Nick Lane: commitment

Transcript context

…By the way, the fact that LLMs exist has made the process of reading a book like this much more feasible and productive. I had a book club with a couple of my friends. We’re not biologists. We’re laypeople to this audience. I do encourage people for a book like this to see if you can form a book club or something and just talk to LLMs a bunch because there’s just a bunch of extremely basic remedial chemistry and biology that we were able to recapitulate with the help of the LLMs. This whole thing of, “Why is the CO2 and H2 reaction incentivized when one side is alkaline and one side is acidic in this early environment?” You just go through the remedial chemistry with the LLM. Yes, I did my best to explain it in the book, and it seems that I didn’t do a great job of it. There’s so much detail, and you can’t avoid that because it’s there in the questions. This is a problem with biology, it’s incredibly complex. Physicists look at biology and they think it’s just too hard to explain, and biologists have got all of this terminology and often get lost in the terminology. I find myself, by nature, trying to find simple common denominators. That lends itself then to writing about them. I probably oversimplify all the time, or maybe I fail and don’t simplify it enough. But you wrestle with it and you try and make it work. It’s genuinely interesting for me to talk to you and the other guys in the book club to see where you were struggling with it. I will build this into the next time I’m writing a book and try to figure out how I do that better. Nick, this has been great. Thank you for the guide through both the remedial biology and chemistry, but also through many of the most interesting questions that you could ask about life.…

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