What Turns Sand Into Cells? How Nonliving Matter Becomes Alive
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer
4.3 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 8 April 2026
⏱️ 87 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How does something living emerge from something that isn't?
In this episode, Lee Cronin pushes the question back even further: before cells, before DNA, before biology as we usually think of it, what kind of process could make matter start organizing itself into something alive?
He and Michael Shermer get into assembly theory, RNA, autocatalysis, and the deeper puzzle of whether causation and selection may already be at work long before the first organism appears. The conversation also branches into consciousness, free will, and the possibility that life may be widespread in the universe, even if it looks nothing like life on Earth.
Lee Cronin is Regius Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, where he leads one of the world's largest multidisciplinary chemistry research groups. He has raised more than $35 million in grant funding, with current research income of $15 million, and has authored more than 350 peer-reviewed papers, including recent work published in Nature, Science, and PNAS. He and his team are trying to make artificial life forms, find alien life, explore the digitization of chemistry, understand how information can be encoded into chemicals and construct chemical computers.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I love the statement, what turns sand into cells? What is the difference between the matter in me and you, which is living? And if we took to us, it's probably not a nice sight to picture, but if we put us through some kind of atom grinder or after we died, we just were cremated and take those atoms, the same atoms, but they are they dead? And so what has happened? What has been done to us? |
| 0:20.4 | So if life is naturally developing all over the universe, what's your answer to Fermi's |
| 0:25.7 | paradox? Where is everybody? The first answer I'll give you is to say that life is not going |
| 0:30.7 | to be the same everywhere. The chemistry is going to be very different. So the signatures for life |
| 0:34.8 | is not universal in the universe unless you're looking for assembly complexity. |
| 0:39.2 | We have to find a way to measure that. |
| 0:40.9 | And right now, we're looking for signals that we are anthropomorphizing. |
| 0:45.0 | For Fermi's paradox, the answer is we just don't know how to recognize life yet because we don't understand what life is. |
| 0:51.3 | You know that photosynthesis looks like it was involved at the bottom of |
| 0:54.9 | the sea in the dark. It's wild, right? It was involved to capture infrared radiation from the |
| 1:00.9 | surface. And then when those things floated up to the top and they got visible light, |
| 1:06.7 | they got bleached. |
| 1:12.4 | All right. |
| 1:13.5 | Hey, everybody. |
| 1:14.3 | It's Michael Schumer. |
| 1:15.0 | It's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer show. |
| 1:17.5 | This is brought to you by, first of all, Skeptic Magazine. |
| 1:20.8 | Hey, here's the new issue. |
| 1:21.8 | It's out. |
| 1:22.5 | Check it out. |
| 1:23.4 | Look at this. |
| 1:24.5 | Aliens on the cover. |
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