Radiolab - Life in a Barrel

Episode Date: March 4, 2022

This week, we flip the Disney story of life on its head thanks to a barrel of seawater, a 1970s era computer, and underwater geysers. It’s the chaos of life. Latif, Lulu, and our Senior Producer Matt Kielty were all sitting on their own little stories until they got thrown into the studio, and had their cherished beliefs about the shape of life put on a collision course. From an accidental study of sea creatures, to the ambitions of Stephen J Gould, to an undercooked theory that captured the world’s imagination, we undo the seeming order of the living world and try to make some music out of the wreckage. (Bonus: Learn how Francis Crick really thought life got started on this planet). This episode was reported by Latif Nasser, Matt Kielty, Heather Radke, Lulu Miller and Candice Wang. It was produced by Matt Kielty and Simon Adler. Sound and music from Matt Kielty, Simon Adler, and Jeremy Bloom, and dialogue mix by Arianne Wack.Special thanks to Alan and Alida Goffinski for giving our chaos musical life in the song at the end of the episode. Radiolab is on YouTube! Catch up with new episodes and hear classics from our archive. Plus, find other cool things we did in the past — like miniseries, music videos, short films and animations, behind-the-scenes features, Radiolab live shows, and more. Take a look, explore and subscribe! Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab today.  Citations in this episodeScientific Papers:Elisa Beninca, Reinhard Heerkloss, et al, “Chaos in a long-term experiment with a plankton community” Nature (2008)Hendrik Schubert, Reinhard Heerkloss, et al, “Chaos theory discloses triggers and drivers of plankton dynamics in a stable environment” Scientific Reports (2019) Books:Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex LifeFrancis Crick, Life Itself: Its Origin and NatureStephen Jay Gould: Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, and The Mismeasure of ManDavid M. Raup, Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck?David Sepkoski, Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline  

Okay, wait, you're listening. Okay. Go on listening to radio lab. Radio lab. From W and Y. See? See? Okay, so let me just, because I also don't entirely know what's going on.

I'm Louis Miller. I'm Lotha Fnazzar. And we also have with us, producer Matt Kilti. We have three different pitches. Yeah, we're gonna, you guys are doing three different things. Yeah, but mine's very little, but I need, you gotta leave me 15 minutes at the end. 15 minutes, okay, and then, little context, a while back,

the three of us found ourselves in a studio together because our editor Soren, he knew that we were independently working on these three different stories. So you don't know that Lulu, you do know the stories or you don't know? No, I don't know. And Unbinos to us at the time,

he decided that each of our stories pitted chaos versus order in a way that could upend some of our deepest beliefs about how life works. Yeah. And so he wanted to just get us in the ring together. It's a cage match. It's a story cage match. Yeah, and we'll get to all that.

But, uh, should I start? Yeah. A lot of has got story number one. All right. Okay, so we're starting at the University of Rostock in Germany. Yeah, it is totally started here in Rostock in Germany. Yeah, the story started here in Rostock. With this ecology professor named Hendrick Schubert. Did it pronounce that right?

Absolutely great, you got it. So back in the early 80s, Hendrick finishes his undergrad degree in ecology at Rostock. Studies in a couple different departments there, goes on teach for a while at a different university. And then by chance, I got the professor ship here in Rostock in my former department. He came back home.

It was really by chance I never dreamed of. But the job was department chair. So basically now he was going to be the boss of his former teachers. Yes, I acquired. Yeah, it's kind of a funny dynamic, right? Anyway, one day he walks into this temperature-controlled lab that they have there, and he sees one of his old professors.

Menta of mine, Reinhard. Reinhard here, Klaus. Yeah, my name is Reinhard, here Klaus. And right next to Reinhard, he also sees much to his surprise. I saw this barrel, a bright blue, 100-liter barrel. Yeah, my barrel for my experiments. And Hendrick knew this barrel. When I was still a student and we had practical course, where we...

Because as an undergrad, he had done this experiment with Reinhardt, where they had filled these barrels full of sea water. Break a water from a lagoon of the Baltic Sea, and they were tweaking the nutrient levels just to watch how it would affect the, you know, tiny microorganisms living in the water. Like copper pods, soup, lank, that's...

But it was a simple little experiment that it only lasted for two weeks. And now, you know, a decade later, Reinhardt still had that barrel, you know, just sitting there. So I asked Reinhard, hey, what are you doing with this? And he taught me. So Reinhart then tells him the story. So I can go back to the late 80s or go. So a few months after the initial experiment in 1989, something unthinkable happened.

The big jump in history. The Berlin Wall fell. The Berlin Wall fell. The Berlin Wall fell. Rothstock was in East Germany, and all of a sudden just fell like overnight. Everything changed. The currency changed, the head of state changed, the university changed its name, its curriculum. Like all these very specific things about Reinhardt's day-to-day life, all of a sudden just changed. Yeah, it's a cultural shock. Cut to six months later.

June 1990. In all the chaos, Reinhardt had totally forgotten about the barrels. Until one day, a colleague of his in his department wanted to do a different experiment. And so came to him and was like, hey, could you, it was just bugging him. Like, could you just get those barrels out of there? I was asked to remove this barrel for their own experiment. So he does it one by one. So he takes the one, he shimmies it over,

he jumps it out. Empty the water and wash out the city man. Takes the other one. So he's sort of doing that. And then he gets to the control barrel, which is the one in the experiment that they had done nothing to. It was just sitting there under a light source, right?

As a comparison for the other barrels where they were tweaking things. Okay. And for some reason, he's about to, it was just sitting there under a light source, right? It was as a comparison for the other barrels where they were tweaking things. Okay. And like for some reason, he's about to tip it over and then he stops himself. And he's like, you know what? Let me just like take a little sample of this and look under a microscope and see what's actually like in this barrel. Is there still life in it or is it not in it?

And so he looks at it and he's totally dumbstruck by what he sees. Sam befilled with many, many organisms with souplunked and algae and so on. I mean, he hadn't even touched this thing in months. Nobody had. I thought that there will be nothing just more or less dead. But when he looks, he sees that it's not just alive, it's thriving. There's like tons of different species. So there are phytoplankton,

these are like little plants and a lot of them are green. So plankton, which are basically like the animal-y type of plankton, some of which eat the phytoplankton, some of which eat the other zooplankton. And then there are bacteria, which are basically like the equivalent of the mushrooms or the whatever that are recycling the whole system. Unwittingly, he had created a little natural world. Quick question of clarification. Did he create it or did he just preserve it? Yeah.

I think it's like a semantic thing. That's what I love. Like, sure. So maybe he didn't create it, but he, he, like, he sustained it. He didn't sustain it because he didn't touch it. It just happened. It's like a symbol of ocean that he got and somehow this symbol of ocean is continuing to live. Okay. Cool. Okay. So also when he sees that it's alive, part of the other reason that it excites him is that at that time in the 80s and 90s, there was this kind of open question in the field of ecology about the natural course of an ecosystem.

And I'm kind of like bastardizing the question in a way that I understand it, so like, but this is basically, I think, what it is. If you could just give an ecosystem the basic things it needs, right? Like sunlight and space and whatever. But there were no humans around to mess with it, no comets, no earthquakes, no outside confounding factors. What would happen? What would that ecosystem do? Huh, cool.

Okay. And there's sort of two options here. Like it might be that all the creatures get, you know, to some certain population level and with a bit of eating one another and more being born over here. And then it basically stabilizes. You know, beyond the day to day up and down,

it basically is like a line in the end, like a never ending line of harmony. Yeah, okay. Or maybe would you see like more like a cycle, like there would be more of one thing for a while, and it would dominate see more like a cycle. Like there would be more of one thing for a while and it would dominate for a while, but then it sort of crashes and because there's not enough of another thing

for it to E and then another thing takes over and then instead of like a, so in this case instead of a line, what you have is a circle. A circle of life. That's right, that's right. It's what Mufasa says in the line king, the circle of life, that's the song, right?

So two options, line or circle, which are kind of just two flavors of balance. The prevailing view was when they left Elon, the nature tend to get balanced. Ah! But here, in this barrel, Reinhard thought, I have the perfect opportunity to answer this question.

I've got an ecosystem that's totally untouched by humans. And the species in that ecosystem are born, reproduce, and die at a super quick clip. So in just a few months' time, I'll be able to see like hundreds of generations generations worth of transformation. And so he starts tracking how the various species are doing. Week after week, he's like interrupting Christmas with his family because he's like, I gotta go,

sorry, looking at and scrutinizing like a glass of water over and over and over again. And everyone's like, this is the most boring thing. Like even his colleagues who are like scientists, who do boring other stuff. I'm gonna go check in my stale water. Exactly. They're all like, this is, like they're like, what even is this experiment?

But from another way, it's like, he is a god over seeing a tiny universe where he is watching it. And it's like generations are passing in effectively the blink of an eye for him And he's watching this like very dramatic story unfolding But he's trying to figure out like what exactly is the shape of it like what is the plot? He's like am I in a suspense movie? Am I in an apocalypse? That's exactly what's happening and he can't figure it out because what he is singing and apocalypse. That's exactly what's happening.

And he can't figure it out because what he is singing? It's like a microbial game of thrones or something that he's like watching, like the species that are there, they're booming, they're crashing. One type of creature could be the dominant species in the barrel for hundreds of generations and then just, it's a blip from then on. Like it just crashes and then it never comes back

It's like Rome rises things to me on top of the world forever And then yeah the barbarians coming to like oh hell no, it's Germany now right right right and He watches this play out in this barrel for over six years waiting for the harmony Oh And he just never It It never came. No line, no circle. In this nutshell, of a small ecosystem, nature is chaos chaos chaos. What Reinhardt had discovered in this barrel was this tiny ecosystem,

when left to its own devices, was completely chaotic. So what does that mean, mean? Like, is that saying it's just booming and busting at random, or does that mean... Well, so... First of all, maybe I should tell you a little bit about chaos, because for most of the people, chaos is just total random, but is not.

This is Alisa Beninca. I'm Alisa Beninca, and I'm a theoretical ecologist. Rhinehart brought her into analyze his data, and she says the way to think about chaos is not whether it's random or not, but to what extent we can predict what's gonna happen. So actually, a chaos is a system which is high predictability

on the short run, but cannot be predicted in the long term. And the weather is actually the best example for that. Materialologists can do forecast up to two weeks. After that, there are no better than you or I trying to predict the weather. And in the case of this barrel, species could be predictable for around 15, 30 days. After that, you couldn't know who is going to be in advantage.

So it's not like things are just happening completely randomly for no reason whatsoever. It's just that we, like it's beyond us to see why things are happening or what's going to happen, which to Reinhardt, you know suggested There's no line. There's no circle. Like harmonious natural balance. That's all BS Like at any moment the natural equivalent of the Berlin wall could fall and and and just upend the whole system. He told me, I never have seen a stable state. So when Hendrick, the student turn department chair, ran into Reinhart and his barrel, Reinhart told him about all of this data he collected.

Sometimes I had a stable state for some weeks or even months, but then suddenly the system shifted again, and I decided to follow up. And then with the help of Alisa and others, Rhinard gets his work published in nature. And according to Hendrick, there was this immediate blowback from some other ecologists. Yes.

Because it sort of, some did know that this whole field of study, like, if this is true, why should we do any research anymore? If we're trying to bring a system back to order and you're saying there's no such order to begin with, what the hell are we even doing? Well, if there's chaos in nature, why do we do restoration or whatever? But, you know, Hendrick, he was also skeptical of the result for, you know, scientific reason. Because, you know, even if Reinhardt found chaos inside this one barrel, it doesn't mean that chaos is something mandatory. He showed that there might be chaos.

Hendrick is like, I'm, I like, I'm redoing this whole thing. Huh, really? Let's see what happens. So this time he repeats the experiment. Similar setup and improved setup. Try to control for all possible variability. To get our best, let's say, and for a year twice,

with eight barrels this time, the scoop and measure, scoop and measure, scoop and measure, etc. What did you, what did you and your colleagues find? We had signs of chaos in some of the vessels and in some of the compartments tested. So not all eight. Not all and not always the same. Like when there was chaos, it was playing out in different ways in the different barrels,

which provides me at least with a little sigh of relief because in some ways it's saying, like we still don't know. Or is it just now like a multiverse of chaos where we can't even tell if it's gonna be chaotic or when it's gonna be chaotic, like I just see deeper, deeper, deeper chaos, which, you know, which fine, I'm okay with.

Really? Yeah. For me, it was, for me, reading about this study, I found it personally, I found it quite jarring. I think you really, I really wanted there to be, like a hidden order to everything that is not about us, that has nothing to do with us, where things make sense.

And for that not to be there, I think, is very unsettling. Like when we do conservation or restoration or whatever, it just feels like you'd be throwing your hands up. And like, if the order is gone, if there is no guaranteed harmony, that actually makes conservation work even more important. It's like if we don't intervene and protect the order, it's not guaranteed.

Who cares about your choices if it's chaos anyway? If there are things that are beyond your control that are gonna screw it all anyway. It's like the idea of the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. I don't think it does, which is terrifying. So what you, you have to fabricate a form of justice. And yeah, there's a pandemic.

Oh, you can I interrupt you? Yeah. Okay, right that version of the Lion King. See how many kids go to see that? Okay. Ready? Yeah, do it. Go make the song.

Elton John, go for it. Okay. Numanai singin' numanai. I'm very serious. Here was coming down here. Symba based on this work as as confirmed by Ryan Hart There is no Delegant harmony awaiting you and if you don't choose wisely and show respect to your fellow creatures and plants and bacteria and fungi that everything will die. The balance is not delicate, the balance is not there. At all.

And the song is not the circle of life. It's a giant abyss of no promises, vortex of life. But then why are we gonna watch any of the rest of the movie? Like, even if you're a lion king, your lion kingdom is going to, like the Roman Empire, it's gonna crumble and fall and like, who cares? Well, I for sure think that's coming. I think we're probably out of here pretty soon, but let's make a decent for the other

humans and creatures that will get to live in the short future. Sure, yes. Okay, so that was round one of our chaos off. Yeah, so we're gonna take a quick break and you can use that time to really ruminate on whether you believe chaos is totally empowering and great or has let all the air out of your spiritual balloon. And then when we come back, round two we've got another Smackdown or Diverse Chaos coming up from producer Matt Kilti. Lulu. What if Radio Lab? And we're back. With Matt. Lulu. Lutthiff, radio lab. And we're back.

With Matt. Okay, so my turn? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I see how these things go together, because lots of has this little barrel ecosystem that was in chaos, which is not totally random, but it's like a weird, wildly fluctuating thing. Right. But I have a story that kind of like steps that up, because we found a part of life, you could argue the most important part, where it looks like things are actually fully, completely random.

Ah. And I say we, because. Hello. Hi. Can you hear me Heather? We can hear into you. I reported this story out with our contributing editor, Heather Rackie. Yes, yes, can you remember Heather we can hear into you? I reported the story out with our contributing editor Heather Rackie Yes, yes, yes, and Heather actually first heard this story from this guy Chris Hoff

Thank you Heather who's a philosopher of science a lot of times that case Western reserve university Yeah, Chris how did we come to the story you kind of you wrote me an email and said I'm a great story for you Yeah, you're like I got a hell of a tale. Exactly. How's your seatbelt? Okay, so we're going back in time to some big collars, cool music. Back to late 60s early 70s and to this guy, processor goals, the floor issues, Stephen J. Gould. I want to start by presenting the basic argument in the somewhat abstract form. Maybe you've heard of him. Darwin, in fact, never said that.

Oh, yeah. Oh, he's the greatest. He's one of the best science writers of all time. And his new book, Full House. Yeah, he wrote some big deal books, Miss Messier of Man is one. Right. He wrote a lot about evolution. The fundamental principles of Darwinian theory.

A lot about the history of science. But before Gould was a public thinker, he was just a young man who really loved fossils. He had like the kind of classic moment where his dad took him to the American Museum and had some history. I was four or five to hold dinosaurs. He sees the T-Rex. I remember standing under the Tyrannosaurus and a man sneezed.

I thought the Tyrannosaurus had come to life. It was about to devour me, but at that moment of fear, I just like fascination creep in. He was like absolutely hooked. Oh, I didn't know that. That's cute. In Gould says, after that moment, this fascination with fossils just started to unlock all these questions. Questions like, why are we here on this Earth?

What are we related to? How is the Earth built? What has its history been through time? What's been the pageant of change over the immense span of years? So Gould felt himself drawn to the field of paleontology, the study of fossils. But that actually became kind of a problem for him. Because paleontology was not really seen as like a real science. You don't really get to answer big fun questions in paleontology.

You kind of look at a lot of fossils. Yeah, I have that. You described it as stamp collecting. This is the problem that Gold was attempting to confront. You know, if we're going to survive as a science, we need to find a way of contributing answers to important questions. So in 1967, Gould gets his PhD. And he's immediately hired at Harvard. And then one day, Sky Tom Shopped, a paneling intelligence at the University of Chicago, called up Gould, said he'd read some of his research and he'd been wondering if they could do anything really cool basically with computers and the fossil record.

And gold's like, oh, that could be something. So the fossil record is like everything we humans know about what existed before us, what allowed us to start thinking about evolution, it kind of became the foundation for Darwin. And for this guy's shop, he thought, well, maybe there's actually still something in there. And we could use these new, powerful machines

to pull it out and start answering some big, important questions. Why are we here on this earth? And so, Gould, was just like, yes. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so let's set the scene. It's like 1972, shop, Gould.. Right and they invite this guy Dave Rout Another paleontologist who had done these really cool studies looking at seashells and geometry And then there's this fourth guy Dan Simberloff and ecologist who was really into you know mathematical modeling

So we got three paleontologists and an ecologist. By the way, it sounds like a beautiful beginning to a joke. Three paleontologists and ecologists and a computer walk into a bar. Yeah. Okay. It's the winter of 1972. These four guys go up to Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Where there's this sort of holy grail with fossil records.

This fossil record of marine life. Marine and vertebrates. What are we even talking about? Like shellfish or what? Yeah, mullisks. Yeah, mullisks and mnites. Oh and vertebrates. What are we even talking about like shellfish or what? Yeah, mollusks. Yeah, mollus, amonites. Oh, sure. Try the bites. Try the bites. Yeah, I mean. You're various bites. Yeah, stuff on the sea floor. And in this book for each species it basically has. Where this first appears in the fossil record, where it disappears in the fossil record.

So they grab this book, they go to a house somebody had, and then they go to the computer, take their big book out, they start entering all the data. And then they're like, okay, what next? I mean, the problem, okay, like a computer need, you can't just say computer, make a cool thing. You have to ask a computer a question. And you get the sense that they just did not know what question to ask the computer. They didn't have a good question to answer that evolutionary theorists would care about. So, like, for five days, they don't know what to do. And then, right before, it's like the last day, Ralph is like, what if we have the computer simulate evolution at random? And why would they do that? Well, because evolution, you know, is not a random process. Right. Darwin established it's like it's small incremental change over

long periods of time. But it's not just that, right? Oh, it favors certain. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And it favors like adaptive traits. Right. The the Right. Yeah. Yeah. And it favors like adaptive traits. Right. The the fittest survive. Yes. And if you're not fit, you just die. You get wiped off the face here. It's because the strongest push you off because they're better suited for the better than you. Yeah. Right. What a bunch of jerks way of the world. But so all they had was this really simple question. Right. If things were just happening by chance, what would we see? So what they do is they make a computer program and they start with, let's say they start with a species in this program.

They don't give that species any definable characteristics, anything like that. It's just this non-script species. Can you just name the species just because? Yeah, let's call it blue. Blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu. Okay, blue. Blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu. And then they program the computers to that at just,

it's an arbitrary number. It's like, let's say, 100 years. 100 years of blue, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, and the computers are like, okay, I now assign all of you bloops one of three things at random. So thing number one could be nothing happens to the bloops. The bloops just get to keep on living, go through to the next round.

So that's one option, or the computer could pick number two, which is a little tweak to blue. And from blue, you get... Blab, blab, blab, blab, blab, blab, blab. Blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu, blu Okay, so they produced these simulations running blue after blue through this program over millions of years And then they go to the computer. They like printed out and all of a sudden They see something pretty bananas, which is the simulations that they produced Look remarkably like the actual fossil record. Oh wait, what is that? I can I can share a screen Chris showed us these graphs. Okay, so this

is a graph of the actual fossil record. For the sake of this, just imagine tree a life sort of evolution, you know, image. And you can see, okay, mullisks, they start here, they die here, and try the bites, they start here, die there. And then Chris showed us the graphs of these simulations. You see this one over here? Oh, whoa. Basically, if you were to zoom in on these branches, you'd see at the end of each of the branches, the extinction points of the species.

And the ones from the computer are the exact same as the ones from the fossil record. So like, bloops and bleeps are going extinct, just like trilobites, when extinct, just like ammonites, when extinct. So for me, it's like, I'm like, huh, wow, yeah, these do look similar, but I'm like, so what? Yeah, so what?

So I think, well, the key here is kind of seeing the resemblance that these randomly simulated groups bear to real groups and Then remembering that These are just going extinct randomly Whereas we thought these were going extinct through natural selection That is wild. So it's like it's just like computer programming equals life. Computer programming of nothing but chance and randomness, which is totally counter to like the sort of order of natural selection. So natural selection would be like you've got a bird with a

like awesome beak and cool eyes and it's like can fly like a baller and then there's like a lesser bird that's kind of a a weeny bird and it's got like me it can't see in three dimensions and it's like not good at sports it's like basically this is Heather bird. Heather bird. Heather bird. Heather. You're a real projector yourself on the weeny bird. But in this scenario in like the Darwinian idea it's like athlete bird with its great eyes, it's great wings, wins the evolutionary battle. Heather Bird goes extinct. Weenie birds as a kind of bird,

as a species, cease to exist. But what these computer simulations were showing is that extinction doesn't work that way. And that actually, Heather Weenie bird and super athlete bird have have equal chance of not necessarily thriving, but like existing. So it's like, if those two species were born at the same time, Weeniebird and Athletebird stop to chance, which one would survive longer than the other one?

Right. So fitness might explain why one species does better than another, but what they saw suggest that when it comes to extinction, it's not fitness or alkenpini one another. It's just random. But it's a little hard to get to mind around. But wait, but I have a question. Going back to that marine, you know, their end with whole, what did they all, do we know what they thought at that moment? What they were, they were all totally shocked.

Crystal does the way he heard it is basically. When the printouts come out, they're like, oh my God. God. Yes. Also, we should say it's at this point that we got Chris a better microphone. This is a mic gain of eight.

Yeah, Chris, you sound great. Anyways, basically, they were kind of freaked out because the idea is if Darwin can't explain why things go extinct, and the question is, why do things go extinct? Is it just chance and randomness? And that question would send the three of them off in very different directions.

So Gould, for Gould, he actually, this was mostly just like a big, Haza moment. Because paleontology, it sort of knocked down a piece of Darwin and put forward this new question. Yeah, exactly. And it's Chris put it. It put paleontology at the high table.

But Gould kind of leaves extinction behind. It goes back to what I said at the very beginning that we want to know why we're here. And he starts using randomness and chance to look at things like diversity and adaptation. To a large extent, it is a grand scale accident that we're here. Evolution has oddly contentioned pathways that we never run the same way twice. And he starts writing all sorts of books. He becomes kind of like famous Steven J. Gold. But then Ralph, the guy who came up with the question

to ask computer, he becomes obsessed with extinction. And stays on that track for the rest of his professional career. He ends up writing this book, which I have right here. Extinction, bad genes, or bad luck, or Bad Luck. Oh, question mark. And to route the answer was it's both. Like you can't discount fitness, but when it comes to Extinction, there's so much other stuff happening.

The climate is changing or an asteroid hits Earth, sea levels can rise and fall drastically. Like all of that stuff is outside of your control. You could sort of die at any moment. So you sort of charts this middle ground view, which is probably how ghoulsah too. But then you have Tom Schopff, the guy who started the whole project, and he just goes full randomness. I mean, the impression that I get was like pretty much from the word go. He was like, randomness is the order. Shopped develop this idea called species as particles.

Species as particles in space and time. He believed that if extinction is truly random, then as a whole species are sort of indistinct. They have no real differences between one another. There are no like better or worse. The way he puts it, there's no inferior or superior beings. There's just ones that survive and ones that don't. Shopeegan writing a book trying to flush out this theory. But in 1984, at the age of 44, he was in Texas doing fieldwork with students and he died suddenly of a heart attack. While reporting this story, we would, we talked to some paleontologists and we're like,

well, like, who, like, do we know? Is it sort of like the Ralph Badgeans bad luck? Is it the shop total randomness? Like, what is, what drives extinction? And the answer we got is that we still don't know. Like, we still haven't answered the question. They sort of uncovered with this computer in Woods Hole. Well, I gotta say I'm rooting for shops. I mean, if it doesn't matter how quote unquote fit or mussely or well-honed or sleek our

model is, that doesn't relate to how long we're going to like hang around on earth. It means in a very real way, like we're all equally good. And for me, it creaks open all this possibility that might be waiting behind things that we look at and deem unfit or deformed or weeny bird-esque. It returns all this possibility that gives me a sense of thrill. It makes me want to look at the things I'm discounting. Totally. I don't know.

I'm discounting, you know? Totally. I don't know. I'm not sure. Because, okay, so to me, it's like, it's this, right? Like, let's say we used to have this idea of fitness where it's like, okay, there are the cool kids who are fit and they, in the old mentality to be like, yeah, like, this is like, we're, we're, team human. There's some people that pick, get picked first for team human who are the ones who are helping us survive and some people who get picked last for team human who are the ones who are helping us survive and some people who get

Pick last for team human who are like us But then this it seems like this if it's like okay, what your survival actually even the fittest people like they're not necessarily helping you survive those Fitty those super fit Characteristics like you could still get hit by a bus and like that's the way they go So it's not like oh now all the people who are picked last on the team, they have the same chances of... But it's not like the people who are picked last, they aren't now brought up to the team of the people who are picked first.

It's like the people who are picked first are now brought down to the level of the rest of us where any of us, but that's the same thing. No, no, no, this is what when Lulu was talking, I'm like, no, it's just a matter of perspective and it's like everything has the same value which means it's like wonderful and beautiful, or everything has the same value, which is, it has no value. It's pointless and defeated, yeah.

But that's kind of awesome. That's great. And it's great, yeah, and you can sit and you can sit in either reality and bask in that. It's just up to you which one you want to bask in. Yeah. Did you want to reflect, Matt Matt about how it had changed to? No. Yeah, do it.

Do it. I want that. Well, I mean, the only thing I would say is that, like, what are the things we learn when reporting the story is that 99.9% of all things that have ever existed on Earth have gone extinct. Basically, basically, everything that's ever lived has eventually died. Whether or not, like, and it seems like chance is a big part of that, but we don't fully

know, but whatever they, everything does. And I've sort of maybe naively always existed with this thought that, like, we as species are progressing towards something, like some sort of better world eventually, for us and I don't know, other species, and kind of really believed in the idea that like, in some way, your actions, the actions that you take, the things that you do are rewarded in some way to continue to strive towards something better.

And instead, in doing this reporting, it's like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, you, you're kind and every other kind eventually just gets wiped off the face of the earth. You have no foresight. You don't know it's coming. It just happens. And not only does it just happen, but like in the long run, it happens to almost everything. And I guess in some way I'm like, it just feels deeply nihilistic and I'm kind of like, well, what are we doing here? I got this, this is making me think of a song for the shape. The song with the shape?

I was like, okay, if it's a circle, yours is telling us it's like it's the clip of life. And we're all gonna die. Who knows where and why. So I even try. Just eat some french fry! When we come back, we're gonna take the chaos, throw down, just stir the pot or the barrel a little bit. I have with me a special guest who is going to have a special guest.

Yep, they're going to be men now. They're beaming in. They're beaming in. So just wait. They're coming. Oh my gosh. They're coming. Oh, gosh. They're coming. Oh, it's getting up. Hi, everyone. Hi, back. And all is right in the world now.

I'm like, uh, so Candice Wong is our former intern and she is the one who got us into this final mess when she told me that we should take a closer look at how it all began. Do you guys have a sort of thing you think about when you think of the origin of life? Sure. In the ocean? Primordial ooze? It's like cauldrons of heat. Heather, did you just say primordial ooze?

Yeah, primordial ooze. Oh, isn't it soup? Is that? Oh, no, that's how I remember it. The primordial soup. Maybe that's right. So it's this idea that life somehow emerged out of this crazy chaotic soup of chemicals, which I remember learning about in the ninth grade.

Yeah. Yeah, me too. I even learned about it on this very show a few times. Yeah, I remember that. But apparently the reason that the primordial soup theory is so widespread, all goes back to one singular experiment done in 1952 that involves a bowl of soup, can of soup, please tell me. Barrel of water? A cauldron, it involves a cauldron, but it's kind of barrel-ass.

Or like a gloss flask or something. So can is, okay, tell us about the experiment and who our guy was. Okay, so our guy is Stanley Miller, this grad student in 1952. You should call go. Um, and- I'm looking at Stanley Miller. Oh, oh, there's a picture. Should we look at it? Like what you see?

Somebody took a sexy pic of him. They did- it's like- I see a Bill Nye, the science guy with no hair. Bondling a globe full of lightning. This is the sexy photo you're talking about? Yes, kind of. What? What?

I kind of feel like the moon. I mean, I think sexy is too much. It's too much, but look at it. He's got swagger. He's got swag. He's got science swag. Anyway, Candace, sorry, please go on. Yeah, so he's looking for an experiment to do

and thought of this old theory from 1920s. Basically that primordial soup theory that we just talked about. The theory had been floating around, but it had never been tested. Yeah. And so Stanley was like, okay, I'm gonna test this out. He took his little cauldron, filled it with all these gases.

There's like ammonia, hydrogen, methane, all those things that people thought were in the early atmosphere. And then he was like, okay, I'm gonna create a little storm and he zapped it. Like a bolt of the early earth lightning. Yeah, lightning, basically. And he's watching the cauldron for only a day. And then he finds that it starts turning a little pinkish. And he's like, oh my goodness, like, is there something going on here? And then a week later, it turns deep red, turbid red. Hmm, like smoky red.

Yeah, it's like rusty blood red water that's collecting at the bottom. Oh, the water's becoming red, I see, I see. Yeah, so it is kind of like a little like red soup at the bottom. So he pulls this red borscht out of the cauldron and he looks to see what's in there and he finds amino acids amino freaking acids So like does anyone know what an amino acid is? Ingredients of DNA, right? Like it's like that stuff But it is the ingredients of pretty much everything else in the cell. So the little

motors and enzymes and all the stuff that actually makes a cell work. Yes, the amino acids, the building blocks of life. So it was a kind of almost a meme as an experiment. It's a beautiful experiment. So this is Nick Lane. Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry at University College London. And he says that as beautiful and scientifically fantastic as Miller's experiment was, the idea that it explains the origin of life is a bit of a leap. You know, going back to Frankenstein, the idea that you have electricity and lightning and you zap things and they come to life, they spring to life. And all you need is another lightning strike and low and behold, you know, fast forward four billion years and we've

got humans. You know, if that doesn't persuade a 13 year old, well, good, because it doesn't persuade me either, huh, why not? Like, what's wrong with that? Well, Nick says, you know, amino acids are great, no. But- It's another 10 or 12 steps to make something living. To make an actual living thing that can make copies of itself you need RNA and DNA and a cell membrane and all the intricate goodies inside. This is asking a lot of spontaneous chemistry that all of these steps should just happen without anything to direct it.

How do you get from just a bunch of ingredients in a soup to like very structured complicated life? That's a very very far gap to jump. I mean Miller himself worried about this during his lifetime. Yeah, but the most famous critic of this whole primordial soup idea was actually Francis Crick, as in the guy who helped discover a little thing called DNA. No-Bell Prize winner, Francis Crick, published an extraordinary book called Life Itself, in which he argues from a scientific point of view that life could not have got started on this planet. So this is a snippet from a Colin radio show where they are discussing what Francis Cricks are as a far more logical explanation of how life began.

The catalog story short, he suggested it was sent here by an alien civilization from the other side of the universe. Yes, Francis Crick proposed what he called directed pan spermia, which is to say some alien civilization puts themselves, some bacterial cells on a rocket and crashed it on the earth. One of those spaceships crashed into the early earth. It's cargo of bacteria still down, and eventually became us.

And that's honestly how Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize winner, saw the beginning of life on this planet. Yeah, seems more feasible than a glass cauldron. Than a lightning bolt. Than a lightning bolt. I mean, my immediate reaction is that it's bonkers, but there's a kind of length, extreme but more real version of that, which is that organic molecules conform in space

and will be delivered to Earth on meteorites. And that's definitely true. That does happen. There's no question about that. But if we can be right, wait, wait, we got to stoke the resident person who knows less here. I mean, what? Well, plenty of amino acids, the same amino acids that Stanley Miller had produced that all of those have been found, and more. From space? In space, yes. How are they found? Because they arrive on meteorites

or people have occasionally taken samples of things, but mostly from meteorites. And Nick says it's not just amino acids. Bits and pieces of the building blocks of DNA have been found there as well. That's wild. Yes. It's amazing that this cosmic chemistry happens

and is delivered to the earth. And so maybe they had something to do with the origin of life. Yes, maybe, maybe. But for Nick, as a full way to explain the origin of life, that's still, you know, that's two steps too far. Even if amino acids or DNA apparently are always raining down from the sky, you still have those 12 other steps he mentioned.

How do you get it to do the things that cells do, which is to say grow, divide, and copy itself? And so his best guess for how or rather where life began, then he's scientific. He's like, this is just my guess. I'm not saying it is. Is a particularly hellish spot that looks very not conducive to life. I personally think life started in deep sea, hydrothermal vents.

You can get these vents anywhere. Some of them can be very deep, 5 or 6 kilometers down. Way beneath the surface of the water, far from any sunlight, where the heat from inside the earth is churning up and creating these craggy rock structures. They can be beautiful spires, pinnacles of rock, 60 meters tall. I mean, I like to think of them as Gothic cathedrals or something.

They're full of little details, little doodles of rock. Can they be beautiful things to look at? And according to Nick, they've got the goods. They've got the materials, the right chemicals, methane, and carbon and hydrogen are swirling around in the water. They've got the energy source, not lightning, but this constant churn of the earth's heat. But finally, what he thinks make them really special

is their structure. The amazing thing about these vents is they mimic the structure of cells in that it's kind of around space with a wall around it. And you can think of a cell as a kind of a bag of solution with a membrane around it. And because you've got the materials, the constant churning energy, and these rock walls that kind of force everything together. That's making these gases react together to form organic molecules, which are forming inside the pores themselves.

They will form spontaneously in this kind of environment into what we call protocells, a little bit optimistically maybe, but effectively a membrane around a bag of water with some stuff inside. It's like the matter and magic you need to make life is lush there. It's like you got it all. Yes, it's got the right materials and it's got the structure. And I think that's what's been missing from the chemistry

and it's what's missing from the soup and it's what's missing from delivery of organic molecules from space by Pantsperm, you know, it ends up in a soup. How does that soup form structure? Well, the earth itself forms the structure for you in the first place in these hydrothermal vents. There is a beautiful link between the geology of the planet with active volcanic systems and active turnover of the surface of the planet and the bottom of the oceans and the way that living cells work. It's as if a living planet gives rise to living cells which have the same structure. They're both the planet and the cell is a little bit like a battery.

It's got a positive charge outside, negative charge inside, a membrane surrounding it and they're both like that. And there's a lovely, lovely sense of continuity that a planet gives rise to living cells. Wow, that is very cool. Balulu, you've been championing chaos this whole time. And now you're serving up a story that's like, to me, this is like, this is order.

Like you're putting order right back at the beginning of it all. Well, that's interesting. I mean, what I... Like the, yeah. Right, like the soup or the pan-spirming are both like very chaotic. Like some random thing just fell to earth

or a random lightning bolt hit a random, you know, piece of gas at the right time. Like, those are pretty chaotic, but if it's like, oh, look, there's this chimney that was being built and there are a whole bunch of them and they have the exactly right gradient and the right this and the right that. Like, then it's the very orderly thing.

Like the shell is a tiny planet. I guess, I mean, I was seeing Nick's explanation as yet another loss. He's pointing out that our beginning, even our scientific beginning, isn't as clean of a story as we thought. There was no lightning strike, no clear moment where it all began, just this slow and bad breath

out of event churning, clumsy mix of chemicals in a dark dank pit. To me, that rips away the last shred of order that I thought the old super version had. You know? Yeah. I don't know because to me, it sounds like maybe at the very beginning of life, there was an orderliness built right on top of the orderliness of the planet itself. You are making me think, if I just focus on the structure of the vent and the cell, there is a sense of belonging in that. Like, the every cell in our body looks a little like this planet.

Maybe we don't matter and the fact that we're here is random, it's okay, I said everything is chaos From the day we arrived on this planet, in darkness and far from the sun There is more that we need than just lightning can see More chance that it would never be done. And as we fight for our place here, competing through struggle and strife, you can't anticipate who gets too domineed in the contest for the greatest life. It's the chaos of life that could fall to the sun. I'm just a spare or a foe It's not as nice as that of snow It's a two-in-a-half-way, two-in-a-half-way

It's just a three-way, two-in-a-half-way It's upon this cross that's grinding It's just a three-way, two-in-a-half-way This grind is... It's just chaos! Guess that's it! This episode was reported by Lachifnosser, Matt Kielte, Heather Radke, Candace Wong, and me, Lulu Miller. It was produced by Matt Kielte and Simon Adler, with sound and music from Matt Kielte's Simon Adler. And Jeremy?

Bloom. Bloom. Big thanks to Alan Gaffinsky for creating that song and a lead of Gaffinsky for belting the heck out of it. Thanks also to Chuck Cheesman, Sarah Luterman, Doug, Irwin Candace Wong. Thanks to David Sapkowski, whose book rereading the fossil we drew on for the story

about Stephen J. Gould and extinction. Thank you to Nick Hadad, Iyana Johnson, Chris Cloudsmire, Laura Verhag, and Noel Bowen. That'll do it. Thanks for listening. Goodbye. I'll bow one. That'll do it. Thanks for listening.

Goodbye. Radio Lab was created by Chad Abumrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulum Miller and Lutti Fnauser are co-hosts. Susie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Dillon Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Qsick, W.A.A. Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz-Coutieres, Sindrniana Sam-Bendum, Matt Kielty, Anna McEwan, Alex Niesen, Sara Carrey, Anna Rusk-Witt Paz,

Arian Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Carolyn McCusker and Sarah Sondbach, Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krueger and Adam Ishibot. Hi, this is Albert in Stek College, Pennsylvania. 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. Science reporting on Radio Lab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Science Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science.

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