Lane (38:28.620)
They're just long strings of cells.
Lex Fridman (38:31.420)
But the origin of the eukaryotic cell
Nick Lane (38:34.500)
seems to have been what's called an endosymbiosis,
Lex Fridman (38:37.300)
so one cell gets inside another cell.
Lex Fridman (38:39.620)
And I think that that's transformed
Lex Fridman (38:42.160)
the energetic possibilities of life.
Lex Fridman (38:43.780)
So what we end up with is a kind of supercharged cell,
Lex Fridman (38:48.160)
which can have a much larger nucleus
Nick Lane (38:50.460)
with many more genes, all supported.
Lex Fridman (38:54.180)
If you think about it, you could think about it
Nick Lane (38:55.780)
as multi bacterial power without the overhead.
Lex Fridman (38:58.340)
So you've got a cell and it's got bacteria living in it,
Lex Fridman (39:00.860)
and those bacteria are providing it
Lex Fridman (39:02.260)
with the energy currency it needs.
Lex Fridman (39:04.700)
But each bacterium has a genome of its own,
Lex Fridman (39:07.060)
which costs a fair amount of energy to express,
Nick Lane (39:10.340)
to kind of turn over and convert into proteins and so on.
Lex Fridman (39:15.060)
What the mitochondria did,
Nick Lane (39:16.780)
which are these power packs in our own cells,
Lex Fridman (39:20.500)
they were bacteria once,
Lex Fridman (39:22.340)
and they threw away virtually all their genes.
Lex Fridman (39:24.100)
They've only got a few left.
Lex Fridman (39:25.660)
So mitochondria is, like you said,
Lex Fridman (39:27.720)
is the bacteria that got inside a cell
Lex Fridman (39:30.120)
and then throw away all this stuff it doesn't need to,
Lex Fridman (39:32.300)
survive inside the cell, and then kept what?
Lex Fridman (39:35.260)
So what we end up with,
Lex Fridman (39:36.340)
so it kept always a handful of genes.
Nick Lane (39:38.820)
In our own case, 37 genes.
Lex Fridman (39:41.580)
But there's a few protists, which are single celled things
Nick Lane (39:44.620)
that have got as many as 70 or 80 genes.
Lex Fridman (39:47.220)
So it's not always the same, but it's always a small number.
Lex Fridman (39:51.220)
And you can think of it as a paired down power pack
Lex Fridman (39:54.180)
where the control unit has really been,
Nick Lane (39:56.020)
has been kind of paired down to almost nothing.
Lex Fridman (39:58.800)
So you're putting out the same power,
Nick Lane (3:00:00.580)
When I was about, I guess, 15 or 16,
Lex Fridman (3:00:03.140)
I remember reading a book by Fred Hoyle
Nick Lane (3:00:06.580)
called The Black Cloud, which I was a budding biologist
Lex Fridman (3:00:10.980)
at the time.
Lex Fridman (3:00:11.460)
And this was the first time I'd come across someone really
Lex Fridman (3:00:13.940)
challenging the heart of biology and saying,
Nick Lane (3:00:16.660)
you are far too parochial.
Lex Fridman (3:00:18.740)
You're thinking about life as carbon based.
Nick Lane (3:00:20.940)
Here's a life form which is kind of dust, interstellar dust
Lex Fridman (3:00:26.500)
on a solar system scale.
Lex Fridman (3:00:30.260)
And it's a novel.
Lex Fridman (3:00:32.500)
But I felt enormously challenged by that novel
Nick Lane (3:00:34.380)
because it hadn't occurred to me how limited my thinking was,
Lex Fridman (3:00:39.980)
how narrow minded I was being.
Lex Fridman (3:00:43.380)
And here was a great physicist with a completely different
Lex Fridman (3:00:46.140)
conception of what life could be.
Lex Fridman (3:00:48.140)
And since then, I've seen him attacked in various ways.
Lex Fridman (3:00:51.540)
And I'm kind of reluctant to say the attacks make more sense
Nick Lane (3:00:55.780)
to me than the original story, which
Lex Fridman (3:00:58.820)
is to say, even in terms of information processing,
Nick Lane (3:01:02.940)
if you're on that scale and there's
Lex Fridman (3:01:04.280)
a limit to the speed of light, how quickly can something
Nick Lane (3:01:06.580)
think if you're needing to broadcast
Lex Fridman (3:01:10.900)
across the solar system, it's going to be slow.
Nick Lane (3:01:16.860)
It's not going to hold a conversation with you
Lex Fridman (3:01:19.060)
on the kind of timelines that Fred Hoyle was imagining,
Nick Lane (3:01:22.500)
at least not by any easy way of doing it,
Lex Fridman (3:01:25.420)
assuming that the speed of light is a limit.
Lex Fridman (3:01:28.940)
And then again, you really can't.
Lex Fridman (3:01:32.580)
This is something Richard Dawkins argued long ago.
Lex Fridman (3:01:34.940)
And I do think he's right.
Lex Fridman (3:01:36.300)
There is no other way to generate
Nick Lane (3:01:39.020)
this level of complexity than natural selection.
Lex Fridman (3:01:41.300)
Nothing else can do it.
Nick Lane (3:01:42.620)
You need populations.
Lex Fridman (3:01:44.780)
And you need selection in populations
Lex Fridman (3:01:46.380)
and a kind of an isolated interstellar cloud.
Lex Fridman (3:01:53.140)
Again, there's unlimited time.
Lex Fridman (3:01:55.300)
And maybe there's no problems with distance.
Lex Fridman (3:01:57.180)
But you need to have a certain frequency of generational time
Nick Lane (3:02:03.780)
to generate a serious level of complexity.
Lex Fridman (3:02:07.620)
And I just have a feeling it's never going to work.
Nick Lane (3:02:11.900)
Well, as far as we know, so natural selection and evolution
Lex Fridman (3:02:15.540)
is really a powerful tool here on Earth.
Lex Fridman (3:02:17.460)
But there could be other mechanisms.
Lex Fridman (3:02:19.020)
So I don't know if you're familiar with cellular automata,
Lex Fridman (3:02:24.540)
but complex systems that have really simple components
Lex Fridman (3:02:29.140)
and seemingly move based on simple rules
Nick Lane (3:02:31.500)
when they're taken as a whole, really interesting complexity
Lex Fridman (3:02:34.660)
emerges.
Nick Lane (3:02:36.180)
I don't know what the pressures on that are.
Lex Fridman (3:02:38.980)
It's not really selection, but interesting complexity
Nick Lane (3:02:41.460)
seems to emerge.
Lex Fridman (3:02:42.740)
And that's not well understood exactly why that complexity
Nick Lane (3:02:46.340)
emerges.
Lex Fridman (3:02:46.860)
I think there's a difference between complexity
Lex Fridman (3:02:48.980)
and evolution.
Lex Fridman (3:02:51.060)
So some of the work we're doing on the origin of life
Lex Fridman (3:02:53.300)
is thinking about how do genes arise?
Lex Fridman (3:02:59.180)
How does information arise in biology?
Lex Fridman (3:03:01.740)
And thinking about it from the point of view
Lex Fridman (3:03:03.860)
of reacting CO2 with hydrogen, what do you get?
Nick Lane (3:03:06.300)
Well, what you're going to get is carboxylic acids, then
Lex Fridman (3:03:08.980)
amino acids.
Nick Lane (3:03:09.700)
It's quite hard to make nucleotides.
Lex Fridman (3:03:13.020)
And it's possible to make them, and it's been done,
Lex Fridman (3:03:15.820)
and it's been done following this pathway as well.
Lex Fridman (3:03:18.300)
But you make trace amounts.
Lex Fridman (3:03:20.140)
And so the next question, assuming
Lex Fridman (3:03:21.780)
that this is the right way of seeing the question, which
Nick Lane (3:03:24.220)
maybe it's just not, but let's assume it is,
Lex Fridman (3:03:26.580)
is, well, how do you reliably make more nucleotides?
Lex Fridman (3:03:29.460)
And how do you become more complex and better at becoming
Lex Fridman (3:03:32.860)
a nucleotide generating machine?
Lex Fridman (3:03:35.140)
And the answer is, well, you need positive feedback loops,
Lex Fridman (3:03:38.420)
some form of autocatalysis.
Lex Fridman (3:03:40.260)
So that can work, and we know it happens in biology.
Lex Fridman (3:03:43.060)
If this nucleotide, for example, catalyzes CO2 fixation,
Nick Lane (3:03:48.260)
then you're going to increase the rate of flux
Lex Fridman (3:03:50.220)
through the whole system, and you're
Nick Lane (3:03:51.620)
going to effectively steepen the driving force
Lex Fridman (3:03:53.540)
to make more nucleotides.
Lex Fridman (3:03:56.660)
And this can be inherited because there
Lex Fridman (3:03:59.940)
are forms of membrane heredity that you can have.
Lex Fridman (3:04:02.780)
And effectively, if a cell divides in two
Lex Fridman (3:04:06.500)
and it's got a lot of stuff inside it,
Lex Fridman (3:04:08.340)
and that stuff is basically bound
Lex Fridman (3:04:10.180)
as a network which is capable of regenerating itself,
Nick Lane (3:04:14.300)
then it will inevitably regenerate itself.
Lex Fridman (3:04:17.340)
And so you can develop greater complexity.
Lex Fridman (3:04:21.180)
But everything that I've said depends on the underlying rules
Lex Fridman (3:04:24.620)
of thermodynamics.
Nick Lane (3:04:25.660)
There is no evolvability about that.
Lex Fridman (3:04:27.860)
It's simply an inevitable outcome of your starting point,
Nick Lane (3:04:33.020)
assuming that you're able to increase the driving
Lex Fridman (3:04:35.820)
force through the system.
Nick Lane (3:04:37.220)
You will generate more of the same.
Lex Fridman (3:04:38.780)
You'll expand on what you can do,
Lex Fridman (3:04:40.180)
but you'll never get anything different than that.
Lex Fridman (3:04:42.860)
And it's only when you introduce information into that
Nick Lane (3:04:45.940)
as a gene, as a kind of small stretch of RNA, which
Lex Fridman (3:04:52.100)
can be random stretch, then you get real evolvability.
Nick Lane (3:04:55.340)
Then you get biology as we know it.
Lex Fridman (3:04:57.500)
But you also have selection as we know it.
Nick Lane (3:05:00.500)
Yeah, I mean, I don't know how to think about information.
Lex Fridman (3:05:06.100)
That's a kind of memory of the system.
Lex Fridman (3:05:08.100)
So it's not, yeah, at the local level,
Lex Fridman (3:05:10.620)
it's propagation of copying yourself and changing
Lex Fridman (3:05:13.420)
and improving your adaptability to the environment.
Lex Fridman (3:05:17.660)
But if you look at Earth as a whole, it has a kind of memory.
Nick Lane (3:05:23.140)
That's the key feature of it.
Lex Fridman (3:05:25.140)
In what way?
Nick Lane (3:05:27.620)
It remembers the stuff it tries.
Lex Fridman (3:05:30.620)
Like, if you were to describe Earth,
Nick Lane (3:05:33.900)
I think evolution is something that we experience
Lex Fridman (3:05:39.500)
as individual organisms.
Nick Lane (3:05:41.700)
That's how the individual organisms
Lex Fridman (3:05:44.020)
interact with each other.
Nick Lane (3:05:45.260)
There's a natural selection.
Lex Fridman (3:05:47.740)
But when you look at Earth as an organism in its entirety,
Lex Fridman (3:05:54.020)
how would you describe it?
Lex Fridman (3:05:55.740)
I mean.
Nick Lane (3:05:56.260)
Well, not as an organism.
Lex Fridman (3:05:57.980)
I mean, the idea of Gaia is lovely.
Lex Fridman (3:06:00.860)
And James Lovelock originally put Gaia out
Lex Fridman (3:06:04.060)
as an organism that had somehow evolved.
Lex Fridman (3:06:07.580)
And he was immediately attacked by lots of people.
Lex Fridman (3:06:10.300)
And he's not wrong, but he backpedaled somewhat
Nick Lane (3:06:14.220)
because that was more of a poetic vision than the science.
Lex Fridman (3:06:20.260)
The science is now called Earth systems science.
Lex Fridman (3:06:23.180)
And it's really about how does the world regulate itself
Lex Fridman (3:06:26.740)
so it remains within the limits which are hospitable to life.
Lex Fridman (3:06:29.300)
And it does it amazingly well.
Lex Fridman (3:06:30.540)
And it is working at a planetary level of integration,
Nick Lane (3:06:37.020)
of regulation.
Lex Fridman (3:06:38.900)
But it's not evolving by natural selection.
Lex Fridman (3:06:41.260)
And it can't because there's only one of it.
Lex Fridman (3:06:43.980)
And so it can change over time.
Lex Fridman (3:06:45.620)
But it's not evolving.
Lex Fridman (3:06:46.940)
All the evolution is happening in the parts of the system.
Nick Lane (3:06:50.620)
Yeah, but it's a self sustaining organism.
Lex Fridman (3:06:53.020)
No, it's sustained by the sun.
Nick Lane (3:06:56.140)
Right, so you don't think it's possible to see Earth
Lex Fridman (3:07:00.940)
as its own organism?
Nick Lane (3:07:03.340)
I think it's poetic and beautiful.
Lex Fridman (3:07:04.860)
And I often refer to the Earth as a living planet.
Lex Fridman (3:07:08.540)
But it's not, in biological terms, an organism, no.
Lex Fridman (3:07:14.860)
If aliens were to visit Earth, what would they notice?
Lex Fridman (3:07:20.580)
What would be the basic unit of light they would notice?
Lex Fridman (3:07:24.060)
Trees, probably.
Nick Lane (3:07:25.020)
I mean, it's green.
Lex Fridman (3:07:26.300)
It's green and blue.
Nick Lane (3:07:27.300)
I think that's the first thing you'd notice.
Lex Fridman (3:07:29.140)
It stands out from space as being different to any
Nick Lane (3:07:32.060)
of the other planets.
Lex Fridman (3:07:33.020)
So it would notice the trees at first because the green.
Nick Lane (3:07:36.260)
Well, I would.
Lex Fridman (3:07:36.940)
I notice the green, yes.
Lex Fridman (3:07:39.020)
And then probably notice, figure out the photosynthesis.
Lex Fridman (3:07:42.820)
Probably notice cities a second, I suspect, maybe first.
Nick Lane (3:07:47.460)
If they arrived at night, they'd notice cities first,
Lex Fridman (3:07:49.300)
that's for sure.
Nick Lane (3:07:50.140)
It depends.
Lex Fridman (3:07:50.940)
Depends the time.
Nick Lane (3:07:52.100)
You write quite beautifully in Transformers.
Lex Fridman (3:07:55.460)
Once again, I think you opened the book in this way.
Nick Lane (3:07:57.700)
I don't remember.
Lex Fridman (3:07:59.060)
From space, describing Earth, it's such an interesting idea
Nick Lane (3:08:04.020)
of what Earth is, you also, I mean, Hitchhiker's Guide,
Lex Fridman (3:08:10.540)
summarizing it as harmless, or mostly harmless.
Nick Lane (3:08:13.300)
It's a beautifully poetic thing.
Lex Fridman (3:08:15.580)
You open Transformers with, from space,
Nick Lane (3:08:19.060)
it looks gray and crystalline, obliterating
Lex Fridman (3:08:22.260)
the blue green colors of the living Earth.
Nick Lane (3:08:24.860)
It is crisscrossed by irregular patterns
Lex Fridman (3:08:27.220)
and convergent striations.
Nick Lane (3:08:30.740)
There's a central amorphous density
Lex Fridman (3:08:33.220)
where these scratches seem lighter.
Nick Lane (3:08:35.460)
This, quote, growth does not look alive,
Lex Fridman (3:08:38.340)
although it has extended out along some lines,
Lex Fridman (3:08:41.260)
and there is something grasping and parasitic about it.
Lex Fridman (3:08:44.980)
Across the globe, there are thousands of them,
Nick Lane (3:08:47.460)
varying in shape and detail, but all of them gray, angular,
Lex Fridman (3:08:51.780)
and organic, spreading.
Nick Lane (3:08:54.660)
Yet at night, they light up, glowing up the dark sky,
Lex Fridman (3:08:59.340)
suddenly beautiful.
Nick Lane (3:09:00.820)
Perhaps these cankers on the landscape
Lex Fridman (3:09:03.340)
are in some sense living.
Nick Lane (3:09:05.060)
There's a controlled flow of energy.
Lex Fridman (3:09:07.260)
There must be information and some form of metabolism,
Nick Lane (3:09:10.460)
some turnover of materials.
Lex Fridman (3:09:12.700)
Are they alive?
Nick Lane (3:09:14.060)
No, of course not.
Lex Fridman (3:09:16.020)
They are cities.
Lex Fridman (3:09:18.220)
So is there some sense that cities are living beings?
Lex Fridman (3:09:22.100)
You think aliens would think of them as living beings?
Lex Fridman (3:09:24.980)
Well, it'd be easy to see it that way, wouldn't it?
Lex Fridman (3:09:27.580)
It wakes up at night, they wake up at night.
Nick Lane (3:09:30.580)
Strictly nocturnal, yes.
Lex Fridman (3:09:33.940)
I imagine that any aliens that are smart enough
Nick Lane (3:09:36.180)
to get here would understand
Lex Fridman (3:09:37.620)
that they're not living beings.
Nick Lane (3:09:40.700)
My reason for saying that is that we tend to think
Lex Fridman (3:09:47.460)
of biology in terms of information and forget about cells.
Nick Lane (3:09:52.460)
I was trying to draw a comparison between the cell
Lex Fridman (3:09:54.820)
as a city and the energy flow through the city
Lex Fridman (3:09:57.940)
and the energy flow through cells
Lex Fridman (3:09:59.700)
and the turnover of materials.
Lex Fridman (3:10:01.580)
And an interesting thing about cities
Lex Fridman (3:10:04.060)
is that they're not really exactly governed by anybody.
Nick Lane (3:10:09.860)
There are regulations and systems and whatever else,
Lex Fridman (3:10:12.980)
but it's pretty loose.
Nick Lane (3:10:16.700)
They have their own life,
Lex Fridman (3:10:18.420)
their own way of developing over time.
Lex Fridman (3:10:20.420)
And in that sense, they're quite biological.
Lex Fridman (3:10:23.020)
There was a plan after the great fire of London.
Nick Lane (3:10:27.020)
Christopher Wren was making plans
Lex Fridman (3:10:29.580)
not only for St. Paul's Cathedral,
Lex Fridman (3:10:31.780)
but also to rebuild in large Parisian type boulevards,
Lex Fridman (3:10:35.780)
a large part of the area of central London that was burned.
Lex Fridman (3:10:40.780)
And it never happened
Lex Fridman (3:10:42.500)
because they didn't have enough money, I think.
Lex Fridman (3:10:44.460)
But it's interesting what was in the plan.
Lex Fridman (3:10:45.940)
There were all these boulevards
Nick Lane (3:10:47.020)
that were built in the middle of the city.
Lex Fridman (3:10:48.980)
It's interesting what was in the plan.
Nick Lane (3:10:50.540)
There were all these boulevards,
Lex Fridman (3:10:51.900)
but there were no pubs and no coffee houses
Nick Lane (3:10:55.460)
or anything like that.
Lex Fridman (3:10:56.900)
And the reality was London just kind of grew up
Nick Lane (3:11:00.420)
in a set of jumbled streets.
Lex Fridman (3:11:03.220)
And it was the coffee houses and the pubs
Nick Lane (3:11:04.660)
where all the business of the city of London was being done.
Lex Fridman (3:11:07.060)
And that was where the real life of the city was.
Lex Fridman (3:11:09.180)
And no one had planned it.
Lex Fridman (3:11:10.060)
The whole thing was unplanned and works much better that way.
Lex Fridman (3:11:13.780)
And in that sense, the cell is completely unplanned,
Lex Fridman (3:11:15.900)
is not controlled by the genes in the nucleus
Nick Lane (3:11:17.980)
in the way that we might like to think that it is,
Lex Fridman (3:11:19.660)
but it's kind of evolved entity
Nick Lane (3:11:22.300)
that has the same kind of flux,
Lex Fridman (3:11:24.180)
the same animation, the same life.
Lex Fridman (3:11:25.820)
So I think it's a beautiful analogy,
Lex Fridman (3:11:28.540)
but I wouldn't get too stuck with it as a metaphor.
Nick Lane (3:11:32.420)
See, I disagree with you.
Lex Fridman (3:11:33.500)
I disagree with you.
Nick Lane (3:11:34.980)
I think you are so steeped,
Lex Fridman (3:11:39.140)
and actually the entirety of science,
Nick Lane (3:11:43.500)
the history of science is steeped
Lex Fridman (3:11:45.540)
in a biological framework of thinking about what is life.
Lex Fridman (3:11:50.140)
And not just biological, it's very human centric too.
Lex Fridman (3:11:54.140)
That human, the human organism is the epitome of life
Nick Lane (3:11:59.940)
on earth.
Lex Fridman (3:12:00.860)
I don't know.
Nick Lane (3:12:01.740)
I think there is some deep fundamental way
Lex Fridman (3:12:04.060)
in which a city is a living being
Nick Lane (3:12:07.180)
in the same way that a human individual can.
Lex Fridman (3:12:09.100)
But it doesn't give rise to an offspring city.
Lex Fridman (3:12:13.100)
So it doesn't work by natural selection.
Lex Fridman (3:12:15.860)
It works by, if anything, memes.
Nick Lane (3:12:17.860)
It works by copying itself conceptually
Lex Fridman (3:12:21.980)
as a mode of being.
Lex Fridman (3:12:24.580)
So maybe memes, maybe ideas are the organisms
Lex Fridman (3:12:29.700)
that are really essential to life on earth.
Nick Lane (3:12:32.300)
Maybe it's much more important
Lex Fridman (3:12:34.140)
about the collective aspect of human nature,
Nick Lane (3:12:37.020)
the collective intelligence
Lex Fridman (3:12:38.060)
than the individual intelligence.
Nick Lane (3:12:40.060)
Maybe the collective humanity is the organism.
Lex Fridman (3:12:43.780)
And the thing that defines the collective intelligence
Nick Lane (3:12:48.140)
of humanity is the ideas.
Lex Fridman (3:12:50.740)
And maybe the way that manifests itself is cities,
Nick Lane (3:12:54.300)
maybe, or societies or geographically concentrated societies
Lex Fridman (3:12:57.900)
or nations and all that kind of stuff.
Nick Lane (3:12:59.900)
I mean, from an alien perspective,
Lex Fridman (3:13:02.100)
it's possible that that is the more deeply noticeable thing,
Nick Lane (3:13:06.460)
not from a place of ignorance.
Lex Fridman (3:13:08.780)
What's noticeable doesn't tell you how it works.
Nick Lane (3:13:12.340)
I think, I mean, I don't have any problem
Lex Fridman (3:13:14.140)
with what you're saying really,
Nick Lane (3:13:15.140)
except that it's not possible without the humans.
Lex Fridman (3:13:20.700)
You know, we went from a hunter gatherers type economy,
Nick Lane (3:13:25.300)
if you like, without cities to cities.
Lex Fridman (3:13:28.260)
And as soon as we get into human evolution
Lex Fridman (3:13:30.300)
and culture and society and so on,
Lex Fridman (3:13:32.420)
then yes, there are other forms of evolution,
Nick Lane (3:13:36.460)
other forms of change.
Lex Fridman (3:13:38.660)
But cities don't directly propagate themselves,
Nick Lane (3:13:41.700)
they propagate themselves through human societies
Lex Fridman (3:13:43.940)
and human societies only exist because humans
Nick Lane (3:13:46.020)
as individuals propagate themselves.
Lex Fridman (3:13:48.340)
So there's a kind of, there is a hierarchy there
Lex Fridman (3:13:51.420)
and without the humans in the first place,
Lex Fridman (3:13:52.860)
none of the rest of it exists.
Lex Fridman (3:13:54.420)
So do you, life is primarily defined by the basic unit
Lex Fridman (3:13:59.260)
on which evolution can operate?
Nick Lane (3:14:01.660)
I think it's a really important thing, yes.
Lex Fridman (3:14:04.220)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (3:14:05.060)
And we don't know, we don't have any other better ideas
Lex Fridman (3:14:08.660)
than evolution for how to create life.
Nick Lane (3:14:10.660)
I never came across a better idea than evolution.
Lex Fridman (3:14:13.100)
I mean, maybe I'm just ignorant and I don't know.
Lex Fridman (3:14:15.740)
And there's, you know, you mentioned that's no automator
Lex Fridman (3:14:19.180)
and so on, and I don't think specifically about that,
Lex Fridman (3:14:22.540)
but I have thought about it in terms of selective units
Lex Fridman (3:14:24.900)
of the origin of life and the difference
Nick Lane (3:14:26.980)
between evolvability and complexity
Lex Fridman (3:14:29.500)
or just increasing complexity,
Lex Fridman (3:14:31.420)
but within very narrow, narrowly defined limits.
Lex Fridman (3:14:35.580)
The great thing about genes and about selection
Nick Lane (3:14:39.460)
is it just knocks down all those limits.
Lex Fridman (3:14:41.420)
It gives you a world of information in the end
Nick Lane (3:14:43.540)
which is limited only by the biophysical reality
Lex Fridman (3:14:47.780)
of what kind of an organism you are,
Lex Fridman (3:14:49.940)
what kind of a planet you live on and so on.
Lex Fridman (3:14:52.300)
And cities and all these other forms that look alive
Lex Fridman (3:14:55.740)
and could be described as alive
Lex Fridman (3:14:58.060)
because they can't propagate themselves
Nick Lane (3:14:59.860)
can only exist as the product of something
Lex Fridman (3:15:02.700)
that did propagate itself.
Nick Lane (3:15:05.060)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (3:15:07.180)
I mean, there's a deeply compelling truth
Nick Lane (3:15:09.300)
to that kind of way of looking at things,
Lex Fridman (3:15:11.700)
but I just hope that we don't miss the giant cloud
Nick Lane (3:15:17.820)
among us.
Lex Fridman (3:15:18.780)
I kind of hope that I'm wrong about a lot of this
Nick Lane (3:15:21.380)
because I can't say that my worldview
Lex Fridman (3:15:24.100)
is particularly uplifting, but in some sense,
Nick Lane (3:15:28.140)
it doesn't matter if it's uplifting or not.
Lex Fridman (3:15:29.900)
Science is about what's reality, what's out there,
Lex Fridman (3:15:33.380)
why is it this way?
Lex Fridman (3:15:35.220)
And I think there's beauty in that too.
Nick Lane (3:15:39.100)
There's beauty in darkness.
Lex Fridman (3:15:41.260)
You write about life and death
Nick Lane (3:15:43.820)
sort of at the biological level.
Lex Fridman (3:15:46.660)
Does the question of suicide, why live,
Nick Lane (3:15:49.780)
does the question of why the human mind
Lex Fridman (3:15:52.220)
is capable of depression, are you able to introspect
Lex Fridman (3:15:56.180)
that from a place of biology?
Lex Fridman (3:16:00.340)
Why our minds, why we humans can go to such dark places?
Lex Fridman (3:16:05.700)
Why can we commit suicide?
Lex Fridman (3:16:08.020)
Why can we go suffer, suffer period,
Lex Fridman (3:16:15.660)
but also suffer from a feeling of meaninglessness
Lex Fridman (3:16:19.340)
of going to a dark place that depression can take you?
Lex Fridman (3:16:23.100)
Is this a feature of life or is it a bug?
Lex Fridman (3:16:30.420)
I don't know.
Nick Lane (3:16:31.260)
I mean, if it's a feature of life,
Lex Fridman (3:16:32.460)
then I suppose it would have to be true
Nick Lane (3:16:33.940)
of other organisms as well.
Lex Fridman (3:16:35.540)
And I don't know, we were talking about dogs earlier on
Lex Fridman (3:16:39.220)
and they can certainly be very sad and upset
Lex Fridman (3:16:43.540)
and may mooch for days after their owner died
Nick Lane (3:16:46.420)
or something like that.
Lex Fridman (3:16:47.620)
So I suspect in some sense it's a feature of biology.
Nick Lane (3:16:50.260)
It's probably a feature of mortality.
Lex Fridman (3:16:54.380)
It's probably a, but beyond all of that,
Nick Lane (3:16:59.900)
I mean, I guess there's two ways you could come at it.
Lex Fridman (3:17:01.740)
There's one of them would be to say,
Nick Lane (3:17:03.340)
well, you can effectively do the math
Lex Fridman (3:17:07.540)
and come to the conclusion that it's all pointless
Lex Fridman (3:17:10.260)
and that there's really no point
Lex Fridman (3:17:11.700)
in me being here any longer.
Lex Fridman (3:17:14.580)
And maybe that's true in the greater scheme of things.
Lex Fridman (3:17:17.700)
You can justify yourself in terms of society,
Lex Fridman (3:17:20.140)
but society will be gone soon enough as well.
Lex Fridman (3:17:22.100)
And you end up with a very bleak place just by logic.
Nick Lane (3:17:26.060)
In some sense, it's surprising
Lex Fridman (3:17:27.540)
that we can find any meaning at all.
Nick Lane (3:17:30.300)
Well, maybe this is where consciousness comes in
Lex Fridman (3:17:32.140)
that we have transient joy, but with transient joy,
Nick Lane (3:17:35.140)
we have transient misery as well.
Lex Fridman (3:17:37.020)
And sometimes with everything in biology,
Nick Lane (3:17:41.740)
getting the regulation right is practically impossible.
Lex Fridman (3:17:45.260)
You will always have a bell shaped curve
Nick Lane (3:17:47.300)
where some people unfortunately are at the joy end
Lex Fridman (3:17:50.340)
and some people are at the misery end.
Lex Fridman (3:17:52.100)
And that's the way brains are wired.
Lex Fridman (3:17:55.060)
And I doubt there's ever an escape from that.
Nick Lane (3:17:58.700)
It's the same with sex and everything else as well.
Lex Fridman (3:18:00.740)
We're dealing with, you can't regulate it.
Lex Fridman (3:18:04.220)
So anything goes, it's all part of biology.
Lex Fridman (3:18:12.220)
Amen to that.
Nick Lane (3:18:13.860)
Let me, on writing in your book, Power, Sex and Suicide.
Lex Fridman (3:18:21.140)
First of all, can I just read off the books you've written?
Nick Lane (3:18:24.060)
If there's any better titles and topics to be covered,
Lex Fridman (3:18:27.740)
I don't know what they are.
Nick Lane (3:18:28.900)
It makes me look forward
Lex Fridman (3:18:29.740)
to whatever you're going to write next.
Nick Lane (3:18:31.500)
I hope there's things you write next.
Lex Fridman (3:18:34.140)
So first you wrote oxygen, the molecule that made the world
Nick Lane (3:18:37.140)
as we've talked about this idea
Lex Fridman (3:18:39.220)
of the role of oxygen in life on earth.
Nick Lane (3:18:41.620)
Then wait for it, power, sex, suicide, mitochondria
Lex Fridman (3:18:46.380)
and the meaning of life.
Nick Lane (3:18:48.220)
Then life ascending, the 10 great inventions of evolution.
Lex Fridman (3:18:52.420)
The vital question, the first book I've read of yours,
Lex Fridman (3:18:54.860)
the vital question, why is life the way it is?
Lex Fridman (3:18:58.040)
And the new book, Transformer,
Nick Lane (3:19:00.240)
the deep chemistry of life and death.
Lex Fridman (3:19:03.480)
In Power, Sex and Suicide, you write about writing
Nick Lane (3:19:08.680)
or about a lot of things,
Lex Fridman (3:19:09.920)
but I have a question about writing.
Nick Lane (3:19:13.480)
You write, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
Lex Fridman (3:19:16.640)
Ford Perfect spends 15 years researching his revision
Nick Lane (3:19:20.720)
to the guide's entry on the earth,
Lex Fridman (3:19:23.180)
which originally read harmless.
Nick Lane (3:19:26.700)
By the way, I would also as a side quest,
Lex Fridman (3:19:29.080)
as a side question would like to ask you
Lex Fridman (3:19:30.760)
what would be your summary of what earth is.
Lex Fridman (3:19:34.720)
You write, his long essay on the subject is edited down
Nick Lane (3:19:37.900)
by the guide to read mostly harmless.
Lex Fridman (3:19:41.560)
I suspect that too many new editions suffer similar fate,
Nick Lane (3:19:46.060)
if not through absurd editing decisions,
Lex Fridman (3:19:48.440)
at least through a lack of meaningful change in content.
Nick Lane (3:19:51.600)
As it happens, nearly 15 years have passed
Lex Fridman (3:19:54.360)
since the first edition of Power, Sex, Suicide was published
Lex Fridman (3:19:57.920)
and I am resisting the temptation to make any lame revisions.
Lex Fridman (3:20:02.400)
Some say that even Darwin lessened the power
Nick Lane (3:20:05.600)
of his arguments in The Origin of Species
Lex Fridman (3:20:08.520)
through his multiple revisions,
Nick Lane (3:20:10.320)
in which he dealt with criticisms
Lex Fridman (3:20:12.520)
and sometimes shifted his views in the wrong direction.
Nick Lane (3:20:16.040)
I prefer my original to speak for itself,
Lex Fridman (3:20:19.320)
even if it turns out to be wrong.
Nick Lane (3:20:23.160)
Let me ask the question about writing,
Lex Fridman (3:20:25.800)
both your students in the academic setting,
Lex Fridman (3:20:28.160)
but also writing some of the most brilliant writings
Lex Fridman (3:20:30.920)
on science and humanity I've ever read.
Lex Fridman (3:20:33.400)
What's the process of writing?
Lex Fridman (3:20:36.280)
How do you advise other humans?
Nick Lane (3:20:43.140)
If you were to talk to young Darwin or the young you
Lex Fridman (3:20:47.760)
and just young anybody and give advice about how to write
Lex Fridman (3:20:51.400)
and how to write well about these big topics,
Lex Fridman (3:20:54.400)
what would you say?
Nick Lane (3:20:56.720)
I mean, I suppose there's a couple of points.
Lex Fridman (3:20:59.300)
One of them is what's the story?
Lex Fridman (3:21:03.560)
What do I want to know?
Lex Fridman (3:21:04.760)
What do I want to convey?
Lex Fridman (3:21:06.560)
Why does it matter to anybody?
Lex Fridman (3:21:08.760)
And very often the biggest, most interesting questions,
Nick Lane (3:21:15.160)
the childlike questions are the one actually
Lex Fridman (3:21:19.640)
that everybody wants to ask, but dents quite,
Nick Lane (3:21:22.000)
do it in case they look stupid.
Lex Fridman (3:21:24.640)
And one of the nice things about being in science
Nick Lane (3:21:26.960)
is the longer you're in,
Lex Fridman (3:21:28.480)
the more you realize that everybody doesn't know
Nick Lane (3:21:30.240)
the answer to these questions
Lex Fridman (3:21:31.320)
and it's not so stupid to ask them after all.
Lex Fridman (3:21:36.200)
So trying to ask the questions
Lex Fridman (3:21:39.680)
that I would have been asking myself at the age of 15, 16,
Nick Lane (3:21:44.520)
when I was really hungry to know about the world
Lex Fridman (3:21:47.240)
and didn't know very much about it
Lex Fridman (3:21:48.760)
and wanted to go to the edge of what we know,
Lex Fridman (3:21:53.760)
but be helped to get there.
Nick Lane (3:21:58.240)
I don't want to be too much terminology.
Lex Fridman (3:22:01.440)
And so I want someone to keep a clean eye
Nick Lane (3:22:03.940)
on what the question is.
Lex Fridman (3:22:07.000)
Beyond that, I've wondered a lot about who am I writing for?
Lex Fridman (3:22:13.200)
And that was in the end, the only answer I had
Lex Fridman (3:22:16.300)
was myself at the age of 15 or 16,
Nick Lane (3:22:19.160)
because even if you just don't know who's reading,
Lex Fridman (3:22:25.200)
but also where are they reading it?
Nick Lane (3:22:27.280)
Are they reading it in the bath or in bed
Lex Fridman (3:22:29.680)
or on the Metro or listening to an audio book?
Lex Fridman (3:22:34.240)
Do you want to have a recapitulation every few pages
Lex Fridman (3:22:39.160)
because you read three pages at a time
Lex Fridman (3:22:41.080)
or are you really irritated by that?
Lex Fridman (3:22:44.120)
You're going to get criticism from people
Nick Lane (3:22:46.880)
who are irritated by what you're doing.
Lex Fridman (3:22:48.800)
And you don't know who they are or what you're going to do
Nick Lane (3:22:50.600)
that's going to irritate people.
Lex Fridman (3:22:51.760)
And in the end, all you can do is just try
Lex Fridman (3:22:53.800)
and please yourself.
Lex Fridman (3:22:57.800)
And that means, well, what are these big fun,
Lex Fridman (3:23:00.520)
fascinating and big questions?
Lex Fridman (3:23:03.040)
And what do we know about it?
Lex Fridman (3:23:04.960)
And can I convey that?
Lex Fridman (3:23:07.160)
And I kind of learned in trying to write,
Nick Lane (3:23:10.520)
first of all, say what we know.
Lex Fridman (3:23:14.360)
And I was shocked in the first couple of books
Lex Fridman (3:23:16.600)
how often I came up quickly against
Lex Fridman (3:23:19.600)
all the stuff we don't know.
Lex Fridman (3:23:21.600)
And if you're trying to, I've realized later on
Lex Fridman (3:23:25.040)
in supervising various physicists and mathematicians
Nick Lane (3:23:29.720)
who are PhD students, their maths is way beyond
Lex Fridman (3:23:32.960)
what I can do.
Lex Fridman (3:23:34.480)
But the process of trying to work out
Lex Fridman (3:23:36.680)
what are we actually going to model here?
Lex Fridman (3:23:37.960)
What's going into this equation?
Lex Fridman (3:23:39.240)
It's a very similar one to writing.
Lex Fridman (3:23:40.480)
What am I going to put on a page?
Lex Fridman (3:23:42.120)
What's the simplest possible way
Lex Fridman (3:23:43.680)
I can encapsulate this idea?
Lex Fridman (3:23:45.640)
So that I now have it as a unit
Nick Lane (3:23:47.160)
that I can kind of see how it interacts
Lex Fridman (3:23:48.920)
with the other units.
Lex Fridman (3:23:50.560)
And you realize that, well, if this is like that
Lex Fridman (3:23:53.040)
and this is like this, then that can't be true.
Lex Fridman (3:23:58.080)
So you end up navigating your own path
Lex Fridman (3:24:00.560)
through this landscape.
Lex Fridman (3:24:02.040)
And that can be thrilling
Lex Fridman (3:24:02.960)
because you don't know where it's going.
Lex Fridman (3:24:05.160)
And I'd like to think that that's one of the reasons
Lex Fridman (3:24:07.480)
my books have worked for people
Nick Lane (3:24:09.120)
because this sense of the thrilling adventure ride
Lex Fridman (3:24:12.000)
that I don't know where it's going either.
Lex Fridman (3:24:14.200)
So finding the simplest possible way
Lex Fridman (3:24:16.600)
to explain the things we know
Lex Fridman (3:24:18.440)
and the simplest possible way to explain
Lex Fridman (3:24:20.080)
the things we don't know
Lex Fridman (3:24:20.960)
and the tension between those two.
Lex Fridman (3:24:22.680)
And that's where the story emerges.
Lex Fridman (3:24:25.120)
What about the edit?
Lex Fridman (3:24:27.240)
Do you find yourself to the point of this,
Lex Fridman (3:24:32.960)
you know, editing down to mostly harmless?
Lex Fridman (3:24:36.400)
To arrive at simplicity, do you find the edit is productive
Lex Fridman (3:24:40.720)
or does it destroy the magic that was originally there?
Lex Fridman (3:24:44.120)
No, I usually find, I think I'm perhaps a better editor
Nick Lane (3:24:47.920)
than I am a writer.
Lex Fridman (3:24:48.880)
I write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite.
Nick Lane (3:24:51.240)
Put a bunch of crap on the page first
Lex Fridman (3:24:52.920)
and then see the edit where it takes you.
Nick Lane (3:24:55.280)
Yeah, but then there's the professional editors
Lex Fridman (3:24:58.200)
who come along as well.
Lex Fridman (3:24:59.200)
And I mean, in Transformer, the editor came back to me
Lex Fridman (3:25:05.080)
after I'd sent him, two months after I sent
Nick Lane (3:25:07.120)
the first edition, he'd read the whole thing
Lex Fridman (3:25:08.600)
and he said, the first two chapters prevent
Nick Lane (3:25:11.560)
a formidable hurdle to the general reader.
Lex Fridman (3:25:14.200)
Go and do something about it.
Lex Fridman (3:25:16.360)
And that was the last thing I really wanted to do.
Lex Fridman (3:25:18.640)
Your editor sounds very eloquent in speech.
Nick Lane (3:25:21.440)
Yeah, well, this was an email,
Lex Fridman (3:25:23.000)
but I thought about it, you know,
Nick Lane (3:25:26.600)
the bottom line is he was right.
Lex Fridman (3:25:28.800)
And so I put the whole thing aside for about two months,
Nick Lane (3:25:33.240)
spent the summer, this would have been,
Lex Fridman (3:25:35.080)
I guess last summer, and then turned to it
Nick Lane (3:25:38.160)
with full attention in about September or something
Lex Fridman (3:25:40.880)
and rewrote those chapters almost from scratch.
Nick Lane (3:25:42.920)
I kept some of the material,
Lex Fridman (3:25:44.040)
but it took me a long time to process it,
Nick Lane (3:25:47.240)
to work out what needs to change, where does it need to,
Lex Fridman (3:25:49.800)
I wasn't writing in this time.
Lex Fridman (3:25:51.200)
How am I going to tell this story better
Lex Fridman (3:25:53.360)
so it's more accessible and interesting?
Lex Fridman (3:25:54.840)
And in the end, I think it worked.
Lex Fridman (3:25:56.880)
It's still difficult.
Nick Lane (3:25:58.440)
It's still biochemistry, but it has,
Lex Fridman (3:26:00.760)
he ended up saying, now he's got a barreling energy to it.
Lex Fridman (3:26:03.360)
And I was, you know, because he'd been,
Lex Fridman (3:26:05.720)
because he'd told me the truth the first time,
Nick Lane (3:26:07.120)
I decided to believe that he was telling me the truth
Lex Fridman (3:26:08.920)
the second time as well and was delighted.
Nick Lane (3:26:13.480)
Could you give advice to young people in general,
Lex Fridman (3:26:18.680)
folks in high school, folks in college,
Lex Fridman (3:26:20.400)
how to take on some of the big questions you've taken on?
Lex Fridman (3:26:23.080)
Now you've done that in the space of biology
Lex Fridman (3:26:24.760)
and expanded out.
Lex Fridman (3:26:26.680)
How can they have a career they can be proud of
Lex Fridman (3:26:32.480)
or have a life they can be proud of?
Lex Fridman (3:26:35.160)
Gosh, that's a big question.
Nick Lane (3:26:40.520)
I'm sure you've gathered some wisdom
Lex Fridman (3:26:42.680)
that you can impart.
Nick Lane (3:26:44.440)
Yeah, so the only advice that I actually ever give
Lex Fridman (3:26:48.920)
to my students is follow what you're interested in
Nick Lane (3:26:55.360)
because they're often worried
Lex Fridman (3:26:58.080)
that if they make this decision now
Lex Fridman (3:26:59.840)
and do this course instead of that course,
Lex Fridman (3:27:01.920)
then they're going to restrict their career opportunities
Lex Fridman (3:27:04.080)
and there isn't a career path in science.
Lex Fridman (3:27:08.720)
It's not, I mean, there is, but there isn't.
Nick Lane (3:27:12.840)
There's a lot of competition,
Lex Fridman (3:27:14.080)
there's a lot of death symbolically.
Lex Fridman (3:27:17.480)
So who survives?
Lex Fridman (3:27:19.200)
The people who survive are the people
Nick Lane (3:27:20.960)
who care enough to still do it.
Lex Fridman (3:27:25.320)
And they're very often the people
Nick Lane (3:27:26.840)
who don't worry too much about the future
Lex Fridman (3:27:31.280)
and are able to live in the present.
Nick Lane (3:27:33.520)
Because if you do a PhD,
Lex Fridman (3:27:35.240)
you've competed hard to get onto the PhD,
Nick Lane (3:27:37.440)
then you have to compete hard to get a postdoc job
Lex Fridman (3:27:39.520)
and you have the next one maybe on another continent
Lex Fridman (3:27:44.080)
and it's only two years anyway.
Lex Fridman (3:27:46.200)
And so, and there's no guarantee
Nick Lane (3:27:49.320)
you're going to get a faculty position at the end of it.
Lex Fridman (3:27:52.320)
So.
Lex Fridman (3:27:53.160)
And there's always the next step to compete.
Lex Fridman (3:27:54.960)
If you get a faculty position,
Nick Lane (3:27:56.840)
you get a tenure and with tenure go full professor
Lex Fridman (3:27:59.840)
and full professor, then you go to some kind of,
Nick Lane (3:28:01.960)
whatever the discipline is,
Lex Fridman (3:28:03.160)
there's an award.
Nick Lane (3:28:04.320)
If you're in physics,
Lex Fridman (3:28:05.240)
you're always competing for the Nobel Prize.
Nick Lane (3:28:06.840)
There's different awards.
Lex Fridman (3:28:08.400)
And then eventually you're all competing to,
Nick Lane (3:28:11.160)
I mean, there's always a competition.
Lex Fridman (3:28:12.600)
So there is no happiness.
Nick Lane (3:28:13.960)
Happiness does not lie.
Lex Fridman (3:28:14.920)
If you're looking into the future, yes.
Lex Fridman (3:28:16.840)
And if what you're caring about is a career,
Lex Fridman (3:28:18.760)
then it's probably not the one for you.
Nick Lane (3:28:22.480)
If though you can put that aside,
Lex Fridman (3:28:25.560)
and I've also worked in industry for a brief period
Lex Fridman (3:28:28.760)
and I was made redundant twice.
Lex Fridman (3:28:30.880)
So I know that.
Nick Lane (3:28:32.360)
You know, there's no guarantee
Lex Fridman (3:28:35.960)
that you've got a career that way either.
Nick Lane (3:28:37.920)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (3:28:38.760)
So, so live in the moment
Lex Fridman (3:28:42.640)
and try and enjoy what you're doing.
Lex Fridman (3:28:44.200)
And that means really go to the,
Nick Lane (3:28:48.520)
go to the themes that you're most interested in
Lex Fridman (3:28:50.880)
and try and follow them as well as you can.
Lex Fridman (3:28:52.840)
And that tends to pay back in surprising ways.
Lex Fridman (3:28:57.360)
I don't know if you've found this as well,
Lex Fridman (3:28:58.640)
but I found that people will help you often.
Lex Fridman (3:29:04.040)
If they see some light shining in the eye,
Nick Lane (3:29:08.400)
you're excited about their subject
Lex Fridman (3:29:11.920)
and you know, just want to talk about it.
Lex Fridman (3:29:15.800)
And they know that their friend in California
Lex Fridman (3:29:18.600)
has got a job coming up.
Nick Lane (3:29:19.520)
They'll say, go for this, this guy's all right.
Lex Fridman (3:29:21.440)
You know, they'll use the network to help you out
Nick Lane (3:29:26.040)
if you really care.
Lex Fridman (3:29:27.040)
And you're not gonna have a job two years down the line,
Lex Fridman (3:29:29.600)
but if what you really care about is what you're doing now,
Lex Fridman (3:29:32.920)
then it doesn't matter if you have a job
Nick Lane (3:29:34.120)
in two years time or not.
Lex Fridman (3:29:35.480)
It'll work itself out if you've got the light in your eye.
Lex Fridman (3:29:39.960)
And so that's the only advice I can give.
Lex Fridman (3:29:42.360)
And most people probably drop out through that system
Nick Lane (3:29:46.920)
because the fight is just not worth it for them.
Lex Fridman (3:29:49.800)
Yeah, when you have the light in your eye,
Nick Lane (3:29:51.840)
when you have the excitement for the thing,
Lex Fridman (3:29:53.480)
what happens is you start to surround yourself with others
Nick Lane (3:29:56.560)
that are interested in that same thing,
Lex Fridman (3:29:57.920)
that also have the light.
Nick Lane (3:29:59.160)
If you really are rigorous about this
Lex Fridman (3:30:01.120)
because I think it does take, it doesn't,
Nick Lane (3:30:05.440)
it takes effort to make.
Lex Fridman (3:30:07.360)
Oh, you've got to be obsessive.
Lex Fridman (3:30:08.840)
But if you're doing what you really love doing,
Lex Fridman (3:30:11.280)
then it's not work anymore, it's what you do.
Nick Lane (3:30:13.320)
Yeah, but I also mean the surrounding yourself
Lex Fridman (3:30:15.600)
with other people that are obsessed about the same thing
Nick Lane (3:30:17.840)
because depending on.
Lex Fridman (3:30:19.080)
Oh, that takes some work as well, yes.
Lex Fridman (3:30:21.040)
And luck.
Lex Fridman (3:30:21.880)
Finding the right, yeah, finding the right mentors,
Nick Lane (3:30:23.880)
the collaborators, because I think one of the problem
Lex Fridman (3:30:27.600)
with the PhD process is people are not careful enough
Nick Lane (3:30:32.880)
in picking their mentors.
Lex Fridman (3:30:34.840)
Those are people, mentors and colleagues and so on,
Nick Lane (3:30:38.360)
those are people who are gonna define
Lex Fridman (3:30:40.600)
the direction of your life, how much you love a thing,
Lex Fridman (3:30:43.880)
how much, I mean the power of just like
Lex Fridman (3:30:46.400)
the few little conversations you have in the hallway,
Nick Lane (3:30:51.160)
it's incredible.
Lex Fridman (3:30:52.360)
So you have to be a little bit careful in that.
Nick Lane (3:30:55.680)
Sometimes you just get randomly almost assigned,
Lex Fridman (3:30:59.120)
really pursue, I suppose, the subject
Nick Lane (3:31:04.840)
as much as you pursue the people that do that subject.
Lex Fridman (3:31:07.480)
So like both, the whole dance of it.
Nick Lane (3:31:09.480)
They kind of go together really.
Lex Fridman (3:31:10.560)
Yeah, they really do.
Lex Fridman (3:31:11.960)
But take that part seriously.
Lex Fridman (3:31:14.720)
And probably in the way you're describing it,
Nick Lane (3:31:19.360)
careful how you define success.
Lex Fridman (3:31:21.800)
Because.
Nick Lane (3:31:22.640)
You'll never find happiness in success.
Lex Fridman (3:31:24.800)
There's a lovely quote from Robert Louis Stevenson,
Nick Lane (3:31:27.560)
I think, who said, nothing in life
Lex Fridman (3:31:29.320)
is so disenchanting as attainment.
Nick Lane (3:31:33.160)
Yeah, so I mean, in some sense,
Lex Fridman (3:31:35.480)
the true definition of success is getting to do today
Lex Fridman (3:31:42.040)
what you really enjoy doing.
Lex Fridman (3:31:43.600)
Just what fills you with joy.
Lex Fridman (3:31:46.360)
And that's ultimately success.
Lex Fridman (3:31:48.120)
So success isn't the thing beyond the horizon,
Nick Lane (3:31:51.520)
the big trophy, the financials.
Lex Fridman (3:31:54.960)
I think it's as close as we can get to happiness.
Nick Lane (3:31:57.760)
That's not to say you're full of joy all the time,
Lex Fridman (3:31:59.800)
but it's as close as we can get
Nick Lane (3:32:01.680)
to a sustained human happiness
Lex Fridman (3:32:03.620)
is by getting some fulfillment
Nick Lane (3:32:05.300)
from what you're doing on a daily basis.
Lex Fridman (3:32:06.800)
And if what you're looking for is the world
Nick Lane (3:32:11.240)
giving you the stamp of approval with a Nobel Prize
Lex Fridman (3:32:14.000)
or a fellowship or whatever it is,
Nick Lane (3:32:15.820)
then I've known people like this who,
Lex Fridman (3:32:18.720)
they're eaten away by the anger,
Nick Lane (3:32:24.480)
the kind of caustic resentment
Lex Fridman (3:32:27.480)
that they've not been awarded this prize that they deserve.
Lex Fridman (3:32:31.080)
And the other way, if you put too much value
Lex Fridman (3:32:32.960)
into those kinds of prizes and you win them,
Nick Lane (3:32:35.480)
I've gotten a chance to see that it also,
Lex Fridman (3:32:42.460)
the more quote unquote successful you are in that sense,
Nick Lane (3:32:45.560)
the more you run the danger of growing ego
Lex Fridman (3:32:50.640)
so big that you don't get to actually enjoy
Nick Lane (3:32:54.560)
the beauty of this life.
Lex Fridman (3:32:56.080)
You start to believe that you figured it all out
Nick Lane (3:32:58.620)
as opposed to, I think what ultimately
Lex Fridman (3:33:01.360)
the most fun thing is is being curious
Nick Lane (3:33:03.280)
about everything around you, being constantly surprised,
Lex Fridman (3:33:06.360)
and these little moments of discovery
Nick Lane (3:33:08.520)
of enjoying beauty in small and big ways all around you.
Lex Fridman (3:33:12.120)
And I think the bigger your ego grows,
Nick Lane (3:33:14.240)
the more you start to take yourself seriously,
Lex Fridman (3:33:15.960)
the less you're able to enjoy that.
Nick Lane (3:33:17.880)
Amen to that, I couldn't agree more.
Lex Fridman (3:33:20.880)
So the summary from harmless to mostly harmless
Nick Lane (3:33:25.720)
in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
Lex Fridman (3:33:27.640)
how would you try to summarize Earth?
Lex Fridman (3:33:31.440)
And if you were given,
Lex Fridman (3:33:34.440)
if you had to summarize the whole thing
Nick Lane (3:33:36.480)
in a couple of sentences,
Lex Fridman (3:33:38.560)
and maybe throw in meaning of life in there,
Nick Lane (3:33:40.400)
like what, why, why, why, maybe,
Lex Fridman (3:33:45.800)
is that a defining thing about humans
Lex Fridman (3:33:47.600)
that we care about the meaning of the whole thing?
Lex Fridman (3:33:52.600)
I wonder if that should be part of the,
Nick Lane (3:33:55.800)
these creatures seem to be very lost.
Lex Fridman (3:33:58.720)
Yes, they're always asking why.
Nick Lane (3:34:00.400)
I mean, that's my defining question is why.
Lex Fridman (3:34:02.940)
It was, as people used to make a joke,
Nick Lane (3:34:06.700)
I have a small scar on my forehead
Lex Fridman (3:34:08.600)
from a climbing accident years ago.
Lex Fridman (3:34:11.160)
And the guy I was climbing with had dislodged a rock
Lex Fridman (3:34:13.760)
and he shouted something.
Nick Lane (3:34:15.520)
He shouted below, I think,
Lex Fridman (3:34:16.600)
meaning that the rock was coming down.
Lex Fridman (3:34:18.440)
And I hadn't caught what he said,
Lex Fridman (3:34:20.280)
so I looked up and then smashed the street on my forehead.
Lex Fridman (3:34:23.600)
And everybody around me took the piss,
Lex Fridman (3:34:27.920)
saying he looked up to ask why.
Nick Lane (3:34:30.280)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (3:34:33.000)
But that's a human imperative.
Nick Lane (3:34:34.600)
That's part of what it means to be human.
Lex Fridman (3:34:37.220)
Look up to the sky and ask why, and ask why.
Lex Fridman (3:34:42.200)
So your question, define the earth.
Lex Fridman (3:34:49.200)
I'm not sure I can do that.
Nick Lane (3:34:50.440)
I mean, the first word that comes to mind is living.
Lex Fridman (3:34:54.840)
I wouldn't like to say mostly living, but perhaps.
Nick Lane (3:34:57.880)
Mostly living.
Lex Fridman (3:34:58.720)
Well, it's interesting because like,
Nick Lane (3:35:00.200)
if you were to write the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
Lex Fridman (3:35:04.120)
I suppose, say our idea that we talked about,
Nick Lane (3:35:10.320)
that bacteria is the most prominent form of life
Lex Fridman (3:35:13.640)
throughout the galaxy and the universe.
Nick Lane (3:35:17.920)
I suppose that earth would be kind of unique
Lex Fridman (3:35:21.720)
and would require.
Nick Lane (3:35:22.560)
There's abundance in that case.
Lex Fridman (3:35:24.440)
Yeah.
Nick Lane (3:35:25.280)
It's profligate, it's rich, it's enormously,
Lex Fridman (3:35:28.280)
enormously living.
Lex Fridman (3:35:29.920)
So how would you describe that it's not bacteria?
Lex Fridman (3:35:33.400)
It's.
Nick Lane (3:35:36.560)
Eukaryotic.
Lex Fridman (3:35:37.680)
Yeah.
Nick Lane (3:35:39.560)
Well, I mean, that's the technical term,
Lex Fridman (3:35:41.700)
but it is basically it's.
Nick Lane (3:35:46.400)
Yeah, and then.
Lex Fridman (3:35:47.240)
How would I describe that?
Nick Lane (3:35:49.280)
I've actually really struggled with that term
Lex Fridman (3:35:52.160)
because the word, I mean, there's few words
Nick Lane (3:35:55.400)
quite as good as eukaryotic to put everybody off immediately.
Lex Fridman (3:35:58.600)
You start using words like that
Lex Fridman (3:35:59.880)
and they'll leave the room.
Lex Fridman (3:36:01.520)
A Krebs cycle is another one that gets people
Nick Lane (3:36:03.680)
to leave the room, but so I've tried to think,
Lex Fridman (3:36:08.360)
is there another word for eukaryotic that I can use?
Lex Fridman (3:36:10.840)
And really the only word that I've been able to use
Lex Fridman (3:36:13.200)
is complex, complex cells, complex life and so on.
Lex Fridman (3:36:18.760)
And that word, it serves one immediate purpose,
Lex Fridman (3:36:22.860)
which is to convey an impression.
Lex Fridman (3:36:26.240)
But then it means so many different things to everybody
Lex Fridman (3:36:31.240)
that actually is lost immediately.
Lex Fridman (3:36:33.640)
And so it's kind of.
Lex Fridman (3:36:36.320)
Well, that's a noticeable from the perspective
Nick Lane (3:36:38.480)
of other planets, that is a noticeable phase transition
Lex Fridman (3:36:42.020)
of complexity is the eukaryotic.
Lex Fridman (3:36:46.760)
What about the harmless and the mostly harmless?
Lex Fridman (3:36:49.240)
Is that kind of.
Nick Lane (3:36:51.680)
Probably accurate on a universal kind of scale.
Lex Fridman (3:36:55.480)
I don't think that humanity is in any danger
Nick Lane (3:36:59.240)
of disturbing the universe at the moment.
Lex Fridman (3:37:02.160)
At the moment, which is why the mostly, we don't know.
Nick Lane (3:37:06.240)
Depends what Elon is up to, depends how many rockets.
Lex Fridman (3:37:10.000)
I think.
Nick Lane (3:37:10.840)
It'll be still even then a while, I think,
Lex Fridman (3:37:13.840)
before we disturb the fabric of time and space.
Nick Lane (3:37:17.700)
Was the aforementioned Andrej Karpathy,
Lex Fridman (3:37:20.360)
I think he summarized Earth as a system
Nick Lane (3:37:25.360)
where you hammer it with a bunch of photons.
Lex Fridman (3:37:30.120)
The input is like photons and the output is rockets.
Nick Lane (3:37:35.520)
If you just.
Lex Fridman (3:37:37.080)
Well, that's a hell of a lot of photons
Nick Lane (3:37:38.440)
before there was a rocket launch.
Lex Fridman (3:37:40.240)
But like, you know, maybe in the span of the universe,
Nick Lane (3:37:43.920)
it's not that much time.
Lex Fridman (3:37:46.080)
And so, and I do wonder, you know, what the future is,
Nick Lane (3:37:49.900)
whether we're just in the early beginnings of this Earth,
Lex Fridman (3:37:52.960)
which is important when you try to summarize it,
Nick Lane (3:37:55.440)
or we're at the end, where humans have finally
Lex Fridman (3:37:59.920)
gained the ability to destroy the entirety
Nick Lane (3:38:02.680)
of this beautiful project we've got going on.
Lex Fridman (3:38:06.120)
Not with nuclear weapons, with engineered viruses,
Nick Lane (3:38:09.160)
with all those kinds of things.
Lex Fridman (3:38:10.240)
Or just inadvertently through global warming
Lex Fridman (3:38:12.460)
and pollution and so on.
Lex Fridman (3:38:15.000)
We're quite capable of that.
Nick Lane (3:38:15.920)
I mean, we just need to pass the tipping point.
Lex Fridman (3:38:18.520)
I mean, I think we're more likely to do it inadvertently
Nick Lane (3:38:20.880)
than through a nuclear war, which could happen at any time.
Lex Fridman (3:38:24.520)
But my fear is we just don't know
Nick Lane (3:38:30.280)
where the tipping points are.
Lex Fridman (3:38:31.560)
And we will, we kind of think we're smart enough
Nick Lane (3:38:35.400)
to fix the problem quickly if we really need to.
Lex Fridman (3:38:37.480)
I think that's the overriding assumption
Nick Lane (3:38:40.260)
that we're all right for now.
Lex Fridman (3:38:43.000)
Maybe in 20 years time, it's gonna be a calamitous problem.
Lex Fridman (3:38:45.740)
And then we'll really need to put some serious mental power
Lex Fridman (3:38:47.900)
into fixing it without seriously worrying
Nick Lane (3:38:51.400)
that perhaps that is too late.
Lex Fridman (3:38:53.720)
And that however brilliant we are, we miss the boat.
Lex Fridman (3:38:59.600)
And just walk off the cliff.
Lex Fridman (3:39:01.720)
I don't know.
Nick Lane (3:39:02.560)
I have optimism in humans being clever descendants.
Lex Fridman (3:39:05.960)
Oh, I have no doubt that we can fix the problem.
Nick Lane (3:39:09.640)
It's an urgent problem.
Lex Fridman (3:39:11.780)
We need to fix it pretty sharpish.
Lex Fridman (3:39:14.080)
And I do have doubts about whether politically
Lex Fridman (3:39:16.760)
we are capable of coming together enough
Nick Lane (3:39:18.640)
to not just in any one country, but around the planet.
Lex Fridman (3:39:23.840)
To, I mean, I know we can do it, but do we have the will?
Lex Fridman (3:39:26.960)
Do we have the vision to accomplish it?
Lex Fridman (3:39:31.280)
That's what makes this whole ride fun.
Nick Lane (3:39:33.920)
I don't know.
Lex Fridman (3:39:35.040)
Not only do we not know if we can handle
Nick Lane (3:39:37.280)
the crises before us, we don't even know all the crises
Lex Fridman (3:39:40.760)
that are gonna be before us in the next 20 years.
Nick Lane (3:39:43.960)
The ones I think that will most likely challenge us
Lex Fridman (3:39:48.360)
in the 21st century are the ones we don't even expect.
Nick Lane (3:39:51.280)
People didn't expect World War II
Lex Fridman (3:39:53.240)
at the end of World War I.
Nick Lane (3:39:56.200)
Some folks did, but yeah, not at the end of World War I.
Lex Fridman (3:39:58.720)
But by the late 1920s, I think people
Nick Lane (3:40:01.600)
were beginning to worry about it.
Lex Fridman (3:40:03.040)
Yeah, no, there's always people worrying about everything.
Lex Fridman (3:40:05.960)
So if you focus on the thing that.
Lex Fridman (3:40:08.000)
People worry about, yes.
Nick Lane (3:40:09.600)
Because there's a million things people worry about
Lex Fridman (3:40:11.400)
and 99.999999% of them don't come to be.
Nick Lane (3:40:14.840)
Of course, the people that turn out to be right,
Lex Fridman (3:40:16.680)
they'll say, I knew all along, but that's not,
Nick Lane (3:40:19.560)
that's not an accurate way of knowing
Lex Fridman (3:40:21.000)
what you could have predicted.
Nick Lane (3:40:22.440)
I think rationally speaking, you can worry about it,
Lex Fridman (3:40:25.600)
but nobody thought you could have another World War.
Lex Fridman (3:40:28.160)
The war to end all wars, why would you have another war?
Lex Fridman (3:40:31.320)
And the idea of nuclear weapons,
Nick Lane (3:40:34.560)
just technologically, is a very difficult thing
Lex Fridman (3:40:37.400)
to anticipate, to create a weapon
Nick Lane (3:40:39.680)
that just jumps orders of magnitude
Lex Fridman (3:40:41.640)
and destructive capability.
Lex Fridman (3:40:43.880)
And of course, we can intuit all the things
Lex Fridman (3:40:46.240)
like engineered viruses, nanobots,
Nick Lane (3:40:49.260)
artificial intelligence, yes, all the different
Lex Fridman (3:40:54.320)
complicated global effects of global warming.
Lex Fridman (3:40:57.320)
So how that changes the allocation of resources,
Lex Fridman (3:40:59.460)
the flow of energy, the tension between countries,
Nick Lane (3:41:02.720)
the military conflict between countries,
Lex Fridman (3:41:04.480)
the reallocation of power,
Nick Lane (3:41:06.760)
then looking at the role of China in this whole thing
Lex Fridman (3:41:09.340)
with Russia and growing influence of Africa
Lex Fridman (3:41:13.600)
and the weird dynamics of Europe,
Lex Fridman (3:41:16.200)
and then America falling apart through the political
Nick Lane (3:41:19.440)
division fueled by recommender systems
Lex Fridman (3:41:22.720)
through Twitter and Facebook.
Nick Lane (3:41:24.140)
The whole beautiful mess is just fun.
Lex Fridman (3:41:26.920)
And I think there's a lot of incredible engineers,
Nick Lane (3:41:30.240)
incredible scientists, incredible human beings
Lex Fridman (3:41:32.920)
that while everyone is bickering and so on online
Nick Lane (3:41:36.140)
for the fun of it on the weekends,
Lex Fridman (3:41:37.780)
they're actually trying to build solutions.
Lex Fridman (3:41:39.320)
And those are the people that will create
Lex Fridman (3:41:41.340)
something beautiful.
Nick Lane (3:41:42.180)
At least I have, that's the process of evolution.
Lex Fridman (3:41:45.660)
It all started with a Chuck Norris single cell organism
Nick Lane (3:41:53.520)
that went out from the vents and was the parent
Lex Fridman (3:41:56.520)
to all of us.
Lex Fridman (3:41:57.880)
And for that guy or lady or both, I guess,
Lex Fridman (3:42:01.800)
is a big thank you and I can't wait to what happens next.
Lex Fridman (3:42:05.820)
And I'm glad there's incredible humans writing
Lex Fridman (3:42:08.440)
and studying it like you are, Nick.
Nick Lane (3:42:10.000)
It's a huge honor that you would talk to me.
Lex Fridman (3:42:12.240)
This is fantastic.
Nick Lane (3:42:13.280)
This is really amazing.
Lex Fridman (3:42:14.360)
I can't wait to read what you write next.
Nick Lane (3:42:17.860)
Thank you for existing.
Lex Fridman (3:42:21.520)
And thank you for talking today.
Nick Lane (3:42:24.600)
Thank you.
Lex Fridman (3:42:26.280)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Nick Lane.
Nick Lane (3:42:28.800)
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors
Lex Fridman (3:42:31.280)
in the description.
Lex Fridman (3:42:32.680)
And now let me leave you with some words from Steve Jobs.
Lex Fridman (3:42:37.600)
I think the biggest innovations of the 21st century
Nick Lane (3:42:40.720)
will be at the intersection of biology and technology.
Lex Fridman (3:42:45.820)
A new era is beginning.
Nick Lane (3:42:47.860)
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman (40:00.860)
but the investment in the overheads is really paired down.
Nick Lane (40:04.380)
That means that you can support
Lex Fridman (40:05.740)
a much larger nuclear genome.
Lex Fridman (40:08.420)
So we've gone up in the number of genes,
Lex Fridman (40:10.540)
but also the amount of power you have
Nick Lane (40:12.220)
to convert those genes into proteins.
Lex Fridman (40:14.940)
We've gone up about fourfold in the number of genes,
Lex Fridman (40:17.100)
but in terms of the size of genomes
Lex Fridman (40:19.260)
and your ability to make the building blocks,
Nick Lane (40:21.840)
make the proteins, we've gone up 100,000 fold or more.
Lex Fridman (40:25.100)
So it's huge step change in the possibilities of evolution.
Lex Fridman (40:29.540)
And it's interesting then that the only two occasions
Lex Fridman (40:33.980)
that complex life has arisen on Earth,
Nick Lane (40:35.900)
plants and animals,
Lex Fridman (40:38.060)
fungi you could say are complex as well,
Lex Fridman (40:40.140)
but they don't form such complex morphology
Lex Fridman (40:42.820)
as plants and animals.
Nick Lane (40:44.540)
Start with a single cell.
Lex Fridman (40:45.660)
They start with an oocyte and a sperm
Nick Lane (40:48.380)
fused together to make a zygote.
Lex Fridman (40:50.420)
So we start development with a single cell
Lex Fridman (40:52.300)
and all the cells in the organism have identical DNA.
Lex Fridman (40:56.460)
And you switch off in the brain,
Nick Lane (40:58.340)
you switch off these genes and you switch on those genes
Lex Fridman (41:00.540)
and liver, you switch off those
Lex Fridman (41:01.700)
and you switch on a different set.
Lex Fridman (41:04.060)
And the standard evolutionary explanation for that
Nick Lane (41:06.120)
is that you're restricting conflict.
Lex Fridman (41:08.580)
You don't have a load of genetically different cells
Nick Lane (41:10.980)
that are all fighting each other.
Lex Fridman (41:13.340)
And so it works.
Nick Lane (41:14.700)
The trouble with bacteria, they form these biofilms
Lex Fridman (41:17.180)
and they're all genetically different.
Lex Fridman (41:18.520)
And effectively they're incapable
Lex Fridman (41:21.020)
of that level of cooperation.
Nick Lane (41:23.300)
They would get in a fight.
Lex Fridman (41:26.380)
Okay, so why is this such a difficult invention
Nick Lane (41:31.180)
of getting this bacteria inside
Lex Fridman (41:33.380)
and becoming an engine which the mitochondria is?
Lex Fridman (41:37.300)
Why do you assign it such great importance?
Lex Fridman (41:40.420)
Is it great importance in terms of the difficulty
Nick Lane (41:42.180)
of how it was to achieve or great importance
Lex Fridman (41:44.300)
in terms of the impact it had on life?
Nick Lane (41:46.900)
Both.
Lex Fridman (41:48.380)
It had a huge impact on life
Nick Lane (41:49.780)
because if that had not happened,
Lex Fridman (41:52.500)
you can be certain that life on earth
Nick Lane (41:54.940)
would be bacterial only.
Lex Fridman (41:56.500)
And that took a really long time too.
Nick Lane (41:58.180)
It took 2 billion years.
Lex Fridman (41:59.940)
And it hasn't happened since to the best of our knowledge.
Lex Fridman (42:02.740)
So it looks as if it's genuinely difficult.
Lex Fridman (42:05.100)
And if you think about it then
Nick Lane (42:06.200)
from just an informational perspective,
Lex Fridman (42:08.500)
you think bacteria have got,
Nick Lane (42:12.380)
they structure their information differently.
Lex Fridman (42:15.260)
So a bacterial cell has a small genome,
Nick Lane (42:17.540)
you might have 4,000 genes in it,
Lex Fridman (42:19.060)
but a single E. coli cell has access
Nick Lane (42:21.100)
to about 30,000 genes potentially.
Lex Fridman (42:24.060)
It's got a kind of metagenome
Nick Lane (42:26.020)
where other E. coli out there
Lex Fridman (42:27.860)
have got different gene sets
Lex Fridman (42:29.060)
and they can switch them around between themselves.
Lex Fridman (42:31.820)
And so you can generate a huge amount of variation
Lex Fridman (42:34.580)
and they've got more,
Lex Fridman (42:36.220)
an E. coli metagenome is larger than the human genome.
Nick Lane (42:40.620)
We own 20,000 genes or something.
Lex Fridman (42:43.220)
So, and they've had 4 billion years of evolution
Nick Lane (42:46.900)
to work out what can I do
Lex Fridman (42:48.540)
and what can't I do with this metagenome?
Lex Fridman (42:51.540)
And the answer is you're stuck, you're still bacteria.
Lex Fridman (42:54.300)
So they have explored genetic sequence space
Nick Lane (42:58.940)
far more thoroughly than eukaryotes ever did
Lex Fridman (43:01.260)
because they've had twice as long at least
Lex Fridman (43:03.060)
and they've got much larger populations
Lex Fridman (43:05.940)
and they never got around this problem.
Lex Fridman (43:08.420)
So why can't they?
Lex Fridman (43:09.340)
It seems as if you can't solve it with information alone.
Lex Fridman (43:12.420)
So what's the problem?
Lex Fridman (43:14.860)
The problem is structure.
Nick Lane (43:16.400)
If the very first cells needed an electrical charge
Lex Fridman (43:21.020)
on their membrane to grow and in bacteria,
Nick Lane (43:23.820)
it's the outer membrane that surrounds the cell
Lex Fridman (43:26.220)
which is electrically charged.
Nick Lane (43:28.220)
You try and scale that up
Lex Fridman (43:29.740)
and you've got a fundamental design problem,
Nick Lane (43:31.940)
you've got an engineering problem.
Lex Fridman (43:33.680)
And there are examples of it
Lex Fridman (43:35.260)
and what we see in all these cases
Lex Fridman (43:37.080)
is what's known as extreme polyploidy,
Nick Lane (43:38.780)
which is to say they have tens of thousands of copies
Lex Fridman (43:41.020)
of their complete genome,
Nick Lane (43:42.740)
which is energetically hugely expensive
Lex Fridman (43:45.520)
and you end up with a large bacteria
Nick Lane (43:49.020)
with no further development.
Lex Fridman (43:52.340)
What you need is to incorporate
Nick Lane (43:55.020)
these electrically charged power pack units inside
Lex Fridman (43:58.500)
with their control units intact
Lex Fridman (44:01.380)
and for them not to conflict so much with the host cell
Lex Fridman (44:03.980)
that it all goes wrong.
Nick Lane (44:05.900)
Perhaps it goes wrong more often than not.
Lex Fridman (44:07.860)
And then you change the topology of the cell.
Nick Lane (44:10.940)
Now you don't necessarily have any more DNA
Lex Fridman (44:14.220)
than a giant bacterium with extreme polyploidy,
Lex Fridman (44:16.740)
but what you've got is an asymmetry.
Lex Fridman (44:19.340)
You now have a giant nuclear genome
Nick Lane (44:21.940)
which surrounded by lots of subsidiary energetic genomes
Lex Fridman (44:25.640)
that do all the, they're the control units
Nick Lane (44:27.920)
that are doing all the control of energy generation.
Lex Fridman (44:32.340)
Could this have been done gradually
Nick Lane (44:33.980)
or does it have to be done,
Lex Fridman (44:35.900)
the power pack has to be all intact
Lex Fridman (44:38.180)
and ready to go and working?
Lex Fridman (44:40.180)
I mean, it's a kind of step change
Nick Lane (44:41.860)
in the possibilities of evolution,
Lex Fridman (44:43.420)
but it doesn't happen overnight.
Nick Lane (44:44.540)
It's gonna still require multiple, multiple generations.
Lex Fridman (44:47.700)
So it could take millions of years.
Nick Lane (44:50.900)
It could take shorter times.
Lex Fridman (44:52.220)
There's another thing I would like to put the number of steps
Lex Fridman (44:54.100)
and try and work out what's required at each step.
Lex Fridman (44:56.180)
And we are trying to do that with sex for example.
Nick Lane (44:58.500)
You can't have a very large genome
Lex Fridman (45:00.820)
unless you have sex at that point.
Lex Fridman (45:02.220)
So what are the changes to go
Lex Fridman (45:03.340)
from bacterial recombination to eukaryotic recombination?
Lex Fridman (45:07.860)
What do you need to do?
Lex Fridman (45:09.540)
Why do we go from passing around bits of DNA
Nick Lane (45:12.340)
as if it's loose change to fusing cells together,
Lex Fridman (45:15.340)
lining up the chromosomes,
Nick Lane (45:16.580)
recombining across the chromosomes,
Lex Fridman (45:18.620)
and then going through two rounds of cell division
Lex Fridman (45:20.820)
to produce your gametes?
Lex Fridman (45:22.340)
All eukaryotes do it that way.
Lex Fridman (45:24.440)
So again, why switch?
Lex Fridman (45:27.420)
What are the drivers here?
Lex Fridman (45:28.780)
So there's a lot of time, there's a lot of evolution,
Lex Fridman (45:31.420)
but as soon as you've got cells living inside another cell,
Lex Fridman (45:34.100)
what you've got is a new design.
Lex Fridman (45:36.340)
You've got new potential that you didn't have before.
Lex Fridman (45:39.100)
So the cell living inside another cell, that design
Lex Fridman (45:44.220)
allows for better storage of information,
Nick Lane (45:48.700)
better use of energy, more delegation,
Lex Fridman (45:52.780)
like a hierarchical control of the whole thing.
Lex Fridman (45:55.420)
And then somehow that leads to ability
Lex Fridman (45:58.340)
to have multi cell organisms.
Nick Lane (46:00.180)
I'm not sure that you have hierarchical control necessarily,
Lex Fridman (46:03.300)
but you've got a system where you can have
Nick Lane (46:06.460)
a much larger information storage depot in the nucleus.
Lex Fridman (46:09.940)
You can have a much larger genome.
Lex Fridman (46:11.700)
And that allows multicellularity, yes,
Lex Fridman (46:13.620)
because it allows you, it's a funny thing,
Nick Lane (46:18.500)
to have an animal where I have 70% of my genes
Lex Fridman (46:24.140)
switched on in my brain,
Lex Fridman (46:25.260)
and a different 50% switched on in my liver or something,
Lex Fridman (46:28.500)
you've got to have all those genes in the egg cell
Nick Lane (46:30.860)
at the very beginning,
Lex Fridman (46:31.780)
and you've got to have a program of development
Nick Lane (46:35.500)
which says, okay, you guys switch off those genes
Lex Fridman (46:37.900)
and switch on those genes, and you guys, you do that.
Lex Fridman (46:40.300)
But all the genes are there at the beginning.
Lex Fridman (46:42.180)
That means you've got to have a lot of genes in one cell
Lex Fridman (46:44.100)
and you've got to be able to maintain them.
Lex Fridman (46:45.620)
And the problem with bacteria is they don't get close
Nick Lane (46:47.660)
to having enough genes in one cell.
Lex Fridman (46:49.900)
So if you were to try and make a multicellular organism
Nick Lane (46:52.760)
from bacteria, you'd bring different types
Lex Fridman (46:54.500)
of bacteria together and hope they'll cooperate.
Lex Fridman (46:56.540)
And the reality is they don't.
Lex Fridman (46:57.940)
That's really, really tough to do.
Nick Lane (46:59.540)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (47:00.380)
We know they don't because it doesn't exist.
Nick Lane (47:02.700)
We have the data as far as we know.
Lex Fridman (47:04.580)
I'm sure there's a few special ones
Lex Fridman (47:06.420)
and they dead off quickly.
Lex Fridman (47:08.180)
I'd love to know some of the most fun things
Nick Lane (47:09.980)
bacteria have done since.
Lex Fridman (47:12.660)
Oh, there's a few.
Nick Lane (47:13.500)
I mean, they can do some pretty funky things.
Lex Fridman (47:15.460)
And this is broad brushstroke that I'm talking about.
Nick Lane (47:18.260)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (47:19.200)
Generally speaking.
Lex Fridman (47:21.060)
So how was, so another fun invention.
Lex Fridman (47:25.060)
Us humans seem to utilize it well,
Lex Fridman (47:27.820)
but you say it's also very important early on is sex.
Lex Fridman (47:31.540)
So what is sex?
Nick Lane (47:34.540)
Just asking for a friend.
Lex Fridman (47:36.380)
And when was it invented and how hard was it to invent,
Lex Fridman (47:39.300)
just as you were saying, and why was it invented?
Lex Fridman (47:42.340)
Why, how hard was it and when?
Nick Lane (47:45.660)
I have a PhD student who's been working on this
Lex Fridman (47:47.980)
and we've just published a couple of papers on sex.
Nick Lane (47:49.980)
Yes, yes, yes.
Lex Fridman (47:50.900)
What do you publish?
Lex Fridman (47:51.740)
Does biology, is it biology, genetics, journals?
Lex Fridman (47:55.540)
This is actually PNAS,
Nick Lane (47:57.220)
which is Proceedings of the National Academy.
Lex Fridman (48:00.180)
Broad, big, big picture stuff.
Nick Lane (48:02.420)
Everyone's interested in sex.
Lex Fridman (48:03.500)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (48:04.340)
And the job of a biologist is to make sex dull.
Lex Fridman (48:07.940)
Yes, yeah, that's a beautiful way to put it.
Lex Fridman (48:10.700)
Okay, so when was it invented?
Lex Fridman (48:13.220)
It was invented with eukaryotes about two billion years ago.
Nick Lane (48:16.940)
All eukaryotes share the same basic mechanism
Lex Fridman (48:20.900)
that you produce gametes, the gametes fuse together.
Lex Fridman (48:23.420)
So a gamete is the egg cell and the sperm.
Lex Fridman (48:26.300)
They're not necessarily even different in size or shape.
Lex Fridman (48:29.580)
So the simplest eukaryotes produce
Lex Fridman (48:31.860)
what are called motile gametes.
Nick Lane (48:32.980)
They're all like sperm and they all swim around.
Lex Fridman (48:34.900)
They find each other, they fuse together.
Nick Lane (48:36.420)
They don't have kind of much going on there beyond that.
Lex Fridman (48:39.940)
And then these are haploid,
Nick Lane (48:43.180)
which is to say we all have two copies of our genome
Lex Fridman (48:46.100)
and the gametes have only a single copy of the genome.
Lex Fridman (48:49.220)
So when they fuse together, you now become diploid again,
Lex Fridman (48:51.980)
which is to say you now have two copies of your genome.
Lex Fridman (48:55.100)
And what you do is you line them all up
Lex Fridman (48:57.820)
and then you double everything.
Lex Fridman (49:01.620)
So now we have four copies of the complete genome.
Lex Fridman (49:03.900)
And then we crisscross between all of these things.
Lex Fridman (49:05.980)
So we take a bit from here and stick it on there
Lex Fridman (49:07.660)
and a bit from here and we stick it on here.
Nick Lane (49:09.620)
That's recombination.
Lex Fridman (49:11.740)
And then we go through two rounds of cell division.
Lex Fridman (49:14.820)
So we divide in half.
Lex Fridman (49:15.900)
So now the two daughter cells have two copies
Lex Fridman (49:18.020)
and we divide in half again.
Lex Fridman (49:19.460)
Now we have some gametes,
Nick Lane (49:21.220)
each of which has got a single copy of the genome.
Lex Fridman (49:24.460)
And that's the basic ground plan
Nick Lane (49:26.660)
for what's called meiosis and Syngami.
Lex Fridman (49:29.780)
That's basically sex.
Lex Fridman (49:31.340)
And it happens at the level of single celled organisms.
Lex Fridman (49:33.900)
And it happens pretty much the same way in plants
Lex Fridman (49:35.780)
and pretty much the same way in animals and so on.
Lex Fridman (49:38.140)
And it's not found in any bacteria.
Nick Lane (49:40.220)
They switch things around using the same machinery
Lex Fridman (49:43.100)
and they take up a bit of DNA from the environment.
Nick Lane (49:44.900)
They take out this bit and stick in that bit
Lex Fridman (49:46.620)
and it's the same molecular machinery they're using to do it.
Lex Fridman (49:50.020)
So what about the kind of, you said, find each other,
Lex Fridman (49:52.660)
this kind of imperative, find each other.
Lex Fridman (49:56.020)
What is that?
Lex Fridman (49:57.300)
Like, is that?
Nick Lane (49:58.260)
Well, you've got a few cells together.
Lex Fridman (50:00.660)
So the bottom line on all of this is bacteria.
Nick Lane (50:04.420)
I mean, it's kind of simple when you've figured it out
Lex Fridman (50:07.820)
and figuring it out, this is not me,
Nick Lane (50:09.300)
this is my PhD student, Marco Colnaghi.
Lex Fridman (50:13.020)
And in effect, if you're doing lateral,
Nick Lane (50:16.420)
you're a Nicoli cell, you've got 4,000 genes.
Lex Fridman (50:19.740)
You wanna scale up to a eukaryotic size.
Nick Lane (50:22.900)
I wanna have 20,000 genes.
Lex Fridman (50:25.380)
And I need to maintain my genome
Lex Fridman (50:27.740)
so it doesn't get shot to pieces by mutations.
Lex Fridman (50:30.460)
And I'm gonna do it by lateral gene transfer.
Lex Fridman (50:32.700)
So I know I've got a mutation in a gene.
Lex Fridman (50:35.420)
I don't know which gene it is because I'm not sentient,
Lex Fridman (50:38.820)
but I know I can't grow.
Lex Fridman (50:40.220)
I know all my regulation systems are saying,
Nick Lane (50:42.460)
something wrong here, something wrong, pick up some DNA,
Lex Fridman (50:44.980)
pick up a bit of DNA from the environment.
Nick Lane (50:47.700)
If you've got a small genome,
Lex Fridman (50:49.060)
the chances of you picking up the right bit of DNA
Nick Lane (50:50.980)
from the environment is much higher
Lex Fridman (50:52.340)
than if you've got a genome of 20,000 genes.
Nick Lane (50:54.780)
To do that, you've effectively got to be picking up DNA
Lex Fridman (50:58.060)
all the time, all day long and nothing else.
Lex Fridman (51:00.500)
And you're still gonna get the wrong DNA.
Lex Fridman (51:02.220)
You've got to pick up large chunks.
Lex Fridman (51:03.720)
And in the end, you've got to align them.
Lex Fridman (51:05.100)
You're forced into sex, to coin a phrase.
Lex Fridman (51:10.220)
So you're...
Lex Fridman (51:11.060)
You're forced.
Lex Fridman (51:12.540)
So there is a kind of incentive.
Lex Fridman (51:18.660)
If you wanna have a large genome,
Nick Lane (51:20.100)
you've got to prevent it mutating to nothing.
Lex Fridman (51:22.620)
That will happen with bacteria.
Nick Lane (51:23.940)
This is another reason why bacteria
Lex Fridman (51:25.640)
can't have a large genome.
Lex Fridman (51:26.940)
But as soon as you give them the power pack,
Lex Fridman (51:28.660)
as soon as you give eukaryotic cells the power pack
Nick Lane (51:30.340)
that allows them to increase the size of their genome,
Lex Fridman (51:33.020)
then you face the pressure
Nick Lane (51:34.380)
that you've got to maintain its quality.
Lex Fridman (51:36.300)
You've got to stop it just mutating away.
Lex Fridman (51:38.340)
What about sexual selection?
Lex Fridman (51:39.820)
So the finding, like, I don't like this one.
Nick Lane (51:44.740)
I don't like this one.
Lex Fridman (51:45.740)
This one seems all right.
Nick Lane (51:47.220)
Like, what's the...
Lex Fridman (51:49.820)
Is it...
Lex Fridman (51:50.660)
At which point does it become less random?
Lex Fridman (51:52.740)
It's hard to know.
Nick Lane (51:54.140)
Because eukaryotes just kind of float around.
Lex Fridman (51:56.020)
Just kind of have...
Nick Lane (51:57.020)
Yeah, I mean, is there sexual selection
Lex Fridman (51:59.060)
in single celled eukaryotes?
Nick Lane (52:00.300)
There probably is.
Lex Fridman (52:01.120)
It's just that I don't know very much about it.
Nick Lane (52:02.940)
By the time we get onto...
Lex Fridman (52:03.780)
You don't hang out with the eukaryotes.
Nick Lane (52:05.700)
Well, I do all the time, but...
Lex Fridman (52:07.380)
But you can't communicate with them yet.
Nick Lane (52:09.020)
Yeah, a peacock or something.
Lex Fridman (52:10.980)
Yes.
Nick Lane (52:12.780)
The kind of standard answer,
Lex Fridman (52:14.180)
this is not quite what I work on,
Lex Fridman (52:15.520)
but the standard answer is that it's female mate choice.
Lex Fridman (52:19.780)
She is looking for good genes.
Lex Fridman (52:22.980)
And if you can have a tail that's like this
Lex Fridman (52:25.660)
and still survive, still be alive,
Nick Lane (52:28.100)
not actually have been taken down by the nearest predator,
Lex Fridman (52:30.420)
then you must've got pretty good genes
Nick Lane (52:31.780)
because despite this handicap, you're able to survive.
Lex Fridman (52:36.460)
So those are like human interpretable things,
Nick Lane (52:38.340)
like with a peacock.
Lex Fridman (52:39.220)
But I wonder, I'm sure echoes of the same thing
Nick Lane (52:43.020)
are there with more primitive organisms.
Lex Fridman (52:46.540)
Basically your PR, like how you advertise yourself
Nick Lane (52:51.220)
that you're worthy of.
Lex Fridman (52:54.020)
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman (52:54.860)
So one big advertisement is the fact
Lex Fridman (52:56.460)
that you survived it all.
Nick Lane (52:58.420)
Let me give you one beautiful example of an algal bloom.
Lex Fridman (53:03.020)
And this can be a sign of bacteria.
Nick Lane (53:05.540)
It's gonna be in bacteria.
Lex Fridman (53:07.100)
So if suddenly you pump nitrate or phosphate
Nick Lane (53:10.780)
or something into the ocean and everything goes green,
Lex Fridman (53:13.340)
you end up with all this algae growing there.
Nick Lane (53:18.180)
A viral infection or something like that
Lex Fridman (53:20.860)
can kill the entire bloom overnight.
Lex Fridman (53:23.380)
And it's not that the virus takes out everything overnight.
Lex Fridman (53:26.860)
It's that most of the cells in that bloom kill themselves
Nick Lane (53:29.700)
before the virus can get onto them.
Lex Fridman (53:31.900)
And it's through a form of cell death
Nick Lane (53:33.740)
called programmed cell death.
Lex Fridman (53:35.020)
And we do the same things.
Nick Lane (53:36.580)
It's how we have the gaps between our fingers and so on.
Lex Fridman (53:39.980)
It's how we craft synapses in the brain.
Nick Lane (53:43.060)
It's fundamental again to multicellular life.
Lex Fridman (53:47.420)
They have the same machinery in these algal blooms.
Lex Fridman (53:51.220)
How do they know who dies?
Lex Fridman (53:52.900)
The answer is they will often put out a toxin.
Lex Fridman (53:56.740)
And that toxin is kind of a challenge to you.
Lex Fridman (54:00.300)
Either you can cope with the toxin or you can't.
Nick Lane (54:03.420)
If you can cope with it, you form a spore
Lex Fridman (54:06.460)
and you will go on to become the next generation.
Nick Lane (54:09.100)
You're forming kind of a resistance spore.
Lex Fridman (54:11.940)
You sink down a little bit, you get out of the way,
Nick Lane (54:14.180)
you're out of the, you can't be attacked by a virus
Lex Fridman (54:17.540)
if you're a spore or it's not so easily.
Nick Lane (54:19.660)
Whereas if you can't deal with that toxin,
Lex Fridman (54:21.900)
you pull the plug and you trigger your death apparatus
Lex Fridman (54:25.700)
and you kill yourself.
Lex Fridman (54:27.100)
Oh, so it's truly life and death selection.
Nick Lane (54:29.140)
Yeah, so it's really, it's a challenge.
Lex Fridman (54:31.620)
And this is a bit like sexual selection.
Nick Lane (54:33.620)
It's not so, they're all pretty much genetically identical,
Lex Fridman (54:36.940)
but they've had different life histories.
Lex Fridman (54:39.020)
So have you had a tough day?
Lex Fridman (54:41.420)
Did you happen to get infected by this virus?
Lex Fridman (54:44.460)
Or did you run out of iron?
Lex Fridman (54:45.540)
Or did you get a bit too much sun?
Nick Lane (54:47.460)
Whatever it may be, if this extra stress of the toxin
Lex Fridman (54:51.180)
just pushes you over the edge,
Nick Lane (54:52.820)
then you have this binary choice.
Lex Fridman (54:53.980)
Either you're the next generation
Nick Lane (54:55.180)
or you kill yourself now using this same machinery.
Lex Fridman (54:57.920)
It's also actually exactly the way I approach dating,
Lex Fridman (55:00.660)
but that's probably why I'm single.
Lex Fridman (55:03.220)
Okay, what about if we can step back, DNA?
Nick Lane (55:07.360)
Just mechanism of storing information.
Lex Fridman (55:10.460)
RNA, DNA, how big of an invention was that?
Nick Lane (55:13.460)
That seems to be, that seems to be fundamental
Lex Fridman (55:16.180)
to like something deep within what life is,
Nick Lane (55:22.540)
is the ability, as you said,
Lex Fridman (55:24.060)
to kind of store and propagate information.
Lex Fridman (55:28.000)
But then you also kind of infer that
Lex Fridman (55:29.900)
with your and your students work,
Nick Lane (55:31.600)
that there's a deep connection between the chemistry
Lex Fridman (55:35.140)
and the ability to have this kind of genetic information.
Lex Fridman (55:39.060)
So how big of an invention is it
Lex Fridman (55:41.140)
to have a nice representation,
Lex Fridman (55:43.740)
nice hard drive for info to pass on?
Lex Fridman (55:46.300)
Huge, I suspect.
Nick Lane (55:47.940)
I mean, but when I was talking about the code,
Lex Fridman (55:50.580)
you see the code in RNA as well.
Lex Fridman (55:52.600)
And RNA almost certainly came first.
Lex Fridman (55:56.100)
And there's been an idea going back decades
Nick Lane (55:58.580)
called the RNA world,
Lex Fridman (55:59.740)
because RNA in theory can copy itself
Lex Fridman (56:03.060)
and can catalyze reactions.
Lex Fridman (56:04.900)
So it kind of cuts out this chicken and egg loop.
Lex Fridman (56:07.860)
So DNA as possible is not that special.
Lex Fridman (56:09.900)
So RNA, RNA is the thing that does the work really.
Lex Fridman (56:13.560)
And the code lies in RNA.
Lex Fridman (56:15.340)
The code lies in the interactions
Nick Lane (56:16.900)
between RNA and amino acids.
Lex Fridman (56:18.340)
And it still is there today in the ribosome, for example,
Nick Lane (56:21.700)
which is just kind of a giant ribozyme,
Lex Fridman (56:23.820)
which is to say it's an enzyme that's made of RNA.
Lex Fridman (56:28.200)
So getting to RNA, I suspect is probably not that hard,
Lex Fridman (56:34.180)
but getting from RNA, how do you,
Nick Lane (56:37.180)
you know, there's multiple different types of RNA now.
Lex Fridman (56:39.860)
How do you distinguish?
Nick Lane (56:42.380)
This is something we're actively thinking about.
Lex Fridman (56:43.860)
How do you distinguish between,
Lex Fridman (56:45.580)
you know, a random population of RNA?
Lex Fridman (56:47.220)
Some of them go on to become messenger RNA.
Nick Lane (56:50.300)
This is the transcript of the code
Lex Fridman (56:52.540)
of the gene that you want to make.
Nick Lane (56:54.240)
Some of them become transfer RNA,
Lex Fridman (56:56.860)
which is kind of the unit that holds the amino acid
Nick Lane (56:59.900)
that's going to be polymerized.
Lex Fridman (57:01.720)
Some of them become ribosomal RNA,
Nick Lane (57:04.300)
which is the machine which is joining them all up together.
Lex Fridman (57:07.540)
How do they discriminate themselves?
Nick Lane (57:10.140)
And, you know, is some kind of phase transition
Lex Fridman (57:12.340)
going on there?
Nick Lane (57:13.180)
I don't know.
Lex Fridman (57:14.220)
It's a difficult question.
Lex Fridman (57:16.060)
And we're now in the region of biology
Lex Fridman (57:18.300)
where information is coming in.
Lex Fridman (57:19.700)
But the thing about RNA is very, very good at what it does.
Lex Fridman (57:22.940)
But the largest genome supported by RNA
Nick Lane (57:25.620)
are RNA viruses like HIV, for example.
Lex Fridman (57:28.880)
They're pretty small.
Lex Fridman (57:29.880)
And so there's a limit to how complex life could be
Lex Fridman (57:34.660)
unless you come up with DNA,
Nick Lane (57:36.380)
which chemically is a really small change.
Lex Fridman (57:39.220)
But how easy it is to make that change,
Nick Lane (57:41.780)
I don't really know.
Lex Fridman (57:42.620)
As soon as you've got DNA,
Nick Lane (57:43.980)
then you've got an amazingly stable molecule
Lex Fridman (57:46.660)
for information storage.
Lex Fridman (57:48.440)
And you can do absolutely anything.
Lex Fridman (57:50.580)
But how likely that transition from RNA to DNA was,
Nick Lane (57:53.260)
I don't know either.
Lex Fridman (57:54.460)
How much possibility is there for variety
Lex Fridman (57:56.920)
in ways to store information?
Lex Fridman (58:00.440)
Because it seems to be very,
Nick Lane (58:01.480)
there's specific characteristics
Lex Fridman (58:03.040)
about the programming language of DNA.
Nick Lane (58:06.600)
Yeah, there's a lot of work going on
Lex Fridman (58:08.320)
on what's called the xenodNA or RNA.
Nick Lane (58:11.880)
Can we replace the bases themselves,
Lex Fridman (58:15.440)
the letters, if you like, in RNA or DNA?
Lex Fridman (58:18.320)
Can we replace the backbone?
Lex Fridman (58:19.880)
Can we replace, for example, phosphate with arsenate?
Nick Lane (58:23.240)
Can we replace the sugar ribose or deoxyribose
Lex Fridman (58:25.940)
with a different sugar?
Lex Fridman (58:26.780)
And the answer is yes, you can.
Lex Fridman (58:29.880)
Within limits, there's not an infinite space there.
Nick Lane (58:34.240)
Arsenate doesn't really work
Lex Fridman (58:36.080)
if the bonds are not as strong as phosphate.
Nick Lane (58:38.000)
It's probably quite hard to replace phosphate.
Lex Fridman (58:42.360)
It's possible to do it.
Lex Fridman (58:43.520)
The question to me is why is it this way?
Lex Fridman (58:47.560)
Is it because there was some form of selection
Nick Lane (58:50.300)
that this is better than the other forms
Lex Fridman (58:52.160)
and there were lots of competing forms
Nick Lane (58:53.720)
of information storage early on
Lex Fridman (58:55.160)
and this one was the one that worked out?
Nick Lane (58:56.840)
Or was it kind of channeled that way,
Lex Fridman (58:58.520)
that these are the molecules that you're dealing with
Lex Fridman (59:01.960)
and they work?
Lex Fridman (59:03.960)
And I'm increasingly thinking it's that way,
Nick Lane (59:05.840)
that we're channeled towards ribose, phosphate,
Lex Fridman (59:08.880)
and the bases that are used.
Lex Fridman (59:11.960)
But there are 200 different letters
Lex Fridman (59:14.560)
kicking around out there that could have been used.
Nick Lane (59:17.160)
It's such an interesting question.
Lex Fridman (59:18.280)
If you look in the programming world in computer science,
Nick Lane (59:21.840)
there's a programming language called JavaScript,
Lex Fridman (59:24.200)
which was written super quickly.
Nick Lane (59:26.360)
It's a giant mess, but it took over the world.
Lex Fridman (59:29.440)
And it was kind of a...
Nick Lane (59:30.280)
Sounds very biological.
Lex Fridman (59:31.320)
It was kind of a running joke that like,
Nick Lane (59:35.080)
like surely this can't be,
Lex Fridman (59:37.800)
this is a terrible programming language.
Nick Lane (59:39.560)
It's a giant mess.
Lex Fridman (59:40.400)
It's full of bugs.
Nick Lane (59:41.760)
It's so easy to write really crappy code,
Lex Fridman (59:44.080)
but it took over all a front end development
Nick Lane (59:48.040)
in the web browser.
Lex Fridman (59:49.340)
If you have any kind of dynamic interactive website,
Nick Lane (59:52.280)
it's usually running JavaScript.
Lex Fridman (59:54.940)
And it's now taking over much of the backend,
Nick Lane (59:57.840)
which is like the serious heavy duty computational stuff.
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