Sarah Walker
speaker
510 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Jun 2024
Sarah Walker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I like invention as a word for them. I think that's good.
No, I think the origin of life is a continual process. That's why. I'm interested in the first transition and solving that problem because I think it's the hardest, but I think it's happening all the time.
I like sight as an invention because I think having sensory perception and trying to comprehend the world, to use anthropocentric terms, is like a really critical feature of life. And I also, it's interesting the way that sight has complexified over time, right? So like if you think of the original life, nothing on the planet could see. Mm-hmm. Right. So like for a long time, life had no sight.
And then, you know, like photon receptors were invented. And then when multicellularity evolved, those cells eventually grew into eyes. And we had the multicellular eye. And then it's interesting when you get to societies like human societies that we invent even better technologies of seeing like telescopes and microscopes, which allow us to see deeper into the universe or at smaller scales.
So I think that's pretty profound the way that sight has transformed the ability of life to literally see the reality in which it's existing in. Yeah. I think consciousness is also obviously deeply interesting. I've gotten kind of obsessed with like octopus. I don't like, I, they're just so weird.
And the fact that like they evolved complex nervous systems kind of independently is like, seems very alien. Yeah.
Oh, I've seen videos of that. It's so gross when the babies come out. Did you see that? Yes. Like in person, like the babies coming out?
It's so gross. It's one of the grossest things I've ever seen.
I guess if I was one of those frogs, I would think that was the most beautiful event I'd ever seen. Although like human childbirth is not that beautiful either.
Well, we come into the world so violently. It's just like, it's amazing.
You know what? This actually makes me think of one that's not up there, which I do find really incredibly amazing, is the process of the germline cell in humans. you know, in organisms, like basically like every living thing on this planet at some point in its life has to go through a single cell. And this whole issue of like development, like the developmental program is kind of crazy.
Like how do you build you out of a single cell? How does a single cell know how to do that? Like, you know, pattern formation of a multicellular organism obviously like evolves with DNA, but there's a lot of stuff happening there about when cells take on certain morphologies and things that people don't understand, like the actual shape formation mechanism.
And a lot of people study that and it's, and there's a lot of advances being made now in that field. I think it's pretty shocking though that like how little we know about that process. And often it's left off of people's lists. It's just kind of interesting. Embryogenesis is fascinating.
Yeah. And the genes in all the cells are the same, right? So like the differentiation has to be something that's like much more about like the actual like, you know, expression of genes over time and like how they get switched on and off and also the physical environment of like the cell interacting with other cells. And there, there's just a lot of stuff going on.
Yes.
Probably, yes. I think most of the things about understanding anything about what we are are embedded in time.
I know. So predictable. It's turning into a deterministic universe.
Yeah, always was, but it won't be in the future.
Yeah. I think the, uh, first thing is, you know, that like the observation that, uh, Life seems to be the only thing in the universe that builds complexity in the way that we see it here. And complexity is obviously like a loaded term. So I'll just use assembly instead because I think assembly is more precise.
But the idea that like, you know, all the things on your desk here from your computer to the pen to, you know, us sitting here don't exist anywhere else in the universe as far as we know. They only exist on this planet. And it took a long evolutionary history to get to us.
Showing 181–200 of 510 · page 10 of 26
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