What Turns Sand Into Cells? How Nonliving Matter Becomes Alive
4/8/20261 hr 27 min
How does something living emerge from something that isn't?
In this episode, Lee Cronin pushes the question back even further: before cells, before DNA, before biology as we usually think of it, what kind of process could make matter start organizing itself into something alive?
He and Michael Shermer get into assembly theory, RNA, autocatalysis, and the deeper puzzle of whether causation and selection may already be at work long before the first organism appears. The conversation also branches into consciousness, free will, and the possibility that life may be widespread in the universe, even if it looks nothing like life on Earth.
Lee Cronin is Regius Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, where he leads one of the world's largest multidisciplinary chemistry research groups. He has raised more than $35 million in grant funding, with current research income of $15 million, and has authored more than 350 peer-reviewed papers, including recent work published in Nature, Science, and PNAS. He and his team are trying to make artificial life forms, find alien life, explore the digitization of chemistry, understand how information can be encoded into chemicals and construct chemical computers.
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Lee Cronin· Guest0:58
I love the statement, what turns sand into cells? What is the difference between the matter in me and you, which is living, and if we took to us, it's probably not a n-nice sight to picture, but if we put us through some kind of atom grinder or after we died, we just-- we're created and take those atoms, the same atoms, but now they're dead. And so what has happened? What has been done to us?
Michael Shermer· Host1:18
So if life is, uh, naturally developing all over the universe, what's your answer to Fermi's paradox? Where is everybody?
Lee Cronin· Guest1:25
The first answer I'll give you is to say that life is not gonna be the same everywhere.