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Betül Kaçar

👤 Speaker
1202 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

Yeah, it's a very standard table.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

So I can explain why this is so amazing.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

So you're looking at, like, this is life's alphabet, right?

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

And so I also want to make a very quick link now to your first question, the tree of life.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

When we try to understand ancient languages or the cultures that use these extinct languages, we start with the modern languages.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

So we look at Indo-European languages and try to understand certain words and make trees to understand.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

This is what Slavic word is for snow, something like snig.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

Exactly.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

So we make trees to understand what is the original ancestor?

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

What did they use to say snow?

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

And if you have a lot of cultures who use the word snow, you can imagine that it was snowy.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

That's why they needed that word.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

It's the same thing for biology, right?

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

If we understand some function about that enzyme, we can understand the environment that they lived in.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

It's similar in that sense.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

So now you're looking at the alphabet of life.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

In this case, it's not 20 or 25 letters.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

You have four letters.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

So what is really interesting that stands out to me when I look at this, on the outer shell, you're looking at the 20 amino acids that compose life, right?

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

The one, the methionine that you see, that's the start.