Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318

1. 0:00 – 1:09

   Introduction

   1. NLNick Lane0:00

      Well, the source of energy at the origin of life is the reaction between carbon dioxide and hydrogen. And amazingly, most of these reactions are exergonic. Which is to say, they release energy. This- if you have hydrogen and CO2 and you put them together in a Falcon tube and you warm it up to, say, 50 degrees centigrade, and you put in a couple of catalysts and you shake it, nothing is gonna happen. But thermodynamically, that is less stable. Two gases, hydrogen and CO2, is less stable than cells. What should happen is you get cells coming out. Why doesn't that happen is because of the kinetic barriers. It's becau- that's why you need the spark.

   2. LFLex Fridman0:38

      The following is a conversation with Nick Lane, a biochemist at University College London, and author of some of my favorite books on biology, science, and life ever written. Including his two most recent titled Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death, and The Vital Question: Why is Life the Way It Is? This is Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Nick Lane.

2. 1:09 – 14:56

   Origin of life

   1. LFLex Fridman1:09

      Let's start with perhaps the most mysterious, the most interesting question that, uh, we little humans can ask of ourselves. How did life originate on Earth?

   2. NLNick Lane1:20

      You could, you could ask anybody working on the subject and you'll get a different answer from all of them. They will be passionately held opinions. And they're opinions grounded in science, um, but they're still really at this point, they're opinions. Because there's so much stuff to know, um, that all we can ever do is get a kind of a small slice of it, and it's the context which matters. So I can give you my answer. My answer is from a biologist's point of view. That has been missing from the equation over decades, which is, well, what does life do on Earth? What, what, why is it this way? Why is it made of cells? Why is it made of carbon? Uh, why does it, why is it powered by electrical charges on membranes? There's all these interesting questions about cells that if you then look to see, well, is there an environment on Earth, on the early Earth 4 billion years ago, that kind of matches the requirements of cells? Well, there is one. There's a very obvious one, it's basically created by whenever you have a wet rocky planet, you get these hydrothermal vents, uh, which generate, um, hydrogen gas in bucket loads, and electrical charges on kind of cell-like pores, uh, that can, that can drive the kind of chemistry that life does. So it seems so beautiful and so, so obvious, um, that I've spent the last 10 years or more trying to do experiments. It turns out to be difficult of course. Everything's more difficult than you ever thought it was going to be. But it looks, I would say, more true rather than less true over that 10-year period. I think I, I have to take a step back every now and then and think, "Hang on a minute, where is this going?" Uh, I, I'm happy it's going in a sensible direction. Uh, and, and I think then you have these other interesting dilemmas. I mean, I'm often accused of being too focused on life on Earth, too kind of narrow minded and inward looking, you might say. I, I'm, I'm talking about carbon, I'm talking about cells, and maybe you or plenty of people can say to me, "Ah, yeah. But life can be anything. I have no imagination." And maybe they're right. But unless we can say why life here is this way, and if those reasons are fundamental reasons or if they're just trivial reasons, then we can't answer that question. Um, so, so I think they're fundamental reasons, and I think we need to worry about them.

   3. LFLex Fridman3:40

      Yeah, there might be some deep truth to the puzzle here on Earth that will resonate with other puzzles elsewhere that will, um, solving this particular puzzle will give us that deeper truth. So, what, to this puzzle, you said vents, hydrogen, wet. So, chemically, what is the potion here? How important is oxygen? You wrote a book about this.

   4. NLNick Lane4:07

      Yeah. And I actually just came straight here from a conference where I was chairing a session on whether oxygen matters or not in the history of life. Of course it matters.

   5. LFLex Fridman4:15

      Yeah.

   6. NLNick Lane4:15

      Uh, but it, it matters most to the origin of life to be not there. Um, as I see it, we have this... I mean, life is made of carbon basically, primarily. Um, organic molecules with carbon-carbon bonds. And the building block, the Lego brick that we take out of the air or take out of the oceans is carbon dioxide. And to turn carbon dioxide into organic molecules, we need to strap on hydrogen. And so we need an en- and this is basically what life is doing, it's hydrogenating carbon dioxide. It's taking the hydrogen and it bubbles out of the earth in these hydrothermal vents and it sticks it on CO2. Um, and it's kind of really as simple as that. Um, a- and actually thermodynamically, there's the, the thing that I find most troubling is that you, if you do these experiments in the lab, the molecules you get are exactly the molecules that we see at the heart of biochemistry and the heart of life.

   7. LFLex Fridman5:10

      Is there something to be said about the earliest origins of that little, um, potion, that chemical process? What really is the spark there?

   8. NLNick Lane5:24

      There isn't a spark. Um, there is a continuous chemical reaction. And there is kind of a spark but it's a continuous electrical charge which helps drive that reaction.

   9. LFLex Fridman5:37

      So literally spark (laughs) ?

   10. NLNick Lane5:39

       Uh, well, the charge at least. But yes. I mean, a spark in that sense is, um, we are, we tend to think of in terms of Frankenstein. We tend to think in terms of electricity and one, one moment you zap something and it comes alive.

   11. LFLex Fridman5:52

       Mm-hmm.

   12. NLNick Lane5:52

       Uh, and what does that really mean? You've, it's come alive and now what's sustaining it? Well (laughs) , we are sustained by oxygen, by this continuous chemical reaction. Uh, and if you put a plastic bag on your head then you got a minute or something before, uh, it's all over.

   13. LFLex Fridman6:07

       So it's some way of being able to leverage a source of energy?

   14. NLNick Lane6:11

       Well, the source of energy at the origin of life is the reaction between carbon dioxide and hydrogen, and amazingly most of these reactions are...... exergonic, which is to say they release energy. There's-- if you have hydrogen and CO2 and you put them together in a Falcon tube and you warm it up to, say, 50 degrees centigrade and you put in a couple of catalysts and you shake it, nothing's gonna happen. But thermodynamically, that is less stable, two gases, hydrogen and CO2, is less stable than cells. What should happen is you get cells coming out. Um, uh, uh, so why doesn't that happen is because of the kinetic barriers. It's bec- that's where you need the spark.

   15. LFLex Fridman6:50

       Is it possible that life originated multiple times on Earth? The way you describe it, you make it sound so easy.

   16. NLNick Lane6:57

       (laughs) There's a long distance to go from the s- first bits of prebiotic chemistry to, say, molecular machines like ribosomes.

   17. LFLex Fridman7:05

       Is that the first thing that you would say is life? Like, if I introduce you, to- the two of you to- at a party, you would say that's a living thing?

   18. NLNick Lane7:15

       I would say as soon as we introduce genes, information, into systems that are growing anyway, so I, I would s- I would talk about growing protocells. As soon as we inf- in- introduce even random bits of information into, into there, uh, I'm thinking about RNA molecules, for example, doesn't have to have any information in here, it can be completely random sequence. But if it's introduced into a system which is in any case growing and doubling itself and reproducing itself, then any changes in that sequence that a- allow it to do so better or worse are now selected by perfectly normal natural selection.

   19. LFLex Fridman7:51

       But the system...

   20. NLNick Lane7:52

       So that's when it becomes alive, to my mind.

   21. LFLex Fridman7:54

       ... that's encompassed into, like, um, uh, an object that keeps information and evolves that information over time, changes that information over time...

   22. NLNick Lane8:06

       Yes, exactly.

   23. LFLex Fridman8:06

       ... in response to the environment.

   24. NLNick Lane8:07

       So it's always part of a cell system from the very beginning.

   25. LFLex Fridman8:11

       So does your sense that it started only once because it's difficult, or is it possible it started at multiple locations on Earth?

   26. NLNick Lane8:18

       It's possible it started multiple occasions. Um, there's two provisos to that. One of them is oxygen makes it impossible, really, for life to start. So as soon as we've got oxygen in the atmosphere, then life isn't gonna keep starting over. So I, I often get asked by people, you know, "Why, why can't we have life starting? If it's so easy, why can't life start in these vents now?" And the answer is, i- if you want, if you want hydrogen to react with CO2 and there's oxygen there, hydrogen reacts with oxygen instead. It just, you know, you, you're getting explosive reaction that way as rocket fuel. So it's never gonna happen. But the other, for, for the origin of life earlier than that, all we know is that there's a single common ancestor for all of life. There could've been multiple origins and they all just disappeared. Um, but there's a very interesting deep split in life between bacteria and what are called archaea, which look just the same as bacteria. Um, and they're not quite as diverse, but nearly, and they are v- very different in their biochemistry. And so any explanation for the origin of life has to a- account as well for why they're so different and yet so similar. And that makes me think that life probably did arise only once.

   27. LFLex Fridman9:29

       Can you describe the difference that's interesting there? What, well, how they're similar, how they're different?

   28. NLNick Lane9:34

       Well, they're different in, uh, in their membranes primarily. They're different in things like DNA replication. They use completely different enzymes and, and the genes behind it for replicating DNA.

   29. LFLex Fridman9:44

       So they both have membranes, both have DNA replication.

   30. NLNick Lane9:48

       Yes.
3. 14:56 – 20:30

   Panspermia

   1. LFLex Fridman14:56

      Um, what do you think about the idea of, uh, panspermia that the theory that life did not originate on Earth and was planted here from outer space? Or pseudopanspermia, which is like the basic ingredients, the magic that you mentioned was planted here from elsewhere in space?

   2. NLNick Lane15:15

      I don't find them helpful. That's not to say they're wrong. Uh, so, so pseudotranspermia, the idea that, you know, the chemicals, the amino acids, the nucleotides are being delivered from space. Well, we know that happens. It's unequivocal. Uh, they're delivered on meteorites, comets, and so on. Um, so what do they do next? That's, to me, the question. And what they do is they stock a soup. Like, presumably they land in a pond or in an ocean, or wherever they land, and then you end up with a, you know, a best possible case scenario is you end up with a soup of nucleotides and amino acids, and then you have to say, "So now what happens?" And the answer is, "Oh, well they have to go bloop (laughs) become alive."

   3. LFLex Fridman15:50

      Mm-hmm.

   4. NLNick Lane15:50

      So, how did they do that? You may as well say that a miracle happened. Um, I don't believe in soup. Um, I th- I think what we have in a vent is a continuous conversion, a continuous growth, a continuous reaction, a continuous converting, a flow of molecules into m- more of yourself, you might say, even if it's a small bit. So you, you've got, you've got a kind of continuous self-organization and growth from the very beginning.

   5. LFLex Fridman16:14

      What-

   6. NLNick Lane16:14

      You never have that in a soup.

   7. LFLex Fridman16:17

      Isn't the entire universe and living organisms in the universe, isn't it just, uh, soup all the way down? Isn't it all soup?

   8. NLNick Lane16:25

      No. No. I mean, soup almost by definition doesn't have a structure.

   9. LFLex Fridman16:29

      But soup is a collection of ingredients that are like randomly interacting-

   10. NLNick Lane16:34

       Yeah, but they're not random. They're not. I mean, they, they, the, we have chemistry going on here. We have membranes-

   11. LFLex Fridman16:39

       So there-

   12. NLNick Lane16:39

       ... forming, which are, which are, you know, effective-

   13. LFLex Fridman16:41

       There's a process going on.

   14. NLNick Lane16:41

       ... oil/water interactions. Uh, i-

   15. LFLex Fridman16:43

       Okay. S- it feels like there's a direction to a proc- like a directed process.

   16. NLNick Lane16:47

       There are d- there are directions to processes. Yeah. Uh, and if you are com- if you're starting with CO2 and you've got two reactive fluids being brought together and they, they react, what are they gonna make? Well, they, they make carboxylic acids, which include the fatty acids that make up the cell membranes and, and they form directly into bilayer membranes. They form like soap bubbles. It's, it's spontaneous organization caused by the nature of the molecules. And, and those things are capable of growing and are capable, in effect, of being selected. Even before there are genes, we have th- so we have a lot of order. And that order is coming from thermodynamics. And the thermodynamics, i- is always about increasing the entropy of the universe, but if you have, if you have oil and water and they're separating, you're increasing the entropy of the universe, even though you've got some order, which is the soap and the water are not, not miscible. Now, n- uh, to come back to your first question about, um, panspermia properly, um, that just pushes the question somewhere else. That just, even if it's true, maybe life did start on Earth by panspermia, but, but so what are the principles that govern the emergence of life on any planet? We, we, it's an assumption that life started here, and it's an assumption that it, you know, it started in a hydrothermal vent or it started in a terrestrial geothermal system. The question is can we work out a testable sequence of events that would lead from one-

   17. LFLex Fridman18:09

       Yeah.

   18. NLNick Lane18:09

       ... to the other one and then test it and see if there's any truth in it or not? With panspermia, you can't do any of that.

   19. LFLex Fridman18:15

       But the, the fundamental question of panspermia is do we have the machine here on Earth to build life? I- is-

   20. NLNick Lane18:23

       Not yet.

   21. LFLex Fridman18:23

       ... the vents enough? I- is oxygen and hydrogen...... and whatever the heck else we want and some source of energy and heat. Is that enough to build life-

   22. NLNick Lane18:36

       Yes.

   23. LFLex Fridman18:36

       ... or, or well, that's-

   24. NLNick Lane18:38

       (laughs)

   25. LFLex Fridman18:39

       ... (laughs) of course, you would say that as a human-

   26. NLNick Lane18:41

       Yeah.

   27. LFLex Fridman18:42

       ... uh, but there could be aliens right now chuckling at that idea. Maybe you need some special, um, special sauce.

   28. NLNick Lane18:50

       Uh, well-

   29. LFLex Fridman18:50

       Special elsewhere sauce.

   30. NLNick Lane18:52

       ... yes. And, and-
4. 20:30 – 33:44

   What is life?

   1. LFLex Fridman20:30

      so freaking amazing-

   2. NLNick Lane20:34

      That it-

   3. LFLex Fridman20:34

      ... that it happened though. It feels like there's a direction to the thing. Can you try to answer from a framework perspective of what is life? So you said there's some order and yet there's complexity. So it's not perfectly ordered. It's not boring.

   4. NLNick Lane21:00

      Mm-hmm.

   5. LFLex Fridman21:00

      There's still some fun in it and it also feels like the processes have a direction through the selection mechanism. They seem to be building something always better, always improving. I mean, maybe it's-

   6. NLNick Lane21:15

      I mean, that's a perception.

   7. LFLex Fridman21:16

      That's our romantization of things are always better. (laughs) Things are getting better, we'd like to believe that.

   8. NLNick Lane21:22

      I mean, you think about the world from the point of view of bacteria and bacteria are the first things to emerge-

   9. LFLex Fridman21:27

      Yeah.

   10. NLNick Lane21:28

       ... from whatever environment they came from and they dominated the planet very, very quickly and they haven't really changed. Four billion years later, they look exactly the same.

   11. LFLex Fridman21:36

       So about four billion years ago, bacteria started to, to really run the show.

   12. NLNick Lane21:42

       Yeah. Yeah.

   13. LFLex Fridman21:42

       And then nothing happened for a while?

   14. NLNick Lane21:44

       Nothing happened for two billion years.

   15. LFLex Fridman21:46

       Yeah.

   16. NLNick Lane21:47

       Then after two billion years, we see another single event origin, if you like, of, of our own type of cell, the eukaryotic cell. So cells with a nucleus and lots of stuff going on inside. Another singular origin, it only happened once in the history of life on Earth. Maybe it happened multiple times and there's no evidence, everything just disappeared. But we have to at least take it seriously that there's something that stops bacteria from becoming more complex, because they didn't. You know, that's a fact that they, they emerged four billion years ago and something happened two billion years ago, but the bacteria themselves didn't change. They remain bacterial. So there is no trajectory, necessary trajectory towards great complexity in human beings at the end of it. It's very easy to imagine that without photosynthesis arising or without eukaryotes arising, that a planet could be full of bacteria and nothing else.

   17. LFLex Fridman22:36

       Okay. We'll get to that 'cause that's a brilliant invention and there's a few brilliant invention along the way. But what is life? If you were to show up on Earth but to take that time machine and you said, asking yourself the question, "Is this a stepping stone towards life?"

   18. NLNick Lane22:52

       Hmm.

   19. LFLex Fridman22:52

       As you step along, when you see the early bacteria, how would you know it's life? Is... And then-

   20. NLNick Lane22:59

       Yeah.

   21. LFLex Fridman23:00

       This is really an important question when you go to other planets and look for life. Like what, uh, what is the framework of telling the difference between a rock and a bacteria?

   22. NLNick Lane23:12

       I mean, the question's kind of both impossible to answer and trivial at the same time and I don't like to answer it because I don't think there is an answer. I think we're trying to describe-

   23. LFLex Fridman23:20

       That's the most fun question.

   24. NLNick Lane23:21

       ... the process that's-

   25. LFLex Fridman23:22

       What do you mean there's no answer? Oh, so-

   26. NLNick Lane23:23

       No, there is no answer. I mean, there's, there's lots out there, at least 40 or 50 different definitions-

   27. LFLex Fridman23:27

       Yeah.

   28. NLNick Lane23:27

       ... of life out there and most of them are, well-

   29. LFLex Fridman23:31

       Not convincing.

   30. NLNick Lane23:32

       ... obviou- ob- obviously bad in one way or another.
5. 33:44 – 37:19

   Photosynthesis

   1. NLNick Lane33:44

   2. LFLex Fridman33:44

      Let's actually go there. Let's, let's go through the inventions.

   3. NLNick Lane33:47

      Yeah.

   4. LFLex Fridman33:48

      Um, what is photosynthesis? And why is it hard?

   5. NLNick Lane33:52

      Well, there are different forms. I mean, basically, you're taking hydrogen and you're sticking it onto CO₂ and it's powered by the sun. Question is where are you taking the hydrogen from? And in photosynthesis that we know in plants, it's coming from water. So you're using the power of the sun to split water, take out the hydrogen, stick it onto CO₂ and the oxygen is a waste product and you just throw it out, throw it away. So it's a, you know, the single greatest planetary pollution event in the whole history of, of, of, of the Earth.

   6. LFLex Fridman34:21

      The pollutant being oxygen?

   7. NLNick Lane34:22

      Yes. Yeah. It also made possible animals. You can't have large, active animals without an oxygenated atmosphere. At least not, not in the sense that we know on Earth.

   8. LFLex Fridman34:33

      So that's a really big invention in the history of Earth?

   9. NLNick Lane34:35

      Huge invention. Yes. And it happened once. There's a few things that happen once on Earth and, you know, you're always stuck with this problem, is it did, once it happened, did it become so good so quickly that it precluded the, the same thing happening ever again? Or are there other reasons? And we really have to look at each one in turn thinking, "Well, why, why, what's, what's, why did it only happen once?" In this case, it's really difficult to split water. It requires a lot of power and that power you're effectively separating charge across a membrane. And the way in which you do it, if it doesn't all rush back and, and, and kind of cause an explosion right at the site, requires really careful wiring. Um, and that wiring, it can't be easy to get it right because, you know, (laughs) the plants that we see around us, they have chloroplasts. Those chloroplasts were cyanobacteria once. Those cyanobacteria are the only group of bacteria that can do that type of photosynthesis. So, there's plenty of opportunity, but-

   10. LFLex Fridman35:28

       So not even many bacteria. So who, who invented photosynthesis? That-

   11. NLNick Lane35:32

       The cyanobacteria or their ancestors.

   12. LFLex Fridman35:34

       And there's not many, um-

   13. NLNick Lane35:36

       No other bacteria can do what's called oxygenic photosynthesis. Lots of other bacteria can split fr- I mean, you can take your, your hydrogen from somewhere else. You can take it from hydrogen sulfide bubbling out of a hydrothermal vent. Grab your two hydrogens, the sulfur is the waste, now.

   14. LFLex Fridman35:51

       Yeah.

   15. NLNick Lane35:51

       Um, you can do it from iron. You can take electrons... So the early oceans were probably full of iron. You can take an electron from ferrous iron, so iron 2+ and make it iron 3+.

   16. LFLex Fridman36:01

       Mm-hmm.

   17. NLNick Lane36:01

       Which now precipitates as rust. Uh, and you take a, a, a proton from the, the acidic, early ocean, stick it there, now you've got a hydrogen atom. Stick it onto CO₂, you've just done the trick. The trouble is, you bury yourself in rusty iron. And with sulfur, you can bury yourself in sulfur. One of the reasons oxygenic photosynthesis is so much better is that the waste product is oxygen, which just bubbles away.

   18. LFLex Fridman36:26

       That seems like extremely unlikely and it's extremely essential for the evolution of complex organisms because of all the oxygen.

   19. NLNick Lane36:36

       Yeah.

   20. LFLex Fridman36:36

       You could do this.

   21. NLNick Lane36:36

       And that didn't accumulate quickly either.

   22. LFLex Fridman36:39

       So it's converting, what is it? It's converting energy from the sun and the resource of water into the resource needed for animals?

   23. NLNick Lane36:50

       ... both resources needed for animals. We need to eat and we need to burn the food. And the, w- we're eating plants, um, which are getting their energy from the sun and w- we're burning it with their waste products, which is the oxygen. So there's a lot of, kind of circularity in that. But with- with- with- without an oxygenated planet, you couldn't really have, um, predation. You- you- you don't... You- you can have animals but you can't really have animals that go around and eat each other. You can't have ecosystems as we

6. 37:19 – 47:20

   Prokaryotic vs eukaryotic cells

   1. NLNick Lane37:19

      know them.

   2. LFLex Fridman37:19

      Well, let's actually step back. What about eukaryotic versus prokaryotic cells, prokaryotes? What, how big, wh- what are each of those and how big of an invention is that?

   3. NLNick Lane37:31

      I personally think that's the single biggest invention in the whole history of life.

   4. LFLex Fridman37:34

      Exciting. (laughs) So what- what are they? Can you explain?

   5. NLNick Lane37:37

      Yeah. So- so- so I- I mentioned bacteria and archaea. These are both prokaryotes. Um, they're basically small cells that don't have a nucleus. If you look at them under a microscope, you don't see much going on. If you look at them under a super-resolution microscope, then they're fantastically complex. Uh, in terms of their molecular machinery, they're amazing. In terms of their morphological appearance under a microscope, they're really small, um, and- and really simple. The earliest life that we can physically see on the planet are stromatolites which are made by things like cyanobacteria and- and- and they're large super structures. Effectively biofilms plated on top of each other, uh, and- and- and you end up with quite- quite large structures that you can see in the fossil record.

   6. LFLex Fridman38:19

      Mm-hmm.

   7. NLNick Lane38:19

      But they- they don't... They never came up with animals. They never came up with plants. They- they came up with multi-cellular things, filamentous cyanobacteria, for example. They're just long, you know, strings of cells. But the origin of the eukaryotic cell seems to have been what's called an endosymbiosis. So one cell gets inside another cell. Uh, and I think that that's transformed the energetic possibilities of life. So what we end up with is a kind of, uh, supercharged cell which can have a much larger nucleus with many more genes, all supported... If you think about it, you could think about it as a- as multi-bacterial power without the overhead. So you've got a- you've got a cell and it's got bacteria living in it, and those bacteria are providing it with the energy currency it needs. But each bacterium has a genome of its own which costs a fair amount of energy to- to express, to, uh, to kind of turn over and convert into proteins and so on. What the mitochondria did, which are these power packs in our own cells, they were bacteria once and they threw away virtually all their genes. They've only got a few left.

   8. LFLex Fridman39:25

      So mitochondria is, like you said, is the bacteria that got inside a cell-

   9. NLNick Lane39:29

      Yeah.

   10. LFLex Fridman39:30

       ... and then threw away all this stuff it doesn't need to survive inside the cell, and then kept what?

   11. NLNick Lane39:35

       So what we end up with... So it keeps always a handful of genes, in our own case, 37 genes.

   12. LFLex Fridman39:40

       Mm-hmm.

   13. NLNick Lane39:41

       Um, but there's- there's a few protists which are single-celled things that have got as many as 70 or 80 genes. So they, it- it's not always the same but it's always a small number. Um, and y- you can think of it as a pared down power pack whe- where the control unit is really being, has been, uh, kind of pared down to almost nothing. So you're putting out the same power but the- the investment in- in the overheads is really pared down. That means that you can support a much larger nuclear genome, so we've gone up in the number of genes but also the- the amount of power you have to convert those genes into proteins. We've gone up about four-fold in the number of genes. But in terms of the- the size of genomes and your ability to- to- to make the building blocks, make the proteins, we've gone up 100,000 fold or more. So it's huge step change in the possibilities of evolution. Um, and- and it's interesting then that the only- the only two occasions that complex life has arisen on earth, plants and animals-

   14. LFLex Fridman40:37

       Mm-hmm.

   15. NLNick Lane40:37

       ... uh, fungi you could say are- are- are complex as well but they don't form such complex morphology as- as plants and animals, start with a single cell. They start with an oocyte and a sperm fused together to make a zygote. So we start development with a single cell, and all the cells in the organism have identical DNA, and you switch off in- in the brain, you switch off these genes and you switch on those genes. In the liver, you switch off those and you switch on a different set. And the standard evolutionary explanation for that is that you've, you know, you're restricting conflict. You don't have a load of genetically i- different cells that are all fighting each other. Um, and- and so it- it works. The trouble with bacteria is they form these biofilms and they're all genetically different and- and effectively, they're incapable of that level of cooperation. Uh, they would get in a fight.

   16. LFLex Fridman41:26

       (inhales) Okay. So, um, why is this such a difficult invention of getting this bacteria inside and becoming an engine which the mitochondria is? Why was that... Why- why do you assign it such great importance? Is it great importance in terms of the difficulty of how it was to achieve or great importance in terms of the impact it had on life?

   17. NLNick Lane41:46

       Both. Uh, it had a huge impact on life because if- if that had not happened, you can be certain that life on earth would be bacterial only. It would be-

   18. LFLex Fridman41:56

       And that took a really long time to-

   19. NLNick Lane41:58

       It took two billion years.

   20. LFLex Fridman41:59

       Yeah.

   21. NLNick Lane41:59

       And it hasn't happened since to the best of our knowledge. So it looks as if it- it's genuinely difficult. And if you think about it then from- from- from just an informational perspective, you- you think bacteria have got... They- they- they structure their information differently. So a bacterial cell has a small genome. It might have 4,000 genes in it. But a single E. coli cell has access to about 30,000 genes potentially. It's got a kind of meta-genome where other E. coli out there have got different gene sets and they can switch them around between themselves. A- and so you can generate a huge amount of variation and, you- you know, they've got more g- an E. coli meta-genome is larger than the human genome. We have 20,000 genes or something. So... And they've had four billion years of evolution to work out what can I do and what can't I do with this meta-genome? And the answer is you're stuck, you're still bacteria. So they have explored...... genetic sequence space far more thoroughly than eukaryotes ever did because they've had twice as long at least and they, they've, they've got much larger populations and they never, they never got around this problem. So, why can't they? It seems as if you can't solve it with information alone so w- what's the, what's, what's the problem? The problem is structure. If s- if s- if cells, if the very first cells needed an electrical charge on their membrane to grow, and in bacteria it's the, it's the outer membrane that surrounds the cell which is electrically charged, you try and scale that up and you've got a fundamental design problem, you've got an engineering problem. And th- there are examples of it and, and what we see in all these cases is what's known as extreme polyploidy, which is to say they have tens of thousands of copies of their complete genome which is, you know, energetically hugely expensive and, uh, y- you know, it, you end up with a large bacteria with n- no further development. What you need is to in- incorporate these electrically charged power pack units inside with their control units intact, uh, and for them not to conflict so much with the host cell that, that it all goes wrong, perhaps it goes wrong more often than not, and then you change the topology of the cell. Now, you don't necessarily have any more DNA than a giant bacterium with extreme polyploidy but what you've got is, uh, an asymmetry, you now have a giant nuclear genome w- surrounded by lots of subsidiary energetic genomes that do, do all the e- d- they're the control units that are doing all the, all the, all the, all the, all the control of energy generation.

   22. LFLex Fridman44:32

       Could this have been done gradually or does it have to be done, th- the power pack has to be all intact and ready to go and-

   23. NLNick Lane44:39

       Uh...

   24. LFLex Fridman44:39

       ... working?

   25. NLNick Lane44:40

       I mean, it's a kind of step change in the possibilities of evolution but it doesn't happen overnight. It's gonna still require multiple and multiple generations so it could take, you know, it could take millions of years, it could take shorter times. This is another thing I would like to put the number of steps and try and work out what's required at each step and we, we are trying to do that with sex, for example. You can't have a very large genome unless you have sex at that point, so what are the changes to go from bacterial recombination to eukaryotic recombination, w- what, w- what do you need to do, why do we go from passing around bits of DNA as if it's loose change to fusing cells together, lining up the chromosomes, recombining across the chromosomes and then going through two rounds of cell division to produce your, your gametes? All eukaryotes do it that way. So again, you know, (laughs) w- why switch? What are the drivers here? So there's a lot of, there's a lot of time, there's a lot of evolution but as soon as you've got cells living inside another cell, what you've got is a c- is a new design, you've, you've, you've got new potential that you didn't have before.

   26. LFLex Fridman45:39

       So the cell living inside another cell, that design allows for better storage of information, better use of energy, uh, m- more delegation, like a hierarchical control of the whole thing, and then, and then somehow that leads to the ability to have multicell organisms?

   27. NLNick Lane46:00

       I'm not sure that you have hierarchical control necessarily but you, you, you've got a system where you can, you can have a, a, a much larger information storage depot in the nucleus, you can have a much larger genome and that allows multicellularity, yes, because, um, it allows you... It's a, it's a funny thing, you, to, to have a, to have a, a, a, an animal where I have, you know, 70% of my genes switched on in my brain and a different 50% switched on in my liver or something, you've got to have all those genes in the egg cell at the very beginning and you've got to have a, a, a program of development which says, "Okay, you guys switch off those genes and switch on those genes and you guys, you do that."

   28. LFLex Fridman46:40

       Mm-hmm.

   29. NLNick Lane46:40

       But all the genes are there at the beginning. That means you've got to have a lot of genes in one cell and you've got to be able to maintain them and the problem with bacteria is they don't get close to having enough genes in one cell so they w- if you were to try and make a multicellular organism from bacteria, you'd bring different types of bacteria together and hope they'll cooperate and the reality is they don't.

   30. LFLex Fridman46:57

       That's really, really tough to do.
7. 47:20 – 55:03

   Sex

   1. LFLex Fridman47:20

      Uh, so how was, uh, so another, you know, fun invention, us humans seem to, uh, utilize it well but you say it's also very important early on is sex. So, uh, what is sex, uh, just asking for a friend-

   2. NLNick Lane47:35

      (laughs)

   3. LFLex Fridman47:36

      ... and when was it invented and how hard is it in- to invent just as you were saying, and why was it invented? Why, how hard was it and when?

   4. NLNick Lane47:45

      I have a PhD student who's been working on this and we've just published-

   5. LFLex Fridman47:48

      On sex?

   6. NLNick Lane47:48

      ... a couple of papers on sex, yes, yes, yes.

   7. LFLex Fridman47:50

      Nice. Where do you publish these-

   8. NLNick Lane47:52

      (laughs)

   9. LFLex Fridman47:52

      ... this biology, is it biology, genetics journals?

   10. NLNick Lane47:54

       Yeah, well this, this is actually P- PNAS which is the, um, Proceedings of the National Academy.

   11. LFLex Fridman48:00

       So like broad, big, big picture stuff.

   12. NLNick Lane48:02

       Everyone's interested in sex.

   13. LFLex Fridman48:03

       Yeah (laughs) .

   14. NLNick Lane48:04

       The, the, the job of biologists is to make sex dull.

   15. LFLex Fridman48:07

       (laughs) Yes, yeah, that's, that's a beautiful way to put it okay so when was it invented?

   16. NLNick Lane48:13

       Uh, it was invented with eukaryotes about two billion years ago. Um, all eukaryotes share the same basic mechanism that you produce gametes, that gametes fuse together so a gamete is, is the, the egg cell and the sperm. They're not necessarily even different in size or shape, uh, so the, the simplest eukaryotes produce what are called motile gametes, they're all like sperm and they all swim around and they find each other and they fuse together, they don't have kind of much, much going on there beyond that. And then these are haploid which is to say we all have two copies of our genome and the, the gametes have only a single copy of the genome so when they fuse together you now become diploid again which is to say you now have two copies of your genome and what you do is you line them all up...Um, and then you, and then you double everything. So now we have four copies of the complete genome and then we criss-cross between all of these things. So we take a bit from here and stick it on there, and a bit from here and we stick it on there. That's recombination. Um, and, and then we go through two rounds of cell division. So we divide in half, so now the two daughter cells have two copies. Then we di- divide in half again. Now we have some gametes, each of which has got a single copy of the genome. And that's the basic ground plan for what's called meiosis and, uh, and syn-gamy, that's, that's basically sex. Uh, and it happens at the level of single-celled organisms and it happens pretty much the same way in plants, and pretty much the same way in animals and so on. And it's not found in any bacteria. They switch things around using the same machinery and they take up a bit of DNA from the environment. They take out this bit and stick in that bit, and it's the same molecular machinery they're using to do it.

   17. LFLex Fridman49:50

       So what about the kind of, you said find each other, this kind of imperative-

   18. NLNick Lane49:54

       Yeah.

   19. LFLex Fridman49:54

       ... to find each other? What is that? Like, is that-

   20. NLNick Lane49:58

       Well, you've got a few cells together. So the bottom, the bottom line on all of this is, is, is bacteria... Or, I mean, it's kind of simple, uh, when, when, when you've figured it out. And figuring it out, this is not me, this is my PhD student, Marco Colnaghi. Um, and, uh, and, and in effect, if you, if you're doing lateral... Y- you're an E. coli cell. You've got 4,000 genes. You want to scale up to a eukaryotic size. Uh, I wanna have 20,000 genes. Um, and I'm, uh, and I need to maintain my genome so it doesn't get shot to pieces by mutations. And I'm gonna do it by lateral gene transfer. So I know I've got a mutation in a gene, I don't know which gene it is 'cause I'm not sentient, but I know I can't grow, I know my regulation systems are saying, "There's something wrong here, there's something wrong. Pick up some DNA. Pick up a bit of DNA from the environment." If you've got a small genome, the chances of you picking up the right bit of DNA from the environment is much higher than if you've got a genome of 20,000 genes. To do that, you've, you've effectively gotta be picking up DNA all the time, all day long and nothing else and you're still gonna get the wrong DNA. You've gotta pick up large chunks, and in the end you've gotta line them up. You're forced into sex (laughs) , to coin a phrase. Um, so you're-

   21. LFLex Fridman51:11

       (laughs) You're for-

   22. NLNick Lane51:11

       (laughs)

   23. LFLex Fridman51:12

       Uh, so it's, it's... So there is a kind of, uh, uh, incentive, uh, to

   24. NANarrator51:18

       ... to talk about.

   25. NLNick Lane51:18

       If you wanna have a large genome, you've got to prevent it mutating to nothing. That will happen with bacteria, so it's another reason why bacteria can't have a large genome. But as soon as you give them the power pack, as soon as you give eukaryotic cells the power pack that allows them to increase the size of their genome, then you face the pressure that you've got to maintain its quality. You've got to stop it just mutating away.

   26. LFLex Fridman51:38

       What about sexual selection? So the, the finding, uh, like, "Uh, I don't like this one, I don't like this one. This one seems all right." Like, what's the, the, the, the... Is, is it... At which point-

   27. NLNick Lane51:51

       Yeah.

   28. LFLex Fridman51:51

       ... does it become less random?

   29. NLNick Lane51:52

       It's hard to know, uh-

   30. LFLex Fridman51:54

       'Cause eu- eukaryotes just kind of float around.
8. 55:03 – 1:02:15

   DNA

   1. LFLex Fridman55:03

      Okay, uh, what about, if we can step back, DNA?... just mechanism of storing information. RNA, DNA-

   2. NLNick Lane55:11

      Yeah.

   3. LFLex Fridman55:11

      ... how big of an invention was that? That seems to be you- that seems to be fundamental to like something deep within what life is, is the ability, as you said, to kind of store and propagate information. But then you also kind of inferred that w- with your and your students' work, that there's a deep connection between the chemistry and the ability, uh, to have this kind of genetic information. So, how big of an invention is, is it to have a nice representation, nice hard drive for info to pass on?

   4. NLNick Lane55:46

      Huge, I suspect. Uh, I mean, but when I was talking about the code, you see the code in RNA as well. Uh, and RNA almost certainly came first. Um, and, and there's been a- an idea going back decades called the RNA world, because RNA, in theory, can copy itself and can catalyze reactions. So, it kind of cuts out this chicken and egg loop.

   5. LFLex Fridman56:07

      So, DNA, it's possible, is not that special.

   6. NLNick Lane56:10

      So, R- RNA, RNA is the thing that does the work, really, and, and the code lies in RNA. The code lies in the interactions between RNA and amino acids. And it still is there today in the ribosome, for example, which is just kind of a giant ribozyme, which is to say it's an enzyme that's made of, uh, of RNA. Um, so getting to RNA, I suspect, is probably not that hard but getting from RNA... How do you... Uh, you know, there's multiple different types of RNA now. How do, how do, how do you distinguish? This is something we're actively thinking about. How do you distinguish between, you know, a random population of RNAs? Some of them go on to become messenger RNA. That, this is the, the, the transcript of the code of the gene that you, you want to make. Some of them become, uh, transfer RNA, which is, which is the kind of the unit that holds the amino acid that's gonna be poly- pro- polymerized. Some of them become, uh, ribosomal RNA, which is the machine which is joining them all up together. How do they discriminate themselves and, and, and... You know, there's some kind of phase transition going on there, what's that? I don't know. It's a difficult question. And we're now in the region of biology where information is coming in. But the thing about RNA, it's very, very good at what it does, but the largest genomes supported by RNA are RNA viruses, like HIV, for example. They're pretty small. Um, and, and so there's a limit to how complex life could be, unless you come up with DNA, which chemically is a really small change, but how easy it is to make that change, I don't really know. As soon as you've got DNA, then you've got a- an amazingly stable molecule for information storage, um, and you can do absolutely anything. But how likely that transition from RNA to DNA was, I don't know either.

   7. LFLex Fridman57:54

      How much possibility is there for variety in, uh, ways to store information? 'Cause it seems to be very... There's specific characteristics about the, the programming language of DNA.

   8. NLNick Lane58:06

      Yeah. There's a lot of work going on in what's called Xeno-DNA, or, I don't know, or RNA. Can we replace the, the bases themselves, the, the letters, if you like, in, in, in, in RNA or DNA? Can we replace the backbone? Can we replace, for example, phosphate with arsenate? Uh, can we replace the sugar ribose or deoxyribose with a different sugar? And the answer is, yes, you can. Um, within limits. Th- there's not an infinite space there. Uh, uh, arsenate doesn't really work if the bonds are not as strong as phosphate. It's probably quite hard to replace phosphate. Um, it's possible to do it. The question to me is, why is it this way?

   9. LFLex Fridman58:47

      Right.

   10. NLNick Lane58:47

       Is it because there was some form of selection that this is better than the other forms, and there were lots of competing forms of information storage early on, and this one was the one that worked out? Or was it kind of channeled that way, that these are the molecules that you're dealing with, um, and, and, and they work? Uh, and I'm increasingly thinking it's that way, that we're channeled towards ribose, phosphate and, and, and, and the bases that are used. But there are, you know, 200 different letters kicking around out there that could have been used.

   11. LFLex Fridman59:17

       It's such an interesting question. If you look at, in the programming world, in, in computer science, there's a programming language called JavaScript-

   12. NLNick Lane59:24

       Yeah.

   13. LFLex Fridman59:24

       ... which was, uh, written super quickly, it's a giant mess-

   14. NLNick Lane59:27

       (laughs)

   15. LFLex Fridman59:27

       ... but it took over the world. And it was kind of a-

   16. NLNick Lane59:30

       Sounds very biological. (laughs)

   17. LFLex Fridman59:31

       It, it wa- it was kind of a running joke that like, um, like surely this can't be the th- it's a terrible programming language, it's a giant mess, it's full of bugs, it's so easy to write really crappy code, but it took over all of front-end development in the web browser. If you have any kind of dynamic interactive website, it has, it's usually running JavaScript, and it's now taking over much of the backend, which is like the serious, heavy-duty computational stuff, and it's become super fast with the different compilation engines, um, that are running. And so it's like, it really took over the world. It's very possible that this initially crappy, uh, derided language actually takes everything over. And then the question is, did human civilization always strive towards JavaScript?

   18. NLNick Lane1:00:22

       (laughs)

   19. LFLex Fridman1:00:22

       Or was JavaScript just the first programming language that ran in the browser and still sticky? The first, the first is the sticky one, and so it wins over anything else because it was first. And that we... I don't think that's answerable, right? But it's good to-

   20. NLNick Lane1:00:36

       Yeah.

   21. LFLex Fridman1:00:36

       ... ask that. I suppose in a lab, uh, you ca- (laughs) you can't, um, run it with programming languages, but in biology you can probably do some kind of, um, small scale evolutionary test to try to infer which, which is which?

   22. NLNick Lane1:00:54

       Yeah. I mean, in, in a way we've g- we've got the hardware and the software here, and, and the, the hardware is maybe the, the DNA and the RNA itself. And then the software per- perhaps is more about the code, uh, is... Did the code have to be this way? Could it have been a different way?

   23. LFLex Fridman1:01:08

       Yeah.

   24. NLNick Lane1:01:09

       Um, people talk about the optimization of the code, and there's some suggestion for that. Uh, I think it's weak, actually.... but you could imagine, you could come up with a million different codes and, and this would be one of the best ones.

   25. LFLex Fridman1:01:21

       Yeah.

   26. NLNick Lane1:01:21

       Um... This-

   27. LFLex Fridman1:01:22

       Well, we don't know this.

   28. NLNick Lane1:01:24

       Well, peop-

   29. LFLex Fridman1:01:25

       We don't know this.

   30. NLNick Lane1:01:25

       I mean, people have tried to model it based on the effect that mutations would have.
9. 1:02:15 – 1:12:50

   Violence

   1. NLNick Lane1:02:15

   2. LFLex Fridman1:02:15

      So what about, you mentioned predatory behavior.

   3. NLNick Lane1:02:19

      Yeah.

   4. LFLex Fridman1:02:20

      We talked about sex. What about violence?

   5. NLNick Lane1:02:22

      (laughs)

   6. LFLex Fridman1:02:22

      Predator and prey dynamics. How, uh... When was that invented? And, uh, poetic and biological ways of putting it, like what, how do you describe a predator-prey relationship? Is it a beautiful dance or is it a-

   7. NLNick Lane1:02:39

      Hmm.

   8. LFLex Fridman1:02:40

      ... violent atrocity?

   9. NLNick Lane1:02:42

      Well, I guess it's both, isn't it? I mean, when does it start? It starts in bacteria. You see these amazing predators, Bdellovibrio is one that, uh, Lynn Margulis used to talk about a lot. Um, it's, it's got a kind of a drill piece that, uh, drills through the wall and the membrane of the bacterium, and then i- it effectively eats the bacterium from just inside the periplasmic space and makes copies of itself that way. So that's straight predation. There are predators among bacteria.

   10. LFLex Fridman1:03:08

       So predation in that... Sorry to interrupt, means you murder somebody and use their body as a resource-

   11. NLNick Lane1:03:15

       Yes.

   12. LFLex Fridman1:03:16

       ... in some way?

   13. NLNick Lane1:03:17

       Yeah.

   14. LFLex Fridman1:03:18

       But it's not parasitic in that you need them to be still alive in some way?

   15. NLNick Lane1:03:24

       No, no, I mean, predation is you kill them, really.

   16. LFLex Fridman1:03:26

       You murder, yeah.

   17. NLNick Lane1:03:27

       Parasite is, uh, you kind of live on them. (laughs)

   18. LFLex Fridman1:03:30

       Okay.

   19. NLNick Lane1:03:30

       Yeah.

   20. LFLex Fridman1:03:31

       So, but it seems the predator is the really popular, uh, um, too.

   21. NLNick Lane1:03:35

       So what we see if we go back 560, 570 million years before the Cambrian explosion, there is, um, what's known as the Ediacaran fauna, or sometimes they're called vendobionts, which is a lovely name. Uh, and, and, and it, it's not obvious that they're animals at all. Uh, they're stalked things. They often have fronds that look a lot like leaves with kind of fractal branching patterns on them. Um, and the thing is they've, they're found sometimes, you know, geologists can figure out the environment that they were in and say, "This was more than 200 meters deep because there's no sign of any waves, there's no, you know, there's n- no storm damage down here," this kind of thing. They were more than 200 meters deep so they're definitely not photosynthetic. These are animals. Um, and they're, they're filter feeders, and we know thin- you know, sponges and corals and things are filter feeding animals, they're stuck to the spot. Uh, and, and little bits of carbon that come their way, they, they filter it out and that's what they're eating. Um, so no predation involved in this beyond stuff just dies anyway, and it feels like a very gentle, rather beautiful, rather limited world, you might say. Uh, there's not a lot going on there. And something changes. Oxygen definitely changes during this period, other things may have changed as well, but the next thing you really see in the fossil record is the Cambrian explosion. And what do we see there? We're now seeing animals that we would recognize. They've got eyes, they've got claws, they've got shells, they're, you know, they're plainly killing things or running away, um, and, and, and hiding. Um, and, and so we've gone from a, a rather gentle but limited world to a rather vicious, unpleasant, um, world that we recognize, um, and which leads to, uh, kind of arms races, evolutionary arms races. Um, which again is something that when we think about a nuclear arms race, we think, "Jesus, we don't wanna go there. It's not done anybody any good." In some ways, maybe we... (sighs) maybe it does do good. I, I, I don't wanna make an argument for nuclear arms but, but predation, as a, as a mechanism, forces organisms to adapt, to change, to be better to escape to, to... or, or to kill. Um, if you need to eat, then you, you've got to eat, and, you know, a cheetah's not gonna run at that speed unless it's, uh, un- un- unless it has to because the, the zebra is capable of escaping. So it leads to, to much greater feats of evolution, whatever have been possible without it, and in the end, to a much more beautiful world. Mm-hmm.

   22. LFLex Fridman1:06:13

       Uh, and so it's not all bad (laughs) by any means. The, the... But the thing is, you can't have this if you don't have an oxygenated planet because if you... it, it's all, in the end, it's about how much energy can you extract from the food you eat. And if you don't have an oxygenated planet, you can get about 10% out, not much more than that. Um, and if you've got an oxygenated planet, you can get about 40% out. And that means you can have, instead of having one or two trophic levels, you can have five or six trophic levels, and that means things can eat things that eat other things and so on, and, and, and you've gone to a, a level of ecological complexity which is completely impossible in the absence of oxygen. This reminds me of the Hunter S. Thompson quote, that "For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled."

   23. NLNick Lane1:07:00

       (laughs) Yes.

   24. LFLex Fridman1:07:01

       I... The, the history of life on Earth, unfortunately, is, uh, that of violence. Just the trillions and trillions of multicell organisms that were murdered in the, in the s- struggled for survival.

   25. NLNick Lane1:07:17

       It's a sorry statement, but yes, it's basically true. Uh-

   26. LFLex Fridman1:07:20

       And that somehow is a catalyst...... from an evolutionary perspective, for creativity, for creating more and more complex organisms that are better and better at surviving.

   27. NLNick Lane1:07:30

       I mean survival of the fittest-

   28. LFLex Fridman1:07:32

       Yeah.

   29. NLNick Lane1:07:32

       ... if you just go back to that old phrase, means death of the weakest. Um, now what's fit, what's weak? They are- these are terms that, that don't have much intrinsic meaning, but the thing is evolution only happens because of death.

   30. LFLex Fridman1:07:45

       One way to die is the, the constraints, the scarcity of the resources in the environment, but that seems to be not nearly as good of a mechanisms, mechanism for death than other creatures roaming about in the environment. When I say environment, I mean like the static environment, but then there's the dynamic environment of bigger things trying to eat you and use you for your energy. (takes deep breath)
10. 1:12:50 – 1:18:45

    Human evolution

    1. LFLex Fridman1:12:50

       So it is interesting about humans that there is an inner sense of morality, which begs the question of, how did homo sapiens evolve? If we think about the invention of, uh, early invention of sex and early invention of predation, what was the thing invented to make humans? What- what would you say?

    2. NLNick Lane1:13:17

       I mean, I- I suppose a couple of things I'd say. N- number one is y- you don't have to wind the clock back very far, five, six million years or so, and- and- and- and- and let it run forwards again, and the chances of humans as we know them is not necessarily that high.You, you know, imagine as an alien you find planet Earth and it's got everything apart from humans on it. It's an amazing, wonderful, marvelous planet, but nothing that we would recognize as extremely intelligent life, you know, space-faring civilization. So when we think about aliens, we, we, we're kind of after something like ourselves. We're after a space-faring civilization. We're not after, you know, z- zebras and giraffes and lions and things, amazing though they are. But the, the additional kind of evolutionary steps to go from large, complex mammals, monkeys let's say, to, to humans doesn't strike me as that long a, a distance. It's all about the brain. And where's the br- where's the brain and morality coming from? It seems to me to be all about groups, human groups and interactions between groups.

    3. LFLex Fridman1:14:22

       The collective intelligence of it. The-

    4. NLNick Lane1:14:24

       Yes.

    5. LFLex Fridman1:14:24

       Yeah, the, the-

    6. NLNick Lane1:14:25

       The interactions really. And there's, there's some, there's a guy at UCL, uh, called Mark Thomas who's done a lot of really beautiful work, I think, on, on those kind of questions, so I talk to him every now and then, so my views are influenced by him. Um, but a lot seems to depend on population density, that the more interactions you have going on between different groups, the more transfer of information, if you like, between groups, so people moving from one group to another group, almost like lateral gene transfer in bacteria, um, the more expertise you're able to develop and maintain, the more culturally complex your society can become. And, and, and groups that have become detached, um, like on Easter Island for example, very often degenerate in terms of the complexity of their civilization.

    7. LFLex Fridman1:15:13

       Is that true for complex organisms in general, population density-

    8. NLNick Lane1:15:17

       Really matters.

    9. LFLex Fridman1:15:17

       ... is often productive?

    10. NLNick Lane1:15:19

        Really matters. But in human terms, um, I don't know what the actual factors were that were driving a, a, a large brain, but you know, you can, you can talk about fire, you can talk about tool use, you can talk about language, and none of them seem to correlate especially well with the actual known trajectory of human evolution in terms of cave art and these kind of things. That, that seems to work much better just with, with population density and number of interactions between different groups. All of which is really about human interactions, human-human interactions and the complexity of those.

    11. LFLex Fridman1:15:58

        But population density is the thing that increases the number of interactions, but then there must have been inventions, uh, forced by that number of interactions that actually led to humans. So like Richard Wrangham-

    12. NLNick Lane1:16:16

        Yeah.

    13. LFLex Fridman1:16:16

        ... talks about that it's basically the beta males had to beat up the alpha male. So that's what collaboration looks like, is they-

    14. NLNick Lane1:16:24

        (laughs)

    15. LFLex Fridman1:16:24

        When you're living together, they don't like to s- The, the, our early ancestors don't like the dictatorial aspect of a single individual at the top of a tribe. So they, uh, they, they learn to collaborate how to, uh, basically (laughs) create a democracy, uh, of sorts.

    16. NLNick Lane1:16:42

        Yeah.

    17. LFLex Fridman1:16:42

        A democracy that prevents, minimizes, or lessens the amount of violence, which essentially gives strength to the tribe and make the war between tribes, uh, versus the dictator less-

    18. NLNick Lane1:16:55

        I mean, I think one of the most wonderful things about humans is we're all of those things. I mean, we are deeply social as a species, and we're also deeply selfish. And it seems to me the conflict between capitalism and, and communism, it's really just two aspects of human nature, both of which are-

    19. LFLex Fridman1:17:11

        We have both.

    20. NLNick Lane1:17:11

        We have both. Uh, and, and we have a constant kind of vying between the two sides. We, we really do care about other people beyond our families, beyond our immediate people. We care about society and the society that we live in. And, and you could say that's a, you know, a drawing towards socialism or communism. On the other side, we really do care about ourselves. We really do care about our families, about working for something that we gain from. And that's the capitalist side of it. They're both really deeply ingrained in human nature. In terms of violence, um, and, and, and interactions between groups, yes, all this dynamic of if you're interacting between groups, you can be certain that, that, that they're gonna be burning each other, and, and all kinds of interac- physical, violent interactions as well, which will drive the kind of cleverness of how do you resist this? Let's build a tower. Let's, you know, what, what are we gonna do to, to, to prevent being overrun by those marauding gangs from over there? Um, a- and you look, you look outside humans and you look at chimps and bonobos and so on, and, and they're very, very different structures to society. Chimps tend to have an aggressive alpha male type structure, and bonobos are, you know, they, they, they are... There's basically a female society where the males are predominantly excluded and only brought in at the behest of the female. We sh- have a lot in common with both (laughs) -

    21. LFLex Fridman1:18:28

        Yeah.

    22. NLNick Lane1:18:28

        ... both of those groups. Uh-

Episode duration: 3:43:01