Powering the complexity of life with Michael Levin and Nick Lane | Reason with Science | Biology
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- čas přidán 1. 06. 2024
- This episode is with Michael Levin and Nick Lane. Mike is a Professor in the Biology department at Tufts University. He studies the role of bioelectric signals in regulating development and regeneration in animals. Nick is a professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry at University College London. His work is focused on the fundamental processes that underlie the origin and evolution of life. In this conversation, we talk about major transitions and key innovations in biology, information in biological systems, bioelectricity, emergence of eukaryotes and importance of bioelectric signals to create artificial life.
Guests info:
Nick Lane-
Website: nick-lane.net/
Amazon: www.amazon.com/Nick-Lane/e/B0...
Google scholar: scholar.google.co.uk/citation...
Michael Levin-
Website: ase.tufts.edu/biology/labs/le...
Twitter: / drmichaellevin
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Apple podcast: podcastsconnect.apple.com/my-...|-reason-with-science-|-biolectricity/0a003abf-4d67-48c2-aed8-e4dadcebe574
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:00:58 Transition from chemistry to biology
00:06:53 Emergence of complexity
00:09:53 Key innovation of biology (Resting potential over genome)
00:13:53 Hardware-software in biology
00:15:35 Evolutionary biology and software of extinct species
00:18:48 Bioelectricity and biology
00:21:45 Bioelectricity at molecular level
00:29:05 Metabolism is central to bioelectric signals
00:32:21 How bioelectric systems evolve?
00:43:33 Emergence of eukaryotes
00:47:05 Multicellularity
01:19:55 Plasticity at the genome level
01:30:02 How the memories are stored?
01:44:00 Ploidy (genome copies) and biology
01:49:00 Anesthesia
01:53:37 Importance of bioelectricity to create synthetic life
01:58:38 Thank you
More on Reason with Science:
1) Chemistry of life and death | Nick Lane | Reason with Science | Origin of life | Biochemistry ( • Chemistry of life and ... )
2) Collective intelligence of cells | Michael Levin | Reason with science | Bioelectricity | Biology ( • Collective intelligenc... )
More conversations/talks by Nick:
1) How the Krebs cycle powers life and death - with Nick Lane ( • How the Krebs cycle po... ) @TheRoyalInstitution
2) Nick Lane on Origins of Life, Consciousness, Alien Life, Krebs Cycle, and Evolution ( • Nick Lane: Origins of ... ) @TheoriesofEverything
3) Mindscape 198 | Nick Lane on Powering Biology ( • Mindscape 198 | Nick L... ) @seancarroll
4) Why is Life the Way it Is? with Nick Lane ( • Why is Life the Way it... ) @TheRoyalInstitution
5) Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast ( • Nick Lane: Origin of L... ) @lexfridman
More conversations/talks by Mike:
1) Michael Levin: Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | Lex Fridman Podcast ( • Michael Levin: Biology... ) @lexfridman
2) Bioelectric Networks: Taming the Collective Intelligence of Cells for Regenerative Medicine ( • Michael Levin | Taming... ) @ForesightInstitute
3) Michael Levin | Cell Intelligence in Physiological and Morphological Spaces ( • Michael Levin | Cell I... ) @SEMF
4) Michael Levin: The electrical blueprints that orchestrate life | TED ( • Michael Levin: The ele... ) @TED
5) Michael Levin: Morphogenesis, Regeneration, & Xenobots ( • Unveiling the Mind-Blo... ) @TheoriesofEverything
#reasonwithscience #biology #evolution - Věda a technologie
Wow Nick Lane and Michael Levin together ! It’s Christmas come early to watch these two geniuses at work.
What a time to be alive. Future Nobel prize winners right here
levin is a nobel candidate, certainly. nick lane is certainly not.
@@marutanray Oh wow. That is probably incorrect by the last half, at least. But no matter--why the whiff of derogation when none is needed or warranted?
As Joscha Bach said, bring together the smartest and most passionate people in the same field and let them ask each other the questions they ask themselves.
yes, and Michael Levin, Nick Lane and Josha Bach are among the people I want to listen to, I think they have important things to say and are also capable to communicate them
Wow. Well said. Heck yeah.
Joscha’s interviews by Lex were sensational. Very enjoyable
Why Joscha has to be mentioned here is another question.
@@artandculture5262 because awesome
These two, Nick Lane and Micheal Levin, reawakened my interest in biology. I was always a physics guy.
Nick Lane lectu8re on the Kreb cycle was amazing Michael is amazing also having them together priceless
a conversation between James tour, nick lane and Michael levin would be awwwwesome
Great selection of guests
4 minutes in and Michael is laying out a proper observer dynamic, which doesn't disagree with the science. Nick, 12 minutes in, otherwise everything is bit, 28 minutes, asks an interesting question which Nick reply to about building a synthetic mitochondria around a electrical connection. Michael. 29:25, you don't hear Michael say amazing that often. 41 minutes, Michael, wow, this get together is revelatory for everyone involved I think. This has been cool.
it's stretching it to say that there is any 'proper observer dynamic' theory which doesn't disagree with science. no, it's just a pragmatic 'as-if' stance w/o which reverse engineering would be virtually impossible, and it's ofc also implied by the empiricist stance, but it's unexplained and quite elusive, so it's sort of an ascientific brute phenomenon/datum, which will probably be explained away.
@@real_pattern It works for simple me, have a great day
I really hope Michael Levin hosts Nick Lane as a regular conversation like he does with Mark Solms, Richard Watson and Chris Fields. I can’t get enough of these talks.
Where does he host the above mentioned? I would love to follow
This is one of the best conversations I've ever had the pleasure of witnessing. Thank you!
Big time colab. The world needs more of this. Wish I could have been there live! Thanks
Way exceeded expectations! I came into this having seen and read many things from both guests and was expecting just a rehash. Could not have been more wrong! Truly excellent conversation from two legends in their fields.
Amazing facilitation!! Two of the most inspiring scientists, just let them inspire each other..
Wonderful conversation, thank you
Michael's team is slowly discovering the concept of a fractal nature/universe by consensus of a gradient and spectrum of awareness on all levels. Welcome back to mysticism with modern and more accurate points of reference.
Most interesting and helpfull. Your guest are some of my favorite, Lane and Levin are most knowledgeable and serious about their work. I can appreciate that fact. Peace
Awesome conversation, thanks to all!
Phenomenal work getting both of them together! Thank you
Michael’s explanation of planarians error correction just before the hour mark was absolutely fascinating!
Excellent host-thank you for bringing these two together and then being able to get out of the way. Nothing kills these kinds of talks more than a chatty host using their role to hold everyone hostage to their random word vomit. I just listened to another vid where the “host” talked and talked, at one point in the middle of it he waxed poetic for 7 minutes straight about without letting the guest get a word in.
Would love to see some tests of how exposure to different colors on the light sprectrum interferes with meta-cognition.
That introductory notion of Prof. Lane's--that an elementary charge, simply bolting across the membrane of a cell, is a pivotal episode in the emergence/endurance/epigramming the "Presente!" of vitality, the "yes" of us, an ensign of existence whether we're referring to compounded dimensions of evolution or exceptional events of essential import, evanescent comport. And then Prof. Levin illuminates that to the hilt of relevance--without resting potential we are nothing--whats a "reaction" without an action? Energy traverses a venue with a power expressed in potential and confined to a moment of purchase, a zillion cycles times a single "possible." Captivating!
Professor Levin mentioned a book by Sir J. C. Bose. Sir. Bose was brilliant scientist of pre-Independent India. He worked on problems of transmission of radio waves, building transistor like components with non-linear current-voltage characteristics and biophysics. There is a research institution named after him, called Bose Institute in Kolkata (Calcutta), India. I will look for the book now.
I can’t take credit for finding this on my own. I have watched some CZcams videos with Nick Lane and CZcams popped this up, but I am really enjoying it!
Would love a closer look at Nick and Michael’s bookshelves!
Very cool!
(1:22:54) "Generally, I think what evolution does is, instead of producing a specific solution to a specific environment, I think it generally makes problem solving machines"
5:50 - Excellent point by Dr. Levin here. There's a huge argument over whether consciousness is emergent from physical processes or not (I'm in the "no, it's not" camp). Well, I have little doubt that regardless of how consciousness actually , it's going to have physical processes that run alongside it. By the very nature of quantum theory, when we ask the universe a question, it will give us an answer. So there's going to something physical going on that's highly correlated with our conscious acts. That won't mean that those processes our consciousness, but it's going to be terribly hard (maybe impossible) to prove that, and of course the same camp of people now who will even go so far as to say "we aren't really conscious at all" will latch onto that and say "Ah, there it is - there is the consciousness." This argument will never end.
i suggest that the genome is the semantic component of cells, whereas the bio-electric networks and membrane charge are the syntactic components of cells, organizing the semantic component into operable and meaningful structures. for more on this you can see the essay "from biosemiotics to cosmosemitics" by joe corbett.
I am grateful to Jirender for bringing Michael and Nick together before us. It is truly a feast for the intellect. There's much that can be said but I'll focus on one single issue, and that's the origin of Michael's bioelectric template. In another interview he was asked about this and his answer was that it was an emergent property "like the third angle of a triangle". I find this unconvincing (indeed, rather a cop-out) and feel that there's a huge missing piece here.
With the discussion on representation, coarse graining, etc. Michael needs to look into Dr Ian McGilchrist's work, where he demonstrates the separation of the hemispheres of the brain (pretty much all brains), which have these two different roles.
Woah this is along awaited! I wonder if they will keep talking in the future
you need the genome to give you certain things
15:29
but uh if you don't get the membrane from The genome you don't get the cytoskeleton uh structure you get the
Evolutionary biology and software of extinct species
15:35
proteins but you don't get the structure that that templates on the previous cytoskeleton all of these physiological
15:41
things are over and above the genetic Hardware
mitochondria have two membranes and the
22:46
the outer membrane um is is not electrically charged or at least not very much if it is at all
22:52
whereas the inner membrane has got a pretty high potential on it um but the the proteins that are
22:58
targeting the mitochondria without a membrane potential are targeting the outer membrane and there are protein complexes that join the two up and it's
23:05
possible that it can work that way but it's also possible that there's electrical signaling across those
23:11
distances and I think it's likely that there is but then the question becomes
23:16
well if it's simply an electrostatic potential
23:21
um then it falls off very quickly because it it uh it decays with the square root of the distance
23:28
um so so it's it's not going to it's not going to Signal very far whereas
23:34
electromagnetic fields potentially could signal much further but that requires a very specific morphology to be able to
23:41
work at all and there's a there's an interesting and difficult question about well just what could they do how can
23:48
they interact with the hardware and there are ways that they can undoubtedly but is it strong enough can we measure
23:54
it do we have the facilities to do to to get at all these things so I think it does work at the molecular level
24:00
um and I I think of a very short distances so for example with the with the ATP synthase there's a beautiful
as soon as you've got cells you don't have to have genes in those cells you just have to have cells which are capable of doubling and if
30:00
you're starting as life does on Earth with CO2 um then the point of having the
30:06
electrical membrane potential is in effect to get Co2 to react with hydrogen they they don't they're not particularly
30:11
reactive they don't particularly want to react together and cells today
30:16
um effectively use the charge on the membrane to to to force them to react um and those charges make sense at the
30:24
origin of the origin of life because what you have as Peter Mitchell actually said in in 1957
30:31
um the inside and the outside of a cell if you like are two uh equivalent phases
30:38
separated and linked by the membrane that that's between them
30:43
um and those phases are not the same in terms of their ionic composition or anything else they cannot be one is one
30:50
is the living cell and the other one is the outside world uh and and that necessarily generates charges on those
30:56
membranes and and and and those charges necessarily organize things so it you
31:02
know however much you you know it's just there you cannot avoid it you will have
31:07
a charge on a membrane and that charge on the membrane does something useful even in a purely
31:13
Prebiotic World which is to say it will make carbon dioxide react with hydrogen to make organic molecules inside this
31:20
cell-like thing which is now got more organic molecules inside which would include more membrane molecules and
31:26
everything else and so it can grow so the whole thing from the very beginning way before we had genes is driven by
31:31
charge and structure um yeah Richard um the late Richard borgans had had this made this
31:37
interesting point where he said that as as soon as super early on as soon as you
31:42
have a membrane that segregates some some goodies inside the organism versus outside you can you're likely to have a
as soon as super early on as soon as you
31:42
have a membrane that segregates some some goodies inside the organism versus outside you can you're likely to have a
31:48
charge imbalance and then if you get injured so let's say the membrane gets gets perforated you immediately get a free Vector to the
31:56
side of the damage because of the short circuit of the electric field you get and and that's and you get that for free that's a free gift from physics you
32:02
don't need a genome you don't need uh right you don't need Pathways you don't need you don't need any of that immediately you know where the damage
32:08
was so if you have some sort of Electro sensitive um uh subunit as as occurs in
32:13
wound healing and whatnot uh it you know it just the physics tells you what the what where to go to to plug up the
32:20
damage and so on so I I'm guessing there are many of these things that are just you know so these these free gifts that
How bioelectric systems evolve?
32:25
we get from from chemistry and physics and and then the evolution uh exploits those in different ways
Wow...To be living in the time of the rewriting of both biology and computer science.
The part of this that no one ever talks about is, "Why does it like something to be conscious?" The model doesn't require that - we could be unconscious robots with the same behavior and it would work just as well. So why aren't we? Why are we "aware"? And are we aware? How does that work, exactly and in detail?
Incoming sensory nerve signals activate the target cortical area into a flurry of neurons firing back and forth, creating a resonance. This is electrical activity and creates an electric field. That electric field is a sensation. We do not "experience" this electrical field No humunculus need apply. That electrical field is our experience, consciousness is the summation of such sensations and reonances/
How does Dr. Levin propose that that "shape information" gets from parent to child? He stated categorically that the genome doesn't provide it. But the genome is the only thing that's passed down the lineage. So yeah - once we've got that cellular hardware in the right state, we can regard it as memory. But ho does that information arrive in the first place?
Around minute 18, the question is how we inherite out physiology if not from genome? At least the default?
Just found this gem
Life is actin's potential! Root cause of the system of 'Life as Information' Communication from the membrane throughout the cell by the cytoskeleton is the master key being missed by biologists. Physics is much closer to the answer to the vital question.
First, let me say I have a great deal of respect for both these individuals.
I also want to say that the abiotic origins of biota, is an illogical assumption predicated upon preconceived beliefs. In the entire known history of humanity, there has never been a valid report of such an occurrence. Let me now temper this with the notion that creationism pertaining to an old timey religious god is as nonsensical as abiotic origins of biota.
What we have observed is that only life begets life. This simple little logic is extremely profound, for if you extend it to the infinitesimal and the infinite, it suggests that the universe itself is an organism. Alfred North Whitehead, esteemed mathematician, physicist and Solvay conference attendee, referred to the universe as the ultimate organism, and as such, it is unknowable to us, as we are unknowable to the microorganisms that inhabit the universe that is our being. Not only is life a continuum, it is fractal.
@12:30 Nick discusses a single cell, but, in my research one thing I have learned is that one cannot study a single cell, that to understand the unknown functions of a single cell one needs to study them in a colligative format. In other words as collections, or as I prefer, as communities.
@25:40 Nick discusses electrostatics versus electromagnetics. Well, what about the electromotive force produced when a dielectric material is exposed to an electric potential? Mind you I do not know if there are any dielectric materials present at the cellular level. it is just a thought.
I want a Planaria as a pet.
Great convo
Can we have the name of the lady working on sexual differences and how growth hormones can alter sexual determination from the genome?, thank you , amazing conversation with these 2 geniuses.
Can someone explain the answer to question "where or how the memories are stored"? It's about bioelectric, right?
Meanwhile, astonishingly, Mr Lane lays out, humbly and quietly, a most convincing theory of abiogenesis, origin of life, from prelife chemical thermodnamic processes, leading to metabolism, resulting in the formation of'the genetic coding apparatus'. (1:55:07).
Dissappointingly, it seems unlikely that he'll be able to 'prove' this theory empirically, due to a lack of funding for a half a billion year old, 6 sextillion ton 'labratory'.
Nonetheless, a great presentation, not least for the comparison of the two scientists' demeanors.
Thanks for the discussion.
Did life begin as small organisms to survive cosmic explosions or ripping?
The only bad thing with having Nick Lane and Michael Levin on the same show is that only one can speak at a time.
For a moment I thought it was a podcast with Mr. Beast
What if words are the substrate
BioFreeCAD software is bundled
Sorry guys there is no abiogenesis
1:40:30
[Benveniste's] latest theory, and the cause of the current flap, is that the "memory" of water in a homeopathic solution has an electromagnetic "signature." This signature, he says, can be captured by a copper coil, digitized and transmitted by wire-or, for extra flourish, over the Internet-to a container of ordinary ...
Who said all of science is physics and stamp collecting :-) 5:42 I think Rutherford.
We all know why we're here 😏
Evolution by natural selection.
This is an astounding confluence of sharp, questing minds. Nothing but good can come from assembling these two.
We are used to thinking of genes as the basic information processing tool for life, but nucleotides come late to the party. The first piece of information important to life is which side of a membrane you are on. If the membrane encloses a space, you can say inside = 1, outside = 0. At a smaller scale, the high-potential side = 1, low-potential side = 0; or pH high = 1, pH low = 0, signaling molecule A concentration rising = 1, falling = 0, more of A than B = 1, more of B than A = 0, A rising faster than B = 1, slower = 0. Life gets many, many choices how to represent information.
We are used to thinking of DNA/RNA as memory, but it is, first, a machine substrate capable of performing abstract computation. Given computation, memory is useful, so if your memory and your computational elements are the same, it is much easier to build up computation: you don't need to convert between systems. In electronics, it takes as few as two logic gates to store one bit, and four transistors, sometimes fewer, for a logic gate. (Just one transistor is enough to store information, for long enough.) But a transistor is still hundreds of thousands of atoms: "there is plenty of room at the bottom".
In life, bits can be stored most stably as a choice of RNA base (A/U/G/C); but methylation state on a base is easier to change. Presence or absence of a molecule, or choice of molecule, in a defined place is the fundamental memory element.
Physically, the most fundamental information operation, what unavoidably consumes energy is, strangely, forgetting: destroying a bit consumes an irreducible quantum of energy. It is the only logical operation that requires expending energy, although we can waste energy doing anything, and we do, but wasting energy makes heat which has to be carried away.
.
16:54 shockingly ignorant
Nick says that the information comes spontaneously because metabolism is self organising???? He says there is experimental backing for this idea, so what is it? Please cite the experiment that shows that information is self organising. I have never heard so much bs in my life.
I tried hard but no idea what is this all about apart from some thought gymnastics
They both have bushy eyebrows and beards.
Jesus and Judas having a mouth to mouth conversation!! These men are kinds of christs!!!
godamn this chenell is awesome, thank you for this discussion it was an great watch