Lee Cronin: preference

Transcript context

…How special is that? How do you know those kinds of evolution factors aren’t everywhere in the universe? I don’t, and I’m excited because I think selection isn’t special at all. I think what is special is the history of the environments on earth that gave rise to the first cell that now has taken all those environments and is now more autonomous. And I would like to think that, you know this paper could be very wrong, but I don’t think it’s very wrong. I mean it’s certainly wrong, but it’s less wrong than some other ideas, I hope, right? And if this inspires us to go and look for selection in the universe because we now have an equation where we can say, we can look for selection going on and say, “Oh, that’s interesting. We seem to have a process. It’s giving us high copy number objects that also are highly complex, but that doesn’t look like life as we know it.” And we use that and say, “Oh, there’s a hydrothermal vent. Oh, there’s a process going on. There’s molecular networks,” because the assembly equation is not only meant to identify at the higher end advanced selection, what you get, I would call in biology super advanced selection. And even, you could use the assembly equation to look for technology and God forbid we could talk about consciousness and abstraction, but let’s keep it primitive, molecules and biology. So I think the real power of the assembly equation is to say how much selection is going on in this space. And there’s a really simple thought experiment I could do is you have a little Petri dish and on that Petri dish you put some simple food. So the assembly index of all the sugars and everything is quite low. So then, and you put a single cell of E. coli cell and then you say, “I’m going to measure the assembly in this, amount of assembly in the box.” So it’s quite low, but the rate of change of assembly, DADT will go [inaudible 00:33:47] sigmoidal as it eats all the food and the number of coli cells will replicate because they take all the food, they copy themselves, the assembly index of all the molecules goes up, up and up until the food is exhausted in the box. So now the E. coli’s stopped- … in the box. So now the E. coli’s stopped… I mean, die is probably a strong word. They stopped respiring because all the food is gone. But suddenly, the amount of assembly in the box has gone up gigantically because of that one E. coli factory has just eaten through, milled lots of other E. coli factories run out of food and stopped. And so that, looking at that… So in the initial box, although the amount of assembly was really small, it was able to replicate and use all the food and go up. And that’s what we’re trying to do in the lab, actually, is make those experiments and see if we can spot the emergence of molecular networks that are producing complexity, as we feed in raw materials and we feed a challenge, an environment. We try and kill the molecules. And really, that’s the main idea for the entire paper. Yeah, and see if you can measure the changes in the assembly index throughout the whole system.…

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