Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, it's Molly Webster. I have a surprise for you. Next month, myself and producer Mona Medgalker are going to do an AMA about our snail sex tape episode. You can ask us anything about snails and the behind the scenes of making an episode work. How long did it take us to make? How did we come up with the sound effects? Why are snails and slugs related? The AMA will be on April 16th.
And in order to come, you have to be a member of the lab. So go to radiolab.org slash join right now. Sign up. Use the code word snail to get a discount on your membership. And also, if you sign up now, you get a snail enamel pin. If you're already a member of the lab, come to the AMA. Thank you for listening. Can't wait to see you there, April 16th. Hey, it's Molly.
Before this episode starts, I want to let you in on a little secret, which is that Radiolab is doing an Ask Me Anything about our recent episode, Snail Sex Tape. So the AMA is going to be with myself and our producer, Mona McGowker, who is like a snail expert, a snexpert. And you can ask us anything, how the episode got made, how we came up with the idea. Do snugs really exist?
So come to the AMA on April 16th. Now, the catch is, in order to come, you need to be a member of the lab. So if you're not a member of the lab, go sign up now, fools, so you can come see us. Go to radiolab.org slash join, radiolab.org slash join. Use code snail so you get a discount on your first year of membership.
And as a thank you for signing up right now, we will send you an enamel snail pin that we are about to drop. It's very cool. We all want it on our jean jackets. So I can't wait to see you April 16th. And until then, we have a really great episode for you today. It is a story Lulu and Latif reported back in 2022, all about the chaos and messiness of life.
And I'm talking life with a capital L, like the kind that evolution gets involved in. So let's go listen.
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Chapter 2: What surprising experiment involving a barrel does Reinhardt conduct?
In this nutshell of a small ecosystem, nature is chaos, chaos, chaos. What Reinhardt had discovered in this barrel was that this tiny ecosystem, when left to its own devices, was completely chaotic. So what does that mean mean? Like, is that saying it's just booming and busting at random or does that mean? Well, so.
First of all, maybe I should tell you a little bit about Chaos. Please. Because for most of the people, Chaos is just totally random, but it's not.
This is Elisa Beninka.
I'm Elisa Beninka and I'm a theoretical ecologist.
Reinhart brought her in to analyze his data. And she says the way to think about chaos is not whether it's random or not, but to what extent we can predict what's going to happen.
So actually, chaos is a system which is high predictability on the short run, but cannot be predicted in the long term. And the weather is actually the best example for that. Meteorologists can do forecasts up to two weeks
After that, they're no better than you or I trying to predict the weather.
And in the case of this barrel... Species could be predictable for around 15, 30 days. After that, you couldn't know who is going to be in advantage.
Huh. So it's not like, you know, things are just happening completely randomly for no reason whatsoever. It's just that we, like... Like, it's beyond us to see why things are happening or what's going to happen, which... To Reinhart, you know, suggested, there's no line. There's no circle. Like, harmonious natural balance, that's all BS.
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Chapter 3: How does chaos theory relate to the findings in Reinhardt's barrel experiment?
The theory had been floating around, but it had never been tested. Yeah, and so Stanley was like, okay, I'm going to test this out. He took his little cauldron, filled it with all these gases.
There's like ammonia, hydrogen, methane, all those things that people thought were in the early atmosphere. And... Then he was like, OK, I'm going to create a little storm. And he zapped it.
Like a bolt of the early Earth's lightning.
Yeah, lightning, basically. And he's watching the cauldron for only a day. And then he finds that it starts turning a little pinkish. And he's like, oh, my goodness. Like, is there something going on here? And then a week later, it turns deep red.
turbid red like smoky red yeah it's like rusty blood red water that's collecting at the bottom oh the water's becoming red i see i see yeah so it is kind of like a little like red soup at the bottom so he pulls this red borscht out of the cauldron and he looks to see what's in there and he finds amino acids amino freaking acids wow the stuff of life
So, like, does anyone know what an amino acid is? It's the ingredients of DNA, right? Well, no, but it is the ingredients of pretty much everything else in the cell. So the little motors and enzymes and all the stuff that actually makes a cell work.
Yes. Amino acids, the building blocks of life. So it was a kind of a... Almost a meme as an experiment. It's a beautiful experiment.
So this is Nick Lane.
Professor of evolutionary biochemistry at University College London.
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