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EPISODE LINKS:
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Lee's Website: https://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/cronin/
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:02 - Life and chemistry
15:27 - Self-replicating molecules
25:51 - Origin of life
42:16 - Life on Mars
47:20 - Aliens
54:01 - Origin of life continued
1:00:55 - Fermi Paradox
1:10:35 - UFOs
1:18:56 - Science and authority
1:24:59 - Pickle experiment
1:27:54 - Assembly theory
2:10:53 - Free will
2:22:08 - Cellular automata
2:45:40 - Chemputation
3:02:54 - Universal programming language for chemistry
3:16:05 - Chemputer safety
3:28:47 - Automated engineering of nanomaterials
3:37:46 - Consciousness
3:47:19 - Joscha Bach
3:58:35 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Leek Ronan, a chemist from University of Glasgow, who's 1 of the most fascinating, brilliant, out of the box thinking scientists I've ever spoken to.

This episode was recorded more than 2 weeks ago, so the War in Ukraine is not mentioned.

I have been spending a lot of time each day talking to people in Ukraine and Russia.

I have family, friends, colleagues, and loved ones in both countries.

I will try to release a solo episode on this war, but I've been failing to find the words that make sense of it for myself and others.

I ask for your understanding no matter which path I take.

Most of my time is spent trying to help as much as I can privately.

I'm talking to people who are suffering, who are angry, afraid.

When I returned to this conversation with Lee, I couldn't help but smile.

He's a beautiful, brilliant, and hilarious human being.

He's basically a human manifestation of the mad scientist Rick Sanchez from Rick and Morty.

I thought about quitting this podcast for a time but for now at least I'll keep going.

I meet folks on the street or when I run, you say a few kind words about the podcast and we talk about life, the small things and the big things.

I ask for your support, wisdom, and patience as I keep going with this silly little podcast, including through some difficult conversations, and hopefully many fascinating and fun ones too.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

How do you think life originated on Earth and what insights does that give us about life?

If we go back to the origin of Earth and you think about maybe

billion years ago, the planet was quite hot, there was a limited number of minerals, there was some carbon, some water, and I think that maybe it's a really simple set of chemistry that we really don't understand.

So that means you've got a finite number of elements that are going to react very simply with 1 another and out of that mess comes a cell.

So literally sand turns into cells and it seems to happen quick.

So what I think I can say with some degree of, I think not certainty but curiosity, genuine curiosity is that life happened fast.

Yeah, so when we say fast, this is a pretty surprising fact, and maybe you can actually correct me and elaborate, but it seems like most, like 70 or 80% of the time that Earth has been around there's been life on it, like some very significant percentage.

So when you say fast, like the slow part is from single cell or from bacteria to some more complicated organism.

It seems like Most of the time that Earth has been around, it's been single cell or like very basic organisms, like a couple of billion years.

I recently kind of revisited our history and saw this.

And I was just looking at the timeline, wait a minute, like how did life just spring up so quickly?

That makes me think that it really wanted to, like put another way, it's very easy for life to spring.

Yeah, I agree, I think it's much more inevitable and I think I try to kind of, not provoke, but try and push chemists to think about this because chemists are central to this problem, right?

Understanding the origin of life on Earth, at least, because we're made of chemistry.

But I wonder if the origin of life on a planet, or sorry, the emergence of life on a planet is as common as the formation of a star.

And if you start framing it in that way, it allows you to then look at the universe slightly differently because, and we can get into this I think in quite some detail, but I think to come back to your question, I have little idea of how life got started, but I know it was simple and I know that the process of selection had to occur before the biology was established.

So that selection built the framework from which life kind of grew in complexity and capability and functionality and autonomy.

And I think these are all really important words that we can unpack over the next while.

So you said selection, so natural selection, the original A-B testing.

And so, and then complexity, and then the degree of autonomy and sophistication.

Because I think that people misunderstand what life is.

Some people say that life is a cell and some people that say that life is a virus or life is an on-off switch.

Life is the universe developing a memory.

And the laws of physics, and the way, well, there are no laws of physics.

Physics is just memory-free stuff, right?

So there's only a finite number of ways you can arrange the fundamental particles to do the things.

So it's like sewing a piece of art slowly and then you can look back at it.

And when you say memory, it's like there's a stickiness to a bunch of the stuff that's building together.

So like you can, in a stable way, like trace back the complexity and that tells a coherent story.

Okay, and then there's autonomy, said complexity we'll talk about, but it's a really interesting idea that selection preceded biology.

Like, does sand still count as chemistry?

Sure, I mean, as a chemist, a card carrying chemist, if I'm allowed a card, I don't know.

What's the chemical composition of the card?

Well, chemistry is the thing that happens when you bring electrons together and you form bonds.

So bonds, or I say to people when they talk about life elsewhere.

I just say, well, there's bonds, there's hope.

Because bonds allow you to get heterogeneity, they allow you to record those memories.

Or at least on Earth, you could imagine a Stanislav Lem-type world where you might have life emerging or intelligence emerging before life.

That may be something like Solaris or something.

But to get to selection, if atoms can combine and form bonds, those atoms can bond to different elements and those molecules will have different identities and interact with each other differently.

And then you can start to have some degree of causation or interaction and then selection and then existence.

And then you go up the path of complexity.

And so at least on Earth, as we know it, there is a sufficient pool of available chemicals to start create searching that commentarial space of bonds.

So, okay, this is a really interesting question.

We say there's bonds, there is life, there's intelligence, there's consciousness.

And what you just made me realize is those can emerge, or let's put bonds aside, those can emerge in any order.

It's like panpsychists believe that consciousness, I guess, comes before life and before intelligence.

So consciousness permeates all matter, it's some kind of fabric of reality.

Okay, so within this framework, you can kind of arrange everything, but you need to have the bonds that precedes everything else.

So like the mechanism of selection, that could proceed.

I would say that there is an elegant order to it.

Bonds allow selection, allows the emergence of life, allows the emergence of multicellularity, and then more information processing, building state machines all the way up.

However, you could imagine a situation if you had, I don't know, a neutron star or a sun or a ferromagnetic loops interacting with 1 another and these oscillators building state machines and these state machines reading something out in the environment.

Over time, these state machines would be able to literally record what happened in the past and sense what's going on in the present and imagine the future.

However, I don't think it's ever going to be within a human comprehension, that type of life.

I wouldn't count it out because whenever you, I know in science, whenever I say something's impossible, I then wake up the next day and say, no, that's actually wrong.

I mean, there are some limits, of course.

I don't see myself traveling fast and light anytime soon.

But- Eric Weinstein says that's possible, so he will say you're wrong.

Sure, but I'm an experimentalist as well, so 1 of my, I have 2 superpowers.

My stupidity, and I don't mean that as a, you know, I'm like absolutely completely witless, but I mean my ability to kind of just start again and ask the question and then do it with an experiment.

I always wanted to be a theoretician growing up but I just didn't have the intellectual capability.

I was able to think of experiments in my head I could then do in my lab or when I was a child outside.

And then those experiments in my head and then outside reinforced 1 another.

So I think that's a very good way of kind of grounding the science, right?

Well, that's a nice way to think about theoreticians is they're just people who run experiments in their head.

I mean, that's exactly what Einstein did, right?

But you were also capable of doing that in the head, in your head, inside your head, and in the real world, and the connection between the 2 is when you first discovered your superpower of stupidity.

So I have, like everybody, ego problems, but my curiosity is bigger than my ego.

You're just dropping some powerful lines.

That's something I have to think about because you always struggle about the role of ego in life.

And that's so nice to think about, don't think about the size of ego, the absolute size of ego, think about the relative size of ego to the other horses pulling at you.

If the curiosity 1 is bigger, then ego will do just fine and make you fun to talk to.

How do those connect to natural selection or selection and bonds and, I forgot already, life and consciousness?

So we're going back to selection in the universe and origin of life on Earth.

I mean, I'm convinced that selection is a force in the universe.

Not a fundamental force, but it is a directing force because existence, although existence appears to be the default, the existence of what?

We can get to this later I think, but it's amazing that discrete things exist.

And You see this cup, it's not the sexiest cup in the world, but it's pretty functional.

This cup, the complexity of this cup isn't just in the object, it is literally the lineage of people making cups and recognizing that, seeing that in their head, making an abstraction of a cup and then making a different 1.

So I wonder how many billions of cups have come before this 1.

And that's a process of selection and existence.

And the only reason the cup is still used is quite useful.

I like the handle, it's convenient so I don't die, I get hydration.

And so I think we are missing something fundamental in the universe about selection.

And I think what biology is, is a selection amplifier.

And that this is where autonomy comes in.

And actually, I think that how humanity is gonna, humans and autonomous robots, or whatever we're gonna call them in the future, will supercharge that even further.

So selection is happening in the universe, but if you look in the asteroid belt, selection, if objects are being kicked in and out of the asteroid belt, those trajectories are quite complex.

You don't really look at that as productive selection because it's not doing anything to improve its function.

The asteroid belt has existed for some time.

So there is some selection going on, but the functionality is somewhat limited.

On Earth, at the formation of Earth, interaction of chemicals and molecules in the environment gave selection and then things could happen.

Because you could think about in chemistry, we could have an infinite number of reactions happen, but they don't all have all the reactions are allowed to happen don't happen Why because they're energy barriers So there must be some things called catalysts out there or there are bits of minerals that when 2 molecules get together in that mineral it lowers the energy barrier for the reaction and so the reaction is promoted.

So suddenly you get 1 reaction over another series of possibilities occurring that makes a particular molecule and this keeps happening in steps.

Before you know it, almost these waves as discrete reactions work together and you start to build a machinery that is run by existence.

So as you go forward in time, the fact that the molecules, the bonds are getting, there are more bonds in a molecule, there's more function, there's more capability for this molecule to interact with other molecules, to redirect them, it's like a series of little, and I don't want to use this term too much, but it's almost thinking about the simplest von Neumann constructor, that's the simplest molecule that could build a more complicated molecule to build a more complicated molecule.

And before you know it, when that more complicated molecule can act on the causal chain that's produced itself and change it, suddenly you start to get towards some kind of autonomy and that's where life, I think, emerges in earnest.

Every single word in the past few paragraphs, let's break those apart.

So who's von Neumann, what's a constructor, the closing of the loop that you're talking about, the molecule that starts becoming, I think you said like the smallest von Neumann constructor, the smallest, the minimal.

So what do all those things mean and what is, what are we supposed to imagine when we think about the smallest von Neumann constructor?

So, John von Neumann is a real hero actually, not just me but many people I think, computer science and physics.

He was an incredible intellect who probably solved a lot of the problems that we're working on today, I just forgot to write them down.

And I'm not sure if it's John von Neumann or Johnny, as I think his friends called him, but I think he was Hungarian, mathematician, came to the US, and basically was involved in the Manhattan Project and developing computation and came up with all sorts of ideas and I think it was 1 of the first people to come up with cellular automata.

I think- Well, anyway, if he didn't come up with it, he probably did come up with it and didn't write it down.

There was a couple of people did at the same time, and then Conway obviously took it on, and then Wolfram loves CAs.

And what I think he imagined was that he wasn't satisfied, and this may be incorrect recollection, but a lot of what I say is going to be just way out of my...

Lee, you're just part of the universe creating its memory, designing...

So, but what I mean is, I think he liked this idea of thinking about how could a Turing machine literally build itself without a Turing machine, right?

It's like literally how do state machines emerge?

And I think that von Neumann constructors, he wanted to conceive of a minimal thing, autonomous, that could build itself.

And what would those rules look like in the world?

And that's what a von Neumann kind of constructor looked like.

It's a minimal hypothetical object that could build itself, self-replicate.

And I'm really fascinated by that because I think that although it's probably not exactly what happened, It's a nice model because as chemists, if we could go back to the origin of life and think about what is a minimal machine that can get structured randomly, so like with no prime mover, with no architect, it assembles through just existence.

So random stuff bumping in together and you make this first molecule.

And molecule A interacts with another random molecule B and they get together and they realize by working together they can make more of themselves.

But then they realize they can mutate, so they can make AB prime.

So AB prime's different to AB, and then AB prime can then act back where A and B were being created, and slightly nudge that causal chain and make AB prime more evolvable or learn more.

It feels like the mutation part is not that difficult.

It feels like the difficult part is just creating a copy of yourself as step 1.

It seems like 1 of the greatest inventions in the history of the universe is the first molecule that figured out, holy shit, I can create a copy of myself.

I think replicating molecules are rare, but if you say, I think I was saying on, I probably got into trouble on Twitter the other day, so I was trying to work this, there's about more than 18 mils of water in there, so 1 mole of water, 6.022 times 10 to the 23 molecules, that's about the number of stars in the universe, I think, of the order.

So there's 3 universe worth, but between 1

Yeah, as ever, I'm always being corrected, it's a great fact.

But there's a lot of molecules in the water.

And so there's a lot of, so although it's, for you and me, really hard to conceive of, if existence is not the default for a long period of time, because what happens is the molecules get degraded, so much of the possibilities in the universe are just broken back into atoms.

So you have this kind of destruction of the molecules for our chemical reactions.

So you only need 1 or 2 molecules to become good at copying themselves for them suddenly to then take resources in the pool and start to grow.

And so then replication actually over time when you have bonds I think is much simpler, much easier.

And I even found this in my lab years ago.

I had 1 of the reasons I started doing inorganic chemistry and making rust, making a bit of rust based on a thing called molybdenum.

Molybdenum oxide is this molybdenum oxide, very simple, but when you add acid to it and some electrons, they make these molecules you just cannot possibly imagine, would be constructed big gigantic wheels of 154 molybdenum atoms in a wheel or an icosidodecahedron

I realized when I just finished experiments 2 years ago, I've just published a couple of papers on this, that there actually is a random small molecule with 12 atoms in it that can form randomly, but it happens to template its own production.

And then by chance it templates the ring.

Just an accident, just like, just an absolute accident.

And that ring also helps make the small 12 mer.

And so you have what's called an autocatalytic set where A makes B and B helps make A and vice versa.

So it's a bit like they all work in synergy to make this chain of events that grow.

And it doesn't take a very sophisticated model to show that if you have these objects competing and then collaborating to help 1 another build, they just grow out of the mess.

And although they seem improbable, they are improbable, in fact impossible in 1 step.

This is when the blind people look at the blind watchmaker argument and you're talking about how could a watch spontaneously emerge, well it doesn't.

It's a lineage of watches and cruder devices that are bootstrapped onto 1 another.

Right, so it's very improbable, but once you get that little discovery, like with the wheel and fire, it just gets, explodes, because it's so successful, it explodes.

So this templating mechanism that allows you to have a little blueprint for yourself, how you go through different procedures to build copies of yourself.

So in chemistry somehow it's possible to imagine that that kind of thing is easy to spring up.

In more complex organisms it feels like a different thing and much more complicated.

We're having multiple abstractions of the birds and the bees conversation here.

But with human, sorry, with complex organisms, it feels like difficult to have reproduction.

To, that's gonna get clipped out, I'm gonna make fun of that.

It's difficult to develop this idea of making copies of yourself, or no.

Because that seems like a magical idea for life to, wow, That feels like very necessary for what selection is, for what evolution is, but then if selection precedes all of this, then maybe these are just like echoes of the selecting mechanism at different scales.

So selection is the default in the universe.

If you want to, and what happens is that life, the solution that life has got on Earth, life on Earth, biology on Earth, is unique to Earth.

But that is the solution that works on Earth, the ribosome, the fundamental machine that is responsible for every cell on Earth, or wherever it is in the kingdom of life.

That is an incredibly complex object, but it was evolved over time and it wasn't involved in a vacuum.

And I think that once we understand that selection can occur without the ribosome, but what the ribosome does, it's a phase transition in replication.

And I think that that, and also technology, that is probably much easier to get to than we think.

Why do you put the ribosome as the central part of living organisms on Earth?

It basically is a combination of 2 different polymer systems, so RNA and peptides.

So the RNA world, if you like, gets transmitted and builds proteins and the proteins are responsible for all the catalysis.

The majority of the catalysis goes on the cell.

No ribosome, no proteins, no decoding, no evolution.

You don't put like the RNA itself as the critical thing, like information, you put action as the most important thing.

Yeah, I think the actual molecules that we have in biology right now are entirely contingent on the history of life on Earth.

There are so many possible solutions, and this is where chemistry got itself, and the Origin of Life chemistry gets itself into a bit of a trap.

You've tweeted, you're gonna get, I'm gonna cite your tweets like it's Shakespeare, okay?

It's surprising you haven't gotten canceled on Twitter yet.

There's, you like to have a little bit of fun on Twitter.

You've tweeted that, quote, origin of life research is a scam.

So if this is Shakespeare, can we analyze this word?

Why is the origin of life research a scam?

Aren't you kind of doing origin of life research?

Okay, it was tongue in cheek, but yeah, I think, and I meant it as tongue in cheek.

I am, I'm not doing the origin of life research.

And I also want to bound the likelihood of the origin of life on earth, but more importantly to find the origin of life elsewhere.

There are many, many good chemists out there doing origin of life research, but I want to nudge them.

The chemistry they are doing, the motivation is great.

So what I meant by that tweet is saying that maybe they're making assumptions about saying if only I could make this particular type of molecule, say this RNA molecule or this phosphodiester or this other molecule, it's going to somehow unlock the origin of life.

And I think that origin of life has been looking at this for a very long time.

And whilst I think it's brilliant to work out how you can get to those molecules, I think that chemistry and chemists doing origin of life could be nudged into doing something even more profound.

And so the argument I'm making, it's a bit like right now, let's say, I don't know, the first Tesla that makes its way to, I don't know, into a new country in the world.

Let's say there's a country X that has never had a Tesla before and they get the Tesla.

And they take the Tesla, and what they do is they take the Tesla apart and say, we wanna find the origin of cars in the universe.

And say, okay, how did this form and how did this form?

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Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #269