The Origins of Life with Sara Imari Walker
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You're listening to the Nocturnous Conversations. I'm Emily Silverman. Today we're wrestling with one of the oldest questions in science. What exactly is life? For years we've struggled to answer this question. We've said maybe living things are defined by reproduction, or compartments, or metabolism, or being a self sustaining system. But it seems like there's always an exception to the rule. We either rule something in that clearly isn't life, like a car engine that metabolizes gasoline, or we rule something out that clearly is alive, like a mule, which is sterile and can't reproduce. It seems no matter what box we try to draw around life, it breaks free from our definitions. But our guest today, astrobiologist and theoretical physicist Sarah Walker, wonders if maybe it's less important to define what life is and more important to define what life does.
This is at the heart of her work on assembly theory, which we talk about in this episode. Sarah is the Deputy Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts and Science and a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. She's a fellow at the Bergerin Institute and member of the External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Her lab is internationally regarded as one of the leading labs building fundamental theories about life, and she recently wrote a book called Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence. I stumbled upon Sarah on YouTube a few months ago and could not stop watching her talk. She's one of those transdisciplinary polymaths who can speak about everything from physics to chemistry to biology to linguistics to artificial intelligence.
Dissolving the lines that humans have placed on reality and always seeking to unite, reduce, and simplify. I was very honored to have the opportunity to speak with her today about why traditional physics fails to describe life, the tenets of her assembly theory. The way she thinks about that magical phase change from a random chemical soup to life and its markers, her vision of life as a force that propagates through time as an exploding phylogenetic tree, her belief that human beings are actually some of the largest objects in the universe, containing four billion years of history and information all curled up inside, and so much more. It's a dense conversation, but a fascinating one. So grab your coffee, buckle your seatbelt, and enjoy this episode, which begins with Sarah reading a short excerpt from her book, Life as No One Knows It.
The Paradox of Defining Life. Look around you right now. I'll bet you can confidently catalog what is living and what is not. I could quiz a four year old, and they would probably corroborate your classification. In fact, small children seem rather good at telling the difference between living things and inanimate objects with little explicit direction. Once a child is taught that plants are alive, they can readily tell those apart from non living things and act accordingly. For example, not stomping on the flower bed, but perhaps jumping in the mud instead. Kids can also misclassify life by assuming inanimate objects, like a favorite stuffed animal, are life.
Why do we struggle to define what counts as living versus non‑living?
Are they wrong in doing this, or are we wrong in correcting them?
I am sitting here with Sarah Walker. Sarah, thank you so much for being here.
Thanks for having me. I'm really excited about our conversation.
I discovered you on YouTube actually before I knew that you had a book coming out. And just listening to you talk, my face kind of melted off, to be honest. From how brilliant you are, not just the content of your work, which changed how I look at the world, but also the way that you're able to communicate that content.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–4:07
2
Why do we struggle to define what counts as living versus non‑living?
4:07–9:50
3
How did Sara Walker’s path lead a physicist to study the origin of life?
9:50–50:13
4
What is Assembly Theory and how does it differ from traditional physics?
50:13–54:04
5
How can Assembly Theory help identify life‑like molecules in drug discovery?
54:04–1:11:53