Betül Kaçar

So these are, I counted, I think, six different things that seems to have happened just once.

So what's really fascinating here is that there seems to be two different courses, the time course.

Evolution is operating at the molecular level, right?

We're talking about seconds.

We're talking about mutations that happen every second.

We're talking about selection that's also happening under a minute, right?

So that is a very fast process.

The fact that I can evolve bacteria in a lab and I say almost complainingly, oh my goodness, it took me 150 days, right?

I mean, that's pretty rapid for change to be seen.

But then the big changes and the ones that I'm talking, the really big innovations that caused an increase of oxygen on this planet, or even its own mere presence, are due to these molecular innovations.

Seems to only happen a handful of times over billions of years of timescale.

We are nothing but chemical systems capable of formulating or answering questions about our own existence.

Humans.

Humans are... I mean, the fact that we even have this conversation about our place in the universe is, at least to our knowledge, is quite specific to our own chemical species.

But...

Yes.

I think that understanding the – what I really find interesting about understanding origin of life or even contemplating about our own place in the universe, if at the end of this would come down to appreciating or even before appreciating, really truly comprehending what it is that we got here.

That to me is a huge gain because there's no single question in biology, I think, that will deliver that magnitude of that message and understanding, but understanding how life here started at first place, if we truly comprehend that.

This is not a concept that is well thought in schools.

We ask students to memorize these concepts.