What Turns Sand Into Cells? How Nonliving Matter Becomes Alive
About this episode
Lee Cronin discusses the processes that may lead nonliving matter to organize into living cells and the implications for understanding life in the universe.
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…
People in this episode
Host: Michael Shermer
Guest: Lee Cronin
Topics covered
- emergence of life
- assembly theory
- RNA
- autocatalysis
- consciousness
- free will
- alien life
Keywords
- life emergence
- nonliving matter
- cells
- DNA
- biology
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: University of Glasgow
Books & works: Nature, Science, PNAS
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