Lee Cronin
speaker
545 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2023
last heard Jun 2024
Lee Cronin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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got going so biological evolution and biological selection so for me this seems like a simple continuum so when i mentioned selection and evolution in the title i think and in the abstract we should have maybe prefaced that and said non-biological selection and non-biological evolutions and then that might have made it even more crystal clear but i didn't think that biology evolutionary biology should be so bold to claim ownership of selection and evolution
And secondly, a lot of evolutionary biologists seem to dismiss the origin of life questions and say it's obvious. And that causes a real problem scientifically. Because when the physicists are like, we own the universe, the universe is good, we explain all of it, look at us. And the biologists say we can explain biology. And the poor chemists are in the middle going, but hang on.
and this paper kind of says hey there is an interesting um disconnect between physics and biology and that's at the point at which memories get made in chemistry through bonds and hey let's look at this close and see if we can quantify it so yeah i mean i never expected the paper to to to kind of get that much interest and still i mean it's only been published just over a month ago now
Yeah, that's a really good for selection selection. So I think for selection you need. So this is where for me, the concept of an object is something that can persist in time and not die, but basically can be broken up.
Mm hmm.
So if I was going to kind of bolster the definition of an object, so if something can form and persist for a long period of time under an existing environment that could destroy other, and I'm going to use anthropomorphic terms, I apologize, weaker objects or less robust objects, then the environment could have selected that.
So good chemistry examples, if you took some carbon and you made a chain of carbon atoms, whereas if you took some, I don't know, some carbon, nitrogen and oxygen and made change from those, you start to get different reactions and rearrangements. So a chain of carbon atoms might be more resistant to falling apart under acidic or basic conditions.
versus another set of molecules so survives in that environment so the acid pond the molecule the molecule the resistant molecule can get through and and then then that molecule goes into another environment so that environment now maybe being an acid pond is a basic pond or maybe it's an oxidizing pond and so if you've got carbon and it goes an oxidizing pond maybe the carbon starts to oxidize and break apart so you go through all these kind of
Obstacle courses, if you like, given by reality. So selection is the ability happens when an object survives in the environment for some time. But, and this is the thing that's super interesting.
subtle the object has to be continually being destroyed and made by process so it's not just about the process the object now it's about the process and time that makes it because a rock could just stand on the mountainside for four billion years and nothing happened to it and that's not necessarily really advanced selection so for selection to get really interesting you need to have a turnover in time you need to be continually creating objects producing them
what we call discovery time. So there's a discovery time for an object. When that object is discovered, if it's, say, a molecule that can then act on itself or the chain of events that caused itself to bolster its formation, then you go from discovery time to production time, and suddenly you have more of it in the universe. So it could be a self-replicating molecule.
And the interaction of the molecule in the environment, in the warm little pond or in the sea or wherever, in the bubble, could then start to build a proto factory, the environment. So really to answer your question, what the factory is, the factory is the environment, but it's not very autonomous. It's not very redundant. There's lots of things that could go wrong.
So once you get high enough up the hierarchy of networks of interactions, something needs to happen that needs to be compressed into a smaller volume and made resistant and robust. Because in biology, selection and evolution is robust, that you have error correction built in, that there's good ways of basically making sure propagation goes on.
So really, the difference between inorganic abiotic selection and evolution, and evolution and stuff in biology, is robustness. The ability to survive in lots of different environments. Whereas Our poor little inorganic soul, molecule, whatever, just dies in lots of different environments.
So there's something super special that happens from the inorganic molecule in the environment that kills it to where you've got evolution and cells can survive everywhere.
I don't, and I'm excited because I think selection isn't special at all. I think what is special is the history of the environments on Earth that gave rise to the first cell that now has taken all those environments and is now more autonomous. And I would like to think that this paper...
could be very wrong but i don't think it's very wrong it means certainly wrong but it's less wrong than some other ideas i know right and if this allow inspires us to go and look for selection in the universe because we now have an equation where we can say we can look for selection going on and say oh that's interesting we seem to have a process process that's giving us
giving us high copy number objects that also are highly complex. But that doesn't look like life as we know it. And we use that and say, oh, there's a hydrothermal vent. Oh, there's a process going on, there's molecular networks. Because the assembly equation is not only meant to identify at the higher end advanced selection, what you get, I would call it in biology, super advanced selection.
And even, I mean, you could use the assembly equation to look for technology and God forbid, we could talk about consciousness and abstraction, but let's keep it primitive, molecules and biology. So I think the real power of the assembly equation is to say how much selection is going on in this space. And there's a really simple thought experiment I could do.
You have a little Petri dish, and on that Petri dish you put some simple food. So the assembly index of all the sugars and everything is quite low. And you put a single cell of E. coli cell. And then you say, I'm going to measure the assembly, the amount of assembly in the box. So it's quite low, but...
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