Life in a Barrel
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Radio from WNYC. Okay, so let me just, because I also don't entirely know what's going on. I'm Lulu Miller. I'm Latif Nasr. And we also have with us producer Matt Kilty. We have three different pitches. Yeah, we're going to, you guys are the- Wow, we're doing three different things? Yeah, but mine's very little, but I need, you got to leave me 15 minutes at the end. 15 minutes, okay. Okay, a little context. A while back, the three of us found

Found ourselves in a studio together because our editor, Sorin, he knew that we were independently working on these three different stories. Oh, so you don't know that, Lulu, you do know the stories or you don't? No. And unbeknownst to us at the time, he decided that each of our stories pitted chaos and

versus order in a way that could upend some of our deepest beliefs about how life works. And so he wanted to just get us in the ring together. It's a cage match. It's a story cage match. Yeah, and we'll get to all that. But should I start? Latif has got story number one. All right. Okay. So we're starting at the University of Rostock in Germany. Yeah, the story started here in Rostock. With this ecology professor named Hendrik Schubert.

Did I pronounce that right? Absolutely great. You got it. So back in the early 80s, Hendrik finishes his undergrad degree in ecology at Rostock, studies in a couple of different departments there, goes on to teach for a while at a different university. And then by chance, I got the professorship here in Rostock in my former department. He came back home. It was really by chance. I never dreamed of. But the job was department chair. So basically now he was going to be the boss of his former teachers.

Yes. Awkward. Yeah, it's kind of a funny dynamic, right? Anyway, one day he walks into this temperature-controlled lab that they have there, and he sees one of his old professors. A mentor of mine, Reinhard. Reinhard Herkloss. Yeah, my name is Reinhard Herkloss. And right next to Reinhard, he also sees, much to his surprise, I saw this barrel. a bright blue...

100-liter barrel. Yeah, my barrel for my experiments. And Hendrik, Hendrik knew this barrel. When I was still a student and we had a practical course where we... Because as an undergrad, he had done this experiment with Reinhardt where they had filled these barrels full of seawater. And they were tweaking the nutrient levels just to watch how it would affect the, you know, tolerability.

tiny microorganisms living in the water. Like copper poles, zooplanktons. But it was a simple little experiment that it only lasted for two weeks. And now, you know, a decade later, Reinhardt still had that barrel, you know, just sitting there. So I asked Reinhardt, hey, what are you doing with this? And he taught me. So Reinhardt then tells him the story. So I can go back to the late 80s or

So a few months after the initial experiment in 1989, something unthinkable happened. The Berlin Wall fell. Rostock was in East Germany. And all of a sudden, it just felt like overnight.

Everything changed. The currency changed. The head of state changed. The university changed its name, its curriculum. Like all these very specific things about Reinhardt's day-to-day life all of a sudden just changed. Cut to six months later, June 1990. In all the chaos, Reinhardt had totally forgotten about the barrels until one day a colleague of his in his department said,

wanted to do a different experiment and so came to him and was like, hey, could you, it was just bugging him, like, could you just get those barrels out of there? I was asked to remove these barrels for their own experiment. So he does it one by one. So he like takes the one, he like shimmies it over, he dumps it out. Empty the water and wash out the sediment.

He takes the other one. So he's sort of doing that. And then he gets to the control barrel, which is the one in the experiment that they, you know, they had done nothing to. It was just sitting there under a light source, right? As a comparison for the other barrels where they were tweaking things. Okay. And like for some reason, he's about to tip it over and then he stops himself. And he's like, you know what? Let me just like take a little sample of this and look under a microscope and see what's actually like in this barrel. Is there still life in it or is it not in it? And so...

He looks at it and he's totally dumbstruck by what he sees. Sample filled with many, many organisms with zooplankton and algae and so on. I mean, he hadn't even touched this thing in months. Nobody had. I thought that there will be nothing, just more or less dead. But when he looks, he sees that it's not just alive, it's thriving. There's like tons of different species.

So there are phytoplankton. These are like little plants and a lot of them are green. Zooplankton, which are basically like the animal-y type of plankton, some of which eat the phytoplankton, some of which eat the other zooplankton. And then there are bacteria, which are basically like the equivalent of the mushrooms or the whatever that are recycling the whole system. Unwittingly, he had created a little natural world. Quick question of clarification. Did he create it or did he just preserve it? Yeah.

I think it's like a semantic thing. That's what I love. Like, sure. So maybe he didn't create it, but he like... He sustained it. He didn't sustain it because he didn't touch it.

It just happened. It's like a symbol of ocean that he got and somehow this symbol of ocean is continuing to live. Okay, cool. Okay, so also when he sees that it's alive, part of the other reason that it excites him is that at that time in the 80s and 90s, there was this kind of open question in the field of ecology about the natural course of an ecosystem. And I'm kind of like bastardizing the question in a way that I understand it. So like, but this is basically, I think what it is.

If you could just give an ecosystem the basic things it needs, right, like sunlight and space and whatever, but there were no humans around to mess with it, you know, no comets, no earthquakes, no outside confounding factors, what would happen? What would that ecosystem do?

Huh. Cool. Okay. And there's sort of two options here. You know, like, it might be that all the creatures get, you know, to some certain population level and with a bit of eating one another and more being born over here. And then it basically stabilizes. You know, beyond the day-to-day up and downs, it basically is like a line in the end. Like a never-ending line of harmony. Yeah. Okay. Or maybe...

would you see like more like a cycle like there would be more of one thing for a while and it would dominate for a while but then it sort of crashes and because there's not enough of another thing for it to eat and then another thing takes over and then instead of like like a so in this case instead of like a line what you have is a circle a circle of

That's right. That's right. It's what Mufasa says in The Lion King. The circle of life. That's the song, right? So two options, line or circle, which are kind of just two flavors of balance. The prevailing view was when they are left alone, the nature tend to get balanced. Ah!

But here, in this barrel, Reinhardt thought, I have the perfect opportunity to answer this question. I've got an ecosystem that's totally untouched by humans. And the species in that ecosystem are born, reproduce, and die at a super quick clip. So in just a few months' time, I'll be able to see, like, hundreds of generations' worth of transformation. And so he starts tracking how the various species are doing.

Week after week, he's like interrupting Christmas with his family because he's like, I gotta go. Sorry. Looking at and scrutinizing like a glass of water over and over and over again. And everyone's like, this is the most boring thing. Like even his colleagues who are like scientists who do boring other stuff. Exactly. They are all like, this is like, they're like, what even is this experiment? But from another way, it's like, he is a god.

overseeing a tiny universe where he is watching it and it's like generations are passing in effectively the blink of an eye for him. And he's watching this like very dramatic story unfolding, but he's trying to figure out like what exactly is the shape of it? Like what is the plot? He's like, am I in a suspense movie? Am I in an apocalypse? That's exactly what's happening. And he can't figure it out because what he is seeing is

It's like a microbial Game of Thrones or something that he's like watching. Like the species that are there, they're booming, they're crashing. One type of creature could be the dominant species in the barrel for hundreds of generations. And then just it's a blip from then on. Like it just crashes and then it never comes back. It's like Rome rises, things are gonna be on top of the world forever. And then the barbarians come in like, oh, hell no. It's Germany now. Right, right, right.

And he watches this play out in this barrel for over six years, waiting for the harmony. Oh. And he just never... It never came? It never came. No line, no circle. In this nutshell of a small ecosystem...

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...

The 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, 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. Like, at any moment, the natural equivalent of the Berlin Wall could fall and just upend the whole system.

He told me, "I never have seen a stable state." So when Hendrik, the student turned department chair, ran into Reinhardt and his barrel, Reinhardt told him about all of this data he collected. Sometimes I had a stable state for some weeks or even months, but then suddenly the system shifted again and I decided to follow up. And then with the help of Elisa and others, Reinhardt gets his work published in Nature. And according to Hendrik,

There was this immediate blowback from some other ecologists. Yes. Because it sort of thumbed its nose at this whole field of study. If this is true, why should we do any research anymore? If we're trying to bring a system back to order and you're saying there's no such order to begin with...

what the hell are we even doing? Well, if there is chaos in nature, why do we do restoration or whatever? But, you know, Hendrik, he was also skeptical of the result for, you know, scientific reason. Because, you know, even if Reinhardt found chaos inside this one barrel... It doesn't mean that chaos is something mandatory. He showed that there might be chaos. ♪

Hendrik is like, I'm redoing this whole thing. Really? Let's see what happens. So this time he repeats the experiment. Similar setup and improved setup. Try to control for all possible variability. To get our best, let's say. And... For a year, twice. With eight barrels this time. They scoop and measure, scoop and measure, scoop and measure. Et cetera, et cetera.

What did you and your colleagues find? We had signs of chaos in some of the vessels and in some of the compartments tested. So not all eight? Not all and not always the same. Like when there was chaos, it was playing out in different ways in the different barrels, which provides me at least with a little sigh of relief because in some ways it's saying, like, we still don't know. Or...

Or is it just now like a multiverse of chaos where we can't even tell if it's going to be chaotic or when it's going to be chaotic? Like, I just see deeper, deeper, deeper chaos, which, you know, which fine. I'm okay with. Really? Yeah. For me, it was for me reading about this study. I found it personally, I found it quite jarring. I think you really, I really wanted there to be like a hidden order to everything that is not about us, that has nothing to do with us.

where things make sense. And for that not to be there, I think is very unsettling. Like when we do conservation or restoration or whatever, it just feels like you'd be throwing your hands up. My thought was like, if the order is gone, if there is no guaranteed harmony, that actually makes conservation work even more important. It's like if we don't intervene and protect the order,

It's not guaranteed. Who cares about your choices if it's chaos anyway? If there are things that are beyond your control that are going to screw it all anyway. It's like the idea of the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. I don't think it does, which is terrifying. So what you do, you have to fabricate a form of justice. And yeah, there's a pandemic. Wait, can I interrupt you? Yeah. Okay, write that version of The Lion King. See how many kids go to see that. Ready? Yeah.

Yeah, do it. Go, make the song. Elton John, go for it. Okay. Numenia singing Numenia. I'm very excited to hear what's coming next year. Simba, based on the work as confirmed by Reinhardt, there is no delicate harmony awaiting you. And if you don't choose wisely and show respect to your fellow creatures and plants and bacteria and fungi, everything will...

will die. The balance is not delicate. The balance is not there at all. And the song is not the circle of life. It's the giant abyss of no promises vortex of life.

But then why are we going to watch any of the rest of the movie? Like, even if you're a lion king, your lion kingdom is going to, like the Roman Empire, it's going to crumble and fall. And like, who cares? I for sure think that's coming. I think we're probably out of here pretty soon. But let's make it decent for the other humans and creatures that will get to live in the short future. Sure. Yes.

Okay, so that was round one of our chaos off. Yeah, so we're going to take a quick break and you can use that time to really ruminate on whether you believe chaos is totally empowering and great. Or has let all the air out of your spiritual balloon. And then when we come back, round two, we've got another Smackdown or diverse chaos coming up from producer Matt Kielty. Thank you.

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Lulu. Latif. Radiolab. And we're back. With Matt. Okay, so my turn? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I see how these things go together because Latif has this little barrel ecosystem that was in chaos, which is not totally random, but it's like a weird, wildly fluctuating thing. But I have a story that kind of like steps that up because we found a part of life you could argue the most important part.

Where it looks like things are actually fully, completely random. And I say we...

Hello. Hi. Can you hear me, Heather? We can hear and see you. I reported this story out with our contributing editor, Heather Racky. Yes, yes, yes. And Heather actually first heard this story from this guy, Chris Hoff. Thank you, Heather. Who's a philosopher of science at Case Western Reserve University. Chris, how did we come to the story? You kind of, you wrote me an email and said... I have a great story for you. Yeah. You're like, I got a hell of a tale. Exactly. Hop in your seatbelt.

Okay, so we're going back in time to some big callers. Cool music. Back to...

Late 60s, early 70s. And to this guy. Professor Gould, the floor is yours. Stephen Jay Gould. I want to start by presenting the basic argument in a somewhat abstract form. Maybe you've heard of him. Darwin, in fact, never said that. Oh, yeah. Oh, he's the greatest. He's one of the best science writers of all time. And his new book, Full House. Yeah, he wrote some big deal books. Mismasure of Man is one. Right. Wrote a lot about evolution. The fundamental principles of Darwinian theory. A lot about the history of science. But...

Before Gould was a public thinker, he was just a young man who really loved fossils. He had like the kind of classic moment where his dad took him to the American Museum of Natural History. I was four or five. To the Hall of Dinosaurs. He sees the T-Rex. I remember standing under the Tyrannosaurus and a man sneezed. I thought the Tyrannosaurus had come to life. It was about to devour me, but at that moment of fear, I...

Just let fascination creep in. He was like absolutely hooked. Oh, I didn't know that. That's cute. And Gould says after that moment, this fascination with fossils just started to unlock all these questions. Questions like, why are we here on this earth? What are we related to? How is the earth built? What has its history been through time? What's been the pageant of change over this immense span of years? So

So Gould felt himself drawn to the field of paleontology. The study of fossils. But that actually became kind of a problem for him. Because paleontology was not really seen as like a real science. You don't really get to answer big fun questions in paleontology. You kind of look at a lot of fossils. Yeah, you described it as stamp collecting. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, this is the problem that Gould was attempting to confront. You know, if we're going to survive as a science, we need to find a way of contributing answers to important questions. So in 1967, Gould gets his Ph.D. And he's immediately hired at Harvard.

And then one day... This guy, Tom Schaaf, he's a paleontologist at the University of Chicago. Called up Gould, said he'd read some of his research and he'd been wondering... If they could do anything really cool, basically, with computers and the fossil record. And Gould's like...

That could be something. So the fossil record, it's like everything we humans know about what existed before us. It's what allowed us to start thinking about evolution. It kind of became the foundation for Darwin. And for this guy Schaaf, he thought, well, maybe there's actually still something in there. And we could use these new powerful machines to pull it out.

and start answering some big, important questions. Why are we here on this earth? And so Gould... What are we related to? Was just like, yes. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so let's set the scene. It's like 1972, shop...

Right. And they invite this guy, Dave Routt. Another paleontologist. Who had done these really cool studies. Looking at seashells and geometry. And then there's this fourth guy, Dan Simberloff. An ecologist who was really into, you know, mathematical modeling. So we got three paleontologists and an ecologist. By the way, it sounds like a beautiful beginning to a joke. Three paleontologists and ecologists and a computer walk into a bar. Yeah. Okay.

It's the winter of 1972. These four guys go up to Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Where there's this sort of holy grail of fossil records. This fossil record of marine life. Marine invertebrates. What are we even talking about? Like shellfish or what? Yeah. Mollusks? Yeah, mollusks. Ammonites. Oh, sure. Trilobites. Trilobites.

bites. Yeah, I mean... Your various bites. Yeah, stuff on the sea floor. And in this book for each species, it basically has... Where this first appears in the fossil record, where it disappears in the fossil record. So they grab this book, they go to a house somebody had. And then they go to the computer. Take their big book out, they start entering all the data. Uh-huh. And then they're like, okay...

What next? I mean, the problem, okay, like a computer needs, you can't just say computer make a cool thing. You have to ask a computer a question. And you get the sense that they just did not know what question to ask.

the computer. They didn't have a good question to answer that evolutionary theorists would care about. So, like, for five days, they don't know what to do. And then right before, it's like the last day, Ralph is like, what if we have the computer simulate evolution at random?

And why would they do that? Well, because evolution, you know, is not a random process. Right. Darwin established it's like it's small incremental change over long periods of time. But it's not just that. Right. It favors certain things. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And it favors like adaptive traits. Right. The fittest survive. Yes. And if you're not fit, you just die. You get wiped off the face of the earth because the strongest push you off. Because they're better suited for it. Right. They're better than you. Yeah. Right. What a bunch of jerks. Way of the world.

But so all they had was this really simple question. Right. If things were just happening by chance, what would we see? So what they do is they make a computer program and they start with, let's say they start with a species in this program. They don't give that species any definable characteristics, anything like that. It's just this nondescript species. Can you just name the species just because? Yeah, let's call it, let's call it Bloop. Bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop. Okay, Bloop. Bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop.

It's just this bloop, blah, bloop. And then they program the computer so that it's an arbitrary number. It's like, let's say, 100 years. 100 years of bloop living. The computer's like, okay, I now assign all of you bloops one of three things at random. So thing number one could be nothing happens to the bloops. The bloops just get to keep on living, go through to the next round. So that's one option. Or the computer could pick number two, which is a little...

Tweet to Bloop. And from Bloop, you get... Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. Whole new species. So it's just Bloops. Bloop, bloop. Bloop. Then it's Bloops and Bleeps. Yeah. And they could just, now they could go forward and they can go to the next stage. So number one is nothing happens. You move on. Number two, you can change, evolve, speciate. Or the third thing that can happen is... Bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop.

Bye-bye, Bloop. Dead. Extinct. Dead. Forever. Bye-bye, Bloop. R.I.P. So that's it. One, two, three. Live, die, or speciate. Rock, paper, scissors, shoot. Yeah, exactly. And the computer's picking them at random. Okay.

So they produced these simulations running bloop after bloop through this program over millions of years. And then they go to the computer, they like print it out. And all of a sudden they see something pretty bananas. Which is the simulations that they produced looked remarkably like the actual fossil record. Wait, what is that?

I can share a screen. Chris showed us these graphs. Okay, so this is a graph of the actual fossil record. For the sake of this, just imagine...

tree of life sort of evolution, you know, image. And you can see, okay, mollusks, they start here, they die here. And trilobites, they start here, die there. And then Chris showed us the graphs of these simulations. You see this one over here? Oh, whoa. Basically, if you were to zoom in on these branches, you'd see at the end of each of the branches, the extinction points of the species. And the ones from the computer are

are the exact same as the ones from the fossil record. So like bloops and bleeps are going extinct just like trilobites went extinct, just like ammonites went extinct. So for me, it's like, I'm like, huh, wow. Yeah, these do look similar, but I'm like, so

- Yeah, okay. - So what? - So I think the key here is kind of seeing the resemblance that these randomly simulated groups bear to real groups and then remembering that these are just going extinct randomly, whereas we thought these were going extinct through natural selection.

That is wild. So it's like, it's just like computer programming equals life itself. Computer programming of nothing but chance and randomness, which is totally counter to like the sort of order of natural selection. So natural selection would be like, you've got a bird with a...

like awesome beak and cool eyes and it's like can fly like a baller and then there's like a lesser bird that's kind of a weenie bird and it's got like me it can't see in three dimensions and it's like not good at sports it's like basically this is Heather bird but in this scenario it's

In like the Darwinian idea, it's like athlete bird with its great eyes, its great wings, wins the evolutionary battle. Heather bird goes extinct. Weenie birds as a kind of bird, as a species, cease to exist. But what these computer simulations were showing is that extinction doesn't work that way. And that actually, Heather weenie bird and super athlete bird have equal chance of not necessarily thriving, but like,

So it's like if those two species were born at the same time, weenie bird and athlete bird, it's up to chance which one would survive longer than the other one. Right. So fitness might explain why one species does better than another. But what they saw suggests that when it comes to extinction, it's not fitness or out competing one another. It's just survival.

It's a little hard to get your mind around. But wait, but I have a question. Going back to that Marine, you know, there in Woods Hole, what did they all... Do we know what they thought at that moment? Yeah, we do. They were all...

Totally shocked. Crystal just, the way he heard it is basically... When, you know, the printouts come out, they're like, oh my God. Also, like we should say, it's at this point that we got Chris a better microphone. This is a mic gain of eight. Yay, Chris, you sound great. Anyways, but basically, like they were kind of freaked out because the idea is like, if Darwin can't explain why things go extinct, then the question is,

why do things go extinct? Like, is it just chance and randomness? And that question would send the three of them off in very different directions. So, Gould, for Gould, he actually...

This was mostly just like a big huzzah moment. Because paleontology had sort of knocked down a piece of Darwin and put forward this new question. Yeah, exactly. And as Chris put it... They put paleontology at the high table. But Gould kind of leaves extinction behind. It goes back to what I said at the very beginning, that we want to know why we're here. And he starts using randomness and chance to look at things like...

diversity and adaptation. - To a large extent, it is a grand scale accident that we're here. Evolution has oddly contingent pathways. It would never run the same way twice. - And he starts writing all sorts of books. He becomes kind of like famous Stephen Jay Gould. But then Raup, the guy who came up with the question to ask the computer,

He becomes obsessed with extinction. And stays on that track for the rest of his professional career. He ends up writing this book, which I have right here. Extinction, Bad Genes or Bad Luck? Oh, God.

Oh, question mark. To Ralph, the answer was it's both. Like you can't discount fitness. But when it comes to extinction, there's so much other stuff happening. The climate is changing or an asteroid hits Earth. Sea levels can rise and fall drastically. Like all that stuff is outside of your control. You could sort of die at any moment.

So he sort of charts this middle ground view, which is probably how Gould saw it too. But then you have Tom Shopfe, the guy who started the whole project, and he just goes full randomness. I mean, the impression that I get was like,

Pretty much from the word go, he was like, randomness is the order. Schopf developed this idea called species as particles. Species as particles in space and time. He believed that if extinction is truly random, then as a whole, species are sort of indistinct.

Like they have no real differences between one another. That there are no like better or worse. The way he puts it, there's no inferior or superior beings. There's just ones that survive and ones that don't. Schaap began writing a book trying to flesh out this theory. But in 1984, at the age of 44, he was in Texas doing fieldwork with students and he died suddenly of a heart attack.

While reporting this story, we talked to some paleontologists and we're like, well, like, who, like, do we know? Is it sort of like the Raup, bad genes, bad luck? Is it the shop, total randomness? Like, what is, what drives extinction? And the answer we got is that we still don't know. Like, we still haven't answered the question they sort of uncovered with this computer in Woods Hole. Well, I gotta say, I'm rooting for shops.

I mean, if it doesn't matter how quote unquote fit or muscly or well honed or sleek our model is, that doesn't relate to how long we're going to like hang around on earth. It means in a very real way, like we're all equally good. And for me, it creaks open all this

possibility that might be waiting behind things that we look at and deem unfit or deformed or weenie bird-esque. It gives all this... It returns all this possibility that gives me a sense of thrill. It makes me want to look at the things I'm discounting. Totally. I don't know. I'm not sure. To me, it's this. Let's say we used to have this idea of...

where it's like, okay, there are the cool kids who are fit and they, in the old mentality to be like, yeah, like this is like, we're team human. There's some people that get picked first for team human who are the ones who are helping us survive. And some people who get picked last for team human who are like us,

But then this, it seems like this, if it's like, oh, okay, your survival actually, even the fittest people, like they're not necessarily helping you survive. Those fitting, those super fit characteristics, like you could still get hit by a bus and like, that's the way they go. So it's not like, oh,

now all the people who were picked last on the team, like they have the same chances of survival. But it's not like the people who were picked last, they aren't now brought up to the team of the people who were picked first. It's like the people who were picked first are now brought down to the level of the rest of us where any of us, but that

same thing. No, no, no. This is what I, when Lulu was talking, I'm like, no, it's, it's just a matter of perspective. And it's like, everything has the same value, which means it's like wonderful and beautiful or everything has the same value, which is, it has no value. It's pointless and defeated. Yeah. But that's kind of awesome. That's great. It's good. Yeah. And you can sit, you can sit in either reality and, and bask in that. It's just up to you, which one you want to bask in. Yeah. Did you want to reflect Matt about how it had changed you? No. Yeah. Do it.

Do it. I want that. Well, I mean, the thing, the only thing I would say is that like, one of the things we learned when reporting the story is that 99.9% of all things that have ever existed on Earth have gone extinct. Basically, basically everything that's ever lived has eventually died. Whether or not like, and it seems like chance is a big part of that, but we don't fully know, but whatever they, everything dies. And I sort of maybe naively think

Always existed with this thought that like we as species are progressing towards something like some sort of better world eventually for us. And I don't know other species and kind of really believed in the idea that like in some way your actions, the actions that you take, the things that you do are rewarded in some way to continue to strive towards something.

something better. And instead, in doing this reporting, it's like, oh no, no, no, no, no, no. You, your kind, and every other kind eventually just gets wiped off the face of the earth. You have no foresight, you don't know it's coming, it just happens. And not only does it just happen, but in the long run, it happens to almost everything. And I guess, in some way, I'm like, it just feels deeply nihilistic, and I'm kind of like, well...

What are we doing here? I got us. This is making me think of a song for the shape. A song with a shape? I was like, okay, if it's a circle, yours is telling us it's like, it's the clip of life. And we're all gonna die. Who knows where and when. So why even try? Just eat some french fries.

When we come back, we're going to take the chaos question all the way back to the beginning.

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For our final round of this order versus chaos throwdown, just to stir the pot or the barrel a little bit, I have with me a special guest who is going to- In person, you have a special guest? Yep. They're going to beam in now. They're beaming in? They're beaming in, so just wait. They're coming. Oh my gosh. They're coming. Oh, it's Gandy! Hi, everyone. I'm back. And all is right in the world now.

So Candice Wong is our former intern, and she is the one who got us into this final mess when she told me that we should take a closer look at how it all began. Do you guys have a sort of thing you think about when you think of the origin of life? Sure. In the ocean? Yeah.

Primordial ooze? It's like cauldrons of heat. Heather, did you just say primordial ooze? Yeah, primordial ooze. Oh, isn't it soup? Is that? I don't know. That's how I remember it. The primordial soup. Maybe that's right.

So it's this idea that life somehow emerged out of this crazy chaotic soup of chemicals, which I remember learning about in the ninth grade. Yeah, me too. I even learned about it on this very show a few times. Yeah, I remember that. But apparently the reason that the primordial soup theory is so widespread all goes back to one singular experiment done in 1952 that involves a...

Soup? Bowl of soup. Can of soup. Please tell me. Barrel of water? A cauldron. It involves a cauldron, but it's kind of barrel-esque. Or like a glass flask or something. Yeah. So, Candice, okay. Tell us about the experiment and who our guy was. Okay, so our guy is Stanley Miller, this grad student in 1952 in Chicago.

Um, and I'm looking at Stanley Miller. Oh, there's a picture. Should we look at it? Like what you see? Somebody took a sexy pic of him. It's like Bill Nye, the science guy with no hair, fondling a globe full of lightning. This is the sexy photo you're talking about. I mean, I think sexy is too much. It's too much. But look, he's got swagger. He's got he's got science swag.

Anyway, Candace, sorry, please go on. Yeah, so he's looking for an experiment to do and thought of this old theory from 1920s, basically that primordial soup theory that we just talked about. 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 dissolved.

Then he was like, okay, 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 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. 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 almost a meme as an experiment. It's a beautiful experiment. So this is Nick Lane. Professor of evolutionary biochemistry at University College London. And he says that as beautiful and scientifically fantastic as Miller's experiment was, the idea that it explains the origin of life...

is a bit of a leap. You know, going back to Frankenstein, the idea that you have electricity and lightning and you zap things and they come to life, they spring to life, and all you need is another lightning strike and lo and behold, you know, fast forward four billion years and we've got humans. You know, if that doesn't persuade a 13-year-old, well, good, because it doesn't persuade me either. Huh, why not?

Like, what's wrong with it? Well, Nick says, you know, amino acids are great and all, but... It's another 10 or 12 steps to make something living. To make an actual living thing that can make copies of itself, you need RNA and DNA and a cell membrane and all the intricate goodies inside. This is asking a lot of

spontaneous chemistry that all of these steps should just happen without anything to direct it. How do you get from just a bunch of ingredients in a soup to like very structured, complicated life? That's a very, very far gap to jump. I mean, Miller himself worried about this during his lifetime. Yeah, but the

The most famous critic of this whole primordial soup idea was actually Francis Crick. As in the guy who helped discover a little thing called DNA. Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick published an extraordinary book called Life Itself, in which he argues from a scientific point of view that life could not have got started on this planet. So this is a snippet from a call-in radio show where they are discussing what Francis Crick saw as a

has a far more logical explanation of how life began. To cut a long story short, he suggested it was sent here by an alien civilization from the other side of the universe. Yes. Francis Crick proposed what he called directed panspermia, which is to say some alien civilization put some cells, some bacterial cells on a rocket and crashed it on the Earth. One of those spaceships crashed into the early Earth. Its cargo of bacteria spilled out and eventually became us.

And that's honestly how Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize winner, saw the beginning of life on this planet. Yeah, seems more feasible than a glass cauldron. Than a lightning bolt. Than a lightning bolt. I mean, my immediate reaction is that it's bonkers. But there's a kind of...

extreme but more real version of that, which is that organic molecules can form in space and will be delivered to Earth on meteorites. And that's definitely true. That does happen. There's no question about that. What? Wait, wait. We got to... Okay, the resident person who knows less here. I mean...

What? Well, plenty of amino acids, the same amino acids that Stanley Miller had produced, that all of those have been found and more. From space?

In space, yes. How are they found? Because they arrive on meteorites, or people have occasionally taken samples of things, but mostly from meteorites. And Nick says it's not just amino acids. Bits and pieces of building blocks of DNA have been found there as well. That's wild. Yes. It's amazing that this cosmic chemistry happens and is delivered to the Earth. And so maybe they had something to do with the origin of life.

Yes, maybe, maybe, but... For Nick, as a full way to explain the origin of life, that's still... You know, that's two steps too far. Even if amino acids or DNA apparently are always raining down from the sky, you still have those 12 other steps he mentioned.

How do you get it to do the things that cells do, which is to say grow, divide and copy itself? And so his best guess for how or rather where life began, and he's scientific, he's like, this is just my guess, I'm not saying it is, is a particularly hellish spot that looks very not conducive to life.

I personally think life started in deep sea hydrothermal vents. You can get these vents anywhere. Some of them can be very deep, five or six kilometers down. Way beneath the surface of the water, far from any sunlight.

where the heat from inside the earth is churning up and creating these craggy rock structures. They can be beautiful spires, pinnacles of rock, 60 meters tall. I mean, I like to think of them as gothic cathedrals or something. They're full of little details, little doodles of rock. They're beautiful things to look at. And according to Nick, they've...

got the goods. They've got the materials, the right chemicals, methane and carbon and hydrogen are swirling around in the water. They've got the energy source, not lightning, but this constant churn of the Earth's heat. But finally, what he thinks make them really special is their structure.

The amazing thing about these vents is they mimic the structure of cells in that it's kind of a round space with a wall around it. And you can think of a cell as a kind of a bag of solution with a membrane around it. And because you've got the materials, the compounds,

the constant churning energy and these rock walls that kind of force everything together. That's making these gases react together to form organic molecules which are forming inside the pores themselves. They will form spontaneously in this kind of environment into what we call protocells, a little bit optimistically maybe, but effectively a membrane around a bag of water.

with some stuff inside. It's like the matter and magic you need to make life is lush there. It's like you got it all. Yes, it's got the right materials and it's got the structure. And I think that's what's been missing from the chemistry and it's what's missing from the soup and it's what's missing from delivery of organic molecules from space by panspermia. It ends up in a soup. How does that soup form structure? Well, the earth itself forms the structure for you in the first place in these hydrothermal vents.

There is a beautiful link between the geology of the planet with active volcanic systems and active turnover of the surface of the planet and the bottom of the oceans and the way that living cells work.

It's as if a living planet gives rise to living cells, which have the same structure. Both the planet and the cell is a little bit like a battery. It's got a positive charge outside, a negative charge inside, a membrane surrounding it. And they're both like that. And there's a lovely, lovely sense of continuity that a planet gives rise to living cells. Wow, that is very cool. But Lulu, like you've been...

You've been championing chaos this whole time, and now you're serving up a story that's like, to me, this is order. You're putting order right back at the beginning of it all. Well, that's interesting. Yeah, right. The soup or the panspermia are both very chaotic. Some random thing just fell to earth, or a random lightning bolt hit—

a random, you know, piece of gas at the right time. Like, like those are pretty chaotic, but, but if it's like, oh, look, there's this chimney that was being built and there were a whole bunch of them and they have the exactly right gradient and the right this and the right that, like, and then it's a very orderly thing. And like the cell is a tiny planet. Hmm. I guess, hmm.

I mean, I was seeing Nick's explanation as yet another loss. You know, he's pointing out that our beginning, even our scientific beginning, isn't as clean of a story as we thought. You know, there was no lightning strike, no clear moment where it all began. Just this slow and like bad breath out of a vent, churning, clumsy mix of chemicals in a dark, dank pit. To me, that

That rips away the last shred of order that I thought the old soup version had, you know? Yeah. I don't know because it's like to me it sounds like maybe at the very beginning of life there was an orderliness built right on top of the orderliness of the planet itself. You are making me think if I just if I focus on the structure of the vent and the cell and

There is a sense of belonging in that. Like every cell in our body looks a little like this planet. Maybe we don't matter and the fact that we're here is random, but we do belong. ♪ Everything is chaos, it's okay ♪ ♪ Everything is chaos, it's okay ♪ ♪ Everything is chaos, it's okay ♪ ♪ Everything is chaos ♪ ♪ From the day we arrived on this planet ♪

In darkness and far from the sun, there is more that we need than just lightning can seed. More chance that it would never be done. And as we fight for our place here, competing through struggle and strife.

Uh...

Guess that's it. This episode was reported by Latif Nasser, Matt Kielty, Heather Radke, Candice Wong, and me, Lulu Miller. It was produced by Matt Kielty and Simon Adler with sound and music from Matt Kielty, Simon Adler, and Jeremy Bloom.

Big thanks to Alan Gofinski for creating that song and Alita Gofinski for belting the heck out of it. Thanks also to Chuck Cheeseman, Sarah Luderman, Doug Irwin, Candice Wong. Thanks to David Sapkoski, whose book Rereading the Fossil we drew on for the story about Stephen Jay Gould and extinction. Thank you to Nick Haddad, Ayanna Johnson, Chris Klausmeier, Laura Verhaegh, and Noelle Bowen. That'll do it. Thanks for listening.

Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Susie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design.

Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhunyanisambindam, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Khari, Anna Roskvet-Pas, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Carolyn McCusker and Sarah Sonbach. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Adam Shibill. ♪

Hi, this is Albert in State College, Pennsylvania. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Science Reporting on Radiolab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science.