'Hey Bill Nye, What If Life Had Evolved From Viruses?’ #TuesdaysWithBill | Big Think

Viewer: Hello Bill. I'm just curious:

what

would

life

be like if it had

evolved

from

viruses

instead of bacteria? Bill Nye: Maybe

life

evolved

from

viruses

and we just don't know it. However, it seems that the bacteria disappeared on their own. And talking a little more about myself, in my book Undeniable, which I like to

think

of as an introduction to evolution, I speculated that viruses should have their own domain of life, la vera, which in Latin would be a second declension noun. In Latin they apparently didn't have a plural of viruses, they never needed one, they never used it like we use it today.

So I don't know if life evolved from viruses, but in my own experience I am absolutely delighted by the science fiction story Andromeda Strain, where the compartmentalization of the chemicals necessary for life was done with crystals instead of membranes. And it's science fiction for everyone, but bacteria differ from viruses in that bacteria have separate structures, whereas viruses appear to be a single molecule, which could be considered a single molecule. And so viruses are more like proteins than bacteria, but proteins are created by bacteria, so it is very reasonable that there is some ancestor of viruses and bacteria so that they have a common chemical ancestor in common.

Proving that seems to me like it should be possible. When I was a kid, people celebrated, questioned, and thought a lot about the Miller Urey experiment or the Urey Miller experiment done by these two scientists who tried to create the conditions of the primordial earth in a big glass jar. And apparently the only thing they didn't fully discover was sulfur, which people now generally believe would have reached the Earth's atmosphere from volcanoes. I was in school at Cornell University. I went into the Space Sciences Building when Carl Sagan was very active teaching classes and stuff and they had the Urey Miller experiment going on.

It was a large glass flask with these electrodes sparking because it was or is presumed that lightning was present in the ancient atmosphere and this electricity could cause chemical changes that would have been very, very rapid. So the idea is that you would look for or try to create molecules that through their natural existence would create copies of themselves. And that was the goal. It turns out that creating amino acids, these are biological molecules that have a carbon with a double bond and an oxygen next to it, apparently amino acids are not that difficult to create.

And we find them on asteroids and we find them all over the Earth and scientists or chemists have been able to create amino acids that have the same pattern but they do not exist in nature or we have not found them in living systems, but they are very similar but we do not find them In nature. So all of this makes me

think

that it's reasonable that someone could create something like these primordial conditions of the primordial atmosphere in Earth-based experiments that would produce self-replicating molecules. And we would discover that perhaps there is a common ancestor for both viruses and bacteria.

Oh. Would that molecule be dangerous? Would it be like the supervirus or the superbacteria? Intuitively I don't believe it because we are all here. What happened happened and it didn't kill us. So maybe you'll be the guy who discovers Urey Miller and the next step, the next step of Urey Miller, the next step of self-replicating molecules with primordial components. It is a very convincing idea. May you support us.