Life in a Barrel

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Hey, it's Molly. Before this episode starts, I want to let you in a little secret, which is that radio lab is doing and ask me anything about our recent episode, snail sex tape. So the AMA is going to be with myself and our producer Mona Medgalker who is like a snail expert, a next expert and you can ask us anything how the episode got made, how we came

up with the idea, do snugs really exist. So come to the AMA on April 16th. Now the catch is in order to come you need to be a member of the lab. So if you're not a member of the lab, go sign up now, fool, so you can come see us. Go to radiolab.org/join, radiolab.org/join, use code snail so you get a discount on your

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“And as a thank you for signing up right now, we will send you an enamel snail pin that”

we are about to drop. It's very cool. We all want it on our jean jackets. So I can't wait to see you April 16th and until then, we have a really great episode for you today.

It is a story, Lulu and Latif reported back in 2022, all about the chaos and messiness of life. And I'm talking life with a capital L, like the kind that evolution gets involved in. So let's go listen. Okay so let me just because I also don't entirely know what's going on.

I'm Lulu Miller. I'm Latif Nasser. And we also have with us yeah producer Matt Kilti we have three different pitches yeah we're going to do guys doing three different things yeah but mine's very little but I need you got to leave me 15 minutes at that.

15 minutes okay and then a little context a while back the three of us found ourselves in a studio together because our editor Sorin he knew that we were independently working on these three different stories. It is you don't know that Lulu you do know the stories or you don't know and I'm going to be known 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. The cage match. It's a story cage match.

“Yeah and we'll get to all that but uh should I start?”

Yeah. Latif has got story number one. All right okay so we're starting at the the University of Ross stock in Germany. Yeah it's totally started here in Ross stock with the psychology professor named Hendrik Schubert.

Did it pronounce that right? Absolutely great. You got it. So back in the early 80s Hendrik finishes his undergrad degree in ecology at Ross stock 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 Ross stock 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 cleared. Yeah. It's kind of a funny dynamic.

Anyway one day he walks into this temperature controlled lab that they have there and he sees one of his old professors. Mentor of mine. Rhine Hard here class. Yeah my name is Rhine Hard.

Yeah. Close. And right next to Rhine Hard he also sees much to his surprise. I saw this barrel a bright blue 100 liter barrel. Yeah my barrel for my experiments.

And Hendrik, 100 new this barrel. When I was still a student and we had a practical course baby. Because as an undergrad he had done this experiment with Rhine Hard where they had filled these barrels full of seawater. Breakish water from Lagoon of the Baltic Sea and they were tweaking the nutrient levels

Like copper poles, two plank dunks.

But it was a simple little experiment that it only lasted for two weeks and now, you know, a decade later, Rhine Hard still had that barrel, you know, just sitting there. So ask Rhine, I'll tell you what are you doing with this and he told me. So Rhine Hard then tells him the story. So I can go back to the late 80s.

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 fall. Rothstock was in East Germany and all of a sudden just fell like overnight.

Everything changed. The currency changed ahead of state change. The university changed its name, its curriculum. Like all these very specific things about Rhine Hard's day-to-day life. All of a sudden just changed.

Yeah, this is a cultural shock cut to six months later, June 1990, in all the chaos, Rhine Hard 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 bugging him, like, could you just get those barrels out of there?”

I was asked to remove this barrel for your own experiments. So he does it one by one, so he takes the one, he like shimmies it over, he jumps it out. And he's the water and wash out the city. Takes the other. So he started doing that and then he gets to the control barrel, which is the one in the

experiment that they had done nothing to it. It was just sitting there under a light source, right? 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 and so he looks at it and he's totally dumbstruck by what he sees. Sam fulfilled this many, many organisms with soup, lung done 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 that. But when he looks, he sees that it's, 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-eat type of plankton, some of which eat the

phytoplankton, some of which eat the others, though plankton. And then there are bacteria, which are basically like the equivalent of the mushrooms or the whatever that are recycling the whole system. And wittingly 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, so maybe he didn't create it, but he's like, 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. And he sees that it's alive. But 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, but this is basically, I think what it is. If you could just give an ecosystem the basic things it needs, sunlight and space and whatever, that there were no humans around to mess with it, you know, no comets, no earthquakes, no, no outside confounding factors, what would happen, what would that ecosystem do?

Huh, cool. Okay. And there's sort of two options here, you know, 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 for a while but then it sort of crashes because there's not enough of another thing for it to eat and then another thing takes over and then

instead of like a, so in this case, instead of like a line what you have is a circle. That's right, that's right.

“It's what Mufasa says in the Lion King, the circle of life, that's the son, right?”

So two options, line or circle, which are kind of just two flavors of balance. The prevailing view was the Vensia left alone, the nature tend to get balance. But here in this barrel, Brian Hart thought, I have the perfect opportunity to answer this question.

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 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, 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 overseeing 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, 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 are gonna be on top of the world forever and then the barbarians come in and 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 never came, it never came, no line, no circle. In this nutshell of a small ecosystem, nature is chaos, chaos, chaos.

But Reinhardt had discovered in this barrel with 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 basting at random or does that mean?”

Well, so first of all, maybe I should tell you a little bit of what chaos is because for

most of the people, chaos is just total random, but it is not. This is Alisa Beninka. I'm Elisa Beninka, and I'm a theoretical ecologist. Reinhardt 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 the system which is I predict ability on the short run, but cannot be predicted in the long term. And the weather is actually the best example for me, meteorologists can do forecasts 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 predicted for around 15, 30 days.

Now said that, you could know who is going to be in advantage. So it's not like, you know, 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 just upend the whole system.

And he told me, I never have seen this stable state.

So when Hendrik, the student turned department chair, ran into Reinhardt and his barrel, Reinhardt 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 the gain and I decided to follow up. And then with, you know, the help of Elisa and others, Reinhardt gets his work published

in nature and according to Hendrik, there was this immediate blowback from other, 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, Hendrik, he was also skeptical of the result for, you know, scientific reason.

mean that chaos is something mandatory, he showed that there might be chaos. Hendrik is like, I'm, I'm redoing this whole thing. Really? Let's see what happens. So this time he repeats the experiment.

You may not set up an 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 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 going to be chaotic, or when it's going to be chaotic, like, I just see deeper deeper, deeper

chaos, which I, you know, which fine, I'm okay with. Really? Yeah. For me, 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. I'm like, it was 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 it's, if there are things that are beyond your control that are going to, that are going to happen, 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, 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, do me a nigh, singin' to me nigh. I'm very nice. I'm very nice. Here we go, nigh.

Simba, based on the work, as confirmed by Ryan Hart, there is no delicate harmony awaiting you. And if you don't choose wisely and show respect to your fellow creatures and plants and bacteria and fungi, the 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 the giant abyss of no promises for a text 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 King dumb is going to, like the Roman Empire, it's gonna crumble and fall and like who cares? I 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 orderverse chaos coming up from Producer Matt Kilty. This week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, the United States Ukraine and Russia and now throw Iran into the mix. Iran has played such a huge role in enabling Russia's war against Ukraine.

So now, when Iran is under attack, Russia is reportedly sending drones to Iran, to help them out. I'll talk with Ukrainian journalist Olga Regenko on the New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.

Latif, radio lab. And we're back. With Matt. Okay, so my turn. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

“All right, I think I see how these things go together.”

Because Latif has this little barrel ecosystem that was in chaos, which is not totally random, but it's like a weird wildly fluctuating thing. 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.

And I say we, because hello. Hi, can you hear me? Heather, we can hear into you. I reported the story out with our contributing editor, Heather Racky. Yes, 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 store? 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 tail." Exactly. Happen your secret.

Okay, so we're going back in time to some big college cool music. Back to late 60s, early 70s into this guy. Professor Gold, the floor is yours. Steven 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 Measure of Man is one, right? Read a lot about evolution. The fundamental principles of Darwinian theory. A lot about the history of science. But before Gold 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 at the history of four or five to the whole dinosaurs. It sees the T-Rex. I remember standing under the Taranosaurus and a man sneezed.

I thought the Taranosaurus had come to life. It was about to devour me, but at that moment, to fear. Just like fascination creep in. He was like absolutely hurt. I didn't know that. That's cute.

That's so cute. And Gold says after that moment, fascination with fossils just started to unlock all these questions. Question is like, why are we here on this earth? What are we related to? How is the earth built?

What is its history been through time?

“What's been the pageant of change over the immense span of years?”

So Gold fell to 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, you described it as stamp collecting. This is the problem that Gold was attempting to confront. If we're going to survive as a science, we need to find a way of contributing answers to important questions. So in 1967, Gold gets his PhD. And he's immediately hired at Harvard.

And then one day... This guy Tom Schoff is a paleontologist at the University of Chicago. Called up Gold, said he'd read some of his research and even 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, Schoff, 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 Gold was just like, yes. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so let's set this scene.

It's like 1972, Schoff, Gold. Right, and they invite this guy Dave Rao. Another paleontologist. Who had done these really cool studies. Looking at C-shells and geometry.

And then there's this fourth guy, Dan Simberloff. And a collegeist, who was really into, you know, mathematical modeling. So we got three paleontologists and an ecologist. That's 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, 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, mollusks. Yeah, mollusks.

Ammonites. Oh, sure. Mile of bites. Try the bites. Yeah, I mean.

Your various bites. Yeah, stuck on the sea floor. And in this book for each species, it basically has-- Where this person 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.

They start entering all the data.

And then they're like, OK, what next?

“I mean, the problem-- OK, like, a computer needs--”

but 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. And so 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 is not a random process. Right, Darwin established its like its small incremental change over long periods of time. But it's not just that, right?

Oh, it favors certain things. Right, yeah, yeah. And it favors like adaptive traits. Right, the fit is survived. Yes.

And if you're not fit, you just die. You get wiped out the faceier. It's because the strongest push you off. Because they're better suited for the-- Right, they're better than you.

Yeah, right. What a bunch of jerks, the way of the world. But so all they had was this really simple question.

“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-niscripe species.

Can you just name the species just because-- Yeah, let's call it-- let's call it blue. [MUSIC PLAYING] OK, blue. Did this-- this blue, blah, blue.

And then they program the computer so that it's an arbitrary number. It's like, let's say 100 years. 100 years of blue, but then it appears like, OK, I now assign all of you, blue, one of three things at random. So thing number one could be nothing happens to the blues.

The blues just get to keep on living. Go through to the next round. So that's one option. Or the computer could be a big number two, which is a little tweak to blue. And from blue, you get, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep.

Bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep. Hold your species. So it's just blue, bleep, bleep, bleep. Then it's blue and bleeps. Yeah. And they could just-- now they could go forward

and they can go to the next stage. So number one is nothing happens. You move on. Number two, you can change of all of SPCA.

Or the third thing that can happen is, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep.

Bye-bye, blue. Dad, extinct, dead forever. Bye-bye, blue. All right, P. So that's it.

One, two, three, blue, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep. Rock, paper, scissors, shoot. Yeah, exactly. And the computer's picking them at random. OK.

So they produce these simulations. Running bleep after bleep through this program over millions of years. And then they go to the computer. They like print it out.

And all of a sudden, they see something pretty bananas. Which is the simulations that they produced looked remarkably like the actual fossil record. Ooh, wait, what is that? I can share a screen.

Chris should've seen graphs. OK. So this is a graph of the actual fossil record. For the sake of this, just imagine tree-a-life sort of evolution image.

And you could see, OK, mollusks. They start here. They die here. And trial-abites, 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 trial-abites, wind extinct, just like aminites, wind extinct. So for me, it's like, I'm like, ha, 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 just like computer programming equals life. Computer programming of nothing but chance and randomness, which is totally counter to the order of natural selection. So natural selection would be like, you've got a bird with an awesome beak and cool eyes,

and it's like, can fly like a baller. And then there's like a lesser bird,

It can't see in three dimensions,

and it's like not good at sports.

“It's like basically this is Heather Bird.”

Weenie and Heather Bird had a really nice ride. I found a weenie bird. But in this scenario, in like the Darwinian idea, it's like athlete bird with its great eyes, it's great wings, winds, the evolutionary battle,

Heather Bird goes extinct. Weenie birds as a kind of bird as a species sees 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 equals chance of not necessarily thriving, but like existing. So it's like if those two species were born at the same time, weenie bird and athlete bird, it's up to chance which one would survive longer

than the other. Right, so fitness might explain why one species does better than another. But what they saw suggests that when it comes to extinction, it's not fitness or how competing one another,

it's just random. But it's a little hard to guess, I mind wrong. But wait, but I have a question, going back to that marine, you know, their end was whole,

“what did they, do we know what they thought at that moment?”

Yeah, 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. Also, like 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, but basically, like, they were kind of freaked out because the idea is, like, if Darwin can explain why things go extinct and the question is, why do things go extinct? Like, is it just chance and randomness?

And that question would send the three of them off in very different directions. So, gold, for gold, he actually-- this was mostly just like a big hazam moment. Because paleontology, it's 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 gold, gold, 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 hear evolution has oddly contingent pathways

that would never run the same way twice.

And he starts writing all sorts of books. He becomes kind of like famous Stephen J. Gold. But then, Ralph, the guy who came up with the question to ask him Peter, 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. Oh, question mark. And to Ralph, the answer was 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 in fall drastically. Like, all that stuff is outside of your control.

You could sort of die at any moment. So he sort of charts this middle ground view, which is probably how gold saw it, too. But then you have Tom Shop, the guy who started the whole project.

And he just goes full randomness. I mean, the impression that I get was pretty much from the word go. He was like randomness is the order. Shop developed 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. Like, they have no real differences between one another. That 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. Shop began writing a book trying to flush out this theory. But in 1984, at the age of 44, he was in Texas

doing field work with students. And he died suddenly of a heart attack. While reporting this story, we talked to some paleontologists and we're like, well, like, who do we know? Is it sort of like the route bad genes 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 have an answer to the question, they sort of uncovered with this computer in Woods Hole.

Well, I got to say I'm rooting for shop. I mean, if it doesn't matter how quote-unquote fit or mussely or well-honed or sleek, our model is,

it means in a very real way, like we're all equally good. And for me, it freaks open all this possibility that might be waiting behind things that we look at and deem, unfit, or deformed, or we need bird ass, like, it gives all this,

it returns all this possibility that gives me a sense of thrill. Like, it makes me want to look at the things I'm discounting. - Totally. - I don't know, I'm not sure, 'cause, okay, so to me, like, 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 team human, there's some people

that 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 like us. But then this, it seems like this, if it's like, okay, your survival, actually, even the fittest people,

like, they're not necessarily helping you survive. Those fitted, 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, like, they have the same chances of sort, 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, no, this is what Lulub was talking to, 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 good, yeah, and you can sit and you can sit

either reality and bask in that. It's just up to you, which one you wanna bask in. - Yeah, did you wanna reflect Matt about how it had changed, too? - No.

- Yeah, do it, do it, I want that.

“- Well, I mean, the thing, the only thing”

and I would say is that, like, what are the things we learned when reporting the story is that 99.9% of all things that have ever existed on Earth have gone extinct. Basically, everything that's ever lived has eventually died.

Whether or not, like, it seems like chances a big part of that, but we don't fully know, but whatever everything does.

And I have sort of maybe naively always existed

with the thought that, like, we as species are progressing toward 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,

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, no, no.

You, your 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 us, this is making me think of a song for the shape. - The song with the shape? - I was like, okay, if it's the circle, yours is telling us, it's like, it's the click of love.

(laughing) And we're all gonna die. - You know it's where you're at, why? - So why, you've been trying. Just eat some fresh, bye.

- When we come back, we're gonna take the chaos question, all the way back to the beginning. Defense Secretary Pete Heggsett's monthly prayer meetings in Fu's worship with the fear of Kristen Nationalism, that every round find it's more

and let justice be executed swiftly and without remorse. - Forwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. - He's taken all these verses about violence out of context

and thrown them all together. - Inside Heggsett's holy war on this week's on the media from WNYC. Find on the media wherever you get your podcasts. - For our final round of this order verse chaos,

throw down, just stir the pot or the barrel. Little bit, I have with me a special guest

“who is going to, in person, you have a special guest?”

- Yep, they're gonna be in now. - They're beaming it. - They're beaming it. - So just wait, they're coming.

- They're coming.

- Oh, it's getting, it's getting.

(laughing) Is anyone, I'm back. - And all is right in the world now. - So Kenneth 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 you. - Yeah, there did you just say primordial ooze? - Yeah, primordial ooze.

- Oh, isn't it soup? Is that, oh, that's how I went right. - 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, 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... - So bowl of soup, can of soup, please tell me. - Barrel of water? - I, a cauldron.

It involves a cauldron, but it's kind of barrel less. - Or like the glass blast or something. - Yeah. - So can is, okay, tell us about the experiment and who are guys.

- Well, okay, so are guys, Stanley Miller,

“this grad student in 1952, you should cauldron.”

- 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 pick of him.

- It's like, I really feel like the science guy with no hair, bundling a glob full of lightning. - This is the sexy photo you're talking about? - Yes, kind of. (laughing)

- I got a feeling for mine. I mean, I think, this is too much, this is too much. But look at, he's got wagger. He's got, he's got science flag. Anyway, Candace, sorry, please go on.

- Yes, so he's looking for an experiment to do and thought of this old theory from 1920s. Basically, that primordial superhero 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 helped, zapped it. - Like, a bolt of the early Earth's lightning. - Yeah, lightning, basically. - And he's watching the cauldron for only a day.

And then he finds that his starts turning a little pinkish.

“He's like, oh my goodness, is there something going on here?”

And then a week later, it turns deep red, turbed red, hmm, like smokey red. - Yeah, it's like rusty blood red water. That's collecting at the bottom. - Oh, the water's becoming rice, yes.

- Yeah. - So it is kind of like a red soup at the bottom. - So he pulls this red bush out of the cauldron and he looks to see what's in there. And he finds amino acids, amino freaking acids.

- Wow, that's stuff to play. (gentle music) - So like, does anyone know what an amino acid is? - And ingredients of DNA, right? Like, it's like that's the--

- No, but it is the ingredients pretty much everything else in the cell. So the little motors and enzymes and all the stuff that actually makes a cell work. - Yes, amino acids, the building blocks a life.

So it was a kind of a, almost a meme. There's an experiment, it's beautiful experiments. - 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, fast forward

for building 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, not, 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

“and a soup tube, 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 primary dose of idea was actually Francis Crick,

little thing called DNA. - No doubt prize when a 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 call in radio show where they are discussing what Francis Crick saw as a far more logical explanation of how life began.

- The catalog story showed he suggested it was sent here by an alien civilization from the other side of the universe. - Yes, Francis Crick proposes what he called directed pan sperm, yeah? Which is to say, some alien civilization

puts themselves some bacterial cells on a rocket and crashed it on the earth. - One of those spaces crashed into the earlier it's cargo of bacteria filled out and eventually became a mess.

But 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. - Then a lightning bolt.

- Then a lightning bolt. - My immediate reaction is that it's bunkers, but there's a kind of left 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. - What? - Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, we got a, okay, 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.

- There's bits and pieces of the building blocks of DNA have been found there as well. - That's wild. - 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 wear life began. And he's signed to a fake, 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. - And I personally think life started in deep sea hedgehog events.

You can get these vents anywhere. Some of them can be very deep, five or six 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, 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 makes 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 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 proto cells, a little bit optimistic, 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 pansperm, 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 way that living cells work.

“It's as if a living planet gives rise to living cells”

which have his same structure. They're both the planet and the cell is a little bit like a battery. It's got a positive charge outside of 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. But Lulu, like 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, like the soup or the panspermium”

are both like very chaotic. Like some random thing just fell to Earth or a random lightning bolt hit a random 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. And then it's the very worst thing. - And like the cell is a tiny planet.

I guess, I mean, I was seeing Nick's explanation as yet another loss, you know, he's pointing out that our beginning, even our scientific beginning isn't as clean of a story as we thought.

“You know, there was no lightning strike, no clear moment”

where it all began, just this slow and like bad breath out of event, churning, clumsy mix of chemicals in a dark, dank pit. To me that that rips away the last shred of order that I thought the old soup version had, you know?

- Ah, yeah, I don't know 'cause it's like, 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,

if I 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, but we do belong.

(singing in foreign language)

♪ For chance that it would never be done ♪

♪ And as we fight for our place here ♪ ♪ Come beating through struggle and strife ♪ ♪ You can't anticipate who gets to dominate ♪ ♪ In the contest for the greatest light ♪ ♪ Just the chaos of time ♪

♪ That could be all to start ♪ ♪ It's just a spare order for us ♪ ♪ It's that it's not ♪ ♪ It's a tune that rules our place ♪ (singing in foreign language)

- Guess what's it? This episode was reported by a lot of nother Matt Kielty, Heather Radke, Candice Wong, and me, Lulu Miller. - It was produced by Matt Kielty and Simon Adler with Sound and Music from Matt Kielty, Simon Adler.

- And Jeremy? - Bloom? - Bloom. - Big thanks to Alan Gafinsky for creating that song and a lead at Gafinsky for about the heck out of it. Thanks also to Chuck Cheeseman, Sarah Luterman, Doug Irwin, Candice Wong.

- Thanks to David Seppkowski, whose book re-reading the fossil we drew on for the story about Steven J. Gould and Extinction. And thank you to Nick Hadad, Ayanna Johnson, Chris Klausmeyer, Laura Verhague, and Noel Bowen. - That'll do it.

Thanks for listening. Goodbye. - Hi, I'm Gabby.

Radio Lab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Lots of Nasser.

Soren Wheeler is our executive editor.

“Sarah Sandback is our executive director.”

Our managing editor is Pat Walters.

Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom,

“W Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez,”

Sindu Nina Sambandon, Matt Kielty,

Mona Madgauker, Annie McQun, Alex Nesen, Sarah Kari, Natalia Ramirez, Rebecca Rand,

“Anisa Vizza, Arian Wac, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young,”

with help from Gabby Santos. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angelie Mercado, and Sophie Semi. - Hi, I'm Maddie, and I'm from Frederick, Maryland. Leadership support for Radio Lab's science programming

is provided by the Science Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundation support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Every day WNYC Studios is working to get closer to New York and to New Yorkers. The underwriting we get from businesses helps power our independence. Learn how your organization can join in at sponsorship.wNYC.org.