What Turns Sand Into Cells? How Nonliving Matter Becomes Alive

What Turns Sand Into Cells? How Nonliving Matter Becomes Alive

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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Why Good People Disagree About Right and Wrong

Why Good People Disagree About Right and Wrong

Why do reasonable people disagree so strongly about right and wrong? And why are we so quick to assume that people on the other side of a moral or political issue are irrational, selfish, ignorant, or...

11 Elo 1h 57min

Are We Building a God? AI, Superintelligence, and the Coming Singularity

Are We Building a God? AI, Superintelligence, and the Coming Singularity

Robert Wright joins Michael Shermer to discuss his new book, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, and why he thinks the AI revolution may be moving much faster than m...

5 Elo 1h 22min

Can You Trust Wikipedia? Co-Founder Larry Sanger on Wikipedia's Bias and Why He Was Banned

Can You Trust Wikipedia? Co-Founder Larry Sanger on Wikipedia's Bias and Why He Was Banned

Michael Shermer speaks with Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger shortly after Sanger was permanently banned from editing the site he helped create. Sanger tells the story of Wikipedia's founding, how it...

30 Heinä 2h 3min

How to Think Clearly About a World in Crisis: Iran, China, Russia, and the West's Economic Pessimism

How to Think Clearly About a World in Crisis: Iran, China, Russia, and the West's Economic Pessimism

Michael Shermer speaks with political scientist Marlene Laruelle about Russia's turbulent transformation during the 1990s and the rise of Vladimir Putin, why the Kremlin so badly misjudged Ukraine, Ch...

18 Heinä 1h 4min

The Truth About Sex Differences (Steve Stewart-Williams)

The Truth About Sex Differences (Steve Stewart-Williams)

How do men and women differ? Where do the differences come from? And how do they shape modern life? Drawing on a century of research and a billion years of evolution, Steve Stewart-Williams explains w...

11 Heinä 55min

America at 250: What Did the Founders Get Right?

America at 250: What Did the Founders Get Right?

Michael Shermer makes the case that the U.S. Founding Fathers were not only steeped in Enlightenment values on which the Declaration of Independence was based, but they were also scientists searching ...

6 Heinä 17min

When History Goes on Trial: Demjanjuk, Eichmann, and Justice After Atrocity

When History Goes on Trial: Demjanjuk, Eichmann, and Justice After Atrocity

John Demjanjuk lived for decades as a retired autoworker in suburban Cleveland. Then investigators accused him of being "Ivan the Terrible," one of the most notorious guards at Treblinka. What followe...

27 Kesä 1h 32min

Why I Joined the Government UAP Science Advisory Council

Why I Joined the Government UAP Science Advisory Council

Michael Shermer has been appointed to the newly formed UAP Science Advisory Council, formed at the request of the White House and in coordination with the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), ...

23 Kesä 29min

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