Oh my God, oh, oh, wow, oh, oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Oh, yeah. Hello and welcome to the Science of Everything podcast. I'm your host James Fodor. In this podcast, I discuss a wide variety of topics in both the natural and social sciences, exploring the many fascinating scientific discoveries that help us better understand the world around us. This is episode number four, and the topic for today is the origin of life.

So in this episode, I will cover some basic introductory topics to life and the study of the

origin of life, and then I'll move on to talking about the two main areas that we need to

understand in examining the origin of life,

the source of monomers, and then the origin of polymers from those monomers.

And then I'll have a bit of an overview in summary at the end.

So, first of all, we need to ask the question, what is life?

And this is not really the focus of this podcast,

because it's rather a controversial topic, but for the purposes of this episode, I'll just list

a fairly conventional list of the criteria of what constitutes life. First of all, cellular

organization, so all life is composed of cells. Second of all,

a high degree of order. That seems fairly obvious. Third, response to stimuli. Fourth, growth,

development and reproduction. Fifth, energy utilization. Sixth, evolutionary adaptation. And seventh,

maintenance of homeostasis. And homeostasis refers to the constant

internal conditions of temperature and pH and so on within an organism that allow the chemical

reactions, the sustained metabolism, and to continue properly. It should be noted that the concept of

life is rather a fuzzy one, and there's no clear line dividing

life from non-life, because, as we'll see throughout this episode, it's somewhat of a continuum.

You go from something that's gradually a chemical system that's more and more complicated.

It becomes self-replicating. It does more and more different things, and it sort of gradually

...