Erin Allman‑Updyke and Erin Welsh (This Podcast Will Kill You hosts) - primarily Erin Allman‑Updyke or Erin Welsh
speaker
917 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 28 Jul
Erin Allman‑Updyke and Erin Welsh (This Podcast Will Kill You hosts) - primarily Erin Allman‑Updyke or Erin Welsh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Sorry.
Whatever, however it happened.
But there was a sharp sudden rise in oxygen in the atmosphere that was caused by photosynthesizing cyanobacteria, and it had an enormous impact on life on this planet.
Although we air breathers don't think of oxygen as harmful, it's actually quite toxic if you're not used to it, which at the time of the event described most of the anaerobes that were living on Earth.
And so in response to the accumulating oxygen, many organisms died out.
Like it was probably one of the greatest extinction events in our planet's history.
But other organisms evolved mechanisms that protected them against oxidative damage or they developed strategies to take advantage of this molecule, this new molecule.
Like, for instance, aerobic respiration.
Cholesterol synthesis, which requires oxygen, evolved after the great oxygenation event, and it dramatically changed things.
So you touched on this a bit, but in those early eukaryotes, cholesterol was incorporated into cell membranes, which made for more stable and less permeable barriers.
It protected them from oxidative stress.
It allowed them to signal across cells, within cells, and it just kind of helped to organize things.
things, which ultimately allowed for greater complexity, even multicellularity, because then you're having like, oh, here's a little organelle that I can have.
Here's a little whatever.
We're not doing open floor concept anymore.
We are walling off the bits of ourselves.
Walling it off.
So now, establishing that, so now fast-forwarding to humans, by the time that our species came onto the scene, cholesterol synthesis had been around for billions of years, and the uses of cholesterol had expanded.
It became a precursor for hormones involved in stress, reproduction, metabolism.
It was essential for staying warm as temperatures dropped and helped to provide enough energy for foraging.
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