Dr. Steven (Steve) Novella

speaker

1,490 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 27 Jun

Dr. Steven (Steve) Novella’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe · The Skeptics Guide #872 - Mar 26 2022 podcast

But even still, there's a lot of steps between a replicator and a single living cell, right? voice-verified

Okay. voice-verified

So, and it's, you know, so there's lots of candidate replicators. voice-verified

You know, once you have a single living cell, you're off to the races in terms of evolution, right? voice-verified

Trying to connect the dots between that molecule, replicator molecule, and the single, you know, what we would consider that that's clearly alive, that is a living cell. voice-verified

That's where, you know, we have only, you know, a scant idea what could have happened and what actually did happen. voice-verified

So what's the replicator? voice-verified

There's three main candidates for what the original replicator could have been, DNA, RNA, and proteins, right? voice-verified

Perhaps the leading candidate right now is RNA, and this is the RNA world theory, right, where you had, you know, for a while there was just RNA. voice-verified

How long, a few weeks, months? voice-verified

Yeah, or millions of years. voice-verified

Yeah, something like that. voice-verified

And so that RNA was the original replicator molecule, right? voice-verified

So that's one theory. voice-verified

So the study that I'm going to talk about is building on that notion. voice-verified

It's a study of RNA. voice-verified

Now, one of the questions, there's lots of questions, but one of the questions with going from RNA world to life is could multiple different versions of RNA have coexisted? voice-verified

Because one theory is that two different things, right, whether they're organisms or self-replicating molecules coexist. voice-verified

couldn't occupy the exact same niche because they would be competing for the same resources. voice-verified

And so whichever one had even a slight evolutionary advantage over the other, it would predominate. voice-verified

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