Radiolab - Cellmates

Episode Date: April 6, 2016

There’s a black hole in the middle of the history of life: how did we go from tiny bags of chemicals to the vast menagerie of creatures we see around us?  Today, we explore one of the most underrated mysteries of all time, and present one possible answer that takes us from an unexpected houseguest to a tiny bolt of lightning to every critter you hold dear. It’s the story of one cosmic oops moment that changed the game of life forever.   Production help from Matt Kielty and Annie McEwen. Reporting help from Latif Nasser. Special thanks to Eric Steinbrook, Scott Dawson, Ahna Skop & Rachel Whittaker

Hey, this is Chad. Before we get started on the podcast, just two things. First, the MailChimp challenge we did a little while back. We did it. You guys did it. I mean, the deal was if a certain number of you became sustaining members, MailChimp would pitch in with some money. It happened. We're super grateful. So thank you. We freaking did it. Okay, number two, I want to let you know that toward the end of this podcast, it's about to happen. Hey, Chad. Hi, Chad. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I haven't even said it yet.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, hold up. but we're excited. Yeah, we're happy to be here. Okay, but you guys will have to hang out until the end. Is that cool? Why do we have to be at the end? Yeah. Can we just be up top?

But that was the deal we talked about. This is my Rosa Parks moment. I'm at the front of this episode. And you know why we can say that is because we are black. Yeah. You're putting me in a box here. Okay, so what I was going to say is we're going to, at the end of this podcast, we're going to come back and I'm going to introduce you guys listening to two very funny people

who you just heard, Phoebe Robinson, and Jessica Williams. They're starting a podcast. here at WNYC Studios. It's called Two Dope Queens. It's awesome. We'll talk about it. All right, so you guys will hang out? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I got nothing to do. Yeah. All right, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab.

Radio Lab. From WNYC. See? See? Yeah. Chad. Robert. Radio Lab.

So, I'm going to do. just tell you the story. Just very briefly, I'm going to tell you the story of three enormous mysteries, two of which you know very well, and one of which I bet you've never heard of ever. Okay. Mystery number one. This is the one I know or the one I don't? This is the one you know. All right. So about four billion years ago, the earth is one huge, mostly ocean of lifeless chemicals. And then for some reason, which we have never really been able to understand, lifeless chemicals suddenly produce a pulse, and you get life. Hello, yes, I've just arrived now.

Ah, Nick, wonderful. Like Nick, for example. Nick Lane, I'm a professor of evolutionary biochemistry at University College in London. Nick is the main guy in the story I'm about to tell you, but just to continue this setup, that was mystery number one, where does life come from? Next, mystery number three, to make it more interesting. What about the two? You skipped over two.

is going to be the subject of the story. And, more important, the middle one is the deep surprise, because you've never heard of it. So I thought I would skip over two to remind you how familiar you are with one and three. All right. Fine. Go to three and then come back to two. Okay. Fine.

Three. All right. Consciousness. For some reason, for some reason, one animal on the planet, and only one that we can know seems to spring into this very elaborate sense of self-awareness. We don't know why it happened. We don't know how it happened. It just did.

Right. I'm familiar with one and three. You are. Now, here's number two. That's the one that keeps Nick up at night. Yeah, because there's a kind of a gap, a black hole, where everything important in biology happened. We have very little insight into what it was.

Black hole in biology, I like that. So you want to know what it is, this black hole? Yes, you do, you do. You know you do. Okay, yes. Okay. mystery number two. We're a little bit past one.

We're way before three. Four million years ago, we got life. It's just floating around, you know, little specks in the ocean. You know, very simple cells, probably pretty much like a bacterium as we know them today. This is very small for a start. If you're looking at the period at the end of a sentence, say, is it about that size or smaller than that? Oh, much smaller, much smaller than that. A couple of thousands of a millimeter.

meter long. So tiny things, they all look the same in their size and shape and they don't seem to be doing anything very interesting. Well, you know, they were happy babies, or they were using energy, and they were figuring a lot of things out. But if you look inside one of these little things, not much going on.

Yes, it's basically, it's often described as a bag of chemicals. They're not complex. They're not complex. Simple. Simple as can be. And it goes on like this for millions of years, and then tens of millions of years and in hundreds of millions of years. Well, really, two billion years or so.

Two billion years. If not longer. You just have tiny, tiny, tiny simple, tiny simple bopping, bopping, sitting, drifting in the water, bopping, bopping, bopping, bopping, nothing, nothing, nothing. Come on. No, with it. Look, I'm telling you this for a good reason.

There is, you should know, there is no rule which says life has to get bigger. We could have stayed infinitely small for a hundred billion. years, you know, forever, really. Really? Yes, really. But then, Chad, something happened. As they say. About two billion years ago, all of a sudden, practically overnight, a new kind of life shows up, a new cell, and it's huge.

How huge. A lot bigger than what was before. These first ones, the actual volume were now around about 10,000. times bigger. Whoa. Massive increase in size. It's like we just jump from specs to battleships. And inside these things is massive pieces of complex machinery.

And it becomes bigger and bigger and more complex. And it ultimately leads to jellyfish, giant redwood trees, beluga whales, Baluga caviar, which is baby whales. It's not baby whales. Well, never mind. Cherry trees, turtles, librarians, terrain. orangutans, elephants, pterodactyls. There's your second mystery.

Like, how did life for such an enormously long time say so simple, so dull, and so tiny? And then, boom, you get these big life forms. Like, what happened? And why did it not happen for such a long time? Hmm. Well, are you going to enlighten me with some tacit answers? Yes, but I want to remind you, this is a theory we've got here. just, you know, we're making an hypothesis.

I mean, who knows really exactly what happened? I mean, we're never going to find, like, found footage of that moment, right? We can only imagine, and we can only use the evidence that we've got now. That is Ed Young. I'm a science writer at the Atlantic. Ed's the guy who introduced me to Nick, or to Nick's work, and this theory, and he says, here's the important thing to know. During those two billion years when nothing much happened,

It wasn't that life didn't get complicated. It's that life couldn't get complicated. There is a barrier. There is an energetic canyon that simple cells find themselves trapped in. What? It means that it's a huge deal to try to get big. Think about what it takes to get bigger.

It takes bigger cell walls. It takes more surface, more openings, let things in, push things out, more power, more moving parts, and then to make the whole thing fit and work together, you've got to have a bigger design plan. That's your DNA, so you're going to need more DNA. And all that DNA needs to be copied. You're going to need some DNA copiers.

You then need to read the information that's encoded within it. Some DNA readers. And you need to use that information to build proteins. And some builders. And that last bit is especially costly. In other words, you don't get bigger for free. Every new step takes extra energy. Just like if you're going to, you know,

if you're going to increase the size of your company by a thousand times, if you're going to have a thousand times more employees, You're going to need to pay them all. Where are you going to get the money? I mean, you and I, we might be able to go to a bank. Yeah. But if you're a teeny little thing, you don't have any place to go. So how do you get bigger?

I mean, can't you just eat more food than you normally eat so that you get more energy so that slowly over time you get bigger? No? No. I mean, well, you could do that. But suppose you don't have a stomach to absorb the food. You make a stomach somehow? I don't know.

But in order to make the stomach, you've got to eat more food to be. build the stomach, but in order to eat more food, you've got to have the stomach, but you can't really have the stomach unless you eat the food and you can't eat the food unless you have the stomach. You're stuck in a hole kind of. It's like a catch-22 kind of thing. You're stuck in what it calls an energetic canyon. And to climb over the walls of that canyon and to start experimenting with complexity, you need something improbable to happen. You need something very special. So special and so improbable that according to this, this theory. Over the course of all of our planet's history, that has only happened successfully

once. What? What happened? Well, here's the theory. There's life bopping along and it's boring, boring, boring way. Everything is very tiny, very simple. And then one day, two single-celled creatures start to drift towards one another. One of them is an Archaian. Little blob. And one of them is a bacteria. Another little blob, but smaller. They belong to the two great houses of simple things, you know, the Montague's and Capulets of two billion BC. Any case, these two little cells start to get near each other. Slowly. You know, what each cell wants is what the other one has to offer.

Nick imagines that, I don't know, maybe the little one was expelling some kind of chemical. Let's say it's something like hydrogen gas just for the sake of an argument. Let's say the big one likes hydrogen. that's what it wants. And maybe the big one spits out nitrogen, which is what the little one wants, so they kind of come together. And they snuggle up.

Totally ordinary thing. It happens all the time with cells, he said. But in this case... That snuggling gets closer and closer until... Somehow, those two cells meet and... They merge. They just squish together. How do they merge?

You know, membranes, fuse, cell... walls don't always form. Maybe the big one had a hole in its wall and the little one just fell through the hole. I don't really know what the mechanism is, but we do know if it's possible. The point is, somehow this little guy gets in. The bacterium finds itself inside the arcane. So that's the first thing that happens. One little guy gets inside another little guy. Okay. I got to tell you, this is, this is extremely rare. For the most part, cells don't get inside other cells. And when they do get inside of the cells, for the most part, it doesn't work out. Because if you're this little guy on the inside, now you're trapped.

You can't get to the things you want to eat. It's cut off from the outside world, and chances are it will die. Which is what happens, you know, 99.999% of the time. But not this time. If the swallower is capable of bringing in that outside world and feeding it, spoon-feeding it to its swallow-y, if you like, then it will work. And maybe that's what happened here, says Nick. Maybe the big cell had some kind of mutation that allowed it to keep feeding the little cell in its belly.

So the little cell survives and thrives. Because the second thing that happens here is the little cell in the inside starts to divide. So now you have a cell with two cells inside it, maybe then four cells inside it. Which if you're a big cell, it's normally not a great situation. You find yourself with guests inside you.

Imagine having a house party and the guests won't go away. They're having intercourse among themselves, if you like, and producing more guests. There's going to be a riot. There's going to be a murder or something. The point is, says Nick, when you get to this point, it really shouldn't work. But somehow it did. Like, not only did one cell get in another, which is rare, and then that cell survive, even rarer. And then divided without creating a riot, even rarer.

But then somehow this big cell. finds ways over and over of taking care of all those little new house guests. And they're all stages of their life cycle. You've got some old folk in there and you've got some babies in there. And how are you going to do it? Well, you probably need to, let's put in a maternity ward, first of all, to look after the babies. Let's put in some kind of clinic for end of life for the geriatrics. Somehow, this big cell is able to construct all this new machinery inside itself

to keep this extraordinarily various group of, houseguists happy. Wait, why would it bother? I mean, like, what is the, I mean, what does the cell get in return? And you said that it didn't have enough energy to build itself bigger,

so how is it even doing this? Well, now you're getting to the real nub of the story. The key here, says Nick, is those little houseguests that are living now in the big cell? Yeah. They're not ordinary houseguests.

They are a very specific kind of bacteria that we now call mitochondria. And if you look at the descendants, of those little guys who live in us right now? They have an amazingly strong electrical charge. That sort of radiates across the membrane on their outside. And that electrical charge is, you know, it's tiny, it's 150 millivolts,

but if you shrink yourself down to the size of a molecule and feel the strength of the electric field right next to that membrane, it's actually 30 million volts per meter which is equivalent to a bolt of lightning whoa this is what the big cell gets back this is its return gift lightning

and it's this new electricity that gets it that helps it fund all these new adventures and construction projects now they can support enormously larger genome so you can have where bacteria may have one or two copies of a gene. You can now have pin more genes, or 20 or 30 or maybe 50.

There's no penalty for doing so. And what that gives you is a kind of a redundancy that allows different genes to do slightly different jobs or to diverge to, you know, you've got the scope to experiment to try things out. So you have one group going off to become algae and plants and another group becoming animals and another group becoming the fungi and so on. The descendants did so well they've taken over the world. And they all came from that one single coming together, that one union? Yes. It comes down to one merger between two cells that made one cell. And then everything comes from that.

You, me, the redwood tree or the hummingbird, a fungus, piece of algae growing in a pond, every type of form of life that we can see with our naked eyes. And many that we can't come from that single cell. And what this spawns, says Nick, is this is how we get the great tree of life that we see all around us. After eons and eons of sameness, suddenly we get this many splendid thing that is nature. And it starts right here. What we're looking at is truly the second genesis. Okay, hold on a second.

Hold on. How do we know any of this actually happened? like all of the life that we can see comes from one cell. How would we possibly know that? Well, starting with us, if you go in and look at the genetic material inside our cells. About half of our genes, a little bit less than half, we find them in bacteria or archaea. Nick says you can see very clearly that the original DNA of those two cells, those two cells that merged into one, they're inside us. So their sequence and their structure has remained kind of almost intact for two billion years.

And just the structure of your cells alone provides an important clue. If you look at the cells of all of those things, if you take one of your cells and one cell from that fungus or from the spruce or from the whale, unless you were an expert, unless you've been trained in this stuff, it would be very hard to tell the difference between those. In other words, all of our cells, and this is across animals, plants, fungi, they all look something like those original cells. Very, very similar. They will have that nucleus, that's internal skeleton. They would have mitochondria. Those are the lightning bolts, the descendants of that first little guy that got swallowed.

You know, we have 40 trillion cells, and each of those has got, let's say, on average, a thousand mitochondria. So that's a tremendous number of mitochondria in one human being. And the giant redwood tree has a lot more than that. that. And so does the worm. And so from that point of view, just biomass, we are about 40% mitochondria. So just from biomass, they are possibly the single most prolific life form that ever existed. Okay, you got me. I do like this idea of like trillions of little lightning bolts in your belly. I mean, it is also like, you know, it's a little bit like. That's our producer Sorin Wheeler who chimed in as we were working on this. You remember our guy,

what was his name from the floppy ears, the kind of smart. Richard Wrangham. Is that guy? Richard Wrangham, yeah. Life consists of finding energy. That's him. He had that thing about, he wrote a book a long time ago, but it was all about, I actually talked to him at the time. Human ancestors are going along,

doing their thing and they're eating raw leaves in the forest, same way that chimps do now. But then once they learn to cook... Once you start cooking, there's a terrific advantage. Cooking would break things down. And then once... Then you don't have to break things down inside you, which means that you're putting less energy into your food, but getting more out of it.

Maybe it increases the amount of energy that you can get from your food by 25, 30, 40, 50%, maybe more. And his theory is that that is when we got smart, because we were in, again, an energy canyon, where there was just, given what was around you and how much work it took to break it down to the parts you need, you couldn't do much until you light a fire underneath it and you, like a lightning bolt and you break it down so that you don't have to do that work because now the fire is doing that work, then you put it in your tummy and you get all the goods with half the work, and now you have time and energy to make a brain that can think about itself. That is when the genus homo humans in the first full flowering of the sense of that word emerged. Wow, that's interesting.

So the energy canyon leaping theory might actually talk about. on mystery number three, too, the consciousness one. Yeah, but don't you think that cooking is an act that's intentional? I mean, you know, when you decide to light the fire and cook the meat, then you're doing something that you intend to do. Yeah. What really gets to me is when you go back to the original pairing, I mean, that was just pure accident. And that so much would flow from something completely cosmically accidental, that's what really, really... really kind of freaks me out, actually.

That merger and the harmonious continuance of that merger was so breathtakingly improbable that only once did it take. Nick says it only happened once, two billion years ago, and there's no evidence to suggest that it has happened since. So there is no trajectory towards necessary complex life. The universe is not pregnant with the idea of us. there's nothing about the way that evolution has worked on Earth to suggest that complex life is an inevitable outcome. And if this hadn't happened, would the Earth just be still rich with little, I don't know, life forms that are smaller than a grain of rice?

That's all we'd ever get? I think that's the idea. Does that mean that you have to have this incident on planet Zantar and planet Zantar 36 and planet Zantar? and planets. Right, so that's really interesting, right? So I think when we think about finding, the prospect of finding alien life, we think the universe is so vast that we cannot be alone, that there must be life on other worlds. But I think what this tells us is that we will probably find life elsewhere, but it will

probably be microbial. It will, you know, the odds of finding something, you know, like the aliens that you would, would expect, right? So the odds of finding your Star Wars canteener are significantly reduced. The odds are finding, like, a bacterium somewhere, probably reasonable. Huh. You might find life, but maybe it's going to be boring. We could leave it right there. But, you know, you probably won't get killed by them either, so that's a good thing.

That's true. That's true. Yeah. Nick Lane's book on this theory is called The Vital Question. Special thanks to Eric Steinbrook for his work on this podcast and to Richard Wrangham, whose book is Catching Fire. Ed Young, whose forthcoming book is I contain multitudes. You can find all these references on our website. RadioLab.org.

And speaking of mates. Yes, this is what we called this podcast, Cellmates. Yeah. Well, as promised, I'm going to introduce you to two comedy mates after the break. I'm Chad I boomrod. I'm Robert Krollwich. Stick around. Hi, this is Shereen from Sunrise, Florida.

Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Just to heads up, I speak in a briefs a lot. So I'll just say things like totes and like early twants, and you just have to roll with it. I'll just go with it. I'll nod. like I know what you're saying.

Okay, great. Jed here, as promised at the top of the show, I want to introduce you to a new project that comes from two very funny people. My name is Phoebe Robinson, and I am Michael Fastbender's feature baby mama. My name is Jessica Williams, and I plan to be the maid of honor

in Phoebe and Michael Fastbender's wedding. Oh, yay! You're okay with that? I literally just put myself in your fake wedding. Obviously, you're in the wedding. All right, so Jessica Williams and Phoebe Robinson are two people who are obsessed with Michael Fastbender. I don't even think he's that hot. No, that's so controversial.

And they are both comedians and writers. Phoebe has worked for MPV and Comedy Central. Jessica Williams, you might know from The Daily Show, where she's a correspondent. And the two of them have teamed up to make a podcast called, it's debuting today. It's called Two Dope Queens. And my bet is that if you like Radio Lab, you will also like this podcast. Yeah. All right.

Can I be old white for a second? there's nothing else for you to be yeah so dope people still use the word dope yeah I think so yeah but you know even if they don't like all it takes is like two black people to make something cool yeah that's the rule if we came if we walked out in the street tomorrow and we had our shoes on the wrong foot as long as it's two black people doing it I mean hello

criss cross when they did the jeans it was just two of them they were phenoms yeah and everyone was how did you guys meet We met almost two years ago I was doing a background on a black hair in the military piece that she was doing for the daily show. Story is Jessica was doing this segment. Phoebe was part of the segment.

One thing leads to another. Phoebe invites Jessica to co-host this comedy thing she was doing like a live thing. And she says the moment they got up there on stage. We murdered the stage. Homicide, first degree murder. Law and order, baby. This is all good things, right?

Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes. On stage, I was like, this feels really good. She's like, yeah, and I was like, we should do this more often. And so we were like, oh, well, you know, like kind of like we start dating. You're like, oh, yeah, we'll go to a movie. You're like, oh, yeah, we'll go to the Met. And we'll just keep seeing how things go at the end of the date.

And then after a while, it morphed into something that is our baby. We made a baby. Yeah, we made a baby. My favorite royalty customer service thing, is never in my life. Two Dope Queens is a live comedy show that happens at Union Hall here in Brooklyn. Generally what happens is Phoebe and Jessica, they get up on stage and they just kind of riff for a few minutes. I think if you're in the audience, we really wanted to feel like you're hanging out with us.

So they get up there, they sort of go back and forth for a while. Then we have some of our favorite friends who are stand-ups come and do sets in between us talking and hanging out. I wanted to share this thing that my girlfriend and I have been doing. Like this comedian that Phoebe and I both love named Gary Goldman. We role play. Like the other night we were playing Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. But here's the twist. She was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

I was deputy secretary of housing and urban development. So there was that status thing. She was my boss. And I didn't feel she was pushing her agenda hard enough. I was like, did we come to Washington to make friends? We came to make changes And then we have people like Michelle Boutotow Who's really funny

She does stuff for Comedy Central in a lot of places Here's a clip of comedian Michelle Boutot Telling the story about how she met this guy And I was like oh my god this is the one Like we're going to move in together We're going to live by the mall And he came to visit me in New York one time And both the cell phones were on the bed

And they were exactly alike And it rang and I picked it up And this girl was on the other end And she goes, is Eric there? And I go, who this? And she go, who this? And I go, who this? This went on for a real long time.

Because we knew who the fuck this was. Okay, so set up the next clip, the Naomi clip. Yes. Like, who is Naomi? Who is Naomi at Perrigan? She's a younger woman, but she is practically an old lady. Like, all she wants to do is, she says in her stand-up is, like sit at home with a blanket and play with her cats.

As you can imagine, I love to watch Procedurals. I love it, okay? I love me. Criminal Minds is my number one. I do like classic law and order, but I do prefer a special victim, you know? Yes, I just love it, I love it. I love it.

It's amazing how every episode involves a white woman in peril. You know, it's like a white woman's in peril. That's how we get people to care, you know? And it's just nonsense. But if there's one thing that I feel like we should be taking away, is it like, white ladies, okay, Megan's, Sarah's, Becky's, okay? You guys have got to stop with the jogging at dawn and dust. But if the light is low, you should not go.

Are you following? Now, you've got two options, okay? You're either going to find a dead body or become a dead body with a jogging. We always like to have women represented doing stand-up or storytelling on our show. We make sure that that's in every episode. People of color. People of color. It's really, really fun.

And I hope that if you come to see the show or even if you start listening to our podcast, that you'll see that we really love doing it. You just want a hilarious show. Yep. And I think we really do deliver on that. Yeah. Phoebe Robinson and Jessica Williams from the brand, and new WNYC Studios podcast, Two Dope Queens.

Definitely check it out. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast from and check them out. Two Dope Queens. Thank you, guys. Thank you. I'm Chad I boomrod. Thanks for listening. Hi, this is Nick Lane.

Radio Lab is produced by Jada Bumrad. Dylan Keith is director of sound design. Sorenuehler is senior editor. Jamie York is our senior producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Brenner Farrell, David Gebel Matt Kielty Robert College

Andy Mills Latif Nasser Melissa O'Donnell Kelsey Padgett Ariane Wack and Molly Webster With help from Alexander Lee Hunt

Alexander Lee Young Tracy Hunt Stephanie Tam and Michael Lowinger Our fact checkers are Eva Dasha and Michelle Harris

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