Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
302 | Chris Kempes on the Biophysics of Evolution
Mon, 20 Jan 2025
Randomness plays an important role in the evolution of life (as my evil twin will tell you). But random doesn't mean arbitrary. Biological organisms are physical objects, after all, and subject to the same laws of physics as non-biological matter is. Those laws place constraints on how organisms can fulfill their basic functions of metabolism, reproduction, motility, and so on. Easy to say, but how can we turn this into quantitative understanding of actual organisms? Today I talk with physical biologist Chris Kempes about how physics can help us understand the size of organisms, their metabolisms, and features of major transitions in evolution.Support Mindscape on Patreon.Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/01/20/302-chris-kempes-on-the-biophysics-of-evolution/Chris Kempes received his Ph.D. in physical biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently Professor and a member of the Science Steering Committee at the Santa Fe Institute. His research involves the origin of life and the constraints placed by physics on biological function and evolution.Web siteSanta Fe Institute web pageGoogle Scholar publicationsOrigins of Life online courseSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Have you all heard about the centimeter-long bacterium? I had not heard about this until this podcast, as you will discover, but just a couple years ago, scientists found a kind of bacterium called Thiomargarita magnifica, which can grow up to a centimeter in length, okay?
It's a tiny little tube-like thing, so it's not a spherical centimeter-long thing, but That's very creepy to me. I don't want any centimeter-long bacteria climbing around anywhere near where I am. And I bring this up because I did – Chris Kempis, today's guest, introduced me to the possibility during this podcast. I had never heard about it.
But it shows sort of two sides of a certain coin for a bacterium that is about the size of a coin. One is what we will be talking about in the podcast are the existence and usefulness of physical constraints on biological organisms and their evolution. So biological organisms are embedded in the physical world.
They obey the laws of physics, and therefore they need to use good old sensible, allowed physical mechanisms to survive, to metabolize, to eat, to move, all of these things. it should be unsurprising that the existence of the laws of physics will provide constraints on what kind of architectures and morphologies and sizes are allowed in the realm of living organisms.
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