I'm sure you're familiar with Darwin's theory of evolution, which explains how simple

life forms evolved over billions of years into complex life forms.

But what evolution doesn't tell us about it all is how those simple life forms came into

being in the first place.

How did we go from non-life to life?

And that is the question that keeps today's guest, Jack Shostack, up at night.

Life everywhere is cells, right?

So there had to be a first cell.

That means there had to be some kind of primitive cell membrane that defined the boundaries of the first cells.

Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

Jack Shostek is a University of Chicago chemist who first earned recognition for his work on chromosomes. In fact,

he won a Nobel Prize in 2009 for that work. Now, a lot of researchers who hit upon a Nobel-worthy

idea, they'd about their life to that idea. But not Jack. His interests evolved. Twenty-seven years

ago, he landed on the question of how life first emerged on Earth, a question

that's still captivating him today.

He's authored a book on the topic called Is Earth Exceptional, The Quest for Cosmic

Life?

So what exactly does it mean to study the origin of life in a lab?

That's where we start our conversation today.

I've never been very interested in all these efforts to define life, but what life does is it evolves.

The way I got interested in the origins of life is because for 10 years, we'd been studying the evolution of molecules in the lab with all kinds of fancy instruments and really brilliant students. And then I started to wonder, like, how in the

world could evolution get started all by itself on the early Earth? You need to understand

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