Sam Webster-Harris
speaker
698 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 8 Sep
Sam Webster-Harris’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 — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Within each one of your cells lies several mitochondrion which handle this energy wizardry for you.
They are not strictly you.
They are an ancient bacterium with their own DNA.
They were absorbed by a larger cell some 1.5 billion years ago and they have been quietly replicating ever since.
Mitochondria are so good at their confusing energy job that every single animal on Earth, besides one very strange fish parasite that looks like an alien, but every single other animal on Earth depends upon mitochondria completely.
Evolution, having found a solution that worked, never saw fit to replace it.
When we start looking across our body, we see the same copy-paste logic applying everywhere.
Cells need walls.
They need ways to communicate and divide.
Then consider key animal components like skin, bones, hair, teeth, heart, lungs, veins.
They are all incredibly similar stuff.
You can literally transplant a pig heart into a human.
Ultimately nature is an engineer that works out these fundamental building blocks and then reuses them at will.
Now my last point here is possibly the weirdest and most magical of them all.
How the hell does a single blind cell divide billions of times into a creature with a head at one end, feet at the other, and organs arranged in precisely the right order?
Like, why didn't I get a bladder where my stomach is, or a toe instead of a thumb?
This miracle relies on things called Hox genes, and they govern the body plan of almost every animal on Earth.
If you mess with a fruit fly's Hox genes, it will grow legs where its antenna should be.
Not functional legs, just legs, because that's what you told it to do.
But what's remarkable here is if you take the eye-building gene, say, from a fly, and you put it in a mouse, well, the mouse will now grow an eye wherever that gene told it to.
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