Cellmates

Summary

Radiolab – "Cellmates" (April 6, 2016)

Episode Overview

This Radiolab episode, hosted by Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad, dives into one of the most profound mysteries in biology: how simple, single-celled life on Earth suddenly leaped in complexity, leading to the enormous diversity of large, complex organisms – everything from jellyfish to trees to humans. Drawing on the research and theories of evolutionary biochemist Nick Lane and science writer Ed Yong, the episode unpacks the remarkable and improbably singular event that made complex life possible: the union of two different types of simple cells, an event that gave rise to mitochondria, the "cellmates" inside every complex cell.

The episode also features an introduction to the new WNYC Studios comedy podcast "2 Dope Queens," with guests Phoebe Robinson and Jessica Williams.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Three Great Mysteries of Biology

• Mystery #1: Where did life come from?
  Robert Krulwich introduces this as the mysterious spark that created life from lifeless chemicals about 4 billion years ago.
  "All of a sudden, for some reason which we have never really been able to understand, lifeless chemicals suddenly produce a pulse and you get life." (02:46, Robert Krulwich)

• Mystery #3: The appearance of consciousness
  Only one known species evolved self-awareness—another deep unsolved question.

• Mystery #2: The great leap in complexity — the episode's focus
  For about two billion years, life remained simple and microscopic, little more than "bags of chemicals." Then, in a seeming instant, much larger and more complex cells appeared, eventually leading to multicellular life.

2. The Energetic Barrier to Complexity

• Energetic canyon:
  Ed Yong explains why simple life remained simple for so long:
  "There is a barrier. There is an energetic canyon that simple cells find themselves trapped in." (08:01, Ed Yong)

• Getting bigger and more complex isn't just a matter of accumulating more resources; it also requires much more energy to power bigger structures and more DNA.
  "You don't get bigger for free. Every new step takes extra energy." (08:44, Robert Krulwich)
  "If you're going to increase the size of your company by a thousand times, you're going to need to pay them all." (08:48, Ed Yong)

3. The Merger: How Complex Life Began

• The accident of cell fusion:
  The core hypothesis is that about 2 billion years ago, in one single, extremely improbable event, two simple cells from different domains of life—an archaean and a bacterium—merged.
  "One of them is an archaean little blob and one of them is a bacterium. ... They merge." (10:21, Ed Yong; 11:23, Nick Lane)

• Rarity:
  Such mergers are vanishingly rare and usually disastrous for the engulfed cell—but not this time. Instead, the "guest" bacterium survived, thrived, and even divided inside its host.
  "For the most part, cells don't get inside other cells. And when they do ... for the most part it doesn't work out. ... But not this time." (11:50, Nick Lane & Robert Krulwich)

• The birth of mitochondria:
  The engulfed bacterium evolved into mitochondria, organelles crucial for providing the massive increase in energy needed for complexity.
  "They are a very specific kind of bacteria that we now call mitochondria." (14:14, Robert Krulwich)

• Lightning in the cell:
  Mitochondria produce energy at an intensely concentrated scale—
  "If you shrink yourself down to the size of a molecule and feel the strength of the electric field ... it's actually 30 million volts per meter, which is equivalent to a bolt of lightning." (14:36, Nick Lane)

4. Why Mitochondria Made Complexity Possible

• Having internal powerhouses (mitochondria) allowed cells to massively increase their DNA, experiment with different gene functions, and ultimately become the ancestors of all animals, plants, and fungi.
  "Now, they can support enormously larger genomes. ... The descendants did so well. They've taken over the world." (15:28, Nick Lane)

• Single Origin of Complexity:
  All complex multicellular life today descends from this single event.
  "It comes down to one merger between two cells that made one cell. And then everything comes from that. You, me, the redwood tree, or the hummingbird, a fungus ... Every type of life that we can see with our naked eyes ... come from that single cell." (16:08, Ed Yong)

5. Evidence for the Theory

• Genetic fingerprints:
  All complex organisms have DNA and cell structures clearly traceable to both archaea and bacteria—evidence of the original merger.
  "You can see very clearly that the original DNA of those two cells, those two cells that merged into one, they're inside us." (17:21, Robert Krulwich)

• Structural similarity:
  Across all plants, animals, and fungi, internal structures (including mitochondria) are near-identical, pointing to a single ancestor.
  "They all have that nucleus, that's internal skeleton. They would have mitochondria, those are the lightning bolts, the descendants of that first little guy that got swallowed." (18:02, Ed Yong & Robert Krulwich)

6. Implications for Life Elsewhere in the Universe

• The fusion event was so improbably rare that it likely never happened twice.
  "So there is no trajectory towards necessary complex life. The universe is not pregnant with the idea of us. ... complex life is [not] an inevitable outcome." (21:11, Nick Lane)

• Microbial life might be common, but complex, conscious alien life may be extremely rare.
  "The odds of finding your Star Wars cantina are significantly reduced. The odds of finding, like, a bacterium somewhere, probably reasonable." (22:17, Ed Yong)

7. Related Ideas: Cooking and Human Consciousness

• The "energy canyon" concept may also explain jumps in human evolution, such as the leap enabled by cooking, which allowed us to get more energy out of our food and possibly develop higher intelligence.
  "Maybe it increases the amount of energy that you can get from your food by 25, 30, 40, 50%, maybe more." (19:29, Nick Lane)
  "That is when the genus Homo humans, in the first full flowering of the sense of that word, emerged." (20:05, Nick Lane)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the great merge:
  "All of our cells ... they all look something like those original cells, very, very similar. They all have that nucleus, that's internal skeleton. They would have mitochondria, those are the lightning bolts, the descendants of that first little guy that got swallowed." – Ed Yong (17:56)

• On cosmic improbability:
  "That merger and the harmonious continuance of that merger was so breathtakingly improbable that only once did it take." – Ed Yong (20:53)

• On implications for extraterrestrial life:
  "We think the universe is so vast ... there must be life on other worlds. But I think what this tells us is that we will probably find life elsewhere, but it will probably be microbial." – Ed Yong (21:48)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 02:31 — Introduction of the episode’s three mysteries (Robert Krulwich)
• 04:47–07:21 — The long era of simple cells and the glass ceiling for complexity (Nick Lane)
• 07:42–09:41 — The "energetic canyon" that simple cells couldn't cross (Ed Yong)
• 10:03–13:56 — The endosymbiotic event: one cell engulfs another and creates something new (Nick Lane, Ed Yong)
• 14:25–15:39 — Mitochondria as cellular powerhouses and their impact on genome size (Nick Lane)
• 16:08–17:56 — All complex life descends from one merger; evidence in our DNA and cell structures (Ed Yong)
• 18:12–18:42 — Mitochondria’s overwhelming presence in our bodies (Nick Lane)
• 19:00–20:05 — The cooking hypothesis and energy surpluses linked to human brain development (Soren Wheeler, Nick Lane)
• 21:11–22:17 — The rarity of complex life and its implications for the universe (Nick Lane, Ed Yong)

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2 Dope Queens Introduction (Comedy Segment)

Introduction & Chemistry (27:57–30:08)

• Jad introduces Phoebe Robinson and Jessica Williams, who joke about their friendship and imaginary relationship with actor Michael Fassbender.
• "All it takes is, like, two black people to make something cool. That's the rule. If we ... had our shoes on the wrong foot ... as long as it's two black people doing it." – Jessica Williams (29:00)
• The two recount how they met and instantly hit it off on stage:
  "We murdered this stage. Homicide, first degree murder. Law and order, baby." – Phoebe Robinson and Jessica Williams (29:42)

About the Podcast (30:16–34:00)

• "2 Dope Queens" is a live comedy show podcast, with sets from their favorite comedians, focusing on diversity and inclusivity, especially for women and people of color.
• Sample comedic bits from Michelle Buteau and Naomi Ekperri highlight the show's humor and representation.
• "If you're jogging at those hours, you got two options, okay? You're either gonna find a dead body or become a dead body. Stop it with the jogging." – Jessica Williams (32:45)
• Phoebe and Jessica express pride in what they're creating:
  "We really love doing it ... we really do deliver on that." – Jessica Williams (34:02)

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Conclusion

"Cellmates" blends investigative science with accessible analogies and fun, leveraging the energetic, inquisitive style that Radiolab is known for. The episode reveals how every complex living thing shares a single, wildly improbable origin—a tangling together of two primitive cells, the ultimate "cellmates." The ramifications are humbling and cosmic, suggesting the rarity of complex life not just on Earth, but across the universe.

The bonus introduction to "2 Dope Queens" brings warmth and humor, highlighting Radiolab’s commitment to showcasing diverse, creative voices.

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For references, books mentioned include:

• Nick Lane: "The Vital Question"
• Richard Wrangham: "Catching Fire"
• Ed Yong: "I Contain Multitudes"

More at radiolab.org

Transcript

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[Listener/Caller]

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[Robert Krulwich]

With the Fidelity app, you can choose.

[Molly Webster]

A schedule and set up recurring investments in stocks and ETFs.

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh, that sounds easier than I thought. You got this? Yeah, I do.

[Jad Abumrad]

Now, where did I put my keys?

[Molly Webster]

You will find them where you left them.

[Robert Krulwich]

Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, llc. Member nyse, SIPC.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hey, this is Jad. Before we get started on the podcast, just two things. First, the mailchimp challenge we did a little while back. We did it. You guys did it. I mean, the deal was if a certain number of you became sustaining members, mailchimp would pitch in with some money. It happened. We're super grateful. So thank you. We freaking did it. Okay, number two, I want to let you know that toward the end of this podcast, it's about to happen.

[Molly Webster]

Hey, Jen.

[Phoebe Robinson]

Hi, Jen.

[Nick Lane]

Wait, wait.

[Jad Abumrad]

I haven't even said it yet. Wait, wait, hold on.

[Jessica Williams]

I know, but we're excited.

[Phoebe Robinson]

Yeah, we're happy to be here.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay. But you guys will have to hang out until the end. Is that cool?

[Jessica Williams]

Why? Why do we have to be at the end?

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, that was.

[Phoebe Robinson]

Can we just be up top?

[Jad Abumrad]

But that was the deal we talked about.

[Phoebe Robinson]

This is my Rosa Parks moment. I'm at the front of this episode.

[Jessica Williams]

Yeah. And you know why we can say that is because we are black.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, you're putting me in a box here. Okay, so what I was gonna say is we're gonna. At the end of this podcast, we're gonna come back and I'm going to introduce you guys. Listening to two very funny people who you just heard, Phoebe Robinson, Jessica Williams, they're starting a podcast here at WNYC Studios. It's called 2 Dope Queens. It's awesome. We'll talk about it. All right. So you guys will hang out?

[Jessica Williams]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm in. I got nothing to do.

[Phoebe Robinson]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

All right, cool.

[Nick Lane]

Oh, wait, you're listening.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay. All right. Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

All right.

[Molly Webster]

You're listening to Radio Lab.

[Robert Krulwich]

Radio Lab from wny. See?

[Nick Lane]

Yep.

[Jad Abumrad]

Jad Robert, Radiolab.

[Robert Krulwich]

So I'm gonna just tell you the story, just very briefly. I'm gonna tell you the story of three enormous mysteries, two of which you know very well and one of which I bet you've never heard of, ever. Okay, mystery number one.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is the one I know. Or the one I don't.

[Robert Krulwich]

This is the one you know. All right, so about 4 billion years ago, the Earth is one huge, mostly ocean of lifeless chemicals. And then, for some reason which we have never really been able to understand, lifeless chemicals suddenly produce a pulse and you get life.

[Nick Lane]

Hello? Yes, I have just arrived now.

[Jad Abumrad]

Nick.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay, wonderful. Like Nick, for example.

[Nick Lane]

Nick Lane. I'm a professor of evolutionary biochemistry at University College in London.

[Robert Krulwich]

Nick is the main guy in the story I'm about to tell you. But just to continue this setup, that was mystery number one. Where does life come from? Next, mystery number three, to make it.

[Jad Abumrad]

More interesting, what about the two you skipped over?

[Robert Krulwich]

Two is gonna be the subject of the story. And more important, the middle one is the deep surprise because you've never heard of it. So I thought I would skip over two to remind you how familiar you are with one and three.

[Jad Abumrad]

All right, fine. Go to three and then come back to two. It's fine.

[Robert Krulwich]

Three.

[Jad Abumrad]

All right.

[Robert Krulwich]

Consciousness, for some reason. For some reason, one animal on the planet and only one that we can know seems to spring into this very elaborate sense of self awareness. We don't know why it happened. We don't know how it happened. It just did.

[Jad Abumrad]

Right. I'm familiar with one and three.

[Robert Krulwich]

You are? Now, here's number two. That's the one that keeps Nick up at night.

[Nick Lane]

Yeah. Because there's a kind of a gap, a black hole, where everything important in biology happened. We have very little insight into what it was.

[Jad Abumrad]

Black hole in biology. I like that.

[Robert Krulwich]

So you want to know what it is, this black hole? Yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

You do.

[Robert Krulwich]

You do. You know you do.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay.

[Ed Yong]

Yes.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay, mystery number two. We're a little bit past one. We're way before three. So 4 billion years ago, we got life. It's just floating around, you know, little specks in the ocean.

[Nick Lane]

You know, very simple cells, probably pretty much like a bacterium as we know them today. This is very small, for a start.

[Robert Krulwich]

If you're looking at the period at the end of a sentence, say, is it about that size or smaller than that?

[Nick Lane]

Oh, much smaller. Much smaller than that. A couple of thousandths of a millimeter long. So tiny, tiny things. They all look the same in their size and shape, and they don't seem to be doing anything very interesting.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, you know, they were having babies, or they were using energy and they were figuring a lot of things out. But if you look inside one of these little things, not much going on.

[Nick Lane]

Yes, it's basically. It's often described as a bag of chemicals.

[Jad Abumrad]

They're not complex.

[Robert Krulwich]

They're not complex.

[Jad Abumrad]

Simple.

[Robert Krulwich]

Simple as can be. And it goes on like this for millions of years, and then tens of millions of years, and then hundreds of millions of years.

[Nick Lane]

Well, really 2 billion years or so.

[Robert Krulwich]

2 billion years, if not longer. You just have tiny, tiny, simple, tiny, simple. Bopping, bopping, sitting, drifting in the water. Bopping, bopping, bopping, bopping. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.

[Jad Abumrad]

Come on with it.

[Robert Krulwich]

Look, I'm telling you this for a good reason. There is, you should know there is no rule which says life has to get bigger. We could have stayed infinitely small for a hundred billion years, you know, forever. Really?

[Jad Abumrad]

Really?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yes, really. But then, Chad, something happened, as they say, about 2 billion years ago. All of a sudden, practically overnight, a new kind of life shows up. A new cell. And it's huge.

[Jad Abumrad]

How huge?

[Robert Krulwich]

A lot bigger than what was before these first ones.

[Nick Lane]

The actual volume went out around about 10,000 times bigger. Whoa. Massive increase in size.

[Robert Krulwich]

It's like jump from specks to battleships.

[Nick Lane]

And inside these things is massive pieces of complex machinery.

[Robert Krulwich]

And it becomes bigger and bigger and more complex, and it ultimately leads to jellyfish, giant redwood trees, beluga whales, Beluga caviar, which is baby whales.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's not baby whales.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, never mind. Cherry trees, turtles, librarians, tarantulas, orangutans, elephants, pterodactyls. There's your second mystery. Like, how did life for such an enormously long time, say, so simple, so dull, and so tiny, and then, boom, you get these big life forms, like, what happened and why did it not happen for such a long time? Hmm.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, are you going to enlighten me with some attempts at answers?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yes, but I want to remind you, this is a theory we've got here. We're making a hypothesis.

[Ed Yong]

I mean, who knows really, exactly what happened? I mean, we're never gonna get. We're never gonna find, like, found footage of that moment, right? We can. We can only imagine, and we can only use the evidence that we've got.

[Robert Krulwich]

Now, that is Ed Young.

[Ed Yong]

I'm a science writer at the Atlantic.

[Robert Krulwich]

It's the guy who introduced me to Nick or to Nick's work and this theory. And he says, here's the important thing to know. I mean, I think during those 2 billion years when nothing much happened, it wasn't that life didn't get complicated. It's that life couldn't get complicated.

[Ed Yong]

There is a barrier. There is an energetic canyon that simple cells find themselves trapped in.

[Jad Abumrad]

What?

[Robert Krulwich]

It means that it's a huge deal to try to get big. Think about what it takes to get bigger. It takes bigger cell walls, it takes more surface, more openings. Let things in, push things out, more power, more moving parts. And then to make the whole thing fit and work together, you gotta have a bigger design plan. That's your DNA. So you're gonna need more DNA.

[Ed Yong]

And all that DNA needs to be copied.

[Robert Krulwich]

You're going to need some DNA copiers.

[Ed Yong]

You then need to read the information that's encoded within it, some DNA readers. And you need to use that information to build proteins and some builders. And that last bit is especially costly.

[Robert Krulwich]

In other words, you don't get bigger for free. Every new step takes extra energy.

[Ed Yong]

Just like if you're going to, you know, if you're going to increase the size of your company by a thousand times, if you're going to have a thousand times more employees, you're going to need to pay them all.

[Robert Krulwich]

Where are you gonna get the money? I mean, you and I, we might be able to go to a bank, but if you're a teeny little thing, you don't have any place to go. So how do you get bigger?

[Jad Abumrad]

I mean, can't you just eat more food than you normally eat so that you get more energy, so that slowly, over time, you get bigger? No, no.

[Robert Krulwich]

I mean. Well, you could do that, but suppose you don't have a stomach to absorb the food?

[Jad Abumrad]

You make a stomach somehow. I don't know.

[Robert Krulwich]

But in order to make the stomach, you gotta eat more food to build a stomach. But in order to eat more food, you gotta have the stomach. But you can't really have the stomach unless you eat the food. And you can't eat the food unless you have the stomach. You're stuck in a hole.

[Listener/Caller]

Kind of.

[Robert Krulwich]

It's a catch 22 kind of a thing.

[Nick Lane]

Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

You're stuck in what Ed calls an energetic canyon.

[Ed Yong]

And to climb over the walls of that canyon and to start experimenting with complexity, you need something improbable to happen. You need something very special.

[Robert Krulwich]

So special and so improbable that according to this theory, over the course of.

[Ed Yong]

All of our planet's history, that has only happened successfully once.

[Jad Abumrad]

What? What happened?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, here's the theory. There's life bopping along in Its boring, boring, boring way. Everything is very tiny, very simple. And then one day two single celled creatures start to drift towards one another.

[Ed Yong]

One of them is an archaean little blob and one of them is a bacterium.

[Robert Krulwich]

Another little blob, but smaller.

[Ed Yong]

They belong to the two great houses of simple things, you know, the Montagues and capulets of 2 billion BC.

[Robert Krulwich]

In any case, these two little cells start to get near each other slowly.

[Nick Lane]

You know, what each cell wants is what the other one has to offer.

[Robert Krulwich]

Nick imagines that, I don't know, maybe the little one was expelling some kind of chemical.

[Nick Lane]

Let's say it' something like hydrogen gas. Just for the sake of an argument.

[Robert Krulwich]

Let'S say the big one likes hydrogen.

[Nick Lane]

That'S what it wants.

[Robert Krulwich]

And maybe the big one spits out nitrogen, which is what the little one wants. So they kind of come together and they snuggle up. Totally ordinary thing. It happens all the time with cells, he said.

[Nick Lane]

But in this case that snuggling gets.

[Ed Yong]

Closer and closer until somehow those two cells meet and they merge.

[Jad Abumrad]

They just squish together. How do they merge?

[Nick Lane]

You know, membranes fuse, cell walls don't always form.

[Robert Krulwich]

Maybe the big one had a hole in its wall and the little one just fell through the hole.

[Nick Lane]

I don't really know what the mechanism is, but we do know if it's possible.

[Robert Krulwich]

The point is somehow this little guy gets in.

[Ed Yong]

The bacterium finds itself inside the arcane.

[Robert Krulwich]

So that's the first thing that happens. One little guy gets inside another little guy. Okay, I gotta tell you, this is, this is, this is extremely rare.

[Nick Lane]

For the most part, cells don't get inside other cells. And when they do get inside other cells, for the most part it doesn't work out.

[Robert Krulwich]

Because if you're this little guy on the inside now you're trapped. You can't get to the things you want to eat.

[Nick Lane]

It's cut off from the outside world and chances are it will die, which.

[Robert Krulwich]

Is what happens, you know, 99.999% of the time, but not this time.

[Nick Lane]

If the swallower is capable of bringing in that outside world and feeding it, spoon feeding it to its swallowee if you like, then it will work.

[Robert Krulwich]

And maybe that's what happened here, says Nick. I mean, maybe the big cell had some kind of mutation that allowed it to keep feeding the little cell in its belly. So the little cell survives and thrives. Because the second thing that happens here is the little cell on the inside starts to divide.

[Nick Lane]

So now you have, you know, A cell with two cells inside it and maybe then four cells inside it, which.

[Robert Krulwich]

If you're a big cell, is normally not a great situation.

[Nick Lane]

You find yourself with. With guests inside you. Imagine having a house party and. And the guests won't go away. They're having intercourse among themselves, if you like, and producing more guests. There's going to be a riot. There's going to be a murder or something.

[Robert Krulwich]

The point is, says Nick, when you get to this point, it really shouldn't work. But somehow it did. Like, not only did one cell get in another, which is rare, and then that cell survived even rarer, and then divided without creating a riot, even rarer. But then somehow this big cell finds ways, over and over, taking care of all those little new house guests.

[Nick Lane]

And they're all stages of their life cycle. You got some old folk in there, and you got some babies in there. And how are you going to do it? Well, you probably need to. Let's put in a maternity ward first of all, to look after the babies. Let's, you know, let's put in some kind of clinic for end of life for the geriatrics.

[Robert Krulwich]

Somehow this big cell is able to construct all this new machinery inside itself to keep this extraordinarily various group of houseguests happy.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wait, why? Why would it bother? I mean, like, what is the. I mean, what does the cell get in return? And you said that it didn't have enough energy to build itself bigger. So how is it even doing this?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, now you're getting to the real nub of the story. The key here, says Nick, is those little house guests that are living now in the big cell, they're not ordinary house guests. They are a very specific kind of bacteria that we now call mitochondria. And if you look at the descendants of those little guys who live in.

[Nick Lane]

Us right now, they have an amazingly strong electrical charge that sort of radiates.

[Robert Krulwich]

Across the membrane on their outside.

[Nick Lane]

And that electrical charge is. It's tiny. It's 150 millivolts. But if you shrink yourself down to the size of a molecule and feel the strength of the electric field right next to that membrane, it's actually 30 million volts per meter, which is equivalent to a bolt of lightning.

[Robert Krulwich]

Whoa. This is what the big cell gets back. This is its return gift, lightning. And it's this new electricity that gets it, that helps it fund all these new adventures and construction projects.

[Nick Lane]

Now, they can support enormously larger genomes. So you can have. Where bacteria may have one or two copies of a gene, you can now.

[Robert Krulwich]

Have 10 more genes or 20 or 30 or maybe 50.

[Nick Lane]

There's no penalty for doing so. And what, and what that gives you is a kind of a redundancy that allows different genes to do slightly different jobs or to diverge to, you know, you've got the scope to experiment, to try things out. So you have one group going off to become algae and plants and another group becoming animals and another group becoming the fungi and so on. The descendants did so well. They've taken over the world.

[Jad Abumrad]

And they all came from that one single coming together, that one union.

[Nick Lane]

Yes.

[Ed Yong]

It comes down to one merger between two cells that made one cell. And then everything comes from that. You, me, the redwood tree, or the hummingbird, a fungus, piece of algae growing in a pond. Every type form of life that we can see with our naked eyes, and many that we can't come from that single cell.

[Robert Krulwich]

And what this spawns, says Nick, is this is how we get the great tree of life that we see all around us. After eons and eons of sameness, suddenly we get this many splendid thing that is nature, and it starts right here. What we're looking at is truly the second genesis.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wait, okay, hold on a second. Hold on, hold on. How do we know any of this actually happened like that all of the life that we can see comes from one cell? How would we possibly know that?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, starting with us, if you go in and look at the genetic material.

[Nick Lane]

Inside our cells, about half of our genes, a little bit less than half, we find them in bacteria or archaea.

[Robert Krulwich]

Nick says you can see very clearly that the original DNA of those two cells, those two cells that merged into one, they're inside us.

[Nick Lane]

So their sequence and their structure has remained kind of almost intact for 2 billion years.

[Ed Yong]

And just the structure of your cells alone provides an important clue. If you look at the cells of all of those things, if you look at. If I take one of your cells and one cell from that fungus or from the spru, unless you were an expert, unless you've been trained in this stuff, it would be very hard to tell the difference between those.

[Robert Krulwich]

In other words, all of our cells. And this is across animals, plants, fungi, they all look something like those original.

[Ed Yong]

Cells, very, very similar. They all have that nucleus, that's internal skeleton. They would have mitochondria, those are the.

[Robert Krulwich]

Lightning bolts, the descendants of that first little guy that got swallowed.

[Nick Lane]

You know, we have 40 trillion cells, and each of those has got, let's say on average, a thousand mitochondria. So that, you know, that's a tremendous number of mitochondria in one human being. And the giant redwood tree has a lot more than that. And so does the worm. And so from that point of view, just biomass, we are about 40% mitochondria. So just from biomass, they are possibly the single most prolific life form that ever existed.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, you got me. I do like this idea of like trillions of little lightning bolts in your belly.

[Soren Wheeler]

I mean, it is also like, you know, it's a little bit like.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's our producer, Soren Wheeler, who chimed in as we were working on this.

[Soren Wheeler]

You remember our guy? What was his name? From the floppy ears, the kind of Richard Wrangham.

[Listener/Caller]

Is that correct?

[Soren Wheeler]

Richard Wrangham, yeah.

[Nick Lane]

Life consists of finding energy.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's him.

[Soren Wheeler]

He had that thing about. He wrote a book as all a long time ago, but it was all about. I actually talked to him at the time. Human ancestors are going along, doing their thing, and they're eating raw leaves in the forest, same way that chimps do now. But then once they learn to cook.

[Nick Lane]

Once you start cooking, there's a terrific advantage.

[Soren Wheeler]

Cooking would break things down and then once, then you don't have to break things down inside you, which means that you're putting less energy into your food, but getting more out of it.

[Nick Lane]

Maybe it increases the amount of energy that you can get from your food by 25, 30, 40, 50%, maybe more.

[Soren Wheeler]

And his theory is that, that, that is when we got smart, because we were in again, an energy canyon where there was what was around you and how much work it took to break it down to the parts you need. You couldn't do much until you light a fire underneath it and you like a lightning bolt and you break it down so that you don't have to do that work, because now the fire is doing that work. Then you put it in your tummy and you get all the goods with half the work. And now you have time and energy to make a brain that can think about itself.

[Nick Lane]

That is when the genus Homo humans, in the first full flowering of the sense of that word, emerged.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow, that's interesting. So the energy canyon leaping theory might actually touch on mystery number three, too. The consciousness one.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, but don't you think that cooking is an act that's intentional? I mean, when you decide to light the fire and cook the meat, then you're doing something that you intend to do. What really gets to me is when you go back to the original pairing. I mean, that was just pure accident. And that so much would flow from something completely cosmically accidental. That's what really, really kind of freaks me out, actually.

[Ed Yong]

That merger and the harmonious continuance of that merger was so breathtakingly improbable that only once did it take.

[Robert Krulwich]

Nick says it only happened once, 2 billion years ago. And there's no evidence to suggest that it has happened since.

[Nick Lane]

So there is no trajectory towards necessary complex life. The universe is not pregnant with the idea of us. There's nothing about the way that evolution has worked on Earth to suggest that complex life is an inevitable outcome.

[Robert Krulwich]

And if this hadn't happened, would the Earth just be still rich with little, I don't know, life forms that are smaller than a grain of rice? That's all we'd ever get.

[Ed Yong]

I think that's the idea.

[Robert Krulwich]

Does that mean that you have to have this incident on planet Zantar? And planet Zantar 36 and planet Zantar.

[Ed Yong]

Right. So that's really interesting. Right. So I think when we think about finding, the prospect of finding alien life, we think the universe is so vast that we cannot be alone, that there must be life on other worlds. But I think what this tells us is that we will probably find life elsewhere, but it will probably be microbial. It will, you know, the odds of finding something, you know, like the aliens that you would. You would expect.

[Robert Krulwich]

Right.

[Ed Yong]

So the odds of finding your Star wars cantina are significantly reduced. The odds of finding, like, a bacterium somewhere, probably reasonable you might find life, but maybe it's going to be boring.

[Robert Krulwich]

We could leave it right there.

[Ed Yong]

But, you know, you probably won't get killed by them either. So that's. That's a good thing.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's true. That's true. Yep. Nick Lean's book on this theory is called the Vital Question. Special thanks to Eric Steinbrook for his work on this podcast and to Richard Wrangham, whose book is Catching Fire. Ed Young, whose forthcoming book is I Contain Multitudes. You can find all these references on.

[Jad Abumrad]

Our website, Radiolab.org and speaking of mates.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yes.

[Nick Lane]

This is what this.

[Robert Krulwich]

We call this podcast Cellmates.

[Phoebe Robinson]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, we. As promised, I'm going to introduce you to two comedy mates after the break. I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

Stick around.

[Jessica Williams]

Hi, this is Shereen from Sunrise, Florida. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about [e-mail].

[Phoebe Robinson]

Radiolab is supported by BILT. Nobody wants to pay rent. But if you have to, Bilt works to make it more worthwhile. By paying rent through Bilt, you can earn flexible points that can be redeemed toward hundreds of hotels and airlines, a future rent payment, your next Lyft ride, and more. But it doesn't stop there. You can dine out at your favorite local restaurants and earn additional points, get VIP treatment at certain fitness studios, and enjoy exclusive experiences just for Bilt members. Every month, earn points on rent and around your neighborhood, wherever you call home, by going to joinbuilt.com Radiolab that's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T.com Radiolab.

[Listener/Caller]

Radiolab is supported by Rippling Finance. Teams often spend weeks chasing receipts, reconciling spreadsheets and fixing errors across disconnected spend tools. This can be frustrating. And that's not software as a service, that's sad software as a disservice. If you've been thinking about replacing stitched together tech stacks with one platform for all departments, Rippling can help. Rippling is a unified platform for global hr, payroll, IT and finance, helping people replace their mess of cobbled together tools with one system designed to help give leaders clarity, speed and control. By uniting employees, teams and departments in one system, Rippling works to remove the bottlenecks, busy work and silos in business software. With Rippling, you can choose to run hr, IT and finance operations as one, or pick and choose the products that best fill the gaps. Right now you can get 6 months free when you go to rippling.com Radiolab learn more at r I p p l-I n g.com Radiolab terms and conditions apply.

[Molly Webster]

Hey, I'm Molly Webster and this is an ad by BetterHelp. So it happens every year. The seasons are changing, the days are getting shorter and basically once it becomes dark outside of my window I feel like the rest of the world disappears and I'm alone and there's nothing left to do but watch television. This November, Better Help is asking everyone to reach out to our people. That could be your family, your friends, your neighbors, and to resist this call of the cocoon. And yeah, reaching out can take some courage. I've got text messages from January I haven't responded to and you know what? I'm gonna write em back right now. Hi, sorry I've been missing. How are you? Why don't we all do this sooner? Therapy is the same. BetterHelp makes it easier to take that first step. You just fill out a short questionnaire and they find a licensed therapist who they think you'll like. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com Radiolab that's betterhelp.com Radiolab.

[Listener/Caller]

Radiolab is supported by Planet Visionaries, the podcast created in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. The show is hosted by Alex Honnold, who you may recognize from Free Solo, where he climbed El Capitan without ropes. Now he's turning his focus to the biggest challenge of all, protecting the only planet we've got. Every episode brings you stories that prove climate optimism isn't naive, it's a strategy. The episodes span the globe, from Arctic scientists and Amazon forest guardians to entrepreneurs reimagining fashion and food systems. You'll hear from explorers, scientists, activists, and storytellers who are working to reshape the future in practical, human ways. In one episode, Alex sits down with wildlife photographer Bertie Gregory to discuss how animals can teach humans resiliency, empathy, and hope in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Check out Planet Visionaries Listen or watch on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Phoebe Robinson]

Just a heads up, I speak in a breeze a lot, so I'll just say things like totes and like early taunts, and you just have to roll with it.

[Jad Abumrad]

I'll just go with it. I'll nod like I know what you're saying.

[Phoebe Robinson]

Okay, great.

[Jad Abumrad]

Jad here. As promised, at the top of the show, I want to introduce you to a new project that comes from two very funny people.

[Phoebe Robinson]

My name is Phoebe Robison, and I am Michael Fassbender's future baby mama.

[Jessica Williams]

My name is Jessica Williams, and I plan to be the maid of honor in Phoebe and Michael Fassbender's wedding.

[Phoebe Robinson]

Oh, yay.

[Jessica Williams]

You're okay with that? I literally just put myself in your fake wedding.

[Phoebe Robinson]

No, obviously, you're in the wedding.

[Jad Abumrad]

So Jessica Williams and Phoebe Robinson are two people who are obsessed with Michael Fassbender.

[Jessica Williams]

I don't even think he's that hot.

[Phoebe Robinson]

No. That's so controversial.

[Jad Abumrad]

And they are both comedians and writers. Phoebe has worked for MTV and Comedy Central. Jessica Williams, you might know from the Daily show, where she's a correspondent, and the two of them have teamed up to make a podcast called. It's debuting today. It's called Two Dope Queens. And my bet is that if you like Radiolab, you will also like this podcast.

[Phoebe Robinson]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

All right. Can I be old Wyatt for a second?

[Jessica Williams]

There's nothing else for you to be.

[Phoebe Robinson]

Yeah, true.

[Jad Abumrad]

So dope people still use the word dope?

[Jessica Williams]

Yeah, I think so.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah.

[Jessica Williams]

But, you know, even if they don't, like, all it takes is, like, two black people to make something cool. Yeah, that's the rule. If we came, if we walked down the street tomorrow and we had our shoes on the wrong foot, as long as it's two black people doing it.

[Phoebe Robinson]

I mean, hello. Crisscross. When they did the jeans, it was just two of them.

[Jessica Williams]

They were phenoms.

[Phoebe Robinson]

Yeah.

[Jessica Williams]

Swept the nation.

[Jad Abumrad]

How did you guys meet?

[Phoebe Robinson]

We met almost two years ago. I was doing a background on a black hair in the military piece that she was doing for the Daily Show.

[Jad Abumrad]

Story is, Jessica was doing this segment. Phoebe was part of the segment. One thing leads to another. Phoebe invites Jessica to co host this comedy thing. She was doing, like, a live thing. And she says, the moment they got up there on stage, we murdered this stage.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah.

[Phoebe Robinson]

Homicide, first degree murder.

[Jessica Williams]

Law and order, baby.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is all good things, right?

[Phoebe Robinson]

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. On stage, I was like, this feels really good. She's like, yeah. And I was like, we should do this more often. And so we were like, oh, well, you know, like, kind of like when you start dating, you're like, oh, yeah, we'll. We'll go to a movie or like, oh, yeah, we'll go to the Met, and we'll just keep seeing how things go at the end of the day. And then after a while, it's. It morphed into something that is our baby.

[Jessica Williams]

We made a baby.

[Phoebe Robinson]

Yeah, we made a baby.

[Jessica Williams]

My favorite reality customer service thing is never in my life.

[Jad Abumrad]

2 Dope Queens is a live comedy show that happens at Union hall here in Brooklyn. Generally, what happens is Phoebe and Jessica, they get up on stage and they just kind of riff for a few minutes.

[Jessica Williams]

I think if you're in the audience, we really want it to feel like you're hanging out with us.

[Jad Abumrad]

So they get up there, they sort of go back and forth for a while.

[Jessica Williams]

Then we have some of our favorite friends who are standups, come and do sets in between us talking and hanging out, I wanted to share this thing.

[Robert Krulwich]

That my girlfriend and I have been.

[Jessica Williams]

Doing, like, this comedian that Phoebe and I both love named Gary Goleman. We role play. Like, the other night, we were playing Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. But here's the twist. She was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. I was Deputy Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

[Robert Krulwich]

So there was that status thing.

[Jessica Williams]

She was my boss, and I didn't feel she was pushing her agenda hard enough.

[Robert Krulwich]

I was like, did we come to Washington to make friends.

[Jessica Williams]

We came to make changes.

[Phoebe Robinson]

And then we have people like Michelle Buteau. Amazing. Who's really funny. She does stuff for Comedy Central in a lot of places.

[Jad Abumrad]

Here's a clip of comedian Michelle Buteau telling a story about how she met this guy.

[Phoebe Robinson]

And I was like, oh, my God, this is the one. Like, we're gonna move in together. We're gonna live by the mall. And he came to visit me in New York one time, and both the cell phones were on the bed, and they were exactly alike. And it rang and I picked it up, and this girl was on the other end. She goes, is Eric there? And I go, who dis? And she go, who dis? And I go, who dis?

[Jad Abumrad]

Dis.

[Phoebe Robinson]

Went on for a real long time. Cause we knew who the this was.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, so set up the next clip. The Naomi clip. Yes. Like, who is Naomi?

[Jessica Williams]

Who is Naomi Ekperri? She's a younger woman, but she is practically an old lady. Like, all she wants to do is, she says in her stand up is, like, sit at home with a blanket and play with her cats. As you can imagine, I love to watch procedurals. I love it. Okay. I love Criminal Minds is my number one. I do like classic Law and Order, but I do prefer a special victim, you know? Yes. I just love it. I love it. I love it.

[Nick Lane]

It's.

[Jessica Williams]

And it's amazing how every episode involves a white woman in peril. You know, it's like a white woman's in peril. That's how we get people to care, you know? And it's just nonsense. But if there's one thing that I feel like we should be taking away, is that, like, white ladies.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay?

[Jessica Williams]

Meghan's, Sarah's, Becky's. Okay, you guys have got to stop with the jogging at dawn and dusk. You gotta stop. You gotta stop, honeys. I hate to go, Jesse Jackson, but if the light is low, you should not go. Are you following me? Are you following me? If you're jogging at those hours, you got two options, okay? You're either gonna find a dead body or become a dead body. Stop it with a jogging.

[Nick Lane]

Joking.

[Jessica Williams]

We always like to have women represented doing stand up or storytelling on our show. We make sure that that's in every episode. And people, different orientations, people of color. Like, it's really, really fun. And I. I hope that, like, if you come to see the show or even if you start listening to our podcast, that you'll see that we really love doing it.

[Phoebe Robinson]

You just want a hilarious show.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yep.

[Jessica Williams]

And I think we really do deliver on that.

[Phoebe Robinson]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

Phoebe Robinson and Jessica Williams from The brand new WNYC Studios podcast, 2 Dope Queens. Definitely check it out. Go to itunes or wherever you get your podcast from and check them out. Two Dope Queens. Thank you, guys.

[Jessica Williams]

Thank you.

[Jad Abumrad]

I'm Jad Abumrad. Thanks for listening.

[Nick Lane]

Hi, this is Nick Lane. Radiolab is produced by Jada Bumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

Dylan Keefe is director of sound design, Soren Wheeler is senior editor, and Jamie York is our senior producer. Our staff includes Simon Adza, Brenna Farrell, David Gebbell, Matt Kielty, Robert Crolich, Andy Mills, Latif Nasser, Melissa o', Donnell, Kelsey Padgett, Arianne Wack, and Molly Webster, with help from Alexandra Lee Hunt, Alexandra Lee Young, Tracy Hunt, Stephanie Tam, and Michael Lowinger. Our fact checkers are Evo Dasher and Michelle Harris. Thank you.

[Phoebe Robinson]

End of message.