Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 58-minute class, Pamela Lyon begins her second week exploring the Wheel of Life and the twelve links of dependent origination through the lens of modern biology. Rather than focus on the traditional Buddhist concept of suffering, she investigates the first link—ignorance—by examining why organisms like us are necessarily ignorant as a matter of evolutionary biology. She walks through how we sense and interpret the world, showing how our sensory apparatus, language, culture, and body chemistry shape our perception. The discussion then pivots to thermodynamics, explaining that living beings maintain themselves far from equilibrium—constantly importing energy and exporting waste while simultaneously manufacturing all the components needed to stay alive. This autopoietic process requires constant causal relations with the environment, and homeostasis keeps us within narrow physiological ranges. She closes the first half with a detour into the origin of life, noting its profound mystery: no one can explain how non-living chemicals became self-replicating RNA or DNA. Suited for those with a grasp of Buddhist concepts seeking scientific frameworks.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2008 05 23 Pamela Lyons 12 links 23-05-08.mp3
UUID: d01bed87-4632-4f36-ad36-7820ae9ce82b
Teacher: Pamela Lyon
Collection: Pamela Lyon (Pamela Lyon)
Date: 2008-05-23
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 58.9 minutes
Words: ~5,999
Okay. Well, welcome to the second class in the Wheel of Life, which is part of Buddha House’s new series on contemporary glimpses of traditional Buddhist ideas. In this case, it’s the wheel of life, which you can’t see because I didn’t bring it. But it’ll be there shortly. And those of you who come to Buddha House regularly and those of you who identify as Buddhists and have taken teachings before will know that classes normally start with prayers.
But because not everybody here is a Buddhist, identifies as a Buddhist, then what we’ll do instead is adjust our motivation so that it’s more in tune with what we’re doing. Okay? Suppose I better keep that on so it can be heard. And rather than just saying, Okay, now we start, I’ve got a bell this week. It was a bit abrupt last week.
Sorry about that. Okay. If you take a comfortable posture, try and work out the kinks out of your body and try and relax as best you can, keeping your spine as straight as you can. And take a few deep breaths to just let the tension of the week flow out of the day of the week. We have nowhere to go and nothing else to do for the next two hours.
Whatever hasn’t been done today can wait. Whatever needs to be done tomorrow can wait. Just relax your body. Gently breathe in and out. Just use your awareness to follow the natural flow of the breath.
Don’t force anything. Just watch. Feel your stomach heaving or the tickle of the inflow of air just under your nose. Bring your awareness to any part of your body that’s feeling a bit tight or constrained. Constrained.
And just breathe into it gently and let the stress or tightness dissolve. Think how wonderful it is that we have the opportunity to engage in this investigation of our subjective experience. Each of us bringing our own questions and experience. In our busy lives, such opportunities are so rare. So be glad that you’re here.
Think of all the people in the world who have no opportunities at all or have opportunities and don’t see them. All the people caught up in in war, all the people caught up in earthquakes and famine and drought, all the people who are so poor that they can barely scratch living every day. So many people who have so many more worries that they have no they don’t have the luxury of doing what we’re doing this evening. So feel grateful for that and think, wouldn’t it be wonderful if all those people who were so constrained had the opportunity to reflect on their experience and open their minds to an aspect of the dharma. So think that in some way that your being here might be of some benefit to them in some way.
And that a way that a pebble dropped into a still pool ripples out to unforeseen shores. May this be of benefit. May the action I am taking this evening be of benefit. The graphics have arrived. Thank you, darling.
Okay. The Wheel of Life, scary. Okay. We were sort of making it up as we went along last time in terms of breaks and that sort of stuff. So we’ll go for an hour.
And then we’ll take a break. And there is chai and apparently cake or something like it. And we’ll take about a ten, fifteen minute break. And then we’ll come back again for about a half hour of presentation and fifteen minutes at least of questions. But at any point during the presentation, please ask a question, especially if it’s specifically if it’s related to this.
If you’re wondering about some metaphysical thing, hold it to the end. And I’m not sure I can deal with those anyway. But if there’s anything I say that isn’t clear or you don’t understand, please, please say something. Okay. Last week, we talked about where the twelve links of dependent origination fit in the Buddhadharma.
We talked a bit about how we’re going to be using science in this class. And we talked a bit about how Buddhism and science are they have very, very different agendas. They have some superficial similarities. But they have some really deep differences too. And also talked about because the wheel of life deals with subjective experience.
This is how we come to feel the way we do. It’s the process by which we feel what we feel and we think what we think and we act the way we do. And how we get caught in those actions and those feelings and those cognitions. Most of the course is going to be talking about how this works as far as I can tell. And the very last class will be mainly on how to get out because I’m not out.
I’m really, really in. So my ability to talk about how to get out of it is limited in the extreme. So that’s how we’re proceeding. And we talked a little bit about the nature of mind in the Western philosophical and scientific conception. And we talked about the Buddhist conception of mind and the differences between the two.
And tonight, we’re going to start our presentation with a quote from the Dalai Lama, which can all of you see it? Yeah, Okay. And it’s basically he’s saying that the difference between saṃsāra, which is the suffering realm, which is this whole wheel, and nirvana, which is the exit into this place, is simply a state of mind. It’s simply a state of mind. It’s not like you’re going go to souped-up Bali with nirvana.
It’s not like you’re going to go to as Lama Yeshe says, you’re not going to go to Alaska like if you’re going to hell. It’s all up here. It’s all up here. The transformation takes place here. Tonight we are talking about the first link of dependent origination link, she said and wrote it.
And that is ignorance. And that is, by any account, the biggie. Because this is the one that makes the whole thing run. And in traditional presentations of these teachings, we would now be talking about suffering. And we’d be talking about the nature of suffering.
And we’d be talking about different types of suffering and that sort of thing. But that’s not what we’re going to do here. We’re not going to look at because those are appeals to our immediate experience. And they’re really, really valuable. But this is a contemporary glimpse of a traditional Buddhist idea.
So we’re going to enlist science to unpack this. And how we’re going to do it is we’re going to look at biology. We’re going to look at biology because I believe that if we look at the way organisms like us, and like ants, and like nematodes, and like birds, and like dogs make a living, it’s really clear why we’re ignorant, really clear why we’re ignorant. It’s no surprise that we’re ignorant. It’s really clear that it’s ignorance through and through.
We are evolved to be ignorant. Fundamental way, we’re evolved to be ignorant in these bodies. So what I will borrow from the traditional way of approaching is the appeal to a common everyday meaning of ignorance to start with. We’re beginning this philosophical investigation because that’s what we’re doing here. We’re doing philosophy, basically.
Philosophy is not a subject matter. It’s an activity. It’s a matter of questioning the world and using arguments to question and coming to certain conclusions that either hold water or don’t and then progressing the argument. So what we’re doing here is philosophy. It’s not that I’m presenting you with philosophy.
It’s the interaction between us. What takes place in your mind, what’s taking place in my mind is the collective act of doing philosophy. And what I will borrow from the traditional approach is the ordinary meaning of ignorance, which is ignorance is a state of mind state of mind, once again that is somehow mistaken. Now the implication is it’s a mistake about perception, how something is apprehended, or it’s a mistake about apprehension, conception, conception, how it’s grasped. But it’s what we sense and how we make sense of it.
So it is something mistaken in what we sense and how we make sense of it. Okay. All right. Now before we tackle this, if this is a state of mind and this is a state of mind, we have to look at what is a state of mind. And it’s a state.
It’s a condition of the mind. And there are a number of different things that condition that. We’re not even going to ask what is the mind at this point because we’re just going to bracket all that kind of talk until a later date because we’ll be here all night going through that again. But there are a number of ways that we make sense of the world world and how we apprehend the world. And one is through is our sensory apparatus.
So what a state of mind is, we talk about not what it is. We won’t say what it is. We talk about, well, I’ve got a happy state of mind, or I’ve got an agitated state of mind, or I’ve got a peaceful state of mind today, or I’ve really got an angry state of mind today. We talk about those kinds of states that are the union. So they’re kind of a perceptual, conceptual stance.
Stance is used because it’s not a real thing. I mean, it’s a real biological state. And you can do actual real act. You can perform actual real actions that have effects in the world based on this. But there’s something about it that is more of an attitude than it is a real thing.
It’s not like an electron that you could measure. It’s something that is very, very evanescent and shifting. But it’s based on what we sense and how we make sense. And that’s how we make sense is through concepts. So your state of mind depends on a number of things.
And the first thing, we’re not going to go into the making of concepts too much, like the process of that. We’ll talk more about that in subsequent evenings. But the first one is a sensory apparatus. That’s like the eye, ear, nose, etcetera. And in the traditional Buddhist presentation, there are six of these eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind.
In contemporary science, there are now about twenty two. There are twenty two different things that we sense. There are these major ones that we we’re in touch with. But there are other things that happen. And one of them is proprioception.
Proprioception is the placement of your body in space. One of them is also interoception, which is the state of your body, but its particular types of states of your body. So they’re making finer and finer gradations of distinctions and things like that, kinesthetic sense, and that sort of stuff. So the number of senses there are is a movable feast depending upon what the science is attempting to explain. And some of these distinctions are very fine indeed.
Eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind pretty much covers it for our subjective experience. The second one so this has to be working properly if you’re going to get a reasonable state of mind. The next one is language. How you perceive and what you perceive and how you make sense of it is really dependent on the language that you speak. We talked last week about two words in Russian for blue and the psychological tests that were conducted around those two distinctions and how Russian speakers could detect the two types of blue.
But the people who spoke English could not detect the two types of blue. And there are also languages that have, for example, no word for romantic love. And in those cultures, it isn’t that people don’t ever become head over heels in love, but there just isn’t a name for it in the way that we have named it in longing and romance and all this sort of stuff. It’s just a much more pragmatic approach. And in some languages, there’s one Tibetan word, I think, isn’t it, jampa, where I mean, it’s like losing your mind, isn’t it?
The word for what we consider romantic love is basically going mad. It’s losing your mind. Yeah, it’s not really attractive. And it is like losing your mind. Okay, so what you sense and how you make sense of it depends on your sensory apparatus.
It depends on your language. It depends on your culture. Now culture has a huge not just language, but culture has a huge effect on what we sense and how we make sense of it. My favorite recent example is a study that was done of Japanese students and German students when they were evaluating somebody’s I’m looking at you, and I’m trying to determine your state of mind. Right?
I’m trying to determine what emotion you’re having. And there was an actor that was acting out various emotions. Right? And when the German students were asked to identify the emotional state, they looked directly at the person, and they made their judgment. When the Japanese students were asked to make the judgment, they looked at everybody around them and them, but their eyes were mainly going to the people around them.
It’s like, how are people actually receiving this? Like emotions are really socially mediated. And in collective cultures, like many Asian cultures, that means you triangulate your answer, what you really think is happening, based on also what you think other people are thinking. So right there, what we sense and how we make sense of it is really different. So that’s just these three things.
And the fourth thing is the body, the body as a whole. So what kind of a state of mind you get for people like us depends a lot on these things, but really crucially on the body. Yes, I’m going to. That’s why I was erasing everything that was there. Thank you.
I’m glad you asked that question. How the body affects the mind. Okay, we know quite a lot about how the mind affects the body. We know that you can make yourself really sick. We know that there are many diseases and disorders, clinical disorders, that are the results of stress and our reaction to stress.
And we don’t have much trouble in figuring this out. But how the body affects the mind, we only think of that in terms of like, well, if I’m sick, my mind doesn’t work very well. I’ve come out of anesthetic, or I’ve been to the dentist or something like that, and my mouth’s full of Novocaine and stuff like that, I don’t feel very well. I don’t think very clearly. If I haven’t had my cup of coffee in the morning, I don’t think very clearly.
If I don’t have my fifth cup of green tea, I don’t think very clearly. That sort of thing. So we know that basic stuff, right? But the body has a huge effect on what we think at any given moment. And it’s not just women who can tell you that.
And what I’m talking about here are hormones. Hormones are hugely influential, hugely influential. We’re not just talking PMS. We’re not just talking menopause. We’re not just talking prostate problems.
We’re not just talking about sexual response and that sort of stuff. Our hormones are coursing through our bodies all the time, basically saying, is everything Okay? Is everything Okay? No, this doesn’t seem Lift the not Okay level here. Reduce the Okay level there.
They’re constantly working to keep us in some sort of balance. And the question is, balance for what? Balance for what? Okay. Now, here’s where we start getting really biological.
And if anybody gets lost at point, please raise your hand. Don’t think that, oh, well, I’ll wait till the break or something like that. Really, stop me. Stop me. Okay.
The first thing you have to know about how we exist as the kinds of beings that we are is that I’ll throw this at you right away. We are thermodynamically far from equilibrium. Far from equilibrium systems. Now what this means is, Okay, you’ve got a candle. You’ve got a candle that’s burning.
Now thermodynamics just means the dynamics of heat, heat exchange. So don’t get caught in the terminology. Equilibrium means nothing high, nothing totally flat. And we are far from totally flat. And this is why.
A candle is a self maintenance system. As long this flame will go, as long as there is wax here. And this flame, if there’s no great wind to blow it out or anything like that, no other conditions to interfere with this system. It will burn continuously generating heat and light as long as there is fuel. It burns down.
It’s finished. It is at equilibrium. There are all sorts of chemical systems like that, convection cells and chemical baths that you can pour all kinds of chemicals in of particular dosages and particular types. And they will do all kinds of magical seriously magical self organizing behavior. And they will maintain themselves as long as you keep pouring in the chemicals.
You run out of the chemicals, they stop. There’s nothing more they can do. Done. Finished. Over.
A hurricane, a tornado, is a far from equilibrium system. It’s based on disequilibriums of heat and cold. And it churns around. And it sucks up everything. And obviously, it wreaks all sorts of destruction.
But it keeps maintaining itself until the conditions for it are finished. What human beings do is if a candle nearing about halfway mark said, I think I’m going to go in search of wax. Or if a tornado decided, I think I’m finished in Oklahoma here. I’m just about to peter out. I’m going to head on to Missouri.
It’s the grasping at things to make the thing continue, to persist, not just be far from equilibrium, but persist far from equilibrium. So what’s happening here is not only are we maintaining ourselves far from equilibrium, which nothing else does on this planet nothing, only living things, only living things not only do we do that, we manufacture we manufacture all the working parts that keep the whole thing going as we do it. So we’re importing energy. We’re exporting waste. And we’re manufacturing all the components that were required for living as we walk.
It’s like we seriously lay down a path in walking. If a Boeing seven forty seven was autopoietic in the way that we are, it would not only be flying, it would not only be sensing, maintaining cabin temperature. It would be literally constructing its hull, its engines, everything that makes it go. All of its working parts would be manufactured as it was flying. Right?
This is an amazing feat. It’s an amazing feat. And no one can tell you how this started. No one can tell you how it started. The origin of life is profoundly mysterious.
It’s profoundly mysterious. It is in a book on the history of science that was written by a physical chemist, mind you, in nineteen ninety eight. He said there were so many theories in the area. First of all, that’s always a sign of problem. If there are so many theories that no agreement can sort of fall on anyone.
One of them, he said, but there was so little evidence to support any of them that you might as well believe in God. It is just as plausible a reason as anything that’s floating at the moment. Because you can put nucleic acids, which are the things that make up RNA and DNA, which is the stuff that we don’t run without it. Nothing happens without those two. It’s not just a matter of inheritance.
It’s a matter of making the proteins that make the cells go, determining what’s happening outside and inside in your liver and your kidney and your lung and all this sort of stuff. These things are working all the time, not just to make the next version of you after sexual congress of a particularly successful kind. These are working all the time. They’re working all the time. And you cannot put nucleic acids within the NA in both of those.
That’s what it stands for. You can’t put them in a bath of stuff that looks sort of like a primordial soup and zap it with electricity and get something that looks anything like RNA RNA or DNA. You just can’t. It doesn’t line up. It doesn’t do anything.
You put a piece of RNA or DNA on a table or even on my arm, which is an organic thing, it does nothing. It does nothing. It’s inert. It needs the organism, really, or pieces of the organism that have been taken off and cultured, but were once part of an organism to do anything at all. So we’re thermodynamically open and far from equilibrium systems.
And we’re autopoietic. What this means is anybody lost yet? I know I’m using a lot of big words. Yep? Okay.
It means self producing. Yeah. This, by the way, it’s a little Buddhist note. Autopoiesis was the name given to a theory by a guy named Francisco Varela, who established the Mind and Life conferences of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, with scientists to discuss aspects of the mind. He was very, very interested in the Buddhist view of things.
And I can’t say that he invented autopoiesis because he didn’t. His mentor did, Humberto Maturana. But Varela gave it its name. And he’s the one who made it most famous. But it basically just means self producing.
Just means every single second, every single cell in your body is generating proteins. It’s reacting with other cells. They’re sort of taking a census of what’s happening around. And every moment that you’re moving, you’re just basically a jiggling mass of stuff happening. And besides that, you’ve got billions and billions of bacteria on you and in you working out their own living, doing exactly the same thing.
So the first thing that becomes really, really clear with this can I remove this? Yeah. The thing that becomes really, really clear from this, I think, is that in order to get going at all, you have to develop causal relations with your environment. Because you have to keep energy coming in, and you have to keep moving away from your waste, and that sort of stuff. So you’ve got to have some relationship with your environment.
And in fact, most scientists these days say that the relationship between an organism and its environment is so close you almost cannot describe the one without the other. It’s like subject and object, although both of them are subjects in a way. It’s that one is defined in terms of the other. So first you have causal relations with environment. But you have to maintain even though you’re far from equilibrium and have to stay far from equilibrium, because if you’re at equilibrium, if you’re at thermodynamic equilibrium, you are dead.
You are dead. Or as soon as your nails stop growing, your hair starts growing, everything starts degenerating. That’s when you’re at thermodynamic equilibrium because you’re cold, cold, cold, cold. You’re not generating heat anymore. There’s nothing active going on anymore.
So you don’t want to be a thermodynamically far from equilibrium system at equilibrium before your time, basically. But on the other hand, we know that balance is important. We hear all sorts of things about the body has to be in balance, and the mind has to be in balance, and that sort of stuff. Well, the case of the body, homeostasis is basically all the regulatory bells and whistles control mechanisms that keep us within a range of survivability. Because if you get too hot, you die.
If you get too cold, you die. If you have too much salt, you die. If you have too much water, you die. If you don’t have enough food, you die. If you don’t have enough water, you die.
There are all kinds. If there’s too much pressure, you die. So everything’s within this nice little range of values. And it’s actually quite narrow relative to everything there could be and everything there is in the universe and even just on this planet, the range of values is tiny. It’s really small.
So the states that can bring about equilibrium or death are really many. They are many. And they’re unpredictable because the environment is unpredictable. Ask anybody in Chengdu who had a building fall on them. Ask anybody in Burma who was hit by the cyclone.
Ask anyone who has had well, can’t ask them actually, probably who’s had the thinnest blood vessel so small you could barely imagine. It’s wall thin to a point where the blood, which is just pumping, pumping, pumping, just goes all over the place. Hemorrhage, gone. The range of values is small. We think that it might be wide because we can scale Everest and because we can go to the deep abyss in the sea.
And people live in the desert and they live in the snow and that sort of stuff, we think it looks to us, it looks like maybe the range is pretty wide. But it’s very narrow. It’s very narrow, which is why people are worried about global climate change. But we won’t go there. Within this Okay.
Maybe we can stop a little bit earlier. Maybe John Young would want that. You give me a question? Give me a question about this. You can’t just all be just taking this in and it’s not rolling around and popping up in some way.
Pamela, individuals or perhaps a race that can withstand high temperatures and low temperatures, would they then be able to perhaps survive more than those that got used to very small range? Yes, they’re called bacteria. Sorry? They’re called bacteria. Oh, okay.
They’re called bacteria. But us? I was just thinking there was group of Aboriginal people that discovered in the desert that were living that could withstand temperatures up to fifty degrees. And then sort of It’s still pretty narrow. Yeah.
It’s still pretty have more chance of survival, as you said, with global warming than us that are so used to switching on air conditioning. I wonder if that has an impact on people after generations of not being able to withstand We’ll find out. We’ll find out. Yeah. Did you have one?
But yes, that’s true. But basically, all of this is aimed at maintaining us far from thermodynamic equilibrium, from getting totally cold and inert. Yeah. Yeah. The thermodynamics of the situation.
The candle part, it’s sort of like the physics of biology. Thermodynamics are the physics of biology. Right? That’s the baseline theory of biological. And that’s basically open systems.
And if you really want to go there, dissipative structures. But we really don’t want to talk about that. But that’s the physics of biology. Homeostasis is like the biology of biology. That’s how it works from moment to moment.
At the level of molecules, what you don’t want is thermodynamic equilibrium because that’s about the molecules that are jiggling around doing stuff. This is about the large systems that are keeping the organism going. So that’s why I talked about it in those terms. Come on, people. You’ve got to have something.
Come on. Little sponges. Okay. I don’t necessarily want to go on to where we’re going next just yet. But what I can say is that all of this is designed to bring about survival, well-being or growth, and reproduction.
Now, when people talk about about the definition of life, scientific definitions of life, they’re generally talking about survival, which is metabolism. It’s basically keeping — it’s all this stuff. It’s keeping the show on the road. And so that mainly relates to that. Well-being is almost never mentioned because nobody knows what to do with it.
Reproduction is generally considered by I hate not to put too fine a point on it the young men who gave us the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory, they’re the ones that said reproduction, that reproduction is everything. But it’s pretty clear that if you don’t metabolize and you don’t grow to a certain extent, you ain’t going to reproduce. So there are those today who are arguing that metabolism and growth are actually better indicators than reproduction. Because if we could get this right, quote unquote, such that we could live forever, we’d never have to reproduce. Have to, in the sense of wishing this whole shooting match to persist, to persist.
Because crystals can replicate. They can make perfect copies of themselves, copies with just slight flaws in them. But that’s what diamonds are, right? And they replicate no problem. So reproduction, while evolution doesn’t happen really without reproduction, evolution in the way that we know it.
So those are the signatures. All of biology, everything in the biological realm is basically geared at doing those things. You can see that writing Beethoven’s Ninth really doesn’t come under any of those settings, except maybe well-being, but in a really extreme way. So some of our more magical qualities that human beings have don’t seem to underwrite these directly necessarily. So you can say, well, painting a painting isn’t going to help you with those.
It might make you happy. But it won’t necessarily make you grow better. It won’t necessarily make your calcium balance better. But most of the things that our bodies do are in the service of those things. And now we are going to take a break, unless you’re going to ask me a question.
Okay. You said a while ago that nobody knows how this happened. How it originated? Where began. Five minutes?
Five minutes. So what did you explain to me before? What what Okay. I’ll try. Okay.
Yeah. The question is, Okay, the first mystery and it’s still a bit of a mystery, but we’ve got a much better handle on it now is how an egg and a sperm makes first a cluster of cells, then an embryo, and then a human being, or a frog, or a nematode, a crocodile, or anything. This process at this stage, I mean, this is what everybody’s talking about. Right? They’re talking about stem cells.
Right? Everybody’s interested in getting these little buggers because at this stage, they can become anything. They can become a liver. They can become a kidney. They can become a lung.
They can become bone. They can become neurons. They can become anything. Every single one of these little cells has the same information in it. So how in the world do they start becoming this?
And they’ll say, oh, well, there are chemical gradients. Chemical gradients form. Well, how does the chemical gradient form? I’m not really clear on that, actually. And they’re working on the mechanisms of this.
They’re getting a much better handle on this, on these developmental sequences. So to start with, this was a mystery. Okay? And this was huge. It’s because of this that people thought there was a divine spark.
There was this divine spark because needed you sort of needed an interventionist creator at every step in here to fill in the gaps a bit. So this is development. And this is slowly yielding to us. Origin of life ain’t yielding nothing. I mean, we’ve got we had in the origin of life, there was, Okay, well, Okay, if you haven’t got a divine creator, and it’s all coming out of a primordial soup.
That’s the general idea. Don’t let anybody tell you it came from outer space. It may well have done. But how did it form in the first place is the question. So whether you’re dealing with it here or you’re dealing with it there, you still have to deal with it.
So that’s called panspermia. It’s not worth buying, really. Panspermia. Panspermia, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Panspermia is it came from outer space. Okay. Yeah. We and it was seeded. We life was seeded by comets.
Comets. You know, like, you know, they’re spraying their, icy tails all over and dropping little DNAs or whatever in the hell they were dropping. It doesn’t work, really. I mean, you may find evidence of organic molecules in comets and meteorites and stuff like that. But all that suggests to me is that this whole process is widespread.
It’s happening almost as soon as it can. And in the case of Earth, the Earth is suggested to be four point five billion years. The oldest structure believed to be biological is three point eight to four. That means that life got started just as soon as it could. It didn’t laze around.
It didn’t wait for like some major accident to occur. It got started just as soon as there were conditions for it. Like that. Okay? Now our form of life runs on DNA.
And that’s strings of particular molecules that are called nucleic acids. And they do things. Of the two, RNA, which is the thing that basically sends messages from DNA to the factories that make proteins and that sort of stuff. These are the guys that messenger everything. They’re really the workhorses of the self.
RNAs can do two things. They can replicate on their own, and they can catalyze reactions. So one of the beliefs right now is that RNA was the origin of life. So it’s called RNA world. But how you get from a soup of chemicals at a particular heat to nucleic acids, and then to nucleic acids that line up in a particular way, and then start doing particular things.
It’s like, hey, presto. In nineteen fifty three, there was a series of I think it’s with an E, but it could be an A. There was a series of experiments, I think, that were done at the University of Chicago, but I’m not sure. But it was a guy named Stanley Miller and his colleague, Urey — I can’t remember his first name. And they basically created what they thought was a primordial soup.
And they zapped it over a period of time with electrical currents. And lo and behold, amino acids formed. Now as everybody knows from elementary biology, amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, which are the building blocks of the body, right? Okay, you don’t get a protein that does anything without amino acids. So the mere fact that this soup with striking lightning could create amino acids was a major, major, major thing.
And basically, a lot of people just threw up their hands and said solved, solved, not a problem. The thing is Stanley Miller is still out there working. He’s still out there working. He’s still running theories. He’s still doing computer simulations.
And he’s totally gobsmacked. He hasn’t got a clue. It’s like, go figure. We are not even close close to figuring out how we go from primordial soup to this and this, much less to this. A single bacterial cell.
We no idea. Does that answer your question? Okay. All right. I think chai is ready.
Is it not? Okay, good. All right. I need water. Oh, whoops.